This conversation features Gabrielle Foreman, Dylan Rodriguez, and Jessica Marie Johnson, who carry forward earlier exchanges in this roundtable on why Ethnic Studies matters now. Each writer trenchantly indicts the academy for its war on the people working in Ethnic Studies and associated fields of study (Black/Africana Studies, Indigenous Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latinx Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, American Studies). In their respective pieces, they counterpose this war with the powerful solidarity each has experienced through Ethnic Studies work, as part of wider communities struggling in, against, and beyond the academy.

Gabrielle Foreman | Writes:

When I walked—OK, sped—away from New England and left its storied, pedigreed graduate programs behind to instead enroll in a new PhD program in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, it didn’t feel like the gamble perhaps it was, it felt like freedom. By then, the surge that came with dramatically overperforming racial presumptions in the classes that made up my major had lost its power. I wanted none of it, even if it came with job placement promises that a new Ethnic Studies department, with no students past their comprehensive exams even, couldn’t yet provide. In my first years, I TAed for Cherrie Moraga and studied with Barbara Christian, Ron Takaki, Margaret Washington and Earl Lewis. No longer compelled to jump constantly over low expectations and manage the surprise when we didn’t trip or stumble, my peers and I conserved our intellectual energy for the rigor, research and writing Ethnic Studies scholars and scholarship demanded.

If I were not writing this today, I’d be trying to finish an article I’m calling “Sankofa Imperatives: Historical Recovery and the Archival Turn” that opens by revisiting the disciplinary resistance Barbara Christian faced when, at twenty seven, she took her first tenure track job in the English department at Berkeley. There, as she told it to generations who would return to the warning wrapped in her words, her colleagues insisted that there wasn’t a real tradition to support a scholarly monograph about Black women’s literature.

Having to wade through—or wave off—the thick and heavy incredulity that there are Black pasts to recover, historicize, and theorize is both nothing new and always new. It reaches from the thinking at Harvard that necessitated this forum, back to Thomas Jefferson’s dismissive letter to Black astrologer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker; it spills from the mouths and pens of generations of Western philosophers and statesmen, through centuries of intellectual gatekeepers who have not only questioned, but have erased and buried the thinking and writing that Black people in the Americas have produced against those who bet against us for pleasure or profit. The faith in (Black) human creativity (even as others deny our connection to either humanity or creativity) sent Alice Walker, for instance, to seek and find Zora Neale Hurston, to place a headstone on her unmarked grave and to republish what we now treasure as a once lost masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Likewise, June Jordan’s assumption that Black literary soil has loam enough to sprout generations of genius spurred her to commemorate Phillis Wheatley and the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America. It sent García Peña to the letters, papers and memos that document The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions.

What does it mean to create, to master creativity, in the glint of the steeliest historical and disciplinary negation?

García Peña’s tenure denial in the face of such prize-winning, unqualified, exclamatory excellence, signals the barb-wired border between the individual merit and intellectual achievement that is enough for the Academy’s accepted intellectual citizens, and the collective badge of disciplinary exclusion that marks us as scholarly exiles. The institutional gate-keepers at the highest level are articulating this in the clearest of dictions: we don’t care how celebrated or acclaimed you are, that you enjoy the highest honors and prizes in your area of scholarship or the highest praise in your classrooms, you can’t possibly scale the intellectual, civic, and social borders that we build and move so we can control what is worthy of our acceptance, inclusion, and regard.

Ethnic Studies emerges from a necessary history of organizing as well as scholarly and pedagogical rigor and institution building. And its genealogies and teleologies may lead us to this: if Harvard is so clearly marking the body of our work as foreign and unwanted, it may be time to suspend a long and unequal relationship and to withhold our labor: no rankings and reviews, no letters of recommendation for its graduate or fellowship programs. That may be one way in which Ethnic Studies and its aligned, maligned, fields of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Latinx Studies, matter powerfully today.

Dylan Rodriguez | Responds:

Echoing Gabrielle Foreman, i affirm Ethnic Studies as a dynamic intellectual project that continues to nourish a growing body of knowledge, creativity, and collective pedagogy. It can and must play a vital role in abolishing the university as a creation of the modern white world. Yet, as a graduate of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program (1995-2001) and former chair of UC Riverside’s Department of Ethnic Studies (2009-2016), i must confess that i do not view Ethnic Studies as a uniformly “radical” project in these times, in part because its uneven institutionalizations have cultivated deep, unevenly shared desires for academic respectability and professional recognition among its students, faculty (tenured and tenure-track, contingent, and otherwise), career scholars, administrators, and other practitioners.

The primary “academic” problem faced by Ethnic Studies is not an inadequacy of institutional recognition or insufficient/obstructed access to the regimes of academic respectability. Rather, it is the fact that its scholarship—of which Lorgia García Peña’s work is so obviously exemplary—represents some of the most transformative, epistemologically and theoretically challenging, critically and publicly engaged work to emerge from the academy in the last half century. In producing such field—and academy—altering work, Ethnic Studies represents the elite research university’s (e.g. Harvard et. al.’s) antithesis.

It is worth recalling, over and again, that the modern university is a foundationally colonial, plantation chattel enterprise. A vibrant, growing movement for university reparations is magnifying the long historical centrality of anti-Black violence and racial slavery to the economic, academic, and cultural infrastructures of Georgetown, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and of course Harvard, among other places (see the Scholars for Social Justice platform on reparations in higher education). The global solidarity with the ongoing Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawai’ian) struggle to protect the sacred site of Mauna Kea from the invasive Thirty Meter Telescope (in which my employer has a major stake) further illustrates how the militarized procedures of conquest remain central to the settler university enterprise (see the global petition that has garnered almost 300,000 signatories). Make no mistake: the thriving university-focused reparations movement and struggle at Mauna Kea indicate the continuity and persistence of the modern university’s anti-Black, carceral-chattel, colonial settler-conquest logic as the economic, philosophical, scientific, and bureaucratic conditions of possibility for the making of the academy as such.

Further, as many of Harvard’s students (and a dozen of Yale’s Ethnic Studies faculty) have recently made clear, the self-valorizing diversity mandates of ostensibly “liberal” Ivy League universities are public spectacles of racial-colonial philanthropy: their commitment to a public relations optics of (long overdue) undergraduate student demographic change is simultaneously, tacitly animated by a systemic, reflexive, though no less willful illiteracy and anti-intellectual reaction against the living, present tense archives of thought, art, and truth that expose, undermine, and potentially obliterate the modern academy’s fundamental commitment to a white supremacist, colonial, chattel episteme.

There is no better occasion to cultivate a collective discussion of whether and how to inhabit these poisoned, wretched places than in celebration of a colleague like García Peña, who represents everything that the traditional denizens of elite research universities can neither intellectually comprehend nor viscerally tolerate. This is why i think it is worth dwelling for a bit on Gabrielle’s assertion that this particular tenure case “signals the barb-wired border between the individual merit and intellectual achievement that is enough for the Academy’s accepted intellectual citizens, and the collective badge of disciplinary exclusion that marks us as scholarly exiles.” Her words are another devastating reminder of the academy’s relentless commitment to advancing—and militantly defending—the particular institutional and intellectual space of “the scholarly” as a primary manifestation of “Civilization,” which is to say, the academy is a plantation-frontier regime that its managers and executives oversee as such.

This is why it is no exaggeration to suggest that the university—its administrators and many of its faculty, staff, and students—encounters radical, publicly engaged, productive scholars like García Peña as a principal threat to the carceral law-and-order of its disciplinary, aesthetic, and epistemological foundations, as well as its everyday corporate comportment. When encountering such people on campus, particularly if their work flows in the streams of Black radical, anti- and decolonial, and/or radical feminist traditions, the university mobilizes to neutralize the insurgency, girding its bottomless access to a soulless legal apparatus that will wage juridical wars of attrition to the death. (To emphasize the latter point: serious illness and early death are a commonly understood, shared occupational hazard of the hostile academy for those who commit to challenging its systemic, normalized, violent normativities of thought, intellectual community, and bodily/affective presence.) 

This exercise of Harvard’s propertied, subtly weaponized white supremacist episteme against García Peña amplifies an already existing obligation to organize politically activated, rigorously creative forms of extra-academic praxis among the practitioners of diasporic Black studies, anti- and decolonial praxis, radical feminism, Indigenous and Native studies, trans and queer studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, settler colonial studies, and other critically positioned fields in and beyond Ethnic Studies.

It is the least we can do to abolish the ascendancy of White Being that toxifies these grounds and parasitically saps all other life by relying on places like Harvard to serve as its prestige-ridden centers of command. Guided by Sylvia Wynter’s radical critique of European and Euroamerican humanism and “Man,” i understand White Being as the militarized, normative paradigm of human being that inhabitants of the ongoing half-millennial civilizational project have involuntarily inherited as a violent universal. Wynter’s durable contribution to Black Studies and the critical humanities facilitates a conceptualization of White Being as a narrative, ceremonial, ritualized practice of human being that pivots on relations of dominance with other beings (human and otherwise) and aspirational mastery over the wildness and unknowability of nature and the physical universe. White Being’s ascendancy, in turn, requires perpetual mobilizations of (legitimated state and extra-state) violence and colonial-chattel power that form the premises of the degrading, negating, and deadly differentiations that Gabrielle invokes in the passage above: “border,” “individual merit,” “intellectual citizens,” “disciplinary exclusion,” “scholarly exiles.” In White Being’s ascendancy, there is nothing less than an authoritarian Universal, a compulsory call to war that calls on the university to commodify, occupy, expropriate, exploit, destroy, and/or criminalize  all other human species’ ways of knowing and being. This war, i think, is precisely what i and others  are attempting to engage as part of a sustained guerilla action—above ground and underground, utilizing every possible resource at our disposal to the purposes of short-term survival, institutional counter-inhabitation, sustainable collective insurgency, and a radical/abolitionist/revolutionary futurity. 

This is all to say that the work of Ethnic Studies—including and especially its recent rearticulation as critical ethnic studies (check out Critical Ethnic Studies: a Reader)—is not only an exemplification of some of the most innovative and original “interdisciplinary” scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, but also forms a vital center of gravity for counter- and anti-disciplinary study. By this i mean forms of pedagogy, analysis, research, archive-building, and creative knowledge production that eradicate the ascendancy of White Being that anchors, manages, and defends “disciplinary” thought as the academy’s sanctified ideological premise. Ethnic Studies reflects and magnifies the already existing, long historical praxis of peoples on the underside of the Civilization project whose distinctive, collective genius is carried in the work of colleagues like García Peña.  

How can Ethnic Studies instigate movement toward a point of no return for Harvard and other such places? To the same point, is it a worthwhile political project to push them toward their points of no return? I raise these questions to reflect on my participation in a special issue of Harvard Law Review in 2019, addressing prison and police abolition. As recently as three or four years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine this prestigious journal curating contributions from people like Patrisse Cullors, Angel E. Sanchez, Allegra M. McLeod, Dorothy Roberts, and myself, given our shared radical commitments to abolishing a carceral world. Such an invitation becomes less surprising, however, when cohorts of curious, courageous, freedom-oriented students and colleagues are making these moves, creating these projects, expanding these spaces so others can breathe, laugh, shout, and cuss as much as they damn well please—this exemplifies a small but significant front in what my undergraduate mentor Dr. James Turner (founding Director of Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center) once called “intellectual guerilla warfare.”

Maybe, then, the work of intellectual guerilla war can provide momentum to push the academy to a point of no return, and to make the university unrecognizable to itself. That would be a beautiful thing.

Jessica Marie Johnson | Joins:

I feel very ambivalent about writing and commenting in this roundtable.

I stand with Lorgia. I stan for Lorgia. I am Lorgia, in the sense that untenured faculty members of color, particularly womxn, particularly those of non-white, non-Anglo, and non-Western communities (like the territorialized lands of Ayiti and Borinken, now known by the names given to them during overlapping waves of Spanish, French, and United States conquest as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) are fighting for their lives.

Dylan, you described the university as “a foundationally colonial, plantation chattel enterprise,” and it is true. Scholars of color, almost despite and regardless of their radical politics, are at the mercy of war being waged by the university against itself. It is a war "to the death" and, in fact, women of color have died fighting: Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Barbara Christian, Nellie McKay, Stephanie Camp, Vèvè Clark, and more. We die doing work that is already hard, walking through archives dripping in our blood and the blood of our kin, and it is made harder because the university is determined to reproduce itself in spite of the poison its politics have wrought. Earlier in this forum, Roopika Risam reminds us Atlantic slaving and plantation complex in the Caribbean generated horrific profits that flowed into university coffers. As a historian of slavery, I have also followed the lawsuit being waged against Harvard by Tamara Lanier and a descendant of Renty and Delia, an enslaved man and his daughter who were photographed by Louis Agassiz in 1850. Lanier (joined, interestingly enough, by descendants of Agassiz) has charged Harvard with illegally possessing (#slavery) the photographs of her ancestors and requests their return. As that legal case unfolds, I am also struck by the response of some academic historians to the profound and beautiful #1619Project, a collection of essays, poetry, stories, and artwork commemorating the 1619 landing of Africans at present-day Point Comfort, Virginia, a project led by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times.

In each of these cases, Lorgia García Peña's included, the University has made a claim. The University—either by itself or through its proxies—has made a determination of ownership, of extraction, of coloniality, and they have cloaked it in expertise, objectivity, seniority, and so-called excellence. And, I want to note (because it is important for whatever comes next), that a university is also just a structure, an edifice, a building, an email account. So what I mean to say is that in each of these cases, people—representatives of the University, representatives of what Dylan is describing as White Being, those who have taken into and of and onto themselves the power to determine who lives and who dies, whose work thrives and whose ways of knowing deserve to be exterminated—have decided to reproduce the University to the death and the bodies littering the ground are blackened, feminized, and have no right to papers (be they freedom papers, tenure conferrals, citizenship documents, or otherwise).

At the same time, we who do Ethnic Studies see this clearly. Ethnic Studies, particularly in its intersection with Black or Africana Studies, Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and American Studies, sees this clearly. I agree with Dylan that Ethnic Studies in and of itself is not or no longer a radical project. Imagine, then, how ridiculous it would be to deny someone of García Peña's scholarly record tenure? How terrified the guardians of the Tower must be of this rebellion, this “insurrection,” to take up Frances Negrón-Mutaner's phrasing in this same forum, an insurgency now decades in formation. The overwrought response to critical Ethnic Studies work reminds me that the uprising enslaved Africans initiated on the Northern Plain of what is now Haiti was spurred in part by the multiple and massive denials of rights by officials in France who sent Vincent Ogé back to the Caribbean with fire in his eyes, who rejected Julien Raimond's quite liberal and reformist (and, thus, pro-slavery) overtures; as well as being the product of overseers who raised the whip one too many times, of plantation owners who refused to concede their White Being until the fight for freedom had set fire to their homes. In other words, empire will suffer nothing to impede on itself which is why black freedom has always exceeded the manumission act, has always transgressed the power of paper to constrain it, will always be irreconcilable to the project of white supremacy which the University is a legacy of. And radical, critical, decolonial scholars of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Women Studies, and beyond know tenure is not the beginning or end of the fight. After all, as Gabrielle noted, we have been "scholar exiles" for generations. 

What then is the scholar exile to do in the face of such a crossroads? On the one hand, as people thinking with our communities and with the world, we know we have a right to our knowledges, our ways of being (and our arcane secrets). On the other hand, our demands appear to fail against the Tower walls and seem futile, small, and impossible to achieve. Are they misplaced? Are they naive? Should we, as I saw calls to on social media, reject institutions like Harvard wholesale because "of course they did" and "you should know better" and "go teach your people at X [insert HBCU, HSI, Tribal, community college] instead"? Do we, as Gabrielle said, retract our labor, boycott the committees, reject letter requests? I don't have answers to these questions. I wish I did. And maybe there aren't finite answers but answers for a time, for a place, for a moment. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie reflected, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." And these last few years—Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 with its island-wide ramifications, the U.S. Presidential election of 2016, Hurricane Maria in 2017—have asked questions of all of us, questions we have to struggle with or fail in our duty to our planet and our species. 

Ethnic Studies rise! What a call to power! I feel deeply that this is not a call to further institutionalize. It is not a call to entrench ourselves within institutions. It is also not a futile call. It is not one that means our work in these spaces—even when we are rejected, even when we are killed by them—goes unrewarded. Our work goes on so long as it is true to the people, for the people, with the people. Ethnic Studies is an alternative edifice to the Ivory Tower, a radical geography that, yes, will make the university unrecognizable to itself, but will also create something new in its wake. And, in fact, Ethnic Studies is useless if that isn't what it is doing or has been doing all along.

This is why they fear us.

During #LorgiaFest I tweeted that, "We see us." We see us. Seeing each other might just allow us enough breath in our lungs to imagine otherwise when we feel like we are drowning. The glow of our loving gazes on each other might just be the beacon that lone scholar of color working at Mid-America All-White University needed to create something anew, to dream something larger than what the University has asked of them. Through our Second Sight, we may be able to provide this undergraduate with much needed tools they can use to fight for their own dreams, or offer that graduate student the perspective they need to trust their own intuition, or we may be able to respond to this community organizers’ request for support with expertise, joy, and solidarity.

Critical, radical, decolonial Ethnic Studies is beyond the University. It is a call back, as Gabrielle and Dylan remind us, to the human, away from the structures, and to the people. People inhabit these death-dealing institutions, people maintain the standards of confidentiality, people police the borders, people resist, people organize sit-ins, people teach for a better world. People can be galvanized, and people can be changed. 

Our demands aren't futile. We give you LIFE. One breath, one memory, one ceremony, one archive at a time.