My understanding of the Black Radical Tradition

"You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever...Take no one's word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience."

These few lines from James Baldwin's 'A Letter to my Nephew' in some ways capture what the Black Radical Tradition has meant to me. These sentences encapsulate that limitations- towards success, recognition, and simply dignity- seem to follow the black individual from the beginning of their life because they are, after all, black. What Baldwin does by saying "trust your experience" is moving and powerful, for it asks of the black population to reject everything they are being taught from the beginning about their difference and inferiority and instead find solace in holding their truth, building their strength against how forces of marginalization work against them and building community with the like-minded who inhabit the same reality.

This idea appeals to me because it really speaks to the character of the black radical tradition in how it does not surrender to the assumptions of this white world we live in. It speaks to the character of the tradition that is above all so astoundingly patient and resilient, regardless of the shape and form it takes. The black radical tradition appeals to me for how it has sought to reclaim its history and in how its goals for the present times have been about basic human dignity, but also about righting the wrongs inflicted on generations past. The black radical tradition is to understand, mourn, uncover but also to make peace with a traumatic past. So, the black radical tradition is about healing; a goal we almost think of as impossible, yet one sought for painstakingly as is visible in the work of those we have read.

I have also loved seeing how different forms of expression have been used to bear witness to the experiences of black people (where often, different forms of oppression may interlock).  Whether it is poetry (which as Audrey Lorde has taught us is not a luxury), fiction by one of my personal favorite authors James Baldwin or Toni Morrison, through action of various sorts- MLK Jr.’s methods or Malcolms’- or through redemption music, there is extraordinary hope and promise in each of these.

The standout take away from the black radical tradition for me has been the theme of hope. The tradition reminds us of the importance of holding our truth and the power and necessity of voicing it. It values human experience and to me, speaks to the idea of understanding the body, the individual and memory serving as an important part of history itself. It speaks to my understanding of history as a lived experience and of how deeply personal history can be.

To highlight that point, I’d like to share something I read by Saidiya Hartman in one of my other courses where she talks about the silence of the archive when it comes to the black slave woman. It highlights how personal history is, how personal the task of being a historian itself can feel and how the experiences of the past are felt in the daily life of a person like herself. She says:

“This writing is personal because this history has engendered me, because the knowledge of the other marks me, because of the pain experienced in my encounter with the scraps of the archive, and because of the kinds of stories I have fashioned to bridge the past and the present and to dramatize the production of nothing—empty rooms, and silence, and lives reduced to waste.”

Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts, p.4.

I have loved how the experience of understanding this tradition has taken us from music, to cricket, to politics, to feminism, to intersectionality and to poetry. Studying this has been a reminder of the power of our voices. It has been an introduction to writers I cannot wait to read more from such as Gloria Anzaldua and Audrey Lorde. I have always loved Martin Luther King Jr. whose speeches have always felt like reading poetry to me, and I am grateful for the closer readings I was able to do of his work in this class. The theme of hope and resilience that comes through in the texts we have read and my understanding of the Black Radical Tradition will stay with me much after this semester is over and serve as inspiration, as it has throughout this course.