The Black Radical Tradition

When considering what is compelling about the Black Radical Tradition, I am reminded of the epic debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley in the Cambridge Union. Baldwin spoke about how the scaffold of the American Dream is built on the labored corpses of the African Americans and spoke of how he was a young boy when he realized that he was not like other Americans. Poignantly he says “It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians — when you were rooting for Gary Cooper — that the Indians were you.” For Baldwin, the goal was to make the white audience inside the Cambridge Union internalize a paradigm shift in their system of reality and to understand the depth of what it means when he says “ I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing. For nothing”. When hearing Baldwin in light of the great metaphors of the Black Radical Tradition, from Dubois’s Veil to Fanon’s third body consciousness, I realize the gravity and burden of history that rests upon not just the African American populace but on all people, a burden that translates into a lived experience. The phenomenology of the black experience is the most compelling and terror-inducing aspect of the Black Radical Tradition and what makes it that much more meaningful to me is that for all that I can understand when I read Dubois speak about the double consciousness or when I read Baldwin describe the suffering of his brother in a letter to his nephew, I cannot imagine the burden that rests on the shoulders of that community.

The Black Radical Tradition has exposed to me the limits of my understanding of experience as much it has shown me the realities of experience itself. What I find in Buckley’s ignorant response to Baldwin about the progress being made is the same vacuous sentiment that is espoused daily in criticisms of social justice projects across the globe. Baldwin condenses said sentiment succinctly when he tells his nephew how his countrymen will say "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!” at his condemnation of society's systematic otherization. This demonstrates what I feel is the most compelling aspect of the black radical tradition, namely the idea that so much of discourse about the other and about the disenfranchised is entrenched in undermining experience. We see this kind of ignorance on display when Buckley said that Baldwin’s condemnations are extreme because the immense “progress” that has been made since slavery is a reflection of the fact that there is a wellspring of concern in society for the black community. Similar views are espoused each time gender, sexual, and racial minorities speak about their concerns. The “What more do you want?” defense underpins our understanding of suffering. We place suffering in rational terms instead of experiential terms and we insist that our rationality and faculties of reason accurately capture the plight of communities we know nothing about. We conflate our inability to understand experience with the absence of experience itself and that is what has been so compelling about the Black Radical Tradition; Its narrative of oppression cannot be empathized with or simply understood, it has to be stared at in awe of one's own ignorance. I knew slavery existed but did I really understand that it existed? What changed in my understanding is only the recognition of the experiential reality of black people as the principal lens through which to try and observe history, absorb what I can, and ponder even more at what I cannot.

The Black Radical Tradition imparts on me thus an understanding of how an experiential reality can be and often is the most crucial one and of just how much one is ignorant when one begins to study the other. One has to begin as an outsider when one reads Dubois, Fanon, Davis, or Lorde speak about oppression. This un-relatability is the most powerful tool that this tradition has because it illuminates the real burden of history, captured not by statistics or isolated factoids, but the lived experiences of those that carry it on their back. Today when I consider the global crises from the war on terror to the immigrant crisis, I think not of quantifiable facts and the relativism of suffering. I think of how I can envision the experience of suffering and how I cannot. This engenders a humility within me when speaking about any people, any trauma, and any suffering. The Black Radical Tradition has taught me about the importance and irreducibility of experience as a crucial way of contextualizing history in any meaningful away instead of investing in frivolous abstractions and disinterested theorizing.