The AFF is a form of academic ventriloquism that actively empowers the University’s counterinsurgency.

Some of the most self-serving and institutionally reactionary academics—those who pose a real danger to collectives and communities engaged in radical forms of movement—are the ones who publish books and articles about radicalism and revolution as well as convincing critiques of policing, racism, antiblackness, gendered colonial violence, sexual violence, prisons, and so on. I bet the organizers you’re referencing in your question are understating the case, too: at least the corporate executives, mainstream media elites, cops, and state officials tend to be far more honest with themselves and others about who and what they are—there’s no pretense or mushiness about their institutional and political loyalties. By contrast, some academics who fuck around with radical, progressive reform, and other social justice and “social change” focused organizations and movements are delusional or dishonest about their intentions, commitments, and loyalties.

Something i’ve learned over the last three decades is that people in my profession have earned default suspicion from serious radicals and revolutionaries, especially when those academics don’t actively participate in collective projects that attempt to move toward radical or revolutionary horizons. I recently participated in a conversation convened by AAPI Women Lead , a feminist abolitionist and pro-sex worker organization based in the Bay Area, in which we emphasized the importance of thinking about “community” as a verb rather than a taken-for-granted noun. In the context of trying to build radical and revolutionary projects, the work and experimentation of community is especially precious and vulnerable.

These communities-in-the-making are everywhere: in the U.S. context alone, there are variously scaled movements to confront and abolish antiblack and colonial state power, including sustained struggles for police abolition in Portland, Minneapolis, and Stop Cop City in Atlanta, Indigenous water and land defense at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea, the everyday work of organizations like Ujimaa Medics and Dissenters , strikes in U.S. prisons and detention sites, and militant labor organizing all over the place. These examples show how the term “social movement” is sometimes inadequate or inaccurate when identifying what people are actually creating through radical, autonomous, liberationist, and revolutionary forms of community—again, i’m thinking of “community” as an activity, not a static or predetermined constituency. These community projects—which can also be framed as collective experiments in radical and revolutionary power, sociality, and insurgent becoming—are likely to confront overt state repression as well as liberal counterinsurgency and extra-state opposition from business and corporate interests, conservative religious and cultural groups, and reformist social justice and nonprofit organizations.

Academics can pose special security risks to these projects, experiments, and movements. They generally don’t have the training or practical preparation, much less the militancy of commitment to enter these communities without creating additional vulnerabilities for other people (and sometimes themselves). Sometimes academics’ sensibilities are deformed by liberalism and pacifism—many academics, for example, have a knee-jerk aversion to guns and firearms, which raises concerns about how they might respond to community projects that are prepared to militantly defend against reactionary attack and militarized state repression. There is also a long record of academics exploiting organizations, movements, and communities by playing the role of curious opportunists who don’t make themselves available to the collective in ways that aren’t self-serving.

These are lessons as much as they are criticisms. I think it’s both possible and necessary for the academic to be sacrificed and figuratively immolated for the sake of enlivening and emboldening the radical scholar or “guerilla intellectual ,” a notion that Kalonji Changa, Joy James, Jared Ball, and others at Black Power Media have thankfully revived in recent times. (I constantly think about the late Dr. James Turner, who sat me down in 1995 and explained the charge of becoming an “intellectual guerilla fighter.”) 

I’ve learned from collaborators and fellow scholars, people like Michele Welsing and Yusef Omowale at Southern California Library , that it is necessary for university employed scholars and teachers like me to present ourselves to committed radical, liberation focused collectives and communities with full transparency. A condition of shared responsibility is the understanding that suspicion of “the academic” is a historically informed, principled political position rather than a petty personal attack; there’s no room for the thin-skinned academic here. It’s not about you.

I want to humbly propose that the urgent imperative for people in my line of work is to learn how not to be an “academic” while doing the vital work of scholarship, teaching, research, and study, ideally in settings of shared responsibility with people committed to imagining, experimenting with, and practicing insurgency, liberation, and radical forms of autonomy—the kind of collective praxis that accelerates revolutionary and abolitionist possibilities rather than deferring or pacifying them. To be in communities like these usually means that the community will put the “academic” in check while summoning the scholar/teacher/researcher to share their skillset, resources, and expertise for the sake of enriching, emboldening, and mobilizing the collective.

A friend of and contributor to the Black Agenda Report, Kalonji Changa, shared a story on Twitter about a prestigious academic who felt the need to interpret and ventriloquize what Kalonji had said on a panel. The academic began his reply with, “What the Brother is saying is...,” and Kalonji responded, “that's NOT what I was saying and I don't need a ventriloquist.” What are some of the violent ways that academics “ventriloquize” revolutionary thinkers and texts? And how is this ventriloquizing a form of counterinsurgency? 

First, shoutout to Kalonji, who’s one of the most serious and studied revolutionaries i know. Everyone should check out his work on Black Power Media. I remember when Kalonji posted that tweet. I replied to it. (“I need a name. DM me.”) I think Kalonji was being unintentionally generous when he responded to the unnamed academic that way. It takes a lot of skill, training, artistry, and stage presence to be a good ventriloquist. The truth is, that academic is a cop, and the university is a precinct (many also call it a plantation; having grown up not far from the University of Virginia, that’s always made sense to me). The academy and the academic are both constituted by a form of police power that precedes and exceeds the police.

As i’ve said before, the position of the academic is more aspirational than vocational. To exist as an academic is to identify with a colonial abstraction, “the academy,” that claims a fraudulent prestige-based monopoly on proper knowledge and, by extension, attempts to institutionalize and police proper ways of knowing. The academic is a cop—in Kalonji’s case, also an invasive and condescending ventriloquist—because the “academy” is constituted and reproduced through carceral power. The academy is a carceral regime, by which i mean it’s an arrangement of power and violence that colonizes, disciplines, and effectively incarcerates knowledge, epistemology, imagination, and archive.

The academic regime preys on the canonical myth of the “academic” as an individual, self-contained mode of intellectual production; this is the philosophical foundation of the academy as a concept and ritual that traces back to Plato and company. More truthfully, academics are largely unexceptional people who are trained to do certain forms of work—research, writing, teaching—within institutional settings that direct that work toward the reproduction of the ongoing Civilization project. And this project is the animating, originating force of the academy in the first place, as a backbone of the perpetual European and euroamerican colonial fantasy. (Following thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Walter Rodney, Haunani-Kay Trask, and others, i use the term Civilization as a shorthand for the long present tense of conquest and warfare that has taken various overlapping global forms, including empire, racial capitalism, antiblack chattel, colonial conquest, genocidal policing and criminalization regimes, and violent gender normativity.)

Of course, part of the reason we’re having this conversation is also because radical, liberationist, and revolutionary movement can catalyze insurgent scholarly and artistic projects that organize research, curricula, art and performance studios, teaching, and professional profiles around formal expertise in areas of thought and study that decenter, demystify, and potentially obsolete Civilizational knowledge as such. These projects may even become institutionalized by colleges and universities, usually through a messy process of rebellion, negotiation, compromise and concession. (Nick Mitchell’s forthcoming book thinks about this dynamic in relation to institutionalizations of Black studies and women’s studies in what he calls the “post-Civil Rights U.S. university.”)

This leads to what i think may be better described as an irreconcilable antagonism rather than a dialectical (or otherwise resolvable) contradiction: academic institutionalizations of what you call “revolutionary thinkers and texts” expose this archive of work to the intellectual abuses and disciplinary violence of academics who are generally uninterested in, or actively opposed to participating in—or even overtly supporting—the forms of radical and insurgent praxis that catalyzed that revolutionary thinking and writing in the first place! By way of example, when that unnamed academic tried to speak for Kalonji, they were trying to domesticate him and neutralize his words, perhaps because Kalonji’s thought signifies something wild, unrespectable, and potentially dangerous—to the academic, the academy and the university. Of course, that academic failed. F fucking minus.

This provokes another key question, and i confess it’s one that hovers over me every day: How do academics participate in sustaining Civilization, often while offering rigorous and even radical critiques of its violence and oppressiveness in their scholarly work? Part of the answer to that question comes from understanding how universities and colleges are counterinsurgency machines in-and-of-themselves.

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Universities and colleges are carceral sites, not necessarily in the sense that they’re directly comparable to prisons and jails (although this can sometimes be the case ), but rather in terms of how they institutionalize logics of occupation, displacement, and policing that selectively immobilize people and subject them to gender, colonial, antiblack, and disability violence. These logics target students, staff, and faculty, as well as surrounding criminalized populations, for forms of surveillance, policing, and expulsion under the authority of academic administrators who not only resemble, but materially learn from a long lineage of colonial and neocolonial administrators. This is why graduate school tends to be a toxic, damaging experience for people who are not fully comfortable with embracing an academic identity: the training is correctional and disciplinary, including within fields like Black and African American studies, ethnic studies, Latino/a/x studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and Native American studies. Over the last half century, universities and colleges have institutionalized these academic fields as generally underfunded, politically vulnerable programs and departments that often serve as de facto sites of student triage and mandated diversity exhibition for the benefit of university and college administrators, public relations managers, and governing boards. Of course, waves of revanchist and chauvinistic white academics (and their allies ) denigrate these fields as expendable artifacts of affirmative action or as “politically biased ” (and even “antisemitic ”) so-called social justice efforts unworthy of their respect or esteem. I’ll never forget when the then-UCR Provost visited the Ethnic Studies faculty during my first year as the departmental chair and referred to us as a “boutique department.” If anything, these white academics and their tokenized buddies should be celebrating the existence of these departments and programs because they are structured to domesticate and assimilate Black, Brown, queer, poor, and radical students into academic respectability and legibility. (Kalonji’s encounter was a corollary theater of this power play.) Your question brings attention to how the logic of academic knowledge production is not merely extractive and exploitive, it’s also depersonalizing, individualizing and entrepreneurial. Academics train, reward, discipline, and reproduce each other just like many other professions, but the difference is that this industry fixates—conceptually and materially—on a colonial delusion called “the academy.” This delusion takes institutional and material form through various arrangements: dues paying professional societies, think tanks, elite networks that advise state and military officials, and academic cartels like the University Innovation Alliance and the American Association of Universities, both of which include my employing institution of UC Riverside among their members. I have often argued that students, staff, and faculty can best prepare themselves to navigate university and college power structures by treating them as a hybrid of military hierarchy and organized crime. A community organizer once told me about a purported “radical” professor he had as an undergraduate who told the students they were going to read George Jackson’s Soledad Brother but not Blood in My Eye since George Jackson’s views are too extreme in the latter. What lesson does this serve for those of us in the university who think we’re being radical merely by assigning radical texts? How do the power dynamics involved in the classroom affect how students are learning this material? College and university teachers can and should prime their classrooms as sites of experimentation that invite students to experience radical and revolutionary thought, art, and imagination. Despite the limitations of this institutional work, it can sometimes stoke creative, “extracurricular” movement and counter-war against terror, repression, misery, and institutional extraction, both despite and because of a given teacher’s pedagogical intentions. At the same time, i don’t think there can be a universal blueprint for these pedagogical strategies because the asymmetries of violence created by Civilizational warfare permeate institutions of so-called higher learning. It makes no sense to think in generic, universalizing terms about “students,” “the classroom,” or “the teacher” because those asymmetries disperse and differentiate people even as they’re enrolled in the same class, sitting together for three hours a week, reading the same shit. That’s why i consider teaching to be an experimental labor rather than a formulaic practice. Further, i do not think teaching, in-and-of-itself, is inherently “radical” work, regardless of what books, films, poems, and essays one is assigning. Far too many academics discuss their “activism” and “radicalism” in terms that basically glorify the things they do within the existing terms of their job descriptions; i’m not minimizing or dismissing this kind of political and pedagogical work. I am saying, however, that creating badass curricula, class assignments, student mentoring relationships, and community engaged projects (etc.) are things that academics are literally paid to do. The point is to obsolete the academic for the purpose of cultivating the scholar, teacher, artist, and researcher who is radically available to people, projects, and collectives that are not paying tuition and fees.

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Many academics who present themselves as radical, critical, woke, social justice oriented, and even “abolitionist” are essentially liberals who remain entirely within a field of respectable institutional politics that does not threaten or even significantly disrupt the everyday business of universities and colleges, not to mention other institutions or structures of oppressive violence. Yet, these same academics will get angry and indignant if they’re identified as liberals because they view themselves otherwise. It’s another layer of delusion. “The academy” is a powerful drug.

There seems to be a tendency among academics to think about their political identities (as well as their political activities or non-activities) in individual terms, as if they’re choosing those identities from a buffet of available categories. Academics train and discipline each other to do this.

The academic identity of “abolitionist,” for example, has surged in popularity among academics over the last several years, including among people who never, ever wanted to be affiliated with abolitionist praxis until after the summer of 2020. I’m glad that some academics are engaging with it seriously, of course, but i think many are not—they are basically adding an abolitionist identity to their professional profile and lazily adding a few more authors and books to their syllabi and academic citations. (Regarding this last point, i have to repeat alongside many other longtime abolitionist scholars that The New Jim Crow is overtly anti-abolitionist. I wish people would stop referencing it like it’s anything other than a liberal reformist book! And i say this with real respect for the author, Michelle Alexander, whose thinking has moved closer to abolition over the years.)

While there’s nothing inherently radical about assigning texts to a college class, i do think it’s helpful to note when academics explicitly decline engagement with certain thinkers and ideas. To reference your example, it’s thoroughly unsurprising that a professor who presents themselves as “radical” wants nothing to do with teaching Blood In My Eye in an undergraduate course. George Jackson is theorizing and strategizing the possibilities of waging revolutionary guerilla war against reformist antiblack U.S. fascism; many—perhaps most—academics find the implications of his thinking repugnant, irresponsible, and dangerous. Some professors are probably scared shitless at the prospect of teaching this material in their classroom. I bet some would even dismiss and effectively criminalize it as “domestic terrorist” reading material.

On the other hand, i suspect there are academics who teach Blood In My Eye in ways that alienate the text from its primary purpose, which is to theoretically inform and embolden people who are engaged—or ready to engage—in radical-to-revolutionary activities, however they might define those activities. I think in some ways, this is worse than refusing to teach the book at all.

These and other liberal reactions to revolutionary praxis further reflect the lies that academics often tell themselves (and students) when they claim certain political identities. But to paraphrase the great poet Rasheed Wallace , the Dragon don’t lie.