- 1 This interview was conducted on February 27, 2024.
Robin D. G. Kelley was born in New York City in 1962, in a political environment and family. He is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). His work explores the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; visual culture; labor; race; and Marxism. The idea of freedom is omnipresent in Kelley’s writings, which constantly pay tribute to the activists and the people who organize for justice, abolition, revolution and love. He is the author or co-editor of numerous award-winning books, including Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994), Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009) and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). Freedom Dreams delves into the ideologies, hopes and dreams of liberation that fuel black radical social movements, and shape their collective vision of the future. Kelley’s work is a bridge between the dreams of freedom and the people practicing liberation. In a new edition (2022), the historian reflects on the ways recent and contemporary movements have expanded and transformed his own vision of freedom. Twenty years after it was published for the first time, Freedom Dreams confirms Kelley as one of the most important thinkers of our time. In the following conversation, he discusses how hope is still driving social movements in American cities.
Fig. 1. Robin D. G. Kelley at the Steve Biko Centre (Thando Sipuye, 2017)
Charlotte Recoquillon: American cities have long been strategic places for progressives and radical initiatives aiming at creating better conditions of life for their residents, correcting or eradicating crises and inequalities. In that sense, they also have been laboratories to create solutions and transform systems of oppression. In recent years, as the situation worsened in many communities due to multiple conjunctural and structural crises (Covid, police brutality, climate change, economic crisis…), broad social movements took off, often built on local initiatives. Far from the language of crisis and fear, the notion of hope and—to borrow your words—“radical imagination” (2002) has been quite central.
Let’s take the Black Lives Matter movement for example. After the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, activists pushed for reforms in the hope of reducing or eliminating racial profiling, extrajudicial killings and police violence. Their mobilization led to more radical demands to dismantle the structures perpetuating this violence. Fast forward to after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, when abolitionists’ work has been more visible and supported. Yet it is often misunderstood in the mainstream conversation. When people hear “abolition,” they think of destruction, when it is, in fact, a work of creation. To Mariame Kaba, a leading abolitionist thinker and activist, the object of abolition is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (53). The abolitionist vision then is about “building the world we want, trying new things, and learning from our mistakes,” which will make “new possibilities emerge” (33). But it is not a new framework. Long before her, Black Panther Stokely Carmichael complained,
When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating. A revolutionary must present a viable alternative to the masses. (1971)
So, Robin D.G. Kelley, to start this conversation, can you tell us how hope manifests itself within social movements, particularly those grounded in black radical traditions, as you've explored in your work? How “freedom dreams” contribute to the resilience and mobilization of the people building and participating in social movements?
Robin D. G. Kelley: Hope is a tricky word because sometimes it leads to false optimism. A better term might be determination. Hope and determination are two sides of the same coin. If you look at the social movements I write about, in cities, for example, where premature death is looming at every corner, where a lot of the fights are over basic needs, over safety, over housing or historically, against lynching. . . all these movements must assume that they can win, that they could stop the catastrophe that's in front of them. Otherwise, there's no reason to participate. The assumption is not that if we hope hard enough, things will change. It is that we must be determined, precisely because if we don't fight, we can't change anything. That, to me, is the heart of the matter when we think about what hope is, and about movements. Take the Communist Party in the South hoping to end lynching and redistribute land (Kelley 1990). These things seemed impossible but it's exactly what determination is. When they fight to make the world a safe, just and liberating place, they are not even fighting for their generation. Angela Davis’s writings, for example, provide such clarity on questions of freedom from a place of confinement (2024). I think about black feminist movements dealing with multiple struggles like reproductive justice, feminicide, employment, fair wages, or safe housing. . . They're fighting these battles at every level, sometimes within their own households, against the state, within the streets and still, they keep struggling, organizing, fighting, finding better ways to survive. It reminds me of W.E.B. Du Bois’s opening quote in a chapter of Black Reconstruction. He writes, “How civil war in the South began again—indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights” (670). It speaks to everything I've been trying to write my whole life. He's saying that in this moment of Reconstruction—when for a short moment, democracy was established in the South, when black people established free universal public education and created the possibility of higher wages and better working conditions for the entire region—black people get attacked, they get lynched, and ex-Confederates overthrow local government through force. In this moment, they fight, they die, but they don't stop. And the Civil War doesn't even end at that point because black people are determined not to allow the South to win. And it's that moment, Du Bois writing in Black Reconstruction in 1935, facing the threat of fascism, when he invokes “black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.” His liver, consumed by an eagle no less―in his time and ours, the symbol of U.S. imperialism! The lesson I think is that our own survival depends on both regeneration and trying to break free of that rock. We keep fighting knowing that we have no choice, it is the only path to freedom. And to me, that is hope.
- 2 Panel discussion. “How should we as comrades respond to the Ferguson rebellion and #BlackLivesMatte (...)
C. R.: Hope is more than a disconnected emotion or philosophical and abstract concept. It is important to think of the notion of hope in a material and grounded way, rooted in historical, political and geographical contexts. Hope translates into actions and practices and shapes spaces and people. Through the practice and experience of activism and political mobilization itself, people themselves get transformed. In 2015, in the early stages of the Black Lives Movement, I attended a panel at the Left Forum2 where the conversation revolved around the importance of political mobilization. People were sharing how they learn in action, through motion, and not in the classroom. More importantly, the dialog underlined the healing power of political mobilization, how people can liberate themselves from depression and what they internalized in the context of an oppressive society. Thinking and reflecting on how the system affects us is necessary. To achieve this, safe spaces are needed. A decade later, how transformative has this movement been?
R. D. G. K.: The absence of hope is tricky, it can lead to the kind of pessimism that pushes people out of movements. But being transformed into movement, is also being committed to a movement. Movements are often like revolving doors. People have a concern, they come in, they struggle, they feel like they're not winning anything and nothing's changing, and they step out. It's only the sense of hope that allows people to see the struggle is not about winning a campaign, but creating a new society. Even among my peers and my comrades, as we fight together, it's not simply that we win or lose, it's that we can see the world differently, we see each other differently. That is transformation. We redefine things like justice, we redefine our cohorts, we redefine what the issues are.
Take the fight against policing for example. For black people, it is as old as police itself. Police brutality begins with the formation of Metropolitan Police in Cincinnati in 1840. So, over the last fifty years, we’ve watched a movement emerge that first wanted to reform the police and wanted to make changes in use of force policy. They wanted to have oversight of the police through civilian review boards and body cameras. . . things that they believed could hold police accountable.
Then, over time, they realized none of this is working. The police cannot provide justice for us and, in fact, get in the way. So that's how people shift from fighting for things that they think are very basic to demanding abolition. That's a huge leap. And once they become an abolitionist, they start to think, “what will replace the police if we get rid of it?” Or, “how do we hold people accountable if we get rid of the prisons and jails?” And, for that matter, “how do we hold each other accountable? What is justice?” So transformation is not even about enlightenment. I think that's a big mistake. It's about shining light on things in order to ask more questions, to dig deeper, to find more meaning. To me, that's what it's all about. It requires throwing off old ways of thinking. It's what Grace Lee Boggs explained to me as dialectical thinking (2015). If you think about hope within a dialectic, hope is that boulder pushing up against the force of domination, oppression, exploitation, limitation, and then out of that force, produces a sort of new window. So, we have the thesis of struggle; the antithesis is the right of state power to subjugate people—black people—through premature death for example. The synthesis is abolition: you remove those structures and replace them with new ones created in movement.
C. R.: When I was preparing this conversation, I came across Obama’s famous campaign slogan “hope.” At that moment, America believed (hoped?) it had overcome its racist history and racial divisions, that it became “postracial” (Marable 1-13). Obama then became the first black president of the United States, campaigning on this notion of hope, while also embodying a soft position on race in stark contrast with what the Black Liberation movement had been advocating for decades. What does it say about this moment and his politics?
- 3 Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.
R. D. G. K.: The way Obama used that term hope in his presidential campaign reveals how he is the embodiment of a neoliberal politics of hope. His conception of hope is absent struggle even though he always refers to the line that Doctor King used which came from a nineteenth-century theologian Reverend Theodore Parker, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”3 It suggests that justice is an inevitable outcome. The Obama ethos is that it bends toward justice because the country was created based on the foundation of justice, that somehow there's something inherent in this constitutional Republic that automatically will get us there and everything else is an aberration.
This is Gunnar Myrdal’s argument in An American Dilemma (1944), where he's looking at the race problem in the United States. Myrdal argues that America is essentially democratic, that its values are foundational, but the problem is that white attitudes contradict the creed of the country. So all you have to do is get white attitudes to basically embrace the creed. And so, people began to believe that the civil rights movement “succeeded” because white people started to embrace the creed of the country. But what creed are we talking about? A creed of a country in which the Constitution itself acknowledges not only the legality of slavery, but permits Southern power to count three out of five enslaved persons to boost its representation in Congress? That is the foundation of our country. There's no creed that's based on democracy.
If there is a creed, this is the ironic thing: America only becomes a democracy in the 1860s, during Reconstruction. Why is this important? Because formerly enslaved people are at the heart of it. The people treated like chattel are foundational to the country, as well as Native Americans, the people who are dispossessed. Their struggle for justice, for autonomy, their struggle to acknowledge their very presence, that in some ways is the arc. In other words, social movements, struggles for justice and democracy, led by those at the bottom of the bottom rail that rise to the top, they are the ones that bend that arc. Meanwhile, power seeks to bend it back.
- 4 The state of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis with a lethal injection on Sept. 21, 2011. Davis a (...)
In the case of Obama, it was exactly his regime, his federal government, that also bent it back. So, in many ways, how Obama talks about hope tells us that we should wait, that we should be patient, that inevitably we're going to get there. We may not get there now, but we're going to get there later. That, to me, is different from what I was suggesting with the Promethean analogy, which is to say we will never get there unless we fight. We must push up against power and we must fight with determination. Even if we strike a blow and die, as they used to say in the days of slavery, we don't have a choice. There is very little in Obama's eight years, for me at least, that suggests policy that would empower people. Keep in mind, and again, I don't blame Obama personally for this, but it was under the Obama administration that the emergence of a black urban revolt took off. It took off with the killings of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. It took off with Occupy. One of the catalysts for the Occupy movement was the execution of a black man named Troy Davis who, all the evidence suggests, was innocent.4 So here you have this revolt for which Obama's policies do very little. They would investigate this, look at that, produce a report. But not much changed. His version of hope is silencing movements. The hope that I'm talking about is the determined hope of struggle, it is one that says we don't care if you're the first black president. We don't care about the symbolic politics; we care about the material transformation of our lives.
C. R.: To a certain extent, Donald Trump is riding on dream and hope too, when he says things like “make America great again” and agitates an idealized and fantasized version of it. Somehow, Trump is the result of half a century of conservative activism inside the Republican party (Ndiaye and Recoquillon). They are very intentional and proactive in their struggle to restore a white hegemonic nation.
R. D. G. K.: Hope is also a weapon against the people. That's why I'm always hesitant to use the term. If you think of hope in terms of the collective consciousness, what Trump exhibits is not different from the collective consciousness of post-Weimar Germany or Italy under Mussolini. I'm not saying this is what the people wanted, but how could they mobilize people? They mobilized people around the belief they could all share the glory of a great nation. What is a great nation? A great nation is one in which you have an empire like the ones behind Germany’s fascism, Italy's fascism and Spain's fascism. A great nation is when you could restore glory to the people who feel they have been dethroned, who feel like they once owned this country, who feel like they're being replaced by people, by Jews, by Indigenous people, by immigrants: the white people. Put them back in this room. And again, hope. Hope that we can go back to a time that never existed. The white people fighting for Trump never enjoyed that kind of status or wealth or power. But they believe.
I think of hope as the dark side of a collective ideology which dreams of a past that never existed. That is very different from dreaming of a future that never existed. I don't want to give the impression everyone agrees on what this future should look like because I wrote a book (1999) that dealt with different visions of the future, some of them futures where there were no white people at all, just like the black nationalist vision of the utopian society. So, it's not as if there's a universal understanding of what that future is. But what's important about the way a lot of movements today think about hope is the elimination of structures of repression, exploitation, domination, and their replacement with systems of justice. And it's like Doctor King always said about hope and peace. In many ways, he talks about peace, not meaning simply the absence of tension, but the presence of justice. You could say the same thing about people’s hope for peace. When you grow up in a world where there is war—whether that war is lead paint in your house, not being able to get a job, walking by police officers who are going to harass you every time, being vulnerable to rape and sexual violence—you want peace. And peace is not just the elimination of those structures, but the presence of justice. That is the hope we're talking about.
C. R.: Cities proved to be strategic spaces of political mobilization in this late stage of capitalism. As David Harvey (2004) showed, the centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few and the built environment itself result from capitalist accumulation by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. These neoliberal policies are more and more aggressive, so much so that they disrupt collective organizations, people’s lives, and, by isolating people, prevent them from building movements. Yet, cities are laboratories of hope and struggles for justice and saw an historically massive movement rise. . . If we think of how gentrification policies, for example, are the continuation of racist and capitalist policies of spatial and social appropriation (Recoquillon), it makes sense that cities are places of resistance. What’s the significance of the urban context regarding hope and the capacity to hope?
- 5 There were 247,761 allegations of police misconduct between 1988 and 2018 according to Civic Police (...)
- 6 FiveThirtyEight and The Marshall Project reported that cities have spent more than $3 billion to se (...)
- 7 The Chicago police department has operated off-the-books interrogation compounds, where people deta (...)
- 8 In November 2014, We Charge Genocide (WCG) sent a delegation of eight youth to Geneva, Switzerland (...)
R. D. G. K.: That's a really good question. Of course it's always uneven. To me, one of the most important cities to pay attention to—and I know you wrote a book on Harlem—is Chicago. Chicago is, in many ways, the test case for what's possible and what we are up against. Chicago has a long history and has been one of the leaders in police violence in the country5 with well over a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money spent on settling wrongful deaths and police brutality cases in the last ten or twelve years.6 Chicago PD is famous for a history of torture, in creating black sites7 in places like North Lawndale. In other words, it's been a war zone and a vicious war zone with a body count that is staggering. And yet, what came together over the last fifteen years has been one of the most dynamic movements led not just by Black Lives Matter, but Black Youth Project 100, Let Us Breathe Collective, Assata’s Daughters, Ella's Daughters, etc. We Charge Genocide took the case of State violence onto the international stage in Geneva,8 and to the city council to force Chicago to pay reparations for those people who've been victims, and not just victims of torture, but pay reparations to create a memorial and teach the history of State violence to school kids in Chicago. They created a new kind of political model of working together across generations, led especially by young people. But they're also fighting against gentrification, seizing spaces in places like North Lawndale to turn them into community spaces. They are fighting for fair and affordable housing. They don't win all these battles, but they've connected the dots between the fight against state violence and police violence in particular, and the need to both improve Black and Brown communities but also make sure people are allowed to stay there, without being priced out. What we're seeing is a more intensified version of what we've been seeing for the last four decades.
However, you have to keep in mind that the more intense and successful these movements are, the more money is spent on policing to increase the number of cops, to cover wrongful death and police brutality suits when cops that violate people's civil rights receive free legal protection. And there is the money spent on the technology. Police budgets have increased dramatically, in part because they're using certain forms of surveillance technology. Thanks to Amazon, thanks to Google, thanks to big corporations, thanks to companies like Palantir— which got a startup money from the CIA, by the way—founded by Peter Thiel who made all these billions of dollars, who's a big Trump supporter and developed software that's predictive in terms of where they think crimes will happen. The problem is that the algorithm identifies the very “hot spots” that were already targeted for criminal behavior and thus register high numbers of arrests. The result is an algorithm designed to racially profile. Historical crime data does not predict future criminal activity; rather, it predicts future policing—leading to the continued overpolicing of vulnerable communities. So even as we fight and even as we win some things, the trend is to enhance policing and strengthen police power.
In other words, it's like when Obama became president, looking at the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, he says I'm against dumb wars—not against war, against dumb wars. So, what we're going to do now, we're going to pull troops out of Iraq, but we're going to use drones and just kill people that way. That's the reality we deal with, and we should not be surprised by that because you can't hope away power. You can't wish it away. You could know that every time you make a move, and you succeed, and you create space, that space is going to be attacked. And that's why organizers in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and New York and Saint Louis say we need a politics of abolition because reform doesn’t work, they keep getting bigger weapons. So that's sort of where we are. I mean it's always a struggle and as much as I may feel optimistic some days and celebrate these victories, for every victory they're going back in the back room planning something else.
- 9 Stop Cop City: Defending the Atlanta Forest, stopcop.city/. Accessed August 19 2024.
C. R.: I can't help thinking about the city of Atlanta’s project to build a $90 million militarized police training facility in the middle of the Weelaunee Forest, located in a working-class black community.9 The facility faces massive opposition from groups pushing back against the militarization of the police and criminalization of marginalized people, and from environmental justice activists. This project was announced in the wake of the historic 2020 protests against police violence. And yet, the City and the State remain deaf to people’s opposition. Not only are they ignored, but the backlash against the movement is real. Laws criminalizing bailing out people and activism have been passed, an activist was killed during a protest, numerous arrests have been made and activists were targeted with domestic terrorism charges. . . And it’s not limited to Atlanta. In June, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, announced that the city would spend at least $225 million on a new police training facility to be operational in 2030. But it’s an even bigger trend. The researcher and activist Renee Johnston has tracked 81 cop cities projects pushed across the US since 2020 and Atlanta’s “original” Cop City announcement (Johnston).
- 10 Warnock has served as senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since 2005, and was previ (...)
- 11 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provi (...)
R. D. G. K.: That's exactly what I'm talking about. Cop City is Ground Zero for this struggle. It is emblematic of the amount of money being spent to destroy a viable forest, to create an environmental hazard to train police officers for urban warfare at the expense of people's safety and livelihood on one hand, and the fact that there's so much opposition to it on the other hand. Municipal power and state power passed laws to basically criminalize protest. They will make it impossible to use referenda or other forms of legal voting to be able to overturn these laws. And who's at the forefront of this? The black elite. It is not a black and white issue. This is the black elite of Atlanta who supported Cop City—including someone that people fought really hard for, Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is preaching from the pulpit of Doctor King's Church.10 And it's a travesty. But it doesn't surprise me that the very same prosecutors who are being elevated because of their prosecution of Trump's attempt to overturn the election are the same ones who are pushing really hard to use RICO statutes11 to put these young people in jail, possibly for most of their lives, for doing something that is moral and ethical, and trying to save lives. Nobody needs Cop City except for the powers that be.
Now let's step back for a second because Atlanta is a really good case study, even before Cop City was being planned out. Police officers in Atlanta, just like police officers all over the country, have a police foundation. At least since the 1970s, private companies like Google, Amazon, Walmart, Target, banks. . . support the police foundations which are, basically, corporate entities. They provide private money to give cops what they want, bigger and more powerful weapons, and also to experiment with some of the software and technology that the same companies that support police foundations want to sell. We live in the most corrupt country. This is like a banana republic for sure. In the spring 2020, during the uprising, the real issue was how to make our cities safer but police foundations used one of its usual tactics when you're going to prosecute a cop—one of theirs—, they threaten to go on strike. It's an unspoken rule. But this doesn't surprise me because Atlanta is also the same city where Maynard Jackson (1938-2003) was considered heroic. He was the mayor of Atlanta in the 1970s (1974-1982, 1990-1994), a product of the civil rights movement. In April 1977, nine years after Martin Luther King died fighting on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, the same union of sanitation workers in Atlanta went on strike and Maynard Jackson crushed that strike with the support of Andrew Young and all kinds of other people. They crushed the strike of black sanitation workers and they virtually destroyed the union because they didn't want to pay them.
Meanwhile, fast forward to 2024, all these black elected officials are supporting this albatross, this embarrassment of a military structure in the city of Atlanta. So, what does hope mean in Atlanta? What does that mean when the people that you elected, who you thought were fighting for you, are willing to put their money and their guns behind an institution that means harm, and to cover up the fact that those same people in the institution assassinated an activist? How do you have hope? Well, you don't really have a choice because the choice is you can walk away and the city of Atlanta becomes Cop City. Or, you can continue to fight, knowing the consequences, and hope that people will join you because it's not about winning the argument. Arguments against Cop City are already so clear. The problem is that the people behind it are behind what it really means, that is, the black elite is not that different from the neoliberals who run this place. They want to build a garrison state to protect their interests, their property, and they see the benefit of Cop City as a revenue producing entity; and that they also can leverage it with a combination of private funding from corporate interest and taxpayers’ dollars. We must understand that.
C. R.: When I visited Atlanta a couple of years ago, I did meet with some grassroots activists and progressive Church leaders but overall, it was palpable that this generation of black leaders were not the more radical on the spectrum of the black liberation movement, and that their stance on the Black Lives Matter movement—which was a very hot topic at that time—was not very modern to say the least. The local leaders were not standing behind BLM or Black Liberation. Considering that it was the birthplace of Martin Luther King and that the civil rights movement was so strong there, one could imagine that there is a legacy, however artificial, at least some legacy of fighting. . .
R. D. G. K.: But it's easy to take that legacy and change it. To the point that Martin Luther King has become a symbol people use to support Cop City! Cop City said it hires black police officers and King supported hiring black police officers. Cop City is about making communities safe. King was all about making communities safe. Cop City is about being able to have a safe, multiracial world and so that Atlanta could be the city too busy to hate and King would be turning over in his grave if he saw all the crime and the violence and the drug dealers. . . That's why they used to say King would be on our side. The civil rights movement didn't fight for these people to be selling crack on the corner, and so forth.
- 12 SNCC Digital Gateway. “January 1966. Georgia legislatures refuses to seat Julian Bond.” snccdigital (...)
In fact, the framing is the problem. The criminality of a large houseless or housing insecure population is not considered a crime. The criminality of high unemployment or the disparities between living in Buckhead or in southwest Atlanta, are not considered crimes. But someone who's struggling to make a living, sometimes selling drugs, sometimes selling things illegally, that's the crime. And that's why you need to have $90,000,000 dollars spent to build Cop City. That's how they get away with it. It's not a contradiction at all but part of our problem is that we don't fully understand the civil rights movement, its contradictions, its limits and its potential. When we think about Atlanta, the first thing we think about oftentimes is Doctor King and Ebenezer Baptist Church. What we don't think about is Julian Bond who, because he was a member of the State and because he took a stand against the Vietnam War, was thrown out of the Statehouse.12 You don't think about the Black Panther Party in Atlanta (Jones 12-51). That story is never told. We don't even talk about the sanitation workers’ strike. As long as these things are buried, we will continue to confuse hope as a broader understanding of this landscape of historical black politics connected to mainstream rather than those people who have never been mainstream but really been at the edges, fighting for something bigger than a share of the pie.
C. R.: That is one of the exciting things about the current abolitionist movement. The activists make it very visible how they build power and how they work. It's not just about the symbols or the one event, but how they get there. I think it's a very valuable tool to see that and to understand how you build power, influence and how you make change happen.
R. D. G. K.: Exactly. Accountability has become very important in these movements because one of the things that people are discovering is that the internal dynamics of a movement matter. The gender dynamics, the sexual violence that exists, oftentimes the inequalities, the treatment of people. . . This has become a public issue. Some of the people that we hold dear, who’ve been kind of heroic, turned out to really do harm to other people. So, how do you hold your comrades accountable? And it may seem like a small thing, but in the language of hope, if that hope is a determined hope, we cannot just reform things, we must also transform ourselves and transform our relationships within movements. Because if you can have actual accountability within a movement, imagine how you can model this for society as a whole. And so, for these movements, it's not just making a fairer criminal justice system but remaking that system to hold people accountable without punishment that is dehumanizing.
It also touches on the notions, next to hope, of utopia. The classic definition of utopia is that there's nowhere that it exists. That could be a negative thing or that could be a positive thing. But abstraction. . . you cannot have thoughts without abstraction. It's impossible. For example, how did people come up with the idea of socialism? Not because they walked around and found it. “Oh my God, here's socialism!” It takes abstraction to imagine it, and project it and try to build it. Imagining the end of slavery before emancipation required abstraction because for most of the society it was inconceivable.
I can't think of a movement that doesn't embrace some abstract ideal because that's how you map the future. That includes the right. Fascist dystopias are built on abstractions. They are imagining a world in which they are able to create a pure, Aryan nation, where they could eliminate human beings en masse. There's nothing more dangerously dystopian and abstract than figuring out a way to murder 6 million people. You can't get from the—allegedly—greatest minds the atomic bomb without abstraction. The problem is what is abstraction without ethics? What is abstraction without the recognition of the unity of all humanity or of the value of all life? And that's why abstraction is not the issue, idealism is not the issue. The issue is: what are our ethics, our values, our principles? And that's what distinguishes us from fascists.
- 13 On October 7, 2023, Hamas gunmen crossed Gaza's border into Israel, killing about 1,200 people. Tel (...)
C. R.: At the end of her autobiography, Becoming Abolitionists, Derecka Purnell offers different ideas to build an abolitionist world, including “dream centers” (291). “We can start imagining and believing that we can create the world that we want and deserve,” she writes, adding that “the greatest threats to our freedom are hopelessness, helplessness, and the criminalization of rebellion. Dreaming and joining others fights hopelessness because it reminds us that we develop the world that we want” (291). When I started to prepare this conversation, I was very excited about thinking about the abolitionist vision, and the inspiring decade of activism that has taken place. And then, October 713 happened. It is clear that the mobilization in the U.S. against the genocide of Palestinians is, in part, the result of that very decade of political education on questions of power, domination, colonialism, racial and social justice. The connection between the struggle against police violence in the U.S. and against the apartheid and Israel’s settler colonialism is clear, including through the close relation of American and Israeli polices training together and sharing intelligence and surveillance tactics. The anti-Cop City activists from Atlanta had been raising awareness on this well before October 2023. But it is equally difficult not to feel hopeless in front of so much violence and destruction. How can one stay hopeful in the context of the annihilation of Palestinian lives, through the systematic killing and traumatization of adults and children? The destruction of all schools and universities, health facilities, archives, cultural and historical landmarks. . . The land is destroyed to a point it seems impossible to return. . .
Fig. 2. Robin D. G. Kelley delivering a speech at the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund on Nov. 1, 2014. Collection personnelle.
R. D. G. K.: It goes back to what I began with. Genocide is the destruction of life and the ability to live, creating the conditions so that people can't return to their place. Thus, in the face of genocide, its victims cannot afford hopelessness. They can't. In fact, if they really were hopeless, they wouldn't flee, they would not resist, they wouldn't be scrounging for food, making bread out of animal feed and things like that. I have a colleague who teaches here in Asian American Studies who lost sixty members of her family. Sixty members. In face of that kind of overwhelming genocide supported by the United States, what we see is a level of determination which is unlike anything I've ever seen before. That's why all these people in Jewish Voice for Peace are showing up everywhere, blocking traffic, occupying spaces to bring attention to this violence. That's why so many nations are finally showing up at the International Court of Justice, charging Israel with genocide. That's why all these people continue to resist while the whole nation is basically displaced, and that's why the Israeli bombs don't stop. Because Israel’s seventy-six-year effort to render Palestinians hopeless has failed and will continue to fail. What we are witnessing is the Nakba with bigger weapons, a more extreme version of 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2019-2020, 2021. There's a diaspora of about 6 to 7 million Palestinians all around the world, thanks to the fact that the United Nations didn't really have the wherewithal or the will to allow for either a binational state or a Palestinian state.
This is the longest occupation in history and the longest that any modern nation has been without a state, beholden to a refugee process where they're dependent on food from the United Nations. As I said before, this is Ground Zero of a global crisis. But it teaches us a huge lesson. If we can solve this problem, we will solve a lot of problems around the planet. It's the world order, structured by five centuries of dispossession, slavery, and colonialism, that's unacceptable. It brings premature death to people because of their race, their nationality, their relationship to the Empire. It's what this machine is about. We have to destroy this machine, we have to stop it. It's a matter of life and death. So, to me, hopelessness has not prevailed yet. And, as long as the people in Gaza don't succumb to hopelessness, we have to fight for their lives. We must be determined and not merely wish for a better solution but make one. We're just beginning the work of trying to figure out how to protect and defend and support the right of self-determination on the part of Palestinian people, how to help people heal from their trauma. And again, it's not even new. In 2018, I gave a keynote speech for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. I was talking to a group of mostly Palestinians who raised money to purchase limbs for children, that's all they do. Arms. Legs. Feet. There is a whole society of people who are maimed, terrorized, traumatized, generation after generation after generation. That's a lot of work that's required. And that's what's before us.
C. R.: So much trauma cannot fail to affect multiple generations and our collective future. To wrap up this conversation about hope, what is your take about where we're heading now in terms of the liberation movement? And do you have an advice or something you want to share?
R. D. G. K.: I don't have a clue where we're heading. But, I'm a historian more than anything else, and one thing I've learned is that no one really could predict what was going to happen at certain moments, certain conjunctures. If you walked around cities in, say, 2010, and said, in four years, Saint Louis and Ferguson are going to be the center of a national, if not international movement to end police violence, of course, no one would have believed that. Things happen in ways we cannot predict; the contradictions are often not revealed until some kind of catalyst or some kind of crisis emerges. And when a crisis emerges, sometimes it seems on the surface, just a spontaneous thing, but what it reveals are all the tensions and contradictions beneath. So, I can't predict what's going to happen.
What I do know is that, whatever happens, there are four things we have to keep in mind. One is that we have to really pay attention to the contradictions that exist right now. And those contradictions are often between an emerging and complacent black elite that continues to use its civilized bona fides to do harm not just to black people, but to everybody. Secondly, that fascism is not something in the future, but is right here with us, right now, in this country and elsewhere. So the fight against fascism began long ago, not now. And we're not out of the woods. But a fascist future will not look like Italy or Germany or Spain, or the colonial territories under Portugal. What it's going to look like, in part, is what we can see right now. And then the third thing would be, the Democratic Party will not save us. It never has and never will. It’s becoming clearer and clearer—and ironically the genocide in Gaza has revealed it. And the fourth thing, just to kind of close on this theme of hope, is whether we use the word “hope” or not, we cannot afford to relinquish our determination for radical change, for transformative change. We can't step back and say the best we will ever do is reform the system and just make it a little bit softer, a little bit nicer for some people, because that's not how the system ever worked. We need to continue to do work, even if it seems impossible for our own generation, for generations to come. Because if we don't, and we haven't even talked about this, we will not have our planet. We are facing an existential crisis of the greatest proportions in the history of the planet. At every single level. We really don't have a choice. If you don't push or stand for truly transformative change then, to me, that's no different from being hopeless.