Declare Your Politics Thursday.

I am not radical. 

I have maintained throughout my adult lifetime that I am neither radical nor Marxist in my politics. 

Since middle school, I have read, listened to, and engaged with Black radicalism, Black Marxism, among other schools of Black thought. 

I honor what they have built. 

Some of it is why I get to live the life I live today.

(On the flip side, some of it is why I have to life the life I live today.)

I am not radical.

*

Stacey Abrams was my first choice for the 2020 Vice Presidential pick.

In an alternate universe, she is Governor Abrams of Georgia, mulling over whether to leave her state in the middle of a pandemic to make history or not.

I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the candidates this year. In contrast to the 2018 midterms, when the Democrats took back the House after eight long years, and fielded exciting candidates in several gubernatorial races, the 2020 primaries began with too many candidates, in my opinion. I spent most of 2019 ill and busy. The pre-Iowa political Discourse felt like a backdrop against the continued unraveling of 45’s administration.

I followed Kamala Harris over the years, but from a distance. Like everyone else in the country, I noted when she won the AG seat in Cali (in Michigan we were like, well, that’s California), then of course watched her become the first Black woman to be elected statewide and reach the US Senate since Illinois’ Carol Moseley Braun.

When she announced her candidacy last year, I gave her a quick look. I decided not to vote for her because I’m a Twitter denizen, and everyone in Abolition Twitter was like “hell no, she’s terrible, locked moms and kids up for truancy, she’s a cop.” 

I found this primary season unpalatable. I was asked to join the Warren campaign. I read critiques from the Cherokee Nation about her claims about her heritage. I wanted to honor a friendship and commitments that I thought were mutual at the time, so I refused, and decided not to endorse.

I didn’t consider voting for Bernie Sanders at all until the end of 2019. I was still mad as hell about 2015-2016, and some of the run-ins I had with his supporters even before that election. But I did my homework over the holidays, watched Iowa and New Hampshire go down, and listened to some of his Black women surrogates. After the “weird Black girls” mess, I decided to quietly cast my vote his way, telling only a couple of people.

I voted for him. I thought it was the most ethical thing to do during this cycle.

(So much for “identity politics,” “representation,” and “selfishness.”)

I thought maybe he had a chance to beat Trump, but unlike friends and colleagues left of me, I wasn’t sure about it. I talk to Black people over 40 who do not live in my current world a lot. They told me “we told you ain’t no way in 2016, and our answer remains the same.”

Before the pandemic, I figured that a Sanders/Warren unity ticket was the best progressives could hope for against Trump. I found Black Boomers’ choice of Biden completely inexplicable, but unlike some, I don’t sit up and disrespect my elders.

Before the pandemic, I thought when the party rejected Sanders again, we were choosing to relitigate 2016.

That was before.

*

This is now.

*

I didn't expect to feel a moment of genuine happiness when I learned the news that Joe Biden had picked Kamala Harris as his running mate on my birthday. 

It was truly a pure and honest reaction, and it happened while I was streaming live.

I was surprised, and I was glad.

And if you feel a way about that? That's entirely on you. I've reached the point where I don't care.

Some of my Facebook friends felt Black women’s joy and glee over the announcement was a betrayal, that we were hypocrites, and that it was a “f— you.”

My birthday moment wasn’t that. It was a moment of happiness.

My genuine human emotion wasn’t me putting a middle finger up.

This post is, though.

Stop policing Black women’s reactions for purity.

Stop using us as your avatars for radicalism until or unless we declare that as our politics.

And even then?

Stop.

*

By undergrad, I had questions about the Black radical tradition. Some of them have been answered through conversation, reading, and relationships.

But I still have questions.

I have questions about gender. Yes, I’ve read Black feminist thought. But in practice, I have seen — and repeatedly experienced — harm by those who profess radical politics. (Some of you may be reading this post.)

I have questions about sexuality. Yes, I’ve read Black queer theory. But in practice, I have witnessed and mourned significant harm to my LGBTQ friends by those who declare themselves to be radical.

I have questions about religion. Yes, I’ve read Black radical theology. But in practice, I have seen — and repeatedly experienced — harm in Black churches, even those that are progressives.

And then, there are the radicals who insult religious Black folk, and dismiss the comfort that we find in the faith of our ancestors.

I have questions about idealizing pasts-that-never-were. I’ve done my research. If the past was so amazing, how did the transatlantic slave trade happen?

I have questions about basic shit that get thrown back to me as “Western values.” No. It’s basic interpersonal shit that exists in all human cultures, harms people, and gets handwaved.

The answer is always “white supremacy.” I guess that’s sufficient when you grow up minoritized, or get slammed with being marginalized during your formative years.

That answer doesn’t work when you grew up in Blacktopia.

That answer doesn’t work when you are a survivor among survivors in Blacktopia.

You see, I don’t have to imagine All Black Everything.

I’m from it.

And like many other Black women?

Lately, I have been listening to those who are listing some cold, hard facts, and asking questions about our unilateral racial loyalty…

Like, the way we stay silent while we get dragged for our supposed disloyalty to everyday Black folk, even when our considerable receipts prove otherwise.

I have questions.

*

Fandom, children’s literature, and fantasy are not all that I’ve done in four decades and some change. 

I started a teen grassroots nonprofit org when I was 16 — I guess I was an organizer, although I heard no one call it that in 1993 — then supported student activists as a high school teacher.

(I’ll share those stories some other time.)

It wasn’t until my early 30s that this current chapter of life (Ivy league prof) was even on the radar. And that’s what I see it as - a chapter. 

I do believe there will be other chapters after this. 

*

People are outrageous in their reads of Black people in institutions. 

They flatten your experience and perspectives, and don’t even know the half.

Yes, I have been a graduate student — I was one for 9 years. 

Yes, I have been an adjunct, twice. 

Some of us keep being told representation ain't it, diversity, equity, and inclusion ain't liberation, and Black people in these institutions uphold these white supremacist systems...

1) as if some of us working on these issues don't know that,

2) as if some of us working on these issues don't constantly SAY that,

3) by those who then turn around and then require, and at times demand, the kinds of labor that we can only do because we are in place (representation), with a certain kind of expertise (DEI).

This throwback pic from 2016 perfectly captures my reaction.

And yet the context of many of these conversations are elite institutions.

You came where to do what?

For lib—

Where there are multiple institutions within —

If you don’t—

Anyway, whatever.

When I first came here, I just couldn’t relate to folks who were racial justice warriors in one sentence, and insufferable intellectual elitists in the next. I hated it here. I hated that the demands of the campus were pulling me out of the work I’d hoped to do in schools.

I realized by 2014 that I needed to decide whether I was staying, or whether I was going home.

I got a postdoc. I did a decent job on my reappointment talk, I guess. I got reappointed, then tenured.

I figured I’d ride this thing out, like my stepdad said right before he died. I remembered my Grandma’s words: Don’t let nobody run you out of nowhere. You leave on your own terms. So many Detroit women elders echoed that throughout my life.

I’m clear about why I’m here, and why I remain. 

For now.

*

Every Black intellectual who claims they’re a “radical” or a “scholar activist” ain’t one.

Radical ain’t these doctorates. When I announced I was leaving Cass Tech to start my PhD at Michigan, one of my amazing seniors wrote me a long letter, asking me not to go, and explaining that I have much more impact inside the classroom, with actual Detroit teens. 

“If you go up there, you’ll change…”

Radical ain’t the professoriate in these hostile-to-Black-life institutions at all. At all. I have spent the past 15 years with Detroit in my ear, ever since I left DPS, telling me on repeat what it ain’t — I stayed saying that I didn’t want to be a professor until my fifth and final year of my PhD program. I was going back to DPS, then AAPS, then “there’s an opening at Henry Ford Community College.” It wasn’t until the fall before finishing the dissertation, and getting caught up in the idea of job season with encouragement from my advisor, that I thought, “I can do this!”

And then I was offered the position at Wayne State. A job beyond my wildest dreams — urban institution, in the middle of the city — in my favorite area of the city.

I got a place right on the river. With enough room for family and friends. 

I got to greet the sunrise on the East Side every morning.

In the afternoon and evenings, there was Eastern Market, Pizza Papalis, Traffic Jam… and the riverwalk.

I could hear the foghorns as I fell asleep at night.

I threw parties. Fireworks in June, of course, but Memorial Day and my sister and brother-in-law’s anniversary.

I plugged into church and sorority and started volunteering.

I even started dating again… a little. :)

I was pretty hopeful in the spring of 2011. I’d won my first fellowship to study slavery in children’s lit that summer. My sister Dani was getting married.

I joked with my best friends. “I’m going to sell this book, get rich, and buy a boat by the time I’m 40.”

I felt like I could see the next 30 to 40 years of my life.

And then, three things happened between April and September 2011:

A Black woman professor with 27 publications didn’t make tenure at COE and had to leave. Shenanigans. I began learning of a terrible, decades-long pattern of racism and systemic exclusion at the very institution that had been such a haven for me as a kid, teen, and young adult.

My stepdad’s cancer returned. Heartbreak. I’d buried one father too young - my little sisters were even younger. Surely God wouldn’t let that happen to us again?

And then in late summer, I had a life changing conversation with Kerry Ann Rockquemore, founder of the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, who’d just moved to Detroit.

“There’s this job opening a senior colleague told me about at AERA. It’s at Penn. I told several of my friends to apply. I’m not leaving Detroit, and I don’t want to go to the East Coast to work at some elitist school. I already know how it’ll be…”

That’s what I told her.

(I have kept that same energy for 9 years and counting.)

*

That fall, there were more shenanigans. (Won’t share, but that sentence suffices for everyone who knows.)

At the culmination of that mess, I applied for the job I currently have, writing the application materials during the last weekend in September before the deadline.

My stepdad’s health declined. Watching someone suffer is just awful. You want to pull the disease out of their body, by magic if you must, but you just can’t.

Fall 2011 is a blur in my memory — I was teaching 3 classes, finishing my first book with the co-editor, chairing my Delta chapter’s EMBODI program, volunteering with 3 different other orgs, and in the NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program — was like in Cohort #2 or #3. I did all that, but it feels like I was constantly on the Lodge between downtown and my parents’ home in Southfield.

I got the Penn interview. I figured it was good to have a back up plan… “maybe Wayne State will counter, and I can pay down debt and buy this place.” I’d already cashed in my DPS pension to help a family member out…

(Like, folks just don’t get how working class folks think. Lots of THEORY about the working class, less about our sheer f*cking pragmatism, especially the Black working class of the great cities of the Midwest who came up from the Black belt of the South, the knack, the know-how, the gotta-figure-out-how-to-get-this-shit-done that is part of the culture.)

On the day I came to interview at Penn, my stepdad died. His passing happened while I was on my flight.

“He flew there with you.”

(He met me in the air.)

His last words to me:

“Might as well go there and see what they’re talking about in Philly.”

*

That was the thing about this job:

I gave up two huge parts of myself up to grab this brass ring I wasn’t sure I wanted… still don’t, in many ways.

I gave up Detroit, a city I said after my FAMU experience (another time) I’d never leave. At the time, I thought I’d be able to split my time between the two cities. (Hasn’t happened.)

I gave up my dream of being an urban educator, who writes books for her students on the side… whose greatest ambition was fulfilled in 2008, when I was offered a department chair position at a high school, then surpassed with the WSU dream job.

I learned early on not to tell people here this story — Detroit, and Wayne State, that was your dream? Here, that seems like nonsense. Fool’s gold.

(One of the first who got it was my research partner, which is why we’re good friends.)

The people I’ve connected with the most here, who I frankly love the best, are activist Philadelphia educators. I don’t get to spend enough time with them… my Teachers Institute of Philadelphia course was awesome because of them. They honestly made the early weeks of the pandemic bearable.

Some of them are radical educators. I truly admire them.

They are radical…

I am not.

*

I’m not a radical.

I come from a time and place where you can’t just claim to be some shit that you’re not.

How the hell you radical, and you sittin up there at that Ivy, tenured and comfortable?

You ain’t radical, grinning in white folks’ faces. Shucking and jiving…

These people here in this spacetime think they are telling me something new that I haven’t heard all my life.

I would rather not claim it.

I would rather not over promise and under deliver.

*

I did not seek out elite institutions for my own formative education, refusing every pre-PhD so-called “opportunity” because of my budding youthful politics, starting when I was 13. 

My niece is adamant about attending an HBCU. Why, I’ve asked?

All Black Everything.

We raised her right…

(Well, we raised her.)

*

I said I was going to hammer out this whole notion of “all Black everything,” which I was raised in, came of age in, then took a hiatus from after significant and unanswered patterns of harms, then started re-engaging with much more thoughtfully…

I don’t feel like it. I’m tired, it’s late, I’ve been on the phone, and I’m ranting because I was determined to have a good birthday, had one, and still am OK-ish because of that.

I am not ready to share my HBCU experience.

(There’s a reason I don’t talk much about it.)

Excellent education, though. Ethos that I value. And folks like Chantel Reese of Reesespeak I’ve known more than half a lifetime.

*

It’s annoying, this assumption that all or even most Black professors are radical.

All Black people with an opinion we express in public that doesn’t co-sign BS are (naturally) expected to be radical. And then y’all get mad when we’re not Perfectly Woke, Read the Latest, Always At the Protest, Because How Dare We, Hypocrites…

Y’all said I was radical.

I’m not.

I keep telling you I’m not.

*

For me, being radical means something.

And while definitions differ, for me, radicalism means that you’re committed to ending current systems by any means necessary, now, and building anew.

I love that. At best, it’s a romantic, pretty dream. There are some good people I know — a few who are just amazing — who are radical thinkers, activists, dreamers. Truly doing good in the world.

I am from one of the places in the West where Black radical revolution actually won… at least, for a time.

“Never forget, Detroit is the United States’ Haiti.”

I’ve been told that, more than once, by activists back home. I used to think, well, Haiti is the United States’ Haiti, and Detroit is Detroit.

But I now know what they meant.

(Detroit delenda est.)

*

The second part of the novel I’ve been writing most of my life pays homage to the book above.

“Detroit, I do mind dying” has been a mood since ’77, baby.

I’ve always minded.

I also have always minded being defined.

*

“We need all Black spaces,” they tell me. 

I blink.

I remember.

The novel I have been writing for the vast majority of my life is a critique of Blacktopia.

It interrogates one imagined Afrofuture in ways that Octavia & so many others have by playing (a little) with time.

(“Dr. Thomas, who studies Afrofuturism…”)

(I wrote, very specifically, “This book is not about Afrofuturism.”)

(“Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a theorist of Afrofuturism…”)

Still not radical, though.

*

This demand that all Black women be avatars for a certain kind of politics? It's unreasonable. What’s that all about?

Even among Harris' supporters, there's a range of opinion. Some are huge fans. Stans. Some, like me, are critical of her record, and want her to provide answers for those who have been harmed, as well as concrete steps toward action to address those harms in the future as Vice President.

There seems to be an increase in expectation that Black women (and girls) be the face of a narrow set of politics. Questioning our Blackness. Wondering whether we're down for The People.

And.... nah.

*insert cussing here*

You can truly miss me with that.

I will always feel a way about those who enjoy raining on Black women's parades... even when other Black women do it.

*

I am not a radical.

I understand why you think I must be — Black life is lensed as a radical act in this horror, since Black death is normative — but forget that.

Black women get to define themselves. 

Part of that involves declaring what we are.

Part of that means that eventually, you realize what you’re not.

I respect many radicals. Some are straight up clowns, but many are sincere.

I read, listen, and hear some of it, and think, Amen.

I read, listen, and hear some of it, and think, Nope.

You don’t get to define us, and then judge us according to that definition.

How can you tell me who I am when you don’t even know who you are?

*

“I would have thought you’d be a vegan, Dr. Thomas.”

“I was wondering why we’re not reading more radical Black feminist thought in this course on comics and graphic novels.”

“I’m surprised you get along with someone like Professor X, who is conservative, while you’re much more radical.”

“…a radical Black professor at Penn…”

“…radical Black prof…”

“…radical Black…”

“…radical.”