We made the road for walking and now we must run: Paulo Freire, the Black Radical Tradition, and the inroads to make beyond racial capitalism

Abstract

This essay places Paulo Freire in dialogue with a Black Radical Tradition (BRT) in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, the paper situates the significance of Cedric’s Robinson’s articulation of a BRT while exploring how contemporary scholars are troubling his disputatious relationship with Marxist social thought. Second, the paper foregrounds Freire’s modest contributions to a BRT in his anticolonial literacy campaigns in Guinea Bissau, Africa. Extending the principles of ‘dialogical cultural action’ in the context of African struggle that Freire documented in the letters compiled in Pedagogy in Process, a robust theorization of solidarity comes into sharper view. Third, the paper calls for further reinvention of Freire pointing to the ways his cogent analysis can be augmented by other racialized groups and radical traditions in solidarity with Black struggle to more explicitly confront the inherent racism and anti-Blackness fundamental to global capitalism.

Keywords:

• Racial capitalism
• solidarity
• Black Radical Tradition
• Marxism
• dialogical action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 What James Baldwin said of Stokely Carmichael and the phrase “black power” may also apply to Cedric Robinson and term, BRT. Baldwin states, that Carmichael didn’t not come up with the term. “He simply dug it up again from where it’s been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank.” (Baldwin, 2011, p. 99; Unattributed, 1979).

2 See for instance: The Futures of Black Radicalism edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (2017); The Monthly Review’s special issue on Racial Capitalism (July–August 2020); To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial, Capitalism, and Justice forum (2018) found on the Boston Review website.

3 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, explains “capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it” (Gilmore, 2020).

4 A number of examples can be offered here ranging from the Black Panthers to the student coalition of the Third World Liberation Front that gave birth to Ethnic Studies. A more recent example is the powerful manifesto produced by the Indigenous collective, The Red Nation.

5 In regards, to advancing new ways of relating to our earth, see Greg Misiaszek’s writings as he cross pollinates Freirean critical pedagogy with planetary environmental justice scholarship. (Misiaszek, 2020)

6 Decolonial scholar, Ramon Grosfoguel, et al., building upon Fanon, describes this hierarchy as the “zones of non-being” (Grosfoguel et al., 2015).

7 In response to their shared location within “zones of non-being,” Indigenous scholars of the Red Nation collective have identified the importance of indigenous and Black solidarities as they share a “dream for freedom” (2020). Specifically, the Red Nation argues that we will “never free life on this planet from the death grips of capitalism or colonialism….if we do not center the peoples and traditions who have resisted carcerality since capitalism and colonialism touched down: Black and Indigenous people” (2020).

8 The perceptive social theorist David Roediger identifies how solidarity is a “surprisingly neglected keyword in cultural studies” expressing an uneasiness with the ambiguity of the term as he calls for “more scholarly consideration of solidarity but also more sober and uneasy reflection in thinking through its promises and difficulties” (Roediger, 2017, p. 158). James Petras goes even farther to state, “the word “solidarity” has been abused to the point that in many contexts it has lost meaning” (Petras, 2018). In the realm of labor and globalization studies, sociologist Kim Scipes makes the observation that scholars are building upon familiar historical adages we can easily identify such as “an injury to one, is an injury to all” or “workers of the world, unite!” yet “there is no theory of global labor solidarity to date” (Scipes, 2016, p. 36).

9 To realize and act upon a unity for liberation without a class consciousness, from which class struggle may emerge, is not tenable. He makes this point clear in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the unity of the oppressed involves solidarity among them, regardless of their exact status, this unity unquestionably requires class consciousness.”

10 Michael Apple states, “from my intense discussions with him, I am certain that he would have become an even stronger participant in the struggles over racial subjugation had he but lived longer (Apple, 2003, p. 117).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Joseph Viola

Michael Joseph Viola is Associate Professor at Saint Marys College of California in the Justice, Community & Leadership (JCL) program and affiliate faculty in the Ethnic Studies program. Dr. Viola’s research contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of critical educational studies (critical pedagogy, critical race theory, popular education); ethnic studies; feminist standpoint theory; and critical globalization studies. His scholarship has been published in Critical Ethnic Studies, Race, Ethnicity and Education, the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies, and Kritika Kultura. His co-edited book on global hip hop titled, Hip-Hop(e): The Cultural Practice and Critical Pedagogy of International Hip-Hop received the Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association. He is currently working on a book project that examines Filipino/a American activism and solidarities from 1965 to present