Events & Calendars A Conversation with Walter Johnson ’88

Transcript of conversation between Khary Polk and Walter Johnson

- Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for joining. I'm really excited about tonight's guest and also our moderator. Just a couple of notes to begin, the event will be recorded and will be available on our website for those who are unable to make it tonight and the other note is that our moderator, Professor Khary Polk, will ask some questions and then also turn to your questions. So you could submit a question to the moderator at any point you wish. It's a great pleasure to welcome Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Johnson grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and I'm very proud to say that he is a history major and graduate of Amherst College, class of 1988. After finishing at Amherst, Walter spent a year at the University of Cambridge before earning a PhD in history at Princeton. Professor Johnson's work has long focused on slavery and capitalism in American history, particularly in the 19th century. His earlier books, "Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market" was published in 1999 and "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom" published in 2013. These two books have been recognized with numerous prizes and awards, including the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society of Historians of Early American, the Early American Republic. The Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. I may be missing some of the prizes. Published just last spring, Walter Johnson's most recent book is entitled "The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States" and as many of you who will have read the book know, it traces the interwoven histories of racism, resistance and solidarity in and around St. Louis and tells a much larger story about the history of the country as a whole. It is currently a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction and the LA times 2020 Book Prize for history among others I'm sure. Walter Johnson is the recipient of numerous recognitions and fellowships including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship and he is the founding member of the Commonwealth Project at Harvard, a project I find fascinating and about which I hope he will speak tonight. It's an initiative that models an innovative way for universities to engage with communities and I hope to hear more about it from him directly. Our moderator tonight is associate professor of black studies and sexuality women's and gender studies, Khary Polk. Professor Polk, as many of you know, is a cultural historian of the African American diaspora. He's a specialist in LGBTQ studies and a scholar of race, gender and sexuality in the US military. He received his PhD in American studies from New York University where he knew Walter Johnson, and at Amherst, Khary teaches courses in black sexuality, military history, black European studies and critical theory as well as queer theory. His book "Contagions of Empire" was published recently and to acclaim and I'm delighted that he's agreed to moderate this session. Finally, Professor Johnson has agreed to meet with Amherst students next Monday at 3:45 pm and you can sign up on the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism or you can watch the Daily Mammoth and sign up in that way. I appreciate his generosity and I'm delighted to introduce Professor Walter Johnson.

- Thank you very much for that introduction. It's nice to be back at Amherst so to speak and to have a chance to talk with Khary. I am going to go ahead and just read some of the beginning of the book and then I'll be happy to hear what Khary has and take any questions. The architectural history of a once great city lies packed into crates in a warehouse near Cahokia, Illinois. Molded cement pediments, stained and structural glass, ornamental cast iron, wrought iron and mild steel, stone columns, friezes, reliefs and figural sculptures, doors, window frames and full wooden staircases, remnants of banks and breweries, churches and courthouses, dairies, department stores and steel mills. All of the row houses that lined one side of a downtown square, the red brick gothic classicism of the Little Sisters Of The Poor and the Beaux-Arts Lindell department store. The Ralston Checkerboard Company's grain elevator and the fortress-like First District police station. The 19th century skyscrapers that once lined Real Estate Row, the city of St. Louis torn down, pieced out into elements, cataloged and packed into crates. The archeological remainder of a city that once harbored the ambition of being among the world's greatest, carefully curated by a visionary demo man. Across the Mississippi river, back in the city of St. Louis itself, the pieces of the past lie jumbled together and scattered around the foundation of the city's 30,000 vacant houses, their windows boarded up and roofs collapse upon themselves. Many of these houses have been repossessed by the city and delegated to the St. Louis Land Clearance Redevelopment Authority for resale. Some can be bought for as little as a single dollar. Thousands of poorly maintained parcels of property on the city's north side have been bought up by neighbors or speculators. The population of the city today is just over 300,000, roughly the same number as in 1870 and around 1/3 of the total in 1950. The city has been left behind by its population. Middle-class whites and some blacks have moved to the suburbs. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the neighborhoods of poor blacks and some whites have been torn down around them. It is a truism that the struggles of American cities in the second half of the 20th century were due to white flight and there is no doubt that St. Louis whites moved out of the city in droves in the years following the Second World War but the story of the human geography of St. Louis is as much a story of black removal, the serial destruction of black neighborhoods and the transfer of their population according to the reigning model of profit and policing at any given moment, as of white flight. Of the city's abandoned houses, it is perhaps fair to say that they are worth more dead than alive. The deep burgundy bricks, so smooth that they almost seem glazed, sell for 50 cents a piece today in cities like new Orleans and Houston. For many years, there was little regulation of the demolition business and row houses and brownstones containing anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 bricks were easy money for anyone with a pry bar and a pickup. Even today, when demolition companies must be licensed and tear downs authorized, there are rogue demo men, brick rustlers, who break into abandoned houses to steal the copper wiring, the iron plumbing and the led counterweights out of the window frames. Some will set an old house on fire, knowing that the water from the firemen's hoses will soften the mortar, making the bricks easier to salvage and scrape clean for sale. So many of the houses in North St. Louis have been torn down that some of the neighborhoods look like rural farmsteads. Clusters of houses here and there, surrounded by open space. St. Louis today has the highest murder rate in the nation and the highest rate of police shootings in the nation. There is an 18 year difference in life expectancy between a child born to a family living in the almost completely black JeffVanderLou neighborhood in North St. Louis than a child born to a family living in the majority white suburb of Clayton, which sits less than 10 miles to the west. Indeed, significant differences in virtually any marker of social wellbeing in the city of St. Louis, rates of adult diabetes or childhoods asthma, levels of lead in the bloodstream, internet access can be charted down a single line, Delmar Avenue, which bisects the city between north and south, between black and white. Just over the city line, St. Louis County boasts three of the 25 wealthiest suburbs in the United States, Town and Country, Ladue and Frontenac. Back in the city, standing on streets that depending on the block contend to lead the nation in the density of accidents involving pedestrians, gun murders and payday loan stores, it is hard not to wonder what happened here. From the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the launching of Black Lives Matter, many of the events that we consider central to the history of the United States occurred in St. Louis. Much of this history is so well known that it's Midwestern origins have apparently seemed to historians to be beside the point. The Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott case and the western Indian Wars. The East St. Louis Massacre in 1917, the Supreme Court decisions in the landmark civil rights cases, Shelley v. Kraemer, Jones v. Mayer, housing rights cases, Gaines versus Canada, education and McDonnell Douglas v. Green, employment, and the symbiosis of urban redevelopment by bulldozer, the sequestration of poor black people in housing projects. Pruitt-Igoe was the nation's most notorious and in the white flight suburbanization in the post-war period. The 1960s synthesis of anti-communism, COINTELPRO and white nationalism in the Nixonian new right and the militarization of policing, all of these events and many others that are treated in this book, are aspects of the history of the United States that cannot truly be understood apart from their St. Louis roots. Looking behind the curve of received history, one finds the often forgotten radical history of St. Louis. The history of the city turns out to be less a matter of timeless Midwestern conservatism than of reaction to the consequential efforts of conquered, stigmatized, poor and radical people to transform their lives and their society and to the image of a fuller humanity. The first general emancipation of the Civil War occurred in St. Louis, where Joseph Wedemeyer, confident and publisher, confidant and publisher of Karl Marx was in charge of organizing the city's defense. The first general strike in the history of the United States, which briefly united white and black workers in what historians have termed the St. Louis Commune, occurred in the city in 1877. Through the 1930s and well into the Second World War, St. Louis was one of the most radical cities in the United States and the communist party in St. Louis was an important site of radical interracial organizing. Indeed through both the period of the civil rights movement and after the black freedom struggle in St. Louis was distinguished by its focus on economic issues, jobs, housing and a just social wage. From the successful strike at Funsten Nut and the sit-ins at city hall in 1933 to one of the nation's first rent strikes in Pruitt-Igoe in 1969, black women from St. Louis have been at the leading edge of the radical history of the United States Seen the light of this history, there is nothing uncanny about the fact that the uprising that touched off the most recent wave of black radical organizing, the Michael Brown moment in American history, happened in St. Louis. Historians have traditionally treated St. Louis as a representative city, a city that is at once east and west, north and south, the place where various regional histories of the United States come together, the gateway to the West, the American confluence, a northern city with a southern exposure and so on. This book makes a more pointed claim that St. Louis has been the crucible of American history, that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-blackness in the city of St. Louis. St. Louis rose as the morning star of US imperialism. It was from St. Louis, itself a city built on stolen land, that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed on the journey to survey the commercial potential of the vast Louisiana Purchase territory, the homeland of dozens of nations that had not been party to the bargain. It was from there that Clark later supervised the forcible relocation, the ethnic cleansing of the tribes of the Upper Midwest. And it was from St. Louis that the genocidal Indian Wars of the last half of the 19th century were staged and supervised. For most of the period before the Civil War, the US Army's Department of the West was headquartered at Jefferson Barracks. For a time after, the entire Department of War was relocated to St. Louis. By 1870, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the United States and there was talk of moving the nation's capitol to the world-making confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Although the US military footprint in St. Louis lightened over the course of the 20th century, military contracting remained integral to the economy of both city and county through most of the century. It is not possible to tell the story of St. Louis without including the US Cartridge Company, McDonnell Douglas, Monsanto and Mallinckrodt. Behind the story of the rise and demise of the city of St. Louis is a much more complicated history, of continental and even global distributions of violence. The imperium of St. Louis and thus of the United States was centrally framed by the history of genocide, removal and the expropriation and control of land, all justified in the name of white supremacy. In his 1920 essay, "The Souls of White Folk" written in the years following his visit to East St. Louis in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 massacre, W.E.B. Du Bois provided the outline that I have followed in this book. Racism, he argued, was as old as humanity. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. And the exploitation of one group by another was quote, quite as old as the world, but their combination in the conquest of the Americas and the slave trade was something new, something unprecedented, something world making. The imperial width of the thing, the heaven-defying audacity marks its modern newness. Using a term I draw from the work of the political philosopher and social theorist, Cedric Robinson, I present the history that follows all the way from the slave trade and the Indian Wars down to the murder of Michael Brown and the uprising in Ferguson as part of the history of racial capitalism. The intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and practices of empire, extraction and exploitation, dynamic, unstable ever-changing and world making. At the bottom, the history of racial capitalism has been one in which white supremacy justified the terms of the imperial dispossession and capitalist exploitation. Thus has it been possible to expropriate Native American lands on the ground that they were empty, terra nullius, thus has it been possible to justify slavery in a republic founded under the rubric of equality. Thus has it been possible to maintain a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and importantly, thus has it been possible to make poor and working class white people believe that their interests lie in making common cause with their political leaders and economic betters. Common cause in whiteness, the idea that they might eventually share in the spoils and the understanding that the discomfort and anxiety of their own precarious lives were due to, are due to those below them, rather than those above them. As the historian, Robin D.G. Kelley suggests, guns and tanks and tear gas are sufficient to control the black people or for that matter, the Indians and the immigrants, white supremacy is necessary to control the whites. An important strand of the argument in this book traces the promises made to poor and working class white people, some kept, some broken, in order to keep them committed to the social order. That is to history in the service of empire and capital, to war in the name of white homesteads, to low wages subsidized by segregation and to social isolation and cultural monotony understood as suburban exclusivity. Beyond even the function of white supremacy in underwriting expropriation and exploitation however, the notion of racism and capitalism as organically related, but not identical, helps us understand the excessive pleasures of white supremacy. The joyful mob in East St. Louis in 1917. It was like Mardi Gras, one observer remembered. The dumb grins on the faces of the lynch mobs, mugging for the camera in front of the mutilated body of a lynched man. The rage of the 5,000 St. Louis whites who rioted after some black kids jumped into the pool on the first day of summer season in Fairground Park in 1949. The masculine fellowship of the St. Louis police in the 1960s as they traded stories about beating up Sonny Liston, the one-time heavyweight champion of the world and all of the torture and violation by which white people have historically drawn pleasure from the suffering of blacks. On the other hand, analysis through the lens of racial capitalism helps us understand that the disciplinary tools and predatory takings originally justified by imperial and racial entitlement come eventually to be deployed against the working class as a whole. The insistent generalization of the tools of empire and anti-blackness, was as Achille Mbembe calls, the paradoxical negrofication of the white world. Tracing the United States' centuries long history of imperial dispossession and relating it to the foreclosure crisis of our own times, the legal historian and theorist, K-Sue Park, suggests that the forms of military, social and financial control pioneered in empire and slavery and justified by racialization were eventually adapted and absorbed in race-neutral form into general practice. Labor cannot emancipate itself in white skin where in the black it is branded, Karl Marx wrote in Capital. Beneath their skin privilege, poor and working class whites have often found, although not always recognized, that the very tools the wealthy rely upon to ensure class rule, the police, the prison, the reduction of the social wage and the derogation of public education come eventually to foreshorten the dreams of everyone, not just the radicalized, the marginalized and the imperialised. In the fall of 1966, following the previous year's fury in the black neighborhoods of St. Louis over the police murder of Melvin Cravens, a 17 year old black boy shot to death while handcuffed in a police station, the black activists, Macler Shepard and Ivory Perry, organized a march in solidarity with south side whites, mourning the death of Timothy Walsh, a young man shot in the back while in police custody. The license to kill, they were saying, has been issued in our neighborhood but it can be carried into yours. The cover of whiteness, it turns out, offers incomplete protection from the violence unleashed in its name. This book traces the history of empire and racial capitalism through a series of stages beginning with the fur trade in the early 19th century and following all the way down to payday lending, tax abatement, for-profit policing and mass incarceration in our own times. These stages should not be understood as pure forms, nor as having unfolded according to a strict sequential historical logic. They are improvised solutions to imperial problems and commercial imperatives that have been mixed up with one another and with other ideas about identity and economy, but they each have characteristics, spatial and environmental aspects and the stages of empire and racial capitalism were repeatedly interrupted, confronted and occasionally even overthrown by the people whom they so insistently dispossessed, ravaged and repurposed in the service of empire, whiteness and wealth. And yet, beneath all the change and insistent racial capitalists cleansing, forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration is evidence in the city at the heart of American history. Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of population and the speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military, but in St. Louis, the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of black people within the city limits and because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality and reproduction. Often women and children were singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence. From the time of the Missouri Compromise to the decision in the Dred Scott Case, whites in St. Louis used Indian removal as much as slavery as a model for dealing with their black neighbors and from that time on, black St. Louisans have been repeatedly driven out from East St. Louis in 1917, from the Riverfront, Deep Morgan, Chestnut Valley and Mill Creek Valley in the middle years of the century, from Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 and from whatever neighborhoods were wanted for quote, economic development, down to the present day. To be sure, eviction like extraction and even exploitation has meant different things at various historical moments and yet the continuity between St. Louis's role as the gateway to empire and the 21st century project of enclosing black communities in the hope of a final round of extraction only underscores the point that in St. Louis, empire, slavery and segregation have been distinct aspects of a single common history. The red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-violence. In the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown on August the ninth, 2014, and the uprising that followed, the term structural racism gained renewed currency as a way to understand the depth of the history that was exploding into plain view across the nation. Part of the work of this book is to try to lend meaning to that phrase, to take us beyond using it to mean simply really bad or really persistent racism and begin to understand the ways in which racism has been built into the material fabric of everyday life in the United States of America, into our roads and neighborhoods and schools and universities. The point of identifying racism as structural is not just to say it is really bad or still less to say that it is so bad that we can't really do anything about it anyway and so we should just go on doing whatever it is that we were doing before. The point is to search out the material history of white supremacy and the alibis in which it has been cloaked in order to understand something about structural racism that isn't otherwise visible, the way that the racial character of our everyday lives has become inexorable, even as its origins have been insistently obscure. Any program intending to address economic inequality in our society, whether revolutionary or reformist that fails to grapple with the racialized character of our material lives will likely intensify rather than ameliorate the inequality. For the sake of example, one might point to the various sorts of racism evident in the social post-mortem that followed the uprising in Ferguson in the fall of 2014. Most telling for many was the discovery of persistent attitudinal racism of white people, of the white police and court clerks in Ferguson who were shown to have a particular fondness for hackneyed racial humor. That attitudinal racism shaded imperceptibly into the institutional racism of the police department as a whole, manifested in their disproportionate targeting of black motorists and street-level harassment of black pedestrians, shoddy record keeping and routinely ignored training protocols and the systematic levy through excessive tickets and exorbitant fines whereby the subsistence of the government of Ferguson was extracted from its mostly black population by an almost entirely white police force. All of this was amply documented in the US Department of Justice's report on the Ferguson Police Department. What the report passed over, however, was the structural aspect of the racism. Why was the police department revenue farming poor black motorists when there was a Fortune 500 company doing $25 billion of business a year headquartered within the Ferguson city limits, just a quarter mile to the couth of the spot where Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown? And how could that seem so natural that the corporate headquarters of Emerson Electric on West Florissant Avenue, right there where the demonstrators first sat down in the street and the militarized police rioted through the month of August. Why is it that that would go almost unremarked in the thousands of pages and millions of words written in the aftermath of the uprising? The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson on Canfield Drive ended the life of an 18 year old child and touched off a new period in the history of the United States, the era of Black Lives Matter. This book explores the 200 year history of removal, racism and resistance that flowed through those two minutes of history on August the ninth, 2014. I began writing this book in the month after that event. In the days after the shooting, activists in St. Louis took to the streets of Ferguson demanding that officer Wilson, whose name was initially withheld, be held accountable. Police in St. Louis County and then the Missouri Highway Patrol and eventually the Missouri National Guard responded on a scale and with a ferocity that many observers found wildly disproportionate. Armored personnel carriers patrolled the streets of Ferguson. Police armed with automatic weapons occupied the city. Peaceful protestors were repeatedly dispersed with tear gas, a chemical weapon banned under the Geneva Convention. By the end of November, when the now notorious prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, announced his decision not to bring charges against Officer Wilson, the protests exploded into violence and Ferguson had become a byword for both police violence and the origins of what would come to be called the Black Lives Matter movement. Having grown up just two hours to the west, I had been to St. Louis countless times to visit family, to go to the universities or the museums, even to do historical research for other books that I have written. I came to this book less as a professional historian than as a citizen taking the measure of a history that I had lived through but not yet fully understood. This is a history that I have resisted but also a history from which I have benefited as a white man and a Missourian. I offer the result, not in the spirit of the academics to common conceit that injustice is everywhere but in their own biographical backyards, but rather in the hope that we may all seek to do better, to walk humbly, to act justly, to love mercy. That's all I got.

- Thank you so much, Walter. It's, first off I should say, welcome back and as one of your former students from the September 11th cohort of American studies at NYU, it really is a pleasure to moderate this conversation with the Amherst community.

- I remember.

- Different times. Walter, I'm taken by your use of the term racial capitalism as a framework for linking histories of genocide, removal and the expropriation and control of land, all justified in the name of white supremacy. I was hoping you might discuss why this term at this historical moment is so useful for unpacking the social history of St. Louis, for instance, how does racial capitalism help us understand both the history and the lived present of a city like Ferguson, understood as a sundown community in the 1960s, where blacks came to work during the day, often in white homes, with the understanding they'd be out by sunset, to us understanding now as a space of radical possibility where the movement of Black Lives was launched after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014?

- Yeah, that's terrific. I think that partly my use of the term racial capitalism has to do with my own intellectual genealogy and that is as someone who really has learned a lot from the black radical tradition from the work of people like Du Bois, like Eric Williams, like Cedric Robinson, like Walter Rodney, like C.L.R. James, like Angela Davis, on and on, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. So that's my intellectual inheritance and that's why I use the term racial capitalism as my base term. One might equally use the term empire or settler colonialism and I think that they signal different centers of gravity in the analysis and really what I'm trying to do is to use those terms in sequence with one another, in symbiosis with one another to try to understand the ways that imperialism and the violence of imperialism and the extraction of imperialism are related to what we generally think of as African American history in the United States and to understand that as having a particular shape in the Midwest. That involves then thinking both about the ways that, in thinking about racial formation in a moderately complicated way. So to think about, for instance, the way that in the history of the South, Native Americans are removed from the land from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and that land is then filled in with African-Americans, Africans and African Americans. The relationship of the ruling class in the South to Native Americans is genocidal, it's exterminationist. They want to get rid of native people. Their relationship to African Americans is, it doesn't make sense to compare it morally or practically. It's an abomination, it's a moral abomination, but it is a moral abomination that turns on reproduction, right? The slaveholding regime is pronatalist and so there's a lot more effort to sexually control people and reproduction. One of the things and one of the basic points I'm trying to make at the beginning of the book to relate settler colonialism to racial capitalism in St. Louis is to note the extent to which Western anti-blackness was removalist. It took a similar to form to anti-Indian violence and then to try to think about that and explain why and then to try to relate it to, ultimately to class dynamics within the white population. I try to, you know, the book then catalogs that kind of relationship or analyzes that kind of relationship through a series of moments, the last one being our own moment or the Ferguson moment. And what I try to argue in that part of the book is that the population of Ferguson, which is in North County is what, you know, it's in the northern part of St. Louis County, is first of all, in some ways the descendant population of a number of removals from East St. Louis to Mill Creek Valley to Pruitt-Igoe to Ferguson. But secondly, to be very, very specific about the sorts of extraction that are occurring now no longer really in St. Louis are the, you know, the majority of poor and working class black people being exploited in factories. And in fact, I argue that the population of Ferguson today, because so much of the industry and production has been moved out of the city and in, you know, out to the county, but also out of the country, the population, the black population of Ferguson is in some ways economically surplus from the standpoint of production and so what's happening is that different forms of extraction are being, different extractions are being levied on them, whether that's payday loans or the for-profit policing that we saw in Ferguson or whether that is the political economy of mass incarceration whereby African-Americans, disproportionally poor, disproportionately poor and working class in urban areas are incarcerated and then in many cases, in many States and Missouri is emblematic of this, are held in predominantly white rural areas where they become a source of effectively inflowing revenue for communities, whether that's construction revenue in the building of penitentiaries. I think that every single prison in Missouri, there may be, I can't remember the number but, you know, around 31, every single prison in Missouri has been rebuilt since the early 80s with one exception, I think. And then in provisioning and guarding and so there's this sort of an economic flow I suggest from places like Ferguson to rural Missouri. There's a very complicated argument at the end of the book about the way that the politics of tax abatement work and mobilize the presence of black people in space as a mechanism to produce corporate welfare and that's really where the argument from Emerson, about Emerson Electric comes from.

- Thank you. And I also would like to remind attendees to please submit your questions. And we still have time to, to field these questions. I wanted to circle back to a moment in your book where you write that quote, beyond even that function of white supremacy and underwriting expropriation and exploitation, the notion of racism and capitalism as organically related, but not identical, helps us understand the excessive pleasures of white supremacy. Now I'm really taken by your use of the phrase, excessive pleasures of white supremacy, as it may speak to one of the payoffs, if you will, of white complicity to the ruling supremacist order. But I'm curious if you can speak to first, how does one historicize a feeling like pleasure, excessive pleasure in this sense? And second, as a historian and as a white man, whether this feeling of excessive pleasure may help us better understand what we all witnessed on January 6th, 2021 during the capital riot that left five people dead?

- Hmm. Yeah, let me go first all the way back to the beginning of the question and try to explain by what I mean by organically related but not identical. There's a kind of a, I don't even think it's a, I think it's actually a fairly mainstream debate among people on the left at this point about how to characterize the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism. On the one hand, I think that there are a number of people, I think the 1619 Project would be emblematic of this, they want to see the history of the United States as a long and fairly uninterrupted history of white supremacy. On the other hand, there are a group of people who identify themselves as socialists or Marxists who insist that at bottom, relationships of racial, racial inequality are at bottom class relationships, that they are at bottom economic relationships and so on the one hand you have, you know, the kids term this, right, the debate between race reductionists and class reductionists. And this is really the, this is the same sort of debate that Cedric Robinson was confronting when he wrote "Black Marxism". He was trying to resolve an argument in his mind between overly-orthodox Marxists and between black nationalists and to describe the ways that white supremacy, that racism and capitalism are intertwined, inextricably intertwined, but I think also finally different. And finally, not identical. Not finally different but not identical. And so what, what I mean when I talk about the excessive pleasures particularly in relationship to the riot around the Fairground Park swimming pool is that it is hard to see what exactly the economic stake is in keeping six black kids from jumping in the Fairground Park swimming pool on a hot summer afternoon, right? So it's not, this is not as obvious in some ways as the intense violence that goes into protecting the suburbs as white enclaves in St. Louis. I would argue that there's also a degree of sadism in that but one could look at that and say, well, look, this is simply really at bottom, this is about class politics. This is about people trying to defend their property. But 5,000 people turning out to attack six kids who jumped in a pool and running riot all night? That seems to me to be a different kind of phenomenon, one that has lifted out of any sort of identifiable economic frame and become something else, right? A form of pleasure, just like in East St. Louis, when the newspaper goes into East St. Louis the night after the massacre and the reporter writes, it felt like Mardi Gras, right? Right, well, you know, he's saying that this was like a holiday. And so it's that that I think it's important to capture and it's important to capture not because I believe that we can understand the entire history of the United States as a history of racial sadism and we don't need to think about political economy. That's not what I believe but I think that it's important to think about the meaning of these moments of excess and so that's I guess what I mean by excess is the excess, I mean, I think that the, the entire society, the entire social order is morally excessive. And so I don't think when I say excess, I'm trying to say, well, up to this point it's moral and then this is excessive. I think I'm actually trying to say there's an excess in the history that goes beyond the limits of explanation as, the class interest of white people. I think I'm trying to identify that. Now I do think that, I think that the the joyous character of the attack on the Capitol would be the beginning to think about that, the place to begin to think about that. The kind of antic comic character of the costumes, the strange pleasure that people obviously got from being there and I do think that that is a part of our politics and I think that it is, you know, if I were really to, I mean, this is a little bit off the cuff but it seems to me that that is energy that is kind of playful, uncontrolled energy that in another situation could be, and must be really if we are to survive, transformed into a much more loving, pro-social form of commonality. And right now, all of that pleasure, that humor, that play is aligned in that moment, at least, with white supremacy and a kind of, you know, fascism really, I think in certainly in relationship to non-white people and to queer people, to trans people, to women, to everybody but the, you know, the very central characters.

- Thank you. Let's see. One other question is, what one class from your time at Amherst most influenced your subsequent academic career?

- I had a lot of great classes at Amherst. It took me a while to be worthy of those classes. I think, you know, so I think I should probably just name a whole bunch of folks, Jan Dizard, Robert Gross, Benjamin DeMott, but I think that the class that we were talking about before that really changed my life was taught by Margaret Hunt and it was a class on cultural history of early modern Europe and it was in that class that I read the great British Marxist historian, Christopher Hill, the great, maybe not quite a Marxist, but leftist historian, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Davis, Robert Darnton and these were histories of ordinary people. I mean, in the case of Christopher Hill, these were histories of people, you know, who were so Protestant, they were so Protestant that they believed that they didn't have anything to learn from the priest at all, that godliness rested right in their heart and just in order to prove that godliness rested right in their heart, they would go to church naked and stand in front of the minister and curse to prove their godliness and so for me, being a kind of a misdirected person with a lot of, to be honest with you, with a lot of rage, that helped me actually begin to channel that and think about that politically or to read, you know, to read Robert Darnton about the way that working people in a factory would would take turns having somebody stop, not even a factory, in a shop, I mean, which is the point of the book, but in a shop would have somebody stop working and sit and read political texts while they worked. So for me, that kind of focus on the substantive material everyday lives of humble people that really, really spoke to me and that's really what, what made me think that history was a place that I could take some of the, some of the things I cared about and locate them.

- Thank you. Can you tell us about the Commonwealth Project?

- Yeah, the Commonwealth Project is, I would love to talk about that. So that's something that sits right next to my academic work in St. Louis but emerges out of a set of collaborations with activists and artists in St. Louis. And it's all framed around a beautiful long-term dream, which is to, to set up a, a community-based arts collective on the North side of St. Louis. And at some point we got a little bit ahead of ourselves and at some point we actually had identified a building and kinda got permission to use this building that was a 1938 Arts Deco police station to turn it into an arts collective. It became clear as we began to do that, that we needed to build a little bit more capacity, which is to say, raise money and as a way to do that then I set up a set of internship programs with different organizations in St. Louis, one called the Equal Housing Opportunity Council, the Griot Museum, this year we're gonna work with an organization called Action St. Louis. And I think that as I've done that, I've learned something that for me has been, it's actually been life-changing for me because the work that the students have done has been beautiful. The students have done amazing work, particularly in Centerville, Illinois, which is a community South of East St. Louis, according to median family income, Centerville, Illinois, is the poorest community in the United States, largely elderly, almost entirely black and they have a terrible, terrible storm water sewer problem where both the sewer infrastructure and the storm water infrastructure have decayed to the point that when it rains in Centerville, which is low lying and flat, the streets flood with sewage. And that happens, it can happen five to six times a year and people's houses, people are literally stuck in their houses with two to three feet of sewer water around. So, in cooperation with the Equal Housing Opportunity Council in St. Louis, the Harvard students have gone out there and they've done everything from try to organize community meetings around public health, to do wastewater sampling, this summer the students worked on doing some oral histories and setting up a, a website to try and get out the news about Centerville and the news has got out. There was a story, the story in the Guardian, you know, maybe a month ago. And so we, you know, when we see a story in the Guardian about this, that to me and the students who've worked on this and then particularly the people in St. Louis, that's a combination of two or three years of work. But what I was trying to say is that as I've worked with the students, I learned something new and that was about what I've come to learn, James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit called dialectical humanism, and it's about the notion that as you try to make the world more humane, as you try to transform the world in the image of a higher degree, a higher order of human rights, order of human rights where people have housing and clean water and education and healthcare and a decent social wage and a degree of public dignity, as you try to transform that, the society in that image, you discover new ways of being human yourself, right? You discover a deeper form of humanity in yourself. And I learned that from the students because the students who have gone to St. Louis have loved and supported one another in such extraordinary ways that they helped me, you know, re-imagine this project that I was doing with the Harvard students, not simply as a means to an end of let's get this community, you know, let's get this arts collective done and that's still what I wanna do, I'm still working on that, but really as something in and of itself and the spirit that they go in and this is hard for students to learn, hard for Harvard students to learn is not here's everything I know and now I'm gonna fix your problems. The spirit that in which it's necessary for them to go in order for them to be successful is a spirit of humility, to go and say, you know, how can you tell me about your world in a way that's gonna enable me to help? And, you know, I know we're right at the end of time here, but I think some, I was on a call the other day and somebody said something that I think is profound that stuck with me, so the work only advances at the speed of trust, right? That you need to go and come in a spirit of humility, in a spirit of service and solidarity and that once people trust you, then, which, you know, people in St. Louis and North St. Louis or in a place like Centerville have a lot of reason not to trust people from, you know, the outside and yet that's really the lesson that I've learned.

- Excellent and I think there's time maybe for one more question and considering modes of expropriation and extraction, this question wonders what role has militarism or specifically the military recruitment pipeline played in the recruitment of soldiers in predominantly black neighborhoods in St. Louis?

- That's a great question. I mean, you know, it goes back in a way to something that I try to argue about the Civil War which is that Benson Barracks, which were in North St. Louis in a place called Fairground Park where actually where the swimming pool riot took place in 1949 was the place where the United States Colored Troops started to first enlist black soldiers during the Civil War and that has to do with the comparative speed of the Mississippi Valley campaign which was producing then both emacipations and refugees who came up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and so that I argue, first of all, is part of the radical history of St. Louis but also it's part of the very and I know this is, Khary, you know, much closer to the sorts of things that you work on, is part of the very, very complicated history of the relationship of the African-American freedom story to US militarism and imperialism. St. Louis is the place where the Buffalo soldiers were enlisted into the army. It was the place, Jefferson Barracks was the place where all mounted units in the United States Army began. And so it was a place where I suggest that black freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War was framed by empire, where these black soldiers, who were in many ways the greatest symbol of black liberation in the aftermath of the Civil War, were put to work as agents of empire. And so there's a terrible, I think, you know, a terrible irony in that, that I think that American historians by and large just have not really dealt with. Du Bois talks about it in "Black Reconstruction", Du Bois says of the way that the US Colored Troops made an impression upon the ruling, you know, class in the United States, on the Republican Party, on Abraham Lincoln. He said, effectively he says, look, we gave you, we gave you the greatest orator of the 19th century, Frederick Douglas, and you only started to treat us as equals when we killed white people, right? And so he's talking about that irony. So there is something I think tragic about that moment then, you know, just the other night I did an event with the, you know, with the extraordinary, with my extraordinary soon to be tragically former colleague, Cornel West, and he reminded me that it was black soldiers who had been deployed by the United States in the Philippines as part of the imperial army who trained black people in East St. Louis in self-defense, so that in 1917, one of the many things that happened in 1917 in East St. Louis, is that when these white moms came into the black neighborhoods, there were armed African-Americans trained who shot back. And so Cornel West, you know, helped me kind of close that dialectic. I do think, and this, I don't have a good quantitative answer. I had a hard time figuring out quantitatively what enlistment rates are. I tried and I just couldn't quite crack the case, which is not to say that somebody with a better imagination or more tools could, I think probably somebody could. I tried to figure out about the enlistment into the military from various St. Louis ZIP codes. It is, I think probably, and this is discouraging, it's probably easier to figure out about the incarceration rate in those ZIP codes. But I do think that I think it is to this day true that in many neighborhoods in St. Louis, as in the United States generally, the easiest, you know, the most present choices are between the military and the prison. I think that that's, that characterizes, you know, it's schematic but I think it is fair to say that that characterizes a lot of black and and also poor white life in the United States today.

- I agree. So thank you so much, Walter, for this incredibly rich conversation and thanks to all who are joining us tonight and especially those of us who submitted questions. Before we go, I did want to make a plug for another conversation happening on Wednesday, March 24th at 7:00 pm, Eastern time, we'll have a conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Ibram X. Kendi moderated by Amherst trustee and 1982 Amherst graduate, Kimberlyn Leary, and you can find more details and information at the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism page on our website. Thanks again, Walter, and everyone who turned in and have a fantastic night.