Frank you couldn't again
Okay, good afternoon everyone, my name is Frank Guridy and for those of you who don't know me who are watching
I'm associate professor in the Department of History and also in the african-american and African Diaspora Studies department. Thanks for bearing with us
We're just managing the technological
aspects of this conversation
But we're very excited to be here, you know normally
Faculty and students spend their summers doing their research
Figuring out what they're going to teach next year among other things, but this is not a normal summer
Indeed. This is not a normal year
And the co mid-nineteen pandemic has sent many of us scrambling around trying to figure out how we're gonna do our jobs
How we're going to carry out our teaching or a scholarship an administrative work?
Over the next few months in the year and then of course
There have been the the protests are prompted by the murders of Brianna Taylor and George Floyd and the extraordinary moment that we're facing
In the history of this country and indeed the history of the world
This panel black lives matter a conversation with historians invites us as historians and members of the Columbia community and those of us
Who are watching to reflect on what's happening in the country and in the in the world right now?
Of course, it is impromptu by the extraordinary protest movement that has enveloped the country in the world
But many of us in our department and indeed elsewhere have been engaged in social justice oriented
Activism scholarship teaching mentoring and advocacy for quite some time
alright
And at the department level I will say our Committee on inclusion and diversity
despite its vanilla title has been slowly working on taking on many of the challenges presented by
The me2 movement the women's March black lives matter and trying to figure out ways to incorporate it into our department culture
So this patter really is is is a reflection of these
Departmental level efforts on the individual and the collective level
Its can it's comprised of a selection of faculty students and staff
Who've been doing this kind of work and individually and collectively for some time
Indeed. We were quite intentional with the organization of this panel to show that this work does not simply fall on
the backs the shoulders of black and minority scholars a
session like this one one of its goals I think is to empower all of us to take on the demands of
This kind of work. I
Want to thank really quickly our chair of the history department chair Adam costo for supporting the the C IDS work and for this particular
initiative but in particular I want to thank Emma Sheinbaum and SATA Islam who were gonna be the co-moderators of our
Session today. Emma is our communications coordinator and
Development coordinator Saeeda Islam is the is directive faculty affairs
And is really them who have really inspired us to have this urgent conversation today
So without further ado, I want to pass it over to Emma and Saeeda who will take us through our session
My name is Emma Sheinbaum as Frank said and sayyida and I
initiated this panel series with the help of Frank associate professor and current Committee Chair of sorry cher the Committee on
inclusion and diversity
This is the first of many ongoing
Conversations that will continue between us as individuals and internally as people we invite you all to reflect and continue these conversations
after the final discussion
Our goal is to contextualize our reality with history and to create a space where we can learn think
critically heal and take action
We are including faculty graduate students undergraduate students and staff members in this dialogue
These issues have always been an emergency and we hope this panel series will not only call attention to this
But will happy a place where we can process learn and instigate change together
We thank you all for being here to our colleagues in the department for the support and our work-study students for their assistance
We also welcome you to attend our upcoming panels the dates of which are to be announced
Sayyida you're on mute
Thank you for that Emma and as
Frank and I'm already
Introduced me. I'm just going to go ahead and jump into
introducing our panelists and I want to thank you all for
Volunteering your time to be here with us today. I'm gonna start off with Mohammed. He's the associate professor
he's a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean from
1000 to 1800 SCE
Stephanie McCurry is a professor of history. She specializes in the American Civil War and reconstruction
The 19th century United States the American South and the history of women and gender
She is also interested in the study of Confederate monuments and memory and slavery and its legacy in u.s
Amanda Faulkner is a PhD student in the history department
She studies his social and commercial exchange in the early modern world, especially the Dutch Empire
She is particularly interested in 17th century plague and its repercussions
And
Frank Garrity is an associate professor with specialist
specializes in sports history urban history and the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas
with that said I'm going to
Jump right into our first question here
This question is for all panelists if you can or answer in the order of the introduction
the first question is
What brought you to your studies? And how do you connect your studies in history to the reality of our current moment?
So Minh Anh if you can start please
Right. Thank you so much Emma. And thank you so much sada, first of all for organizing this conversation, I think it's
it's a great step important for our department and also important that
You you're the ones who are taking the lead bringing us faculty students graduate students undergraduates together
So, thank you very much for your labor on this
For you, you know kind of thinking about
You know, there's so many pathways through which we come to what where we come
As scholars and obviously there are many personal intellectual
cultural social reasons for why we study what we study but in the context of the conversation
We're having and why the urgency that we are having this conversation, which is the movement for black lives. I do want to
Think back and see how profoundly I was shaped by the Los Angeles uprising of 1992
Which was something that occurred
Maybe four or five months after I had arrived in this country as a
young student
For my bas, and that was my not just my introduction to the United States to the English language
to the
you know college campus but also to this history of race that
I was ignorant of in I would say almost entirely
and that
Uprising and its impact on the community a community of which I was a part of I was living
Very close to Koreatown at the time
for family shaped how I thought about what structures of power and how those who were
deemed to be
on the margins, who were
Put in both spatial as well as cultural constraints and
Asked to do to bear the burden of the society
Or kept also outside of the classrooms. So when you when I took I remember taking my
introduction to
American history class as an undergraduate
and
feeling both the absence of a true reckoning of slavery, but also
The things that I was at that time starting to think about which was the global history of colonialism
so I think that was that experience and
my own kind of study from that really shaped how I
Constituted myself or thought about myself as doing my scholarship and
Secondly, I do think that that all of us who have worked
and
come coming from
Or worked in working-class communities understand how race and class intersect
especially in the making of community and that experience of being in the service industry or being
working in in farms allowed us access
that I never had in in my
the community in the country I came from and I think those were the some of the key kind of moments that shaped my my
perspective on all in the United States
Thank you. I'll stop there
Yes
Hi everybody
at Columbia and everywhere else, so wonderful to be together and thanks again to Emma and sayyida for
initiating this whole conversation
So I think my own the connection between my own personal biography
and the scholarship I do in this particular moment is kind of
telling because one of the things that this moment brings home, I think very clearly is the global scope of protest and
resistance to white supremacist structures and practice
So we have the George Floyd murder in the United States and the endemic problem of political violence here
But we can see that it's triggering connected
protests in Europe where the brutal legacy of slavery in the slave trade is also very much an issue in
contemporary political
movements and in a way
it's like watching a map of the 17th century the 15th to 19th century slave trade and the
Legacy and slavery all over the world and in all of those places that were touched by this at one time historically
Protesters are challenging public
commemoration and valorisation of the figures who are connected to those histories and
What I where I enter this story is to say that it was always so I grew up in a world
Like this in Belfast under British colonial rule
During the Troubles and that was a world of police violence legal impunity
colonial power
racist violence
Irish conflicts were understood and understood themselves were marked as an inferior race
It's not a concept of race that makes much sense in the United States, but it does it does there
And in that moment one of the fundamental lessons
I learned that became a historian was that people will only take so much before they rise
Resistance has been proved again and again and again and in 1968 when Northern Irish
Nationalist Republicans as they were called when they rose up. The world was on fire wasn't just Northern, Ireland
It was the whole world and the Irish rose against British rule with symbols of the United States
And the global civil rights and anti-colonial movements in the front of their minds. So there was
images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Che Guevara and Mandela and Steve Biko and Yasser Arafat and they were
Painted on the walls of Belfast along with hunger strikers like Bobby Sands the news every night was one blast after another South Africa
Cuba
Palestine it was that was the world and then then would come Belfast one other fire in this global fire
So living through that struggle
Oh
And apparently George Floyd is already on the political murals and in the walls in Catholic Belfast not in Protestant office
but living through that struggle I
learned that people will only take so much but the other thing I learned that really stayed with me is that those movements could be
crushed by violence
The human bodies are frail vehicles of protest
And that's what happened in Ireland in the late 1960s and 1970s and into the 80s
And so when I was forced into the diaspora with my family to Canada where the politics never interested me
I became obsessed with issues of violence and political legitimacy
How does a regime get to call itself the rule of law or law and order when it's acting in this openly?
violent way and
I was entirely unable to professionalize my politics about Ireland. I could never write about it in any way that passed for scholarship
I try
and what so when I was introduced to the history of American slavery in college and
Particularly on the subject of Jefferson as a slave holder. I was just correct
it made eminent sense to me and I think what I did was move my obsession backwards and across the Atlantic to write about
enslaver slaveholders and slavers as we now think of them and first of all how they legitimize their system so that they could bring other
non-slaveholding people into that white supremacist worldview and then later I wrote about the
Confederacy and hardly tried to make an explicitly
pro-slavery and white supremacist nation, so I was grappling with these questions that mattered to me personally in my own personal history, but in another
setting that I could get a little distance from me and
So for me in that sense what I study has always been connected to the politics of oppression and resistance
it's just more obvious at this particular moment and
Maybe a little bit more useful than it is at other times when the scholarship looks like scholarship
It's very gratifying to realize that even these little things we do like writing about the American, you know
The Confederacy can be acts of allies ship in a certain moment
So, I think I'm very focused on that right now
Amanda we'd love to hear from you. Thank yesterday
So first of all, thank you very much too immense
I definitely I think this is the one who said I think it's a very valuable
Opportunities for our community to think about these very important questions and I'm grateful that you first opened up this forum
so I am a PhD student here in the history department at Columbia and
my research currently focuses on 17th century plague in the Dutch Republic and I initially became interested in this because I've always been
fascinated by how interpersonal relationships shape experiences
Social and cultural and economic phenomena and as we are seeing right now
epidemic outbreaks of disease are all of these things as well as except ideological phenomenon, so
As we have all been here in quarantine
I've had a lot of time to think about how my research relates to the moment that we're living through
to the social and cultural reproduction of
Disease outbreaks as well as to the structures of power
and the systemic sources that
advantage and advantage some people in disadvantage other people and
many many things have changed than the
Seventeenth century what my research is focused to today
but one thing that has not changed in the many centuries that have passed is that there are these systems still exist and
There are still people who?
Really experience the repercussions of lasting
Oppression lasting marginalization and what we're seeing currently is
a moment when it's really hard to look away from the consequences of
those historical events and I think
Koban 19 is an experience that we are all having
across the globe but it's also an experience that everyone is having in their individual communities and
The community that you're in is determining whether you have access to resources
Whether it is the people around you are healthy and safe
Whether you can go to the country when the the epidemic strikes to City and these kinds of factors really determine
So many for influence so many areas of your life up to and including
who lives and who dies who has who who lives in poverty who doesn't and
I
Think as we are are seeing these events unfold across the country and around the world
We have to be thoughtful about
the things that have shifted
since the 17th century and before and the things that have not so that's
One thing that my research has helped me to think about as we've been all would you do this movement?
I'll just jump in quickly
You know as a as a child of
afro-caribbean immigrants who came to this New York City in the 1940s and 50s
Some of you came of age in the 70s and 80s, you know, this this moment speaks directly to everything
I've been doing a living I would say
Since certainly and certainly since I became more politically aware in the in my late high school and early college years
so
You know much of what I would say resonates with what's been said already by the other panelists
Serving in the late 80s when I was in college early 90s
There was just kind of reawakening a black activism around the figure of Malcolm X my generation
you know discovered X in an interesting moment precisely in the moment that Minh Anh highlighted right of the
of the Rodney King
verdict and the uprisings that ensued afterwards right in the early 1990s and then you know
Of course as is often the case with scholars, you know
I had some influential professors Naima in knotch Allah who was actually a specialist on colonialism in South Asia
Gave me a sense of the kind of global
Aspects and the colonial roots of white supremacist coloniality, right?
scholars like Horace Campbell
An activist I was very much influenced by Walter Rodney and CLR James
Allowed me to kind of understand the Caribbean aspects of the black freedom struggle
and so in my own work and my own research and teaching looking at the black experience in the Caribbean the
spanish-speaking Americas and more recently in the United States
You know, I think that what we're experiencing now is been directly related to everything
I've been teaching and writing and that's been gratifying and exciting
And it's imposing some new demands of my time, which I welcome actually
but I think that you know, I think what's what's clear here is
So much is what's happening is is this entanglements of class?
gender sexuality and racial hierarchies
right
and we see this in the history of the black freedom movement and we're seeing it right now and the
Co19 covered the nineteen pandemic and and the protests are showing these the interconnectedness of these issues
So, yeah, so it's been gratifying to sort of see
This moment from the perspective my own kind of trajectory as a scholar and as a racialized person in this country
Thank you everyone um, I will have a message for the
Participatory tendis in the webinar right now. There is a Q&A feature on this webinar
Please submit your questions for the panelists and we'll try to get to as many as we can
And this next question is going to be brought back to Frank
you published recently in Colombian news an article called historic protests necessitate historic action by
American political leaders and you really do an excellent job of highlighting how
Protest is it's not spontaneous
It's built on many generations and many decades of consciousness-raising as you put it and about the different
practices of racism and brutality and oppression in
Many different ways and I love it. If you couldn't speak towards all the different those different connections
Yeah, absolutely
I mean the points I was making in that piece has been have been made by other
other scholars and activists for quite some time and you know, what's interesting now is
You know
We're locating our current moment in the in the history of four hundred years of
People of African descent being in the same is fear, right? It's certainly locating it back to slavery
Indeed this this is a part of another moment in this trans historical black freedom struggle
But you know to me I'm and maybe this is my bias as the 20th century historian
You know, I I think so much of what we're experiencing right now. This iteration has really been shape arrived
What's been happening over the last 50 years, right?
And and we know this because activists have been bringing this to our attention since then
Of course right people like Angela Davis talking about political prisons in the late 60s and early 70s
People organizing around mass incarceration which in fact is one of the the exploding fields in US history ography right now
which is really shown as a long reach of
Incarcerate in US history back to the 19th century and before and certainly over the last 50 years
black feminist activism right which takes shape again throughout US history in the history of the Americas but really
Starts to take shape in the 1970s with the Combahee River collective
So I think what we're seeing now is the contemporary moving from black lives is bringing together all of these strands in an interesting kind
of way, right, so
certainly, since the the murders of Trayvon Martin Sandra bland and Michael Brown
You know that sort of contributed to the upsurge of activism
but even things like occupy that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis of
2008 meet to activism the women's march right all of these threats have come together
to
To where we are right now and I think where we are right now
Is this kind of black LED transracial movement?
which is very powerful and I think as we think about
What it means I think you know where some of us are coming to a sort of literacy around anti black racism
but we cannot forget and this is why I kind of bring together these strengths these threads of movements and
My answer here the ways in which these are all interconnected, right?
We can't just do the work of anti racism while forgetting about sexism homophobia transphobia and class stratification
right, and I think this is very important for us as as people who we're trying to move ahead and push these issues to the
Fore right. They are interconnected. We can't just show that we know what anti-racism is. We have to we have to demonstrate
How it's connected to these other isms and hierarchies that are have contributed to this moment
Thank you so much Frank I'm going to
Move on to Stephanie and McCurry if I can ask you a question here
recently published an article in the Atlantic
titled the Confederacy wasn't what you think and how the legacy quote/unquote connects to monuments and the
Politics that surround them could you please elaborate on that article?
Yeah, thank you
So
one of the things that I've been worrying about off and on over the years as Confederate monuments periodically become targets and sort of
foci of a protest organization like after
the Charleston massacre
Charlottesville was actually triggered by the attempt to protect a monument of Lee and
White militias and white supremacist militias gather and make the defense of the statues a sort of new in
new and century
moments, they create violence around the defense of these statues and and over the years oftentimes it can it can be as if the
The Confederate statues get separated from the larger issues that are being contested by them
and so I wrote the article in the Atlantic because I thought that while people might even people
progressive people might understand in some vague way why Confederate symbols are so offensive to
people of African descent in the United States
they wouldn't necessarily know very much about the history of the
Confederacy itself and what it stood for and so all I really wanted to convey is what those statues
Commemorate so that people have a clear understanding in their mind of why they emerged as symbols of white supremacy in the first place
they're the ogee or
a symbol of white supremacy because why because the Confederacy was a
Four-year war against the United States to protect slavery which they could no longer do to their satisfaction within the Union
So they left the Union took the risk of war waited the war against the United States for four years
Specifically as they said as it's easy to show to protect the institution of slavery into perpetuity
This is what they wanted
they wanted to enslave African American people for the duration and their children and
They were candid about this the obfuscation started later
And so I just wanted to make it clear what it is that's being honored here. What's being commemorated on the landscape?
There's another really important history which colleagues have written about very very well, which is about the timing of those monuments
I mean
They're not put up right after the Civil War people didn't love the Confederacy when they had to live in it
It was a really tyrannical kind of government, which was another thing. I want that they had to lose their treat
There's their symbol of treason and defeat and somehow in the United States. They become they become these honored figures
Robert e lee jefferson davis
it's it's it's
incredible the work that it took to erect those people as
and to for them to be now embraced as symbols of american heritage as the president is insisting on doing is
direct provocation
Because they are not that
They come out of a different nation and attempt to build an independent nation
And everybody knows what that nation
stood for and in fact
Those statutes were put up not immediately after the war when it was very difficult to romanticize the confederacy
They were put up starting 30 or 30 years later in the backlash to black democracy and the progressive
expansion of democracy in
And a black civil and political rights and reconstruction
that's when they were put up after the federal government gave up protecting black people and their political and
Civil ambitions in the south then when the white south got control of its own narrative
Its started to build these symbols. They were put up as direct threats. That's why
African-americans understand the most direct threats because they were direct threats
They were put in front of courthouses public squares. It has always been
Incredible to me that African American taxpayers are supposed to send their children to schools called
Robert e lee elementary school or calhoun college. It's
Outrageous and the what is going on around those now is just pouring
purposely pouring fuel on the fire
I'm very worried about the backlash
but what I would say is that to go back to my original point is that I'm incredibly
Hopeful because of exactly what Frank just finished saying these statutes are no longer just statues. They're understood for what they are and
representations of a whole edifice of thinking and value and power in the United States that we no longer want to live with and
that we insist the symbolic have to be symbolically taken down not because that matters simply as a symbolic matter but because
It's connected to a larger conversation and hopefully some kind of reckoning about the legacy of slavery in the United
States
Thank you so much Stephanie next question is for Amanda you specialize as you said in
outbreaks and pandemics and you did say you specialized in the 17th century, but I am
Interested as I'm sure everyone else is if you could speak to the disproportionate effects that koba 19 has had on the black community
Not just limited to health but socioeconomically and other social consequences. I
Want to preface my remarks by saying that
while
Black people in America have a common experience of blackness. I was I would hesitate to
I don't want to over generalize because the
Experience of the black community in Minnesota is different from the black community in New York City and etc
But one thing that I think I keep coming back to you as husband said early on this panel
is that questions of power and
Who gets to access it have direct repercussions or questions such as who is who gets to be sick
And it's healthy
People who have less access to
Financial resources and social resources
to support lis feel the effects of any disaster particularly a disaster like this that moves quickly through communities and
via close proximity and the
Repercussions of an event like this of a global pandemic are always going to be felt more by communities. That will face more pressure
When
confronted by a
Problem like this because they're there fewer
Resources they have to fall back on or they, you know have fewer
opportunities to
go to different spaces that might help keep them safer and
what we're seeing now is
sort of a moment of reckoning
because of a number of confluence of them we are all being forced to
acknowledge that
this pandemic which was initially said to be a great leveler is not in fact a great leveler and is being experienced very differently in
Different communities and also while that's happening
we're also still seeing of
Ongoing violence against black people and people of color by
By many institutions but
While
so some things have have shifted dramatically in something comments, but I think it's very it's
much easier to
notice that if you haven't noticed 54 because of the stark situation that we are all in at the global community right now and the
unequal ways in which
smaller communities and that larger global communities are experiencing that
Thank you for that Amanda our next question is for Minh Anh
Why should issue surrounding anti-blackness and police brutality be an issue for everyone in everywhere not only limited to black people
living in America
You're on mute yes, thank you. You're on mute should be the first sentence. Everyone says in every cell
Thank you so much. I think I mean as as
Mandy as Amanda has already pointed out that there is a world of the 17th century that
Seems to have institutional infrastructure that we can see still
Surrounding us and both in terms of the institutions that are built but also in terms of some of the key
legacies of that world and I think that the
colonialism and
enslavement of people
Are to such institutions that work alongside
Capitalism to frame how there is a global globality to the phenomena that we are seeing here
so if we think about
For example, like the histories of the Royal Africans the South Africa society and the East India Company's
both
companies that emerge in France and in in the Netherlands in
UK
in which
white elite white men
Invest their money either as within the royal
families or as
Or as businessmen as merchants
Both for the transportation of human beings enslaved against their will but also for the ization of territory
and for the extraction of material
Underneath that territory in South Asia
in in South America in the Caribbean
Those so the histories of conan's and capitalism thus allow us to kind of think of this immediately as a global issue
that
Continues to this day
One of the manifestation of that continuation it our for example
The colonial laws that are not not only organized societies in North America and in India in the Caribbean
But they continue to organize societies in places like South Asia
Where a lot of this colonial laws are still on the books and are actually used
Sedition is used. The laws against abortion laws against rape. All of these laws are
continually part of the
overall
Societies even if we think of them as belonging to an earlier age to a colonized era
so I think one of the ways in which
the question of anti blackness and police brutality becomes an issue for everyone in everywhere is precisely because
the the infrastructure of thought of knowing that Orient's us in
Dehumanizing. Someone are
legacies or living legacies really in institutions around the world and
when we watch from a global perspective when we watch
the uprisings
That are happening at the current moment
We do see them we see as Stephanie said there's a global map to it. But we also see how other
communities other oppressed communities other marginalized communities
Can get to have a light shine on their plight within their contacts under this
Global and unified struggle. I'm thinking here precisely about
native peoples both within Australia in Peru and
In North America, who?
whose lives get occluded both not only in the question of Cove in nineteen, but also in the question of
For black lives
I'm also thinking about Dalits and Muslims and South Asia who there have been a recent spate of
lynchings in India
under the context of the COBIT
lockdown
and before that for eating beef or
Accusations of eating beef. So we see that these systems of
dehumanization of oppression of violence that target the marginalized that target that historically
eluded and occluded
Communities a moment like this this globin moment where we are recognizing as a community anti blackness
Allows us to think about
all of the other
solidarity's that are necessarily a part of any
restoration any justice that we can imagine
Thank you
Thank You professor med, our next question is for Stephanie
Honor this is actually a question submitted by one of our graduate PhD students
And the question is on our own campus and in the broader society
How can we support modes of public and collective remembering that acknowledge and mourn legacies of white supremacy?
Genocide is placement terror, etcetera while dismantling their physical ethic legacy
Well, of course
This is the immediate question that confronts us all and it's not like I have some fantastic answer to this
I think what I would say
to begin with
In the event that it's helpful at all. Is that and
I think my colleagues probably have more
Significant things to say but this it's that I think we have to meet these challenges
with what we have to bring
So you you if that's your well if it's your intention
To be part of the solution to be part of the struggle to be part of the recognition of the damage
Then I think you have to
start where you live and
for me that has I mean this sounds I
Think this sound I'm afraid this sounds kind of trite and simplistic
but for me that has always been as a teacher and a scholar and
that
This is where I think I can bring what I know and what I understand to bear on a contemporary struggle. So and
so I don't think for example, I think this is a really interesting moment because
We're we're the history department, right? We're the whole history department various parts of it at Columbia and
Sayyida and emma probably already know that history departments
Historians and the humanities are not exactly the most valued part of any university
It's very easy to dis dis underfund etc. But one of the things that has been so striking about the last couple of months is
the how you know
Everybody is relying on historians to decode what's going on in front of their eyes the best
journalists that are writing Jamelle Bouie and all these people have had in the cold the
Smoke they're the people who are writing these incredible
analyses for the New York Times of Washington Post the Atlantic an observer
They're drawing really heavily on the work of of historians
and this makes perfect sense because the control of the historical nari that narrative is incredibly important to people who are in power and
Dismantling. It is a really important part of the shovin any challenge to that. So I
Think it's a simplistic answer
But I don't think it's a completely pointless answer in part of to do what you do, but with more direct political intention
And so for us it for me, you know
What can I contribute in this particular moment is is to try to be sensitive to who should speak and and when?
but to try to
You know contribute what you can as a teacher as a writer as a historian and and I feel like
I've always felt that and I think this is a moment where we're kind of
Reminded of the value of that because our students actually are out there in the world
They aren't at all confused about what's going on. They're trying to educate their parents their siblings their friends and
you know, so what we do all the time is part and parcel of that struggle and
You know
I I want I then want to be in conversation as we are today about ourselves and our own
unit and
trying to be more self conscious about
Equity and recognize of the ways in which were all
Potentially part of the problem if we don't think consciously enough about how this has all worked even in our own
institution in our own discipline and I'm learning a huge amount and
By the eruption of anger that people are expressing
Black and the ivory the way people are talking about what it means to be a historian a minority historian an african-american
Historian in this moment or any other kind of minority historian in this moment
I have some small insight into that because it wasn't exactly easy to be a woman
Historian or a feminist historian either in the discipline, but I think you know
the courses we teach
Colombian slavery the things that we do in our own institutions
but most importantly I think how we treat each other and how we interact with each other and the into the
Way we try to break down the hierarchies in our own and our own community. That's part of an answer
Thank you
Syed I think you're asking the next question
Yeah, sorry, I was
Myself
So this is a two part of the question. I'm one we received via
email and one is
Here in the chat, but they sort of go hand-in-hand Frank. So
I'm gonna start off by asking you this question
Pulling a never met chat. I'm gonna read it verbatim. It says every news outlet slash media company is posting lists of suggested resources
readings Docs podcasts etc
For people
For people to consult in this moment, could you each suggest and starting with a few Frank please?
Perhaps one resource that you think is necessary in this moment, perhaps something
underappreciated slash under read
The second part to the question to this question, which was sent from someone else, but they go hand in hand
it says also for people who feel helpless and are unsure how to be a
The conversation or take action to bring about change. What advice would you give to them on where to begin?
So Frank if you could please sure
You know, so I'm struck by the
the
the interest in in in the work that historians and activists are doing now and I made a kind of
Sarcastic tweet the other day that a lot of people peddling
Anti-racist literature and and that's me being a snob probably but you know
The book that I think people need to read right now is Barbara rands B's making all black lives matter?
farmer rands we present rands be a
An alum of Columbia, but that's not the only reason why she's not worthy right? She's been a longtime
Blackmon historian activist wrote about Ella Baker wrote about a salon in Robeson and and this book which was published I think in
2017-18 really allows people to understand the kind of the current moment of black activism that the Floyd
Murder has catalyzed you know, so I think it brings together
So many threads I think folks that I mentioned earlier
Particularly the the question about sexuality and feminism and how it has really shaped this moment of black
Activism in ways that that it didn't maybe before
And I think you know where we start, you know, it's interesting
I talked to some people and some folks feel inspired and then some folks feel really, um
helpless and but you know, I think what the Cova 19 pandemic has given us is an urgency to
Act, you know, we don't have a kind of you know
The the privilege of standing still just to survive right even if that means, you know putting on a mask every day
I know that seems silly but I really think that there's there's there's a way in which the protests have demonstrated to us that
We can act now right and not way for somebody to tell us
To move not not worry about offending people, which is another thing that I think imprison some folks right now
And I think there's just plenty of models out there that we see on social media that we see
you know in our neighborhoods that I think people can can draw from right and I think that you know
I've been already bit of part of conversations and webinars
Well, I see people talking very differently people who are not black talking differently about systemic racism
You know and some of that is just regurgitation
But I think some of that is a real awakening that I see happening out there right now
That I think I think that that gives us models that we can draw from, you know, that's kind of a vague answer
But but uh, you know, I'm hesitant to keep prescriptions of what people could do
but I think I think we're seeing models out there in ways that we didn't before and
I think people has sort of following what Stephanie was saying?
She could think about what would work in their realm in their lane, you know, I think that that's the way to proceed
Emma thank you. He's also trying to unmute again. That's a theme. Um
Professor omed this is a question submitted via our Q&A
Why do you think it's important to decolonize
The curriculum and how would you start to do so and maybe we can start with maybe defining? What a clock?
Decolonizing curriculum even means for those who might not know
Sure sure, that's a big question
I mean I think decolonization is generally meant
Mark a process really a movement of
Various degrees of freedoms through which starting after the end of the Second World War the previously colonized spaces
Became and asserted
through through resistance to revolution a
Way of emancipation a way of having their their freedom being able to control their territory being able to
control their subject hood
and I think
The kind of thinking about decolonization
Has become very important in recent years
when I was in graduate school, we were often thinking about post colony as a
as a rubric
But you know, I I mean I come I come from Pakistan and grew up in a military dictatorship
We never had post colony as I like to say we had colonial rule and we had Marshall rule
And so there was no moment in which we could imagine
emancipatory politics without getting shot
And so I think decolonial
decolonization as a movement more recently as analytical movement or way to think about
the questions of power
sovereignty and space have gotten
I think have caught on or have gotten popular precisely because my sense is because it allows us to
Put to a lie
the universal claim of
Enlightenment thought so it allows us to to confront enlightenment
the sort of
insistence that
its understanding of humanity of human rights of
sovereignty
Of law itself for liberal thought
are somehow
the most pristine most most immaculate and most
most
Resonant
Versions of that and I think decolonial thinkers. I'm thinking everyone from
WB Dubois to Mas whose answers air to Gandhi and both curve Malcolm X Walter Rodney Soviet winter
Made a huge list of scholars who?
Were able to us
Not just show the ways in which enlightenment politics enlightenment policies
contributed to the dehumanization and colonialization of the rest of the world of the darker people as the gibberish odd one said but also
it
forced the colonized subject in in the words of fennel to kind of think of himself as a
Themselves as a as a bifurcated individual so I think that's that's sort of a thumbnail on that
How do we do the curriculum? I think you know we read these
These thinkers we put them in our in our syllabi
But I I would I would even suggest that let's let's start with admit
graduate students
Who are black indigenous POC? Let's hire
Dark indigenous enthusiasts Orient's that's tenure black indigenous and POC historians. Let's make them full professors
Let's give them chairs
Let's also change the name of the chairs that belongs to racists and in you Genesis
So let's create a system through which we can think about thought about institution about
syllabi about
Ways in which we approach pedagogy ways in which we approach scholarship
So it's it's it's far greater than citation politics though citation of politics is extremely important. It's far greater than
Drawing a straight line between you know, Hobbes and Locke and
You know
Barack Obama it is about
recognizing the multiplicity of voices the critiques the resistances that are fundamental part of our history and
Making that our present, so that's that's my that will be my answer. Thank you
Thank you so much
I'm gonna pull another
Question from the chat here
It says and this is for everyone whoever wants to answer it first
How should we communicate the history and present provision of systemic racism to people who are resistant to these ideas
especially those who distrust
academia
Is it worth it to spend time trying to convince people of the existence of widespread anti blackness if they don't believe in it?
So and I'll jump up at once Frank do you want to start with answering that question?
Sure
You know, I I'm I I don't have a coherent net to that question, you know, it's interesting because
you know I come from an era where I
Think many of us who were you know?
See ourselves in lighting around systemic racism and social injustice, you know
Finer on people, right, you know constitute community are with people who are fellow travelers
Would you not say that we're doctrinaire and that we all should think the same but that you know
We sort of take for granted that people
Are not gonna be convinced, you know?
And so you build around the people who are persuaded or willing to be persuaded
But I think what's happening now is that at least there's a performance of more people being persuaded, you know?
And I think that presents as an opportunity, you know, whether that's the you know, the institution of Colombia whether that's corporate America, right?
There's a this bit of rhetoric shift that's happened here in in recent weeks
It's almost as if the corporate world is following the lead of Nike when they decided to
Make Colin Kaepernick, you know do their ad in support of him in their formulaic kind of facile way, right?
There's been a there's been a major shift
around at least the rhetoric understanding of
Systemic racism so
You know, even though they're gonna be hardcore white nationalists and folks who who don't think that it's it's important
I I think this moment presents us with an opportunity
This also goes to one of the other questions that are in the chat, right, but what's different about this moment?
there's been this almost dizzying, you know, stunning reversal here in some ways seemingly right in which
You know everywhere you turn everybody's saying black lives matter
And you know, there could be those of us could be, you know cynical about it and snicker
but I think I think it's a rhetorical opportunity for people who
Who were seeking to convince and mobilize around these issues and I think so. That's how I would answer that question
But but also to not waste too much time
With those folks because there's plenty of people to work with who who are willing to be convinced
Yeah, I would also just say in following what Frank just mentioned that
It's really interesting that in this sort of what is hopefully a late trumpian moment. Okay
hopefully we're near the end of this when and
when the the conservators a whole separate concern conservative media universe
Which felt so powerful for so long?
doesn't quite feel like that anymore and we're
Different versions of history are being referenced
Than that than before so that like for example when I wrote that article in the Atlantic last week
I am still going to get that
The the predictable hate mail, okay. It's going to come there are people who can never be convinced
But what's striking is how many people?
have moved as Frank said to a different position and who
so even with this enormous legenda hostility to academics and to knowledge and to experts
there are these mediating figures and they're taking a huge amount of heat to as the 16:19 project showed but
It doesn't come necessarily directly from us
I guess that's one answer is that we teach teachers we teach students people journalists read what we write
Not me specifically, but all of that
amazing scholarship that's out there and it makes its way in and it becomes reference and then there's just the fact that and
People in communities are making different decisions. I mean the the Confederate Monument issue can look for example
Unmovable and then people just take them down
It was in stasis for ages, you know, they were blocked by laws that the president is still trying to do that
He's trying to use the National Guard to protect these statues. Well, some people didn't wait for permission
They just took them down and I read the most amazing thing today about
Ancestors of those Confederate generals who have been petitioning for
Years for those statues to be taken down and who were so relieved when protesters just dragged them off their pedestal
So there's good who's out there?
I mean, I I think there is a lot of you know
we have to worry that there's an awful lot of virtue signaling going on and
Corporate statements and so forth, but I think there's a lot of other things going on inside communities
That you can see the tip of the iceberg is when you see something getting toppled off
of stuff with this community work behind that and
Not all that community work is the predictable people
so I think that's behind the shift that that Frank's alluding to and
that there's reasons something has changed and we were it remains to be seen has it really changed and I
guess as a historian what I'm wait what I want to know is how Bad's the backlash gonna be and
That's what I'm waiting for but I'm
still also
Really hopeful that the mask is off and that you can't really defend Confederates. For example, you can't you can't defend those things anymore
as a ventriloquist act for white supremacy, you just if you're going to stand with them you're standing with white supremacy, and that's just
not many people
Want to make that statement directly in a public?
Thank you very much that does anyone else want to answer the question
Yes, there is one more question this one is it's a pedagogy question so anyone who wants to answer it can
It's
written as an aspiring US history teacher
I wanted to accurately describe the brutal history of white
supremacy and anti black violence that we need to understand to make sense of this current moment, but I also don't want to a
contribute to the
Desensitization to black deaths and that the constant bombardment of imagery, especially on social media can reinforce
Nor be further traumatize black and other racialized students and multiracial classrooms
Do you any of you have suggestions on how to navigate this?
And again, this is for anyone in the panel
I'll take a quick stab at it. I mean, I think those of us who teach histories of colonialism are
Very well aware of the horrific images
both pre photograph and photographic of
Colonized bodies put on display
colonists bodies rendered in different forms for dissection both literal as well as
analytical and so when we teach our classes
It is very important as scholars and as pedagogy that we do not recreate that violence
to put that back up on I mean
I remember viscerally the first anthropology class. I ever took where the white professor
started putting
Ethnographic non graphic images in a you know at that time
There was a corral and you did like click click click and it went you know
It it was the it was extremely traumatic to me as a person because the ethnographic
Field side for that colonial project was India for South Asia
so I think
There's excellent amounts of resources both from feminist and queer scholars from scholars of color
How do how to frame how do not show the image how to speak about the image of?
Excellent scholars, like saya Hartman a sector I have written about it
so I think
It is a it is up to us to communicate to our students how the the power of the image to render
Humanity and to dehumanize are both part and parcel of the author of the power of that image
so, you know, this is something that asked as teachers we
Certainly need to for Graham
Would anyone else like to speak to that
Mean I would just say that I struggled with this very much
That's interesting. How teaching in this particular moment with all of this outside
and around us
Really brings those kinds of dilemmas home. Like how how do you convey the history without showing the images of the brutality?
But how do you do that right now when we're already?
Inundated with images of brutality and so I just didn't use a lot of images this time
But I think there are certain just practices that are being offered now
like very simple ones like and I think
We can all those of us who are academics can chart the moments when this change that we should talk about
People as actors in their own history not just as simply acted upon
so that in the very words we choose to talk about people where
We're recognizing their humanity. So they are enslaved
That that was an act of something of dispossession an active act of dispossession rather than that. They were slaves. They were enslaved
I think the
Certain practices like using that word using enslavers
Capitalizing the letter B. These are very these are practices that are now entering and
Academic practice which is always slow to to
adopt these things and also I think and when you have to teach things like lyndshane, for example
I taught a course on the Ku Klux Klan this year and it was horrendous
To try to figure out what to do about these descriptions and then later the images of white supremacists lynching violence
But I think one strategy which we have learned from
african-american studies is to use the critics of those practices from the time and place as the
commentators on it so that they're not just sitting up there like these images of
Dehumanization and then you leave the students that in other words that they were never
unchallenged and uncontested and I think one of the things we have to do is make sure that when we use them we
reconstruct the conversation and the contestation around them and
That's something I'm learning as I go
Because I don't necessarily know all the history of black resistance and protests in the later periods, but I think that's one
Strategy is that you don't comment on those things you bring?
contemporaries to comment on those things and you know
I think this is part of the reason for example why people are so interested in I to be wells right now
is that as a black journalist in time and place she did so much to
publicize and challenge the claims of the lynchers and
You know, let's put up a few statues to i2b wells around this country. I would also just tell teachers especially that there are
Resources like the equal justice initiative, which I think is amazing
If you go to their website the way that they the the public history work they have done the research that they have done enormous
Resources on there for people to educate themselves and then use it with their students
Thank you, so we are going to ask one more question from our Q&A and then we can wrap up
so
We have an anonymous score just a question sent via QA to what degree can Columbia's quote unquote
Rhetorical shift be engaged when Public Safety continues to hire from NYPD
and invests in increased polit policing around campus and in Harlem
How can we push the university to put its money where its mouth is and cut ties with local PD? Oh
I'll jump in here, you know, probably our next session should be Columbia's specific
We haven't even dealt with yet, you know, even in terms of our department
You know, we're in a moment of reckoning right
throughout the world the country the city in particular in our institution, right and I think
Part of that reckoning is gonna mean the reallocation of resources
right
We've seen this in all the debates around the funding the police, right?
I mean this has been super smart critiques of those who criticized the funding argument by saying that well
You know bla bla bla and by demonstrating the bloated nature of police budgets, you know, there's a whole lot of bloated
Systems in our in our in all little world here. Let's put it that way
Right, and so part of the answer here is not just evaluating the question of you know, Colombia's relations to NYPD
But really how how our institution is run right and how our city is run
I mean one of the things that's so
Striking to me as a native New Yorker having come back here to live over. The last five years is how
securitized and and
Hierarchical the public sphere is in ways that it wasn't in the 1970s and 80s when I was growing up here, you know
Columbia and I think so much of the master narrative, New York
Is that oh, well, Columbia New York is safer now and many buddies
They get mugged back in the day and there was always violence and I think that some to some degree misrepresents
what New York was and what even these neighborhoods were and so part of we need to do is really
Own investments in hierarchy and securitisation, right and this and this is also something that's read that has really developed even post 9/11, right?
there's a way which we have succumb to the securitizing apparatus is
You know throughout the country, right? So so I think you know having you know having become a semi historian of Columbia
I think that we're in a moment here where like after 1968 or a prompted by the CCA protests
we're gonna have to do a whole lot of
Evaluating of our of our institution where our resources go
including
The question of public safety right if we're going to reimagine public safety
I suppose it's something we should be doing right here in Morningside Heights West Harlem
Again, this is a bigger conversation
But you know, I kind of want to frame this as a bigger picture kind of topic because it is Ament
It's not just around security and and the police. It's really about the allocation of resources at our institution
Thank you, and I know that Emma said we were gonna wrap up did someone else won't answer the question
I just wanted to add that I read today that the University of Pennsylvania president made a statement today that they would no longer hire
Philadelphia police to work on campus so, you know starting
Yeah, definitely I know we were gonna wrap up but there's actually one more question in the chat
That I think needs to be answered
it says men that many of you talked about the impact of various protest movements in the US and across the globe in your
Personal and atham and academic growth. What are the parallels and differences?
You see between our current movement and the past ones in terms of strategies demands and responses
So this question is for all panelists whoever wants to answer first
I'll go first, I think
the
I mean one wants to think that all of these movements
all of these protests are iterative that I stand if I stand in protest right now I stand
on
The basis of protests that my elders stood for whether it was ten years ago or four years ago 50 years ago
In Pakistan, for example, we have these
series of poets who were Bataan that shot and imprisoned
From the colonial period to now and every single protest that I ever went to as a young student
and every single protest I see now on YouTube those same lines of poetry are being
That's not a sign of stasis
that's a sign of the the depth of that movement and how that movement is always achieving always being so I think I
See this movement
particularly
as a I mean there is a lot of
Parallels that people are drawing between Ferguson and
Minneapolis in the sense that why did in
Certain sector of the population in the United States not come out as they did now
I think they came out now because of Ferguson. I'm not become without it. There is no
Movement today if it wasn't for 68 and if it wasn't for and 68
I mean the the riots of 68 the uprisings of 68 in LA or 92 or Ferguson or now, so I see this iterative
I do feel one last thing
I will say I do feel that I am heartened most by the globality and the global recognition of
solidarity across Palestine across kashmiri across Balochistan and costal it lies
That the movement now
Is representing and calling for and it is no longer trying to kind of think about the
As if it's the particular is is is separated from the whole I think
This this insight which our our D criminal thinkers have always
insisted upon
Going back to the disenfranchised colonies the essay by WB Dubois
1940 or
1945
And I think this is what's what's beautiful and powerful about this movement. So I see continuity. Thank you
Thank you so much man on
With that, I just like to thank all of my colleagues
Especially Emma and our distinguished panelists who are very instrumental in making this webinar a reality
We hope you will join us again, as this will be a monthly conversation. We hope and we'll continue
To continue having we're committed to continue having these very important discussions on race
how to take action and most importantly a healing space
Please remember to practice self-care and take time to check in with yourself and others around you
Thank you again. And I know I'll turn it over to our panelists for any closing remarks
Oh
Right, I'd also like to add that if you've registered we're going to continue sending out more information if you haven't registered please do so
And if you're a non
columbia
person
Right, you can contact us via facebook
Maybe and maybe you can add our e-mail or something if people wanna yes
Our email is history at Columbia JD you and I did see that a bunch of people asked questions on our Facebook
Comments and just so you know, we let me see them. They won't be discarded. This is an ongoing series
So we're open to letting those questions bleed into other panels as well
So we're listening keeps it keep submitting questions
just to say thank you to sada and Emma for taking leadership on this and
Inviting us into this conversation which feels very different and I'm really grateful for that
Yeah, I want to also thank
I mind say that but I also want to recognize and thank
Amanda for being here as a graduate student. I really appreciate that
and I hope that
Our department will continue to have conversations that are not hierarchically arranged as they may have been in the past
Thank you for having me and thank you
Tell us how you did for organizing this event and for creating a space for us to continue to have discussions like this
one thing that I would want to say in closing is that I think
We are living through a remarkable
moment in time but one thing that's crucially important and one thing that we touched on in this panel is that we don't really
for historians we can tell you about the past but not the future and it's really
important that we keep when when the new cycle moves on and
Pundits are talking about different things that we still
Remember the urgency of these conversations because the the problems that we're trying to address now
Have existed for a very long time and are not going to go away
No matter how loudly we protest right now
we need to continue to care when it's a year from now or ten years from now or
fifty-seven years from now and one of the ways that we can do that is by creating things hopefully like the series of conversations and
And sort of enshrining those opportunities to create positive change
In ways that will last in ways that can move us forward
so that we don't get caught up in the urgency of this moment and
Then let that sort of burn out
Yeah, I just I just want to just echo what what others have said already and and and IIIi, don't see you
I don't see anything burning out anytime soon
in terms of I think think coming down and I think because we're in an election year and because we see the devastation that's
Happening in the Sunbelt in other parts of the country, you know, I think there were in it for a long haul here
You know and I think that it isn't anything good about this pandemic and and even about the zoom whirl is that to some degree
We're interacting in ways that we don't when we're usually running around campus in Manhattan doing a lot of our busy works
alright
You know
I'm encouraged by
Whether this ven and I also want to thank SIA and Emma for encouraging us to do this because I think there's gonna be more
Conversations like this happening and more actionable to move on
In the coming weeks and months, so, but thank you again. Thank you all for attending
Yes, thank you everyone for attending and please stay tuned for the dates as the panels are announced as they come out
We're aiming for a monthly
Going - thank you. Bye everyone
