Of Black Study

288 Pages·2023·1.384 MB·English

by  Joshua Myers

Of Black Study
“This magnificent book is the best recent treatment we have of the great Black
Radical Tradition! Joshua Myers’s powerful and profound examination of his
towering figures lays bare the silences and evasions of contemporary Black
academic studies. His vision of an alternative world grounded in the practices
of Black everyday people is a clarion call for Black intellectual creativity and
courage—just like the best of our Black musicians!”
—Cornel West
“Joshua Myers continues to perform the deep scholarly exploration into Black
Studies and its intellectual foundation. His book is a blueprint manual that helps
to elevate the Black imagination so that a new architecture can create a better
world. His reference to the work of Sylvia Wynter, June Jordan and Toni Cade
Bambara gives visibility to Black women as thinkers and not individuals standing
in the shadows of men. This is long overdue.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist
“In a sustained flash of deep, critical devotion, Joshua Myers has become one of
our most important intellectual historians and the preeminent theorist of Black
Study. His engagement with ‘knowledge otherwise’ in Of Black Study is beautifully
indispensable.”
—Fred Moten, cultural theorist, poet and scholar, New York University 
“For those who are, or wish to become, engaged in this work of radical re-think-
ings, Myers’s Of Black Study is a necessary consideration.”
—Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.), Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
“Joshua Myers has blown the abeng. Through a beautifully woven, ethically
attuned communion with Du Bois, Wynter, Carruthers, Robinson, Jordan, and
Bambara, Myers charts a habit of thought that for more than a century has
produced a body of knowledge robust enough to elaborate the fullness of Black
life. Let us answer the call Of Black Study.”
—Minkah Makalani, Director, Center for Africana Studies
Black Critique
Series editors: Anthony Bogues and Bedour Alagraa
We live in a troubled world. The rise of authoritarianism marks the dominant
current political order. The end of colonial empires did not inaugurate a more
humane world; rather, the old order reasserted itself.
In opposition, throughout the twentieth century and until today, anti-racist,
radical decolonization struggles attempted to create new forms of thought.
Figures from Ida B. Wells to W.E.B. Du Bois and Steve Biko, from Claudia Jones
to Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral produced work which drew from the
historical experiences of Africa and the African diaspora. They drew inspiration
from the Haitian revolution, radical Black abolitionist thought and practice,
and other currents that marked the contours of a Black radical intellectual and
political tradition.
The Black Critique series operates squarely within this tradition of ideas and
political struggles. It includes books which foreground this rich and complex
history. At a time when there is a deep desire for change, Black radicalism is one
of the most underexplored traditions that can drive emancipatory change today.
This series highlights these critical ideas from anywhere in the Black world,
creating a new history of radical thought for our times.
Also available:
Moving Against the System: The 1968 Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial
Congress of Black Writers and the Capitalism, Black Internationalism,
Making of Global Consciousness and Cultures of Resistance
Edited and with an Introduction by Edited by H.L.T. Quan
David Austin
Black Minded: The Political Philosophy
Anarchism and the Black Revolution: of Malcolm X
The Definitive Edition Michael Sawyer
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
Red International and Black Caribbean
After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico
Memory, Imagination, Hope and the West Indies, 1919–1939
Brian Meeks Margaret Stevens
A Certain Amount of Madness: The The Point Is to Change the World:
Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Selected Writings of Andaiye
Sankara Edited by Alissa Trotz
Edited by Amber Murrey
Of Black Study
Joshua Myers
First published 2023 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
and Pluto Press Inc.
1930 Village Center Circle, 3-834, Las Vegas, NV 89134
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Joshua Myers 2023
The right of Joshua Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4412 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4416 4 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4414 0 EPUB
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
For all past, present, and future members of the Kwame Ture Society
for Africana Studies and their students and children

Contents
Introduction: Living—June Jordan 1
1. Of Hesitance—W.E.B. Du Bois 14
2. Of Human—Sylvia Wynter 52
3. Of Speech—Jacob H. Carruthers Jr. 100
4. Of Order—Cedric J. Robinson 140
Conclusion: Dreams—Toni Cade Bambara 183
Acknowledgments 192
Notes 196
Index 258

Introduction: Living
June Jordan
“Black Studies. The engineer, the chemist, the teacher, the lawyer, the
architect, if he is Black, he cannot honorably engage career except as
Black engineer, Black architect. Of course, he must master the compe-
tence, the perspectives of physics, chemistry, economics, and so forth. But
he cannot honorably, or realistically, forsake the origins of his possible
person. Or she cannot. Nor can he escape the tyranny of ignorance
except as he displaces ignorance with study: study of the impersonal,
the amorality of the sciences anchored by Black Studies. The urgency of
his heart, his breath, demands the knowing of the truth about himself:
the truth of Black experience. And so, Black students, looking for the
truth, demand teachers least likely to lie, least likely to perpetuate
the traditions of lying: lies that deface the father from the memory of
the child. We request Black teachers of Black studies. It is not that we
believe only Black people can understand the Black experience. It is,
rather, that we acknowledge the difference between reality and criti-
cism as the difference between the Host and Parasite.”
June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person”1
We are surrounded. We who are in the academy, looking for commu-
nity, like June Jordan and her students in 1969, are still surrounded. We
have also made it inside the gate, but we are now cornered. This place, the
university, is the destination, they said. We were told that we had to be
inside or else. And now that we are here, they lie to us. Just as they lied to
Jordan’s students. Just as they lied to the Black professors they hired when
they demanded teachers less likely to lie. Just as they lied to the Black
teachers who went to college in order to teach those Black professors long
before 1969. They lied about us. About why we are here, how we got here,
and what it means to be here. Although they would eventually again shut
the gates, some of us made it through and have been here for a long time
now. Which means we have listened to these lies for a long time now. The
lies have changed. But they are still lies.
Every now and then, there is a slip, an exposure, a seam opens. We
seize on those moments because the lie that sustains what Jordan called
2 . of black study
this system’s “exploitation of human life, for material gain” cannot exist
forever. 2 We say, we believe. We enter a tradition of recognizing that this
place and its knowledges are all “a logical bundling of lies that mutilate
and kill.”3 That knowledge we call “normative,” “objective,” and therefore
“universal” is not only or simply a fiction or construct; it is a mechanism
of power, a force that imposes a particular kind of regime of truth on
those who they lie about, who are said to have no knowledge to counter
the lie. As we have queried the meaning of these lies, we have come up
with many answers. Even as there are deeper questions we know we
should ask.
But sometimes it feels like there are too few of us. Left alone, left with
questions unanswered, some of us feel we have to participate in the lies in
order to make do. The excuses mount. We turn our contempt inward. We
call ourselves impostors. We rationalize other kinds of harms, perhaps
believing that in the end, the academy’s rewards will suit us just fine.
When we have been inside the gates for so long, there is a tendency to
adjust.
But even this self-criticism has its limits. For it is the gates that surround
us. It is not us—it is them. It is the gates that suffocate the life out of us. It
is the gates that suppress our desires, assaults our capacities to evacuate
the lies out of us. We are not the problem, though we have been told this
over and over. And we have suffered for so long as their conception of
the problem. The gates have enforced the logics of coloniality and state
power. It is the settler and the police that guard these gates. Who then
teach us their knowledges. Only they call themselves scholars. Yet their
ideas manifest harm. For it is their job.
In the face of such duress, such pervasive hardship, such overwhelm-
ing trauma, we must build spaces to re-member that we Black folk have a
tradition of recognizing that it is all a lie.
Of Black Study is a re-membering of that tradition through the lens
and lives of four Black intellectuals who questioned the lie at its most
fundamental core: the very meaning of knowledge.4 They came to the
university with questions. Questions that were not simply driven by why
Black folk caught hell, not simply why poverty existed, not simply why
there were disparities, lack, deprivation, deviance—not simply if we were
in fact surrounded. They asked questions like how the nature of knowl-
edge and knowing itself became the structure that housed the lies. How
the architecture of the lie was not inherent in the lie itself. How it must
have come from some logic that preceded it. So it was not enough to