Theoretical

There [in his autobiography, Jefferson] recalls that on February the seventh, 1779, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, [he] supported an amendment to a slavery bill that would address, early on, the contradiction at the heart of the new-born republic. He supported an amendment that called for the freedom of all slaves born after a certain day and . . . their deportation ‘at a proper age.’ That’s a quote. In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson in 1787 — less than ten years from the events described in his autobiography, 1779 — he elaborates more fully on this deportation amendment that he supported. . . . ‘An amendment was prepared’ — he’s reflecting back now, ten years almost — ‘An amendment was prepared directing that slaves should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up at the public expense to tillage, arts, and sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such places as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of useful domestic animals, etcetera, to declare them a freed and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels, at the same time, to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants, to induce whom to migrate hither proper encouragements were to be proposed.’ Endquote.

Jefferson proposes here, in the early life of the republic, a project — a project, it should be added, to be paid for at the public expense, and thus as the nation’s first public works project — for the expatriation of slaves and the importation of a suitable number of immigrants — ‘suitable’ immigrants, white laborers, he’s clear about — to fill out the American populace and replace Black labor. Really, really interesting. [light laugh]

I’m contending, this is the post-racial already.

Let’s keep going. This deportation-importation project now comes under the name ‘colonization,’ and itself is part of a project of population management. Eventually, over time, Jefferson will fill out this project by suggesting places for these expatriated Blacks, Africans, to go. He will make various suggestions, for Africa, the West Indies, and even places in western North America. What is crucial for my purposes is that Jefferson is making his colonization proposal just at the moment when a number of U.S. elites, Jefferson among them, are wrestling intensely with how to formulate in theory and formalize in practice the ideals of the Enlightenment — how to install and materialize the project of freedom — and with how to respond to the call of Reason to capture and render or represent the light of freedom in philosophical, political, and juridical concepts and institutions.

In short, Jefferson makes his proposal inside of a moment of crisis that can be stated around a two-fold question: on the one hand, how must we think about freedom? How must we think as enlightened thinkers and leaders, on the one hand, and what does freedom and enlightened outlook look like on the ground, on the other? What I would like to suggest is that the colonization project was a laboratory in which Jefferson worked through these questions and, in his writings, through them displaying for us the incarnational imaginary that founds U.S. governance as a project of racial- and population-governance, and in this way, as a project of political theology, meant to install and to stabilize white male identity as a subjectivity of freedom as sovereignty.

Above, religion and Black studies scholar Jay Carter, then at Duke U., from a ‘Post-racial Blues’ lecture given in 2015 (in this case, at UC Irvine, where last year he joined the school of humanities faculty). That’s the year — remember? — of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. Barack Obama was President, relatively popular, in a second term. Donald Trump was making a 2016 bid that generated a shitload of press but that smart types found hard to take seriously.

Here’s the full talk:

I don’t know much about Carter, but I am very interested in greater acquaintance with his work. A fascinating detail, from my point of view, is that he has a Th.M. (1995) from Dallas Theological Seminary, bastion of the Bible-belt dispensationalist (i.e., Darbyite) American Evangelicalism of my own upbringing — a setting for intellectual formation on what we’ll call, in U.S. context, very conservative-Christian terms.

Carter in 2015 isn’t exactly optimistic about the condition of the republic. That’s plain enough. Whatever his path of intellectual formation, this is material informed by a long-preceding lineage of Black radical critique. He’s here to give you an alternative telling, a contrary telling, of the story of America deep into the period of the first Black presidency — a telling that was in that year compelling enough, should you have encountered it, and that is only increasingly more so as Americans regard ourselves in light of the following year’s electoral-system upset and subsequent shift in national political contestation.

What acquaintance with Carter I now have comes with a talk given last year by Dartmouth’s Shaul Magid. Magid mentions in passing some reliance on conversation with Carter in the development of his own recent work. (We may note, in their résumés, that Magid’s stretch as religion professor at Indiana U. ends the same year Carter’s begins, 2018.)

We’ll look at this Magid talk just a bit below, but what I want to come to first is what most immediately occasions the present post. It happens that I experienced in the last week or so a moment of media froth strikingly parallel to the one last December’s ‘Christmas post’ starts with. A story that shouldn’t be a story crossed my desk as I checked headlines at Google News, where quality standards continue not to trend upward. The item in question, sufficiently beneath most people’s notice to make it into the feed for me only the one day, enjoys its soap-bubble minute as news ‘broken’ at National Review by Stanley Kurtz — a guy who invested heavily, when Obama was new on the scene and after, in the trade in revelations of the anti-America, pro-terrorism, far-left truth about Barack and Michelle.

Kurtz, poor soul, keeps at it — a fact not worth dwelling on. We leave him to his rut. I do however want to pay attention briefly to what Kurtz and a few others sought to make right-wing-media hay out of last month, the Brian Lozenski flap.

Lozenski is education professor at a private college, Presbyterian in origin, of good reputation and modest profile, Macalester in St. Paul. His portfolio includes a TED talk (2012) and a text with Brill on urban schooling and Black Americans (2022). He got appointed / attached to a state education-dept. advisory committee under Tim Walz’s governorship at some time in the last few years. And hard-working dirt-diggers focused on now-national-candidate Walz eventually turned up (no doubt with help from folks like the writer of this Minnesota Star Tribune column) a recorded session in which Lozenski appears to say a bad thing.

The bad thing Lozenski says is kind of interesting. What makes it ‘bad’ is his finding (on the fly, one assumes) the word ‘overthrow’ to convey his comments’ gist. It’s not great word-choice, I’d say — but not because of the scandal people like Kurtz would wish, a couple of years later, to see it blossom into. As I read it, the tenor of Lozenski’s comment may be better rendered by Melanie Yazzie’s ‘dismantle,’ for instance.

‘Overthrow’ very evidently has in it, in Lozenski’s probably not carefully considered usage in course of live dialogue, no idea of a taking up of arms against the government. If that were where he was going, you’d be looking at (or rather wouldn’t be unless some kind of insider) a different kind of discussion than the one it’s clear he’s part of. The word as used there certainly does have, however, the meaning of a taking up in its totality of this thing, the United States, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century founding situation through to today, for exposure and examination, and it certainly does then point to a requirement or demand of transformation and rebuilding of the whole. Don’t tell me you’re bringing a critical-theory understanding to your work on education, Lozenski says in this bit of meeting transcript we have, when all you’ve shown up with is the DEI spreadsheet of the good liberal. Lozenski wants ‘CRT,’ Critical Race Theory, held in full as instantiation and inheritance of Black radical thought, nothing less. Black radical thought in this sense, the sense Lozenski upholds, is not good-liberals tradition. It’s revolutionary tradition. It’s about transformation. It isn’t confused by disturbance at the extremities. It goes to the root.

(An expression I associate with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker is ‘building the new in the shell of the old.’ I note Lozenski’s invoking the anarchistic — ‘Okay, [CRT] is an anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period’ — and can’t help imagining Day as sitting in on that session, nodding in sober recognition with him.)

Who among the citizenry has in fact been taking up arms against the U.S. government in the last few years, by the way? Ah yes, hardcore loyalists of candidate-redux Trump, back when he was outgoing holder of elected office particularly. How far have folks in Kurtz’s camp undertaken it, journalistically or otherwise, to ensure that conspirators of this openly violent stripe are exposed, rooted out, denied further opportunity? Well, feel free to look for signs of that sort of vigilant care from them yourself, but my glance around suggests you shouldn’t expect to find much.

It’s to little purpose to rant for long about the right, maybe. At any rate, what’s important to me is to leave the reader of this post with some new awareness of or even beginning of appreciation for what Shaul Magid has been at in the course of his academic career. (Magid is a rabbi as well as an academic. As a younger though not very young man, three and a half decades ago, he was for a while an Israeli military officer. He’s gotten around.) Let’s come back, then, to that recording of last year with the Jay Carter name-drop, a talk held at Harvard’s divinity school. It’s one item of a number sprung from Magid’s work on American-Israeli ultranationalist Meir Kahane around out there to be found, and it’s the Magid material I happened to have up for listening for a period of days during which the non-story story about Brian Lozenski came and quickly went.

It could be helpful, if you’ve come with me this far and especially if you mean to give Magid’s talk a listen, to have reference to something like this 2017 Critical Race Theory and Afropessimism overview of moderate length, written for folks dealing in sociology.

Excerpt from the talk as Magid gathers threads and winds it down:

So this [preceding] analysis points to some of what I mean when I say ‘Judeopessimism,’ which makes claims about antisemitism that are akin to the political ontology of anti-Blackness that we find in some Afropessimists. Just as Afropessimists claim that America is a white supremacist nation, or, as [Frank] Wilderson would have it, that the world as we know it is founded on anti-Blackness, some Jewish thinkers see the non-Jewish world through the lens of antisemitism. Hatred of the Jew is treated as definitive of the non-Jew.

A question that I think is worth asking is the degree to which Judeopessimism also underlies discussions of antisemitism more broadly. Are Jewish scholars of antisemitism similarly claiming this antipathy to the Jew undergirds much of human civilization? And if so, exactly what would that mean? . . .

In practice, Jewish historians of antisemitism tend to describe enmity towards Jews in many historical and societal contexts without particularizing those contexts. Varied expressions of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, from Christian theological supersessionism, to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination, to anti-Zionism, are all just simply called antisemitism, as if they are all essentially the same. In effect, if not in intent, such scholarship is thus engaging in a theological project that is arguably no less ontological in its claims than the theories of anti-Blackness noted above. . . .

This is why [David] Engel’s essay ‘Away from a Definition of Antisemitism’ is such a welcome and crucial, if not also problematic and in need of further examination, intervention into the conversation, even if one disagrees with it. And interestingly, why it was so critically received in Israel in a recent volume of Zion — which had a Hebrew version of Engel’s essay, and then a series of responses, one of them by Susannah Heschel [in the audience].

It is here that I think Afropessimism can be of use to scholars of antisemitism, precisely because it is willing to make its ahistorical claims explicit and thus put them up for debate. Many critical race theorists blanch at Wilderson’s stark assessment because it problematizes any solution or makes solutions inadequate. There is no solution to anti-Blackness, or at least no easy solution, and no solution that would leave civil society intact, since it is constitutive of the construction of the human, at least in the modern West. Anti-Blackness cannot be undone without also undoing much of what we now consider to be civilization. That’s Wilderson’s claim. . . .

The study of antisemitism, as I read it, has not yet developed a critical theory of its subject, whereby it can be analyzed in the fullness of itself. In short, perhaps we need to initiate a school of ‘Critical Jewish Theory.’

And the recording (for which full transcript is provided at the divinity school page):

update (oct 7)
In the version later published in Harvard Theological Review, the paper Magid delivers in the recorded talk, ‘Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory,’ is open-access, I’ve learned.

There are a few things about this talk that I think bear observing before I stop. One is that Magid here shows us in practice really meaningful mutual engagement in / with critical theory of very severe, uncompromising, even caustic character — leaning in on complexity and particularity as he meets an argument, resisting temptation to respond to ethically or politically tough proposition over-abstractly or reductively, letting impasse be impasse, never forgetting that he’s one and only one participant in dialogue of great and necessary breadth.

A second is that, like the Jay Carter talk this post begins with, Magid’s is useful demonstration that in the real world, the religious and the political share a history, are a history, and depend on each other for conceptual and linguistic coherence. (I wonder if it isn’t right to think this a basic ‘critical theory’ thrust or burden, the stipulation that in some way all cultural registers are in play, never one in isolation, never one or two on peculiarly privileged terms.)

A third, perhaps fairly obvious, is that you can’t follow Magid’s path in the subject matter without confronting in some degree the reality of the arbitrariness with which, where there’s endeavor in our era to build or sustain mass political identities, partisan effort can assume to itself aspects of (not the fullness of) the ‘pessimistic’ mode in understanding of historically oppressed populations and state or civilizational condition. (I don’t at all mean to suggest that this means just the same thing for movement projects of the left as it does for those of the right. But that’s topic for another post . . . sometime.) In the recording, audience members’ urge to surface this more than Magid seems to have come prepared to do is interesting feature of the post-talk Q & A — to which you should certainly take time to listen, even if on this point narrowly the exchange may not prove especially illuminating.

It’s weeks now that I’ve been meaning to address tuning in on Magid and his work in a post here. This isn’t the particular post in that way that I had in mind to try pulling together first, it’s just the one circumstances aligned to let me work through before any other. Which is to say that there’s more, when I can get to it.