08/10/2025
Building a Political Home (Restacked)
AfricaFocus Notes on Substack offers short comments and links to news, analysis, and progressive advocacy on African and global issues, building on the legacy of over 25 years of publication as an email and web publication archived at http://www.africafocus.org. It is edited by William Minter. Posts are sent out by email once or twice a month. If you are not already a subscriber, you can subscribe for free by clicking on the button below. More frequent short notes are available at https://africafocus.substack.com/notes.
Editor’s Note
I don’t often restack posts from other sources. But this one from an interview with Cathy Cohen is well worth an exception given her keen insights on the current political situation. The original source is here (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/building-a-political-home/). I have included the full article below.
Share
Subscribe now
AfricaFocus Notes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Cathy J. Cohen is one of the most distinguished political scientists in the American academy. Over the course of her career, she has dramatically reshaped how many of us think about questions of inequality, stigma, and marginalization in American politics and pierced through unexamined assumptions about how Americans, especially youth, approach major questions of political life. Influenced by traditions of Black radical feminism, she is especially celebrated—as well as criticized—for her sharp critiques of mainstream Black and gay civil rights organizations, as well as the paradigms through which they are studied. While many scholars sought influence through more familiar venues of public intellectualism, Cohen quietly impacted successive generations of activists, organizers, students, and civic leaders in Chicago and elsewhere with her ideas and mentorship, especially in the early days of Black Lives Matter.
After a period where it seemed that many of the ideas and organizations she championed were ascendant, such efforts now face a wave of hostility and derision, as reactionary political forces elicit and extend outrage against the supposed excesses of the gains won by Blacks, immigrants, leftists, q***r folks, and others. On July 3, I spoke with Cohen about the attacks on progressivism, what makes social movements work, and the challenge of the second coming of Trumpism.
—Brandon M. Terry
Brandon Terry: As I speak, Congress has passed Donald Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which some commentators consider one of the most consequential single pieces of legislation ever passed. And I think it also represents—alongside the dismantling of civil rights legislation and attacks on higher education—the larger ideological and political ambitions of the second Trump administration. How do you think Black politics ought to respond?
Cathy Cohen: We are in the midst of a fight like none we’ve ever seen before in our lifetimes. And there’s no denying the fundamental role of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and Christian nationalism in structuring Trump’s attacks on Black and brown people through this second term. The first round of this terror has come in the form of what we might call “anti-wokeism,” with the explicit goal of dismantling all things thought to be related to extending opportunity and possibly advancement to folks of color and fundamentally shifting power in this country. The right is using this anti-woke framework to explain away everything they contend is wrong with the country, from the problems at “elite universities” to the stunning claim that DEI caused a plane crash.
The attacks on DEI both target and represent Black and Brown folks as incompetent workers who, they say, have been given an advantage over white people by the government. We have to understand the expansive nature of this work: anti-wokeism is about giving ideological cover to longstanding priorities on the right—dismantling the welfare state and ramping up the carceral state, especially in the form of immigrant deportation and detention on the streets at home and militarism overseas.
BT: What is jarring to me is that we’ve lived through an explosion in popular education about race, especially in the last fifteen years. When I was in college, a graduate student advised me, “Whatever you do, don’t work on residential segregation. No one will want to hear about it.” Today many educated people know what redlining is. How could we have lived through this proliferation of interventions about the history of racial injustice and yet are also seeing this revived story of Black incompetence?
CC: We have to understand that many of Trump’s attacks are not “culture wars” as described in the media, but a generational war meant to win over, in particular, young white people. The success of our research, writing, and teaching the truthful narrative of the history of racism, empire, and white supremacy in this country is changing the way young people—and especially white people—think about institutions, about their role in society, about white privilege and racial capitalism. This has been especially true for young people with some access to college.
However, for non–college educated young white people—who have experienced an increasing vulnerability and precarity and declining access to the white privilege and state power they were told was theirs for the taking, even from their class position—this has built resentment around what is narrated as the unworthy advantages of communities of color, through policies like affirmative action or the expansion of the state for the social and economic mobility of, in particular, the Black middle class. Trump’s message to these young white people is that they have to stop this transgenerational transformation. And part of stopping it is controlling the university, controlling public education—taking back control of the narrative of this country and about people of color and promoting an explanation that white people have less because people of color have more. These two things are deeply influencing each other.
BT: But how do you explain the Trump movement’s appeal to so many Americans who would not understand themselves to be white? There was a lot of movement among Latino voters—Latino male voters in particular—with some movement among a very small segment of Black men, including high-profile online influencers like DJ Akademiks. If this is about white supremacy, why do we see this complex racial demographic mix-up?
CC: The broad agenda of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration is not just about white supremacy; it is also about Christian nationalism. Part of what Trump promises is that men will take what patriarchy tells us is their rightful place as the head of their family. So, even if they don’t have access to economic mobility, men are promised access to patriarchal power. And for men of color with limited access to the spoils of capitalism, he’s even offering new kinds of financial systems such as cryptocurrency.
My research project, the GenForward Survey, conducted focus groups with young Black men about Trump during the campaign. Our participants had an instrumental view of their possible support of Trump, and this has everything to do with the absence of deliverables from the left to those communities. Many of the young men we talked to had no illusions that Trump was on their side or would truly make their lives better. But they didn’t believe that Biden was on their side, either. What they believed was that Trump would at least try to pay them off: the last time Trump was in office, they got a check, and many of them noted they didn’t get that from Biden.
When we said to the participants in the focus group, “Well, Trump lies,” they said, “Everybody lies—this whole political system is built on lies.” And then when we said, “Well, what about the idea that Trump is racist?” they said, “They’re all racist. He just says what they think.” These young men had a deep—and I think appropriate—skepticism about the inherent racism of both political parties.
The young men considered voting for Trump because they believed they might get some symbolic representation or some minor policy wins that would temporarily enhance their lives. I’m not saying I agree with them, but they articulated a position that they’d rather go with the guy who gave them money, who’s trying to buy them off, and who performs a certain type of masculinity that maybe they aspire to. We know what Trump’s play is. The question is, what is the left offering these same young Black men? The gender politics of Trump’s Christian nationalism might be enticing for groups of racially and economically marginalized young men who feel like they don’t have access to power in a society that says men are supposed to.
BT: But even on the most charitable interpretation, Trump’s relationship to religion seems thin and instrumental, not deeply committed. Why does the Christian right see him as a vehicle for the restoration of a “postliberal” Christian era?
CC: He’s advancing their agenda. That’s the reality. He gave them Dobbs, which will then facilitate the mobilization at some point, maybe after the midterm elections, of a federal national ban on abortion. He has reinstated the centrality of the nuclear family and the heteropatriarchal roles in that family. He’s taking on gender nonconformity and destroying all the protections and services won by and for transgender communities. He is embracing the agenda of many white Christian nationalist churches, in particular. Would they prefer a person who articulated and lived their ideology exactly? Sure. But they can live with someone who’s going to deliver wins for them. Because in the end, the idea is to accumulate power so that you can transform and control institutions to advance your political agenda. It’s not complicated.
I think most people understand the pay-to-play relationship that surrounds evangelicals, for example, and their support of Trump. That has caused some fracture in those communities. But yesterday I heard an interview with a congressmember, House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, about the “big ugly bill” that I found revealing. When asked if he was “caving” by voting for the bill despite his concerns about its impact on the deficit, he replied: “Well, if winning is caving, then I guess we caved.” There you go.
BT: Your first book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, gave such a sophisticated, empirically grounded theory of the cleavages within Black political life and the ways that they leave certain segments of the larger group marginalized, even in times of great emergency like the HIV crisis. You’ve been working on that theme since then: Black people disagree. They have deep conflicts. Their solidarity is fragile and contingent. It needs certain conditions to thrive, and may have objectionable consequences at times. But every election cycle, we continuously go through the ritual of being surprised by this. Why do you think your message is so hard for public commentators to digest?
CC: Boundaries was a case study about the politics of HIV and AIDS in Black communities, but it was really intended to help us think about who has power, legitimacy, voice, and resources in terms of defining “a” Black political agenda—even in, or especially in, life-and-death circumstances.
There are many people—W. E. B. Du Bois, Manning Marable, Angela Davis, Michael Dawson—who’ve written about the complexities and different ideological positions of Black people and communities. Many Black feminists have done this as well. Why do public commentators seem to miss this point? There are a couple reasons. The narratives of our diversity, our different positionalities, our different politics are sometimes in tension with what might be considered the unifying themes of Black solidarity that arise in response to a form of anti-Blackness and structural racism that negates the basic humanity of Black people. If I’m trying to respond to arguments about the dehumanization of Black people, I’m not going to focus on the very real differences in Black experiences and positionality—I’m going to make a unifying argument about our humanity.
Another reason is the way scholarship on Blackness is framed and considered relative to other groups. This is typical in political science: researchers often ask how Black people compare to white people, or how Black women compare to white women. But that framework of comparison flattens the specificity of Black experiences and Black politics. Sadly, this comparative approach defines far too much academic work, particularly in the social sciences and biological sciences.
We need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Black communities, because we can never effectively represent and organize Black people without that. You can’t understand the carceral state and its targeting of Black communities without attention to gender, as extraordinary work by scholars such as Beth Richie and Sarah Haley has shown. Premilla Nadasen adds depth to our understanding of class politics in Black communities by detailing how poor Black women built movements of resistance to the contraction of the welfare state. C. Riley Snorton, Jafari Allen, Moya Bailey, and E. Patrick Johnson help us understand the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race and transgender politics in Black communities. I could go on and on highlighting more extraordinary work. The point is that all this scholarship is informing and advancing liberatory formations while paying attention to differential lived experiences and political positionings of Black people.
BT: Is there a place for Black solidarity going forward, then? Does the complexity of Black experiences still allow us to use that language, or is it time for a new vocabulary?
CC: I’m not invested in some magical, expansive Black solidarity that’s built around our lowest common denominator. Instead, I am committed to a Black solidarity that is built, as bell hooks would tell us, “from margin to center,” around our political commitments and liberatory vision. I am working to build a Black solidarity that includes and centers transgender Black people, Black women and gender non-conforming folks, poor and working-class Black people, disabled Black people. But here is the other dimension: we also have to think about a political formation of solidarity that extends beyond that Black community that includes all those with a shared commitment to fighting oppression in its many dimensions—and that includes, yes, some white people.
While I’m deeply committed to a solidarity that centers continuous resistance to anti-Blackness and structural racism, we have to think about how we can build an expansive and transformative kind of solidarity. I am rejecting a limited or traditional form of Black solidarity, which is often embedded in the ways people talk about institutions like the NAACP. I’m working to build a left Black solidarity that’s prepared to fight the emerging fascism taking root in this country and that’s built around some Black people and some Black communities. I never have the expectation that all Black people will line up together: my work around HIV/AIDS and my life coming from a working-class family and as a Black le***an feminist has made that clear. My view of solidarity is built around meaningful political solidarity, not just identity-based solidarity.
BT: Zohran Mamdani just won a surprise upset over Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic primary. That has set the stage for what looks like a contentious general election between Eric Adams—who comes out of his own Black institutional and associational life in Reverend Herb Daughtry’s church and the nationalist organizing that was going on there—and Mamdani, whose politics, I think, are closer to yours (not to mention an independent Cuomo and the conservative Curtis Sliwa). Mamdani has pretty weak Black support, except when you zero in on young people and the self-described Black left.
You know something about these splits from your other career mentoring and supporting Black youth activists who work at a local level in Chicago with Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). Since 2012 you’ve played an important role, giving them institutional resources and moral and intellectual support as well as helping people think about these complexities and try to put them into practice. How have you seen Black youth political engagement evolve, particularly across gender and generational lines?
CC: BYP100 emerged because of brilliant young activists. I was lucky to be able to watch and support their amazing work—for instance, holding police accountable for the killing of young Black people like Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald. They also offered a new framing of the history of neoliberal disinvestment in Black communities through the call to divest from the carceral state and invest in Black and other resource-marginalized communities.
But even though we talked earlier in the interview about generational differences, I’m always a little careful with that frame. There are real differences within generations that we can’t lose sight of. So when we talk about how generational politics have changed over time, I always like to remind people that the politics of young adults evolve most often in relation to the social and political context they encounter. Millennials and members of Gen Z, for example, have lived through the recessions of 2008, recessions related to COVID, and the impending recession that may come from Trump’s tariffs. In some ways they have had more opportunity than previous generations, but they have also had to take on more debt to access promised educational opportunity. They’re less likely to own a home at this point in their life cycle than other generations. These are young people who have experienced a neoliberal, multiracial politics that culminated in the election of the first Black president—an election that also helped to facilitate the election of Trump and his white, Christian nationalist agenda. They are much more skeptical of state-run institutions, even what we might call democratic institutions, than other generations. They largely don’t believe in the two-party system: they want a third party. And when we ask them in our GenForward surveys about the best way to make change in the country, they don’t say elections. They say organizing, activism, nonviolent protests, and even civic engagement. When we ask young Black people the best way to make racial progress, again, they don’t mention traditional forms of politics. One out of five say revolution.
These young people don’t believe that incremental change through traditional political institutions will ever deliver the transformational agenda that they embrace. This viewpoint has moved some to embrace social movement formations calling for radical transformative change. But for others, there is deep cynicism about the effectiveness of collective mobilization, which causes them to lean instead toward an individualized politics, often using social media platforms to register their preferences. And still for others, their skepticism has promoted the idea of distrust in any kind of institution, fostering a belief that they must provide for each other outside traditional institutions with practices that might be labeled mutual aid.
BT: There seems to be a widespread sense that the Black Lives Matter movement is essentially over—or if not over, then in decisive retreat, maybe even defeat. Do you agree, and if so, what are the chief causes of the movement’s decline?
CC: I participate in social movements, and I also study them. And that has taught me these lessons: first, movements are never steady and linear. We need ways of assessing the work of movements when their work is fever-pitched—what happened around Ferguson or the mass mobilizations of 2020. And we also must be able to assess work that happens in movement spaces when they appear more dormant. We are not currently seeing the same activity from movements that we witnessed in opposition to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, but there’s still activity among organizations such as BYP100, Dream Defenders, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Rising Majority. All of these organizations are helping to analyze this moment and to build and maintain the spaces and campaigns meant to organize communities into resistance.
The second lesson is that social movements and their organizations are not meant to last forever. If an organization or even a movement fades, it doesn’t mean its work was irrelevant. Verta Taylor writes about social movement abeyance, where the most visible forms of movement activity may stop for a period of time only to be taken up later in a new formation. The organizations themselves may disappear, but their work or their influence continues.
But I don’t think that the Movement for Black Lives is over. If nothing else, the political impact of their decade or more of work will continue for some time. And their wins shape politics today. Because of their existence then and to some degree now in Chicago, we were able to elect a progressive Black mayor, Brandon Johnson, our former progressive Black state prosecutor, Kim Foxx, and progressive members of DSA to the city council. Their presence meant an expansion in the number of jobs for young people in Chicago, the reinstalling of mental health clinics through the Treatment Not Trauma campaign, and the revoking of cash bail in Illinois. Organizations like BYP100, Dream Defenders, and the coalition of organizations under the Movement for Black Lives provided a political home for young people led by other young people. They built an expansive political education project, sharpening political analysis and discourse in and outside of Black communities. They highlighted Black feminist approaches to strategy, analysis, and leadership. And they helped disseminate and popularize new political frameworks such as abolition. To understand all that these organizations won and their impact on our political landscape, I would recommend Barbara Ransby’s Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century or Deva Woodly’s Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements.
But we should be honest about the fact that many of the movement organizations that emerged after the murder of Trayvon Martin faced real challenges and sometimes failed. I think some became too dependent on philanthropy—and money in general—instead of building a larger volunteer base. Their barriers for entry were sometimes too high and the pathways to engagement for a larger population were sometimes nonexistent.
There’s also the question of whether the organizations that we label BLM reached into and built inside Black working-class and poor communities. There’s an argument that they did not, but I think the answer is a bit more complicated. I know that there were poor and working-class Black people, young Black people in those organizations and in their leadership, but I don’t think the campaigns coming out of those organizations consistently targeted the organizing of Black working-class and poor people and communities. Another difficulty faced by these organizations was the work of what it meant to build and be a political home for folks who are on the margins of society and the margins of Black communities. Sometimes the work of building a political home for folks that protects them from daily attacks on one’s body and being may become so consuming that the collective politics of resistance and organizing become less of a priority.
And then there was the challenge of building democratic forms of accountability and participation among a population that’s rightly skeptical of organizations, centralized power, and money. These organizations faced enormous challenges. Sometimes they navigated them well and other times they didn’t. We have to hold up and celebrate their wins, try to assess their impact by looking at their long-term impact, and also learn from their challenges—and, yes, their failures.
I try to learn from every political experience. So, for example, while BLM rejected the approach of having one charismatic male leader, we still have yet to figure out what a fully accountable and functioning democratic process looks like in movement organizations even if they’re “leaderful”—where some people are given the opportunity to become, if not a figurehead for, then a figure publicly associated with the movement. That’s not an indictment. Our thinking about what accountability looks like just has to evolve. How do we build in and guarantee greater transparency?
This generation of activist organizers also took seriously self-care and self-preservation, a position I have learned to appreciate. However, at times, I—and others of earlier generations—wondered if the focus on self-care was getting in the way of the work. Many of the young people that I know and love would say, “Oh, you’re wrong on this, Cathy.” And I totally get the need to preserve people’s ability to do the hard work of activism and organizing. But I think it has to be balanced with actually doing the work. I’m not sure that balance was always right at times.
Again, there are many more things that this recent generation of activists have taught me and helped me to rethink—not least of which is how we can not only center poor and working-class people in our campaigns, but build political homes and institutions full of and accountable to those same communities. Of course, as folks are organized into movement spaces, they must feel safe, taken care of, and heard. But, as I mentioned earlier, there is a tension between creating those institutions and moving beyond those institutions to do the work of movement building. We have to be building political homes while also doing the door-knocking and organizing that builds power and changes lives. The duality of that work can be hard to hold. It is something I probably didn’t think enough about.
BT: And it speaks to that tension self-care creates—between the feeling of being at home and those difficult outward-facing demands for a more inclusive movement.
CC: Exactly. Then we also have to be prepared to deal with harm—and to navigate, which I think most of these organizations did, instances of harm inflicted too often by men on women. How do we deal with harm while also committing to not discarding anyone? What does it mean to take harm seriously, but also to take the learning, evolution, and care of those who’ve caused harm seriously? We’re asking a lot of these organizations relating to violence and care. Sometimes they handle such challenges well, and sometimes they don’t, but their effort to engage this challenge will inform how people move forward and build movements in the future.
BT: Your classic essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Q***r Politics?” helped a generation of readers articulate deep frustrations with the political rhetoric and strategies in civil rights activism, and offered a kind of q***r politics as a radical alternative. People keep returning to it in part because you draw a sharp distinction between “civil rights-based” inclusion and a radical q***r politics committed to unsettling the hierarchies and identity categories that structure domination. You also critique the presumed opposition between “mainstream” and “q***r,” showing how that binary can obscure the messy and contradictory power relations within marginalized q***r communities themselves.
Today, criticisms that seem like they target your position on this have gained renewed visibility and support. Andrew Sullivan recently argued in the New York Times that the post-Obergefell LGBTQ movement overreached—that it should return to a vision of civil rights inclusion and abandon what he calls “radical gender revolution,” because the latter is alienating the broader public and threatens to undermine the gains of earlier gay and le***an activism. He says the movement is intolerant of dissent, obsessed with identity proliferation, and dangerously focused on youth and educational institutions. Congresswoman Sarah McBride has a similar view: she argues that some trans activists overplayed their hand and abandoned the politics of persuasion, losing the support of sympathetic liberals in the process. How do you respond to these accounts? Do they get anything right, or is this simply the latest chapter in the recurring debate between integration and transformation?
CC: Sullivan has always promoted a liberal, reductive understanding of LGBTQ politics that seems nostalgic for a time when white gay men were understood as the normative category of gay politics. I’m less persuaded by his call for the simpler times uncomplicated by the different gender, race, and class positions of those he understands to be gay or q***r. For me this was a position too often articulated, for example, by some white gay men in the ’80s and ’90s in ACT UP New York meetings, which I attended and participated in. Those individuals seemed to think that their access to white privilege would be tainted by the non-normative and uncompromising positions of radical q***r people who sought freedom, not acceptance from the respectable middle class of g**s. The truth is, a politics of inclusion based on the civil rights framework was never meant to address the issues of q***rs of color and poor and working-class q***rs, whether they were folks of color or white. Sullivan is interested in a politics of inclusion where we conform to hetero- and homo-normative standards and, as a reward, are included—allowed to marry and serve in the military, and accepted because we demand little or nothing from the state.
I count myself among those who believe that same-sex marriage only helps to legitimize a process intent on producing a hierarchy of citizenship and rights bolstered by the institution of marriage. In the 2000s, gay leadership largely sought normality: marriage, military, and electoral power. The cost, of course, of being on the other side of normal, as Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan, and others have warned, is that you must participate in the process of excluding those deemed “deviants” and give up on the cause of radical transformation. It produces, as Duggan explains, a depoliticized, privatized gay community committed to shrinking gay public spaces while expanding the gay market and consumption. So for me, that makes Sullivan’s critique problematic and really not new.
Now, McBride’s argument is different. There is something to her demand that we engage people continuously, moving them to our position and being informed by people’s concerns, even their apprehension—and yes, their misinformation too. I try to say this repeatedly about all sectors of politics, not only q***r politics: we have to persuade, we have to organize, we have to talk to people, we have to engage with folks and their ideas to move them to our side and to have our side informed by people’s lives. We have to be committed to building sustainable power. To do so, we need to think about how we can build a majority around our positions. How are we organizing people to our positions? How are we winning their hearts and minds? If we are truly trying to expand our base so that we can move a left agenda meant to radically transform people’s lives, we have to take McBride’s argument a bit more seriously than I take Sullivan’s position.
BT: Boundaries of Blackness is a book that changed my life. It helped me understand a lot more about the community I grew up in—in particular, the way people treated q***r people in my family and the things they were trying to work through, often in spaces that weren’t visible to everyone else. That affected what I thought were some of the central questions of Black politics. So when people ask me, “What should I read?” I often recommend your book. Let me ask you the same: What have you read that has fundamentally shaped you as a thinker, and is there something you wish more people were reading now?
CC: There are so many texts that have influenced my thinking, but I’ll give you three. As a budding Black feminist, bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was a critical text. It taught me the limits of second-wave feminist theory and what happens when we allow ourselves to center the people around us. For me that was the experiences of Black women. How does that change not only the stories we tell, but the theories we produce and the political work we pursue?
Another was James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance. It reminded me to be attuned to the ways that people are consistently, and sometimes in cloaked ways, engaged in resisting their oppression. In political science, there is a standard way that we operationalize something we might call “politics,” but Scott suggested that people are always thinking, collaborating, and evolving in the ways they preserve limited agency. That emphasis on quotidian power was an important lesson.
The third book is Manning Marable’s Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982. Manning himself had a huge impression on me. He was a generous scholar and mentor, and he modeled what it meant to be in the academy but not of the academy. He took data and statistics seriously as another method of conveying the complexity and beauty of Black people. And his book was important for me in its thinking through of the multiple dimensions of resistance in the history of Black people.
All these texts have changed how I think about my work—and especially in the ways that work can move outside the academy and have an impact on the work of activists and organizers.
BT: You have moved creatively between different communities: mentoring youth activists, participating in local government, teaching in local high schools, helping organize academics for political change. What have you learned in practice about the relationship between academic work and political organizing?
CC: My work outside of the academy has everything to do with my discomfort within it. I come from a working-class family in Toledo, Ohio, that has experienced both the opportunities provided by the welfare state and the penalties extracted from the carceral state. I was a first-generation college student, and I remember feeling like I never fully understood what was expected of me in college and grad school. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the work and assignments in those environments—it was the culture of the institutions, even among the Black people there. Since I never felt fully at home, I was always committed to expanding, and hopefully transforming, the academy so people like me could be there and I would feel less like an outsider.
I also come from a family where union organizing and political engagement—whether through electoral politics, movements, or the church—was expected. I bring that instinct with me into the academy. The people I gravitated to, especially at the University of Michigan, where I was in graduate school, were the scholar-activists. I became friends and chosen family with folks like Barbara Ransby, Tracye Matthews, Premilla Nadasen, Kim Smith, Jocelyn Sargent, and Regina Freer. I was taught by folks like Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Dawson, Tom Holt, and Elsa Barkley Brown. Thus, I was welcomed into a community who understood its work to be both learning and making legible the complicated and beautiful histories, politics, and intimacies of often-ignored communities, especially Black communities, but also transforming institutions of higher education.
At this very dangerous moment, some will turn to the scholar-activist model. That is fine. But I might suggest a more intentional focus on how we think about and build a broad movement in the academy—one intent on reimagining the university and our role in it. I am grateful to be working with an amazing group of comrades in the organization Scholars for Social Justice (SSJ), a group that believes we must work with an expansive analysis of the academy and the work of universities. As Davarian Baldwin, another member of SSJ, highlights in his wonderful book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, we have to understand that the university extends beyond what we do in the classroom to include running police forces and charter schools and being an employer, health care provider, and landlord.
Folks in SSJ also recognize that the dismantling of the academy through an attack on critical race theory and DEI was never enough for this administration, so it has also mobilized claims of rampant antisemitism and threats to safety to justify the imposition of policies meant to end student protest in general and especially protests against the genocide and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Therefore, we must organize on our campuses and across our campuses to build power. That means we have to talk to colleagues we normally would not. We have to do one-on-ones with folks in and out of the university about the issues that are important to them. We might start with the topic of faculty governance or the deporting of students in their labs and move on from there.
BT: I think many faculty want to start with the defense of academic freedom. What do you think universities and faculty members ought to do to today preserve our precarious scholarly freedom — especially those of us interested in questions of class conflict, ethnic and religious violence, or hierarchies built on race, gender, and sexuality?
CC: Truthfully, while academic freedom is something we should defend, especially as it provides a platform for allowing faculty to teach and say what they want, I don’t believe that is the primary struggle that should animate our work right now. As I argued earlier, we have to understand that the right sees its war on the academy and education in general as part of a generational war over what young people, especially young white people, will be taught, how they will be socialized, and how they will align themselves politically. We have to also understand this as a battle for the power to shape the political terrain on which we will define truth, facts, and history.
As Trump seeks to shrink the higher education sector, we have to make a claim for providing more access to folks who want a college education. And as Trump asks students and families to take on more debt to go to college, we have to demand that more colleges are free for the public. As Trump seeks to control administrators, we have to demand that faculty, students, staff, and community members have more power throughout higher education, including on schools’ boards of trustees. Only with the most expansive conceptualization of the university and the centralized financial and political power of the board of trustees can we effectively mount resistance and reimagine the work of the academy during these very dangerous times.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
Cathy J. Cohen is David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement.
AfricaFocus Notes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Activist and scholar Cathy J. Cohen on winning power in the midst of a “generational war.”
