Robin DG Kelley on Freedom Dreams [rebroadcast]

Good morning. It's Thursday, Juneteenth, 2025. This is up front. I'm Brian Edwards-Tickert. Coming up. This is a class society that's run by aristocracy that makes its, reproduces itself through the extraction of a precious mineral, in this case, vibranium. And... Though there's supposed to be a peaceful people, have an overabundance of weapons. Robin D.G. Kelly on the politics of imagining the future, including a very short, highly unorthodox takedown of Wakanda. We'll discuss the new 20th anniversary edition of his book, Freedom Dreams. It's a repeat broadcast because Juneteenth is now an official holiday. That's what's coming up next. After the News. The Public News Service still a newscast June the 19th, 2026. I'm Mike Clifford. Janice Lewis George won Tuesday's Democratic primary for mayor in D.C. setting up a potential showdown with the Trump administration over its moves to challenge the city's limited autonomy. The AP notes that Lewis George likely to take the top spot in the November general election, replacing moderate mural Bowser. And ahead of tomorrow's opening, celebrities and former presidents celebrated the new Obama presidential center in Chicago Thursday. The New York Times notes the rare event drew four former presidents standing together, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton. Joseph R. Biden Jr., along with Barack Obama himself. An invitation was not extended to President Trump, who recently compared the center, to a trash heap. Meantime, people who paid into Social Security for their entire working lives could see their monthly checks cut by 22% as early as 2032, according to a new report for the program's trustees, unless the Congress steps in. One in five Americans receive benefits, and it's the biggest source of income for people who can no longer work. with AARP points to recent polling showing that eight and ten people age 50 or older don't want lawmakers to cut Social Security in order to save it like they did back in 1983. The last thing they need to be doing when prices for everything are going up and people are stretched so thin is to look at cutting Social Security even further. What they need to do is shore up the finances without cutting the benefits that people have earned. The revenue shortfall is largely due to declining fertility and immigration rates, which means fewer workers contributing social security. payroll taxes. But the program is far from doomed. According to the Center on Economic and Policy Research, the shortfall is less than half the cost of increased military spending called for in the Trump administration's 2027 budget. I'm Eric Galatas. And more than 14,000 people, including alumni at Fisk University in Nashville, are voicing their concerns about a proposed data center on campus. The historically black university's Quantum Leap Master Plan includes a $400 million-five-acre data center development built as an innovation center that would drive academic excellence and enhance workforce development. FIS University President Dr. Agena Walker-Clark says she's

disheartened by the opposition from alumni and elected officials, saying they're misrepresenting the good work of the university. Clark says the final design of the data center is still unknown, but stresses the university does not intend to bring a polluting data center operator to the campus. When we say do no harm is a result of two years of research where we now know that the energy source, the water, the environmental footprint will. not be affected and impact negatively anywhere within this community or anywhere else. Danielle Smith reporting. This is Public News Service. Advocates in New York and nationwide are rallying for a better North American trade deal. Our Edwin Javier reports as part of their days of solidarity campaign, they are hosting events in border states like Buffalo and calling for certain changes to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is up for review on July 1st. Jesse Lenny with the New York Trade Justice Coalition outlines what the USMCA should do to improve trade. The trade agreements, trade should benefit all communities, and it should lift wages and lift and protect workers' rights, protect safety in the workplace, protecting communities and the environment that we all depend on, and then it just hasn't done that. He and other advocates want the deal to prioritize everyday people over corporations and doesn't want it to pit working people from the three countries against each other. President Donald Trump has longshided the USMCA despite negotiating it and said, he's not interested in renewing it. An Economic Policy Institute report finds the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico reached $263 billion in 2025, up from $125 billion in 2020. While some believe the USMCA has deficiencies, Lenny and others still see it as a step above the North American Free Trade Agreement. Bureau of Labor Statistics data finds New York lost around 392,000 manufacturing jobs while NAFTA was in effect. He says Rust Belt cities like those in Western New York saw the biggest impact. It really carved out the foundation of the American working class. And that fear of offshoring, the artificial seeking of low wages, bad environmental policies, and no safety protections has also struck fear even in industries that can't be offshored. Under NAFTA, the U.S. lost more than four and a half million jobs. And some of America's top colleges are working to increase their enrollment of students from rural areas and provide the unique support that they need to succeed. While 90% of rural students complete high school, less than half go straight to college, according to the U.S. Department of Education, Marjorie Bentley, executive director of the Stars College Network, says more college recruiters are building relationships with rural high schools and helping students see the value of earning a degree. We don't want to contribute to any sort of brain dream. We want to make sure that they know they can get this great education and they can also still be an integral part of their home. community. Last year, more than 90,000 rural students applied to Starr's member schools like Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown University. That's up 15% from 2024. Data show rural students are also more likely to drop out of college than their urban or suburban classmates. Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation. I'm Catherine Carly for Commonwealth News Service.

A little over 20 years ago, our next guest set out to invert that kind of movement history by telling the story of the visions of a future that have driven generations of struggle, putting artists on equal footing with organizers and revolutionaries. Robin D.G. Kelly is now Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. history at UCLA and has just published a revised and expanded 20th anniversary edition of that seminal book, Freedom Dreams, The Black Radical Imagination. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Maybe we should set the table by talking about how this project began, that kind of inverted movement history, telling history through visions of the future. Sure. You know, when I wrote the book initially, I was a professor at Columbia University in the midst of What people forget was a real intense struggle around fighting mass incarceration, the end of welfare as we know it under the Clinton administration. And of course, this emerging war on terror. You know, this is the eve of or during 9-11 and also the continuation of relentless police violence. You know, the murder of Amadou Diallo, which some of you listeners may be familiar with, was kind of like that generation's Mike Brown or George Floyd, actually, I could say that. So this is all swirling around and I was dealing with students who felt that. they felt pessimistic. They felt like they couldn't see the movements that they had been reading about. The movements that they felt like succeeded, you know, like the Black Panther Party, for example, without actually thinking that maybe they didn't succeed if the intention was to make a revolution in the United States. So I wrote the book for those students and those young activists. to remind them that the measure of a movement is not always its ability to achieve its agenda. Because one, the agenda keeps shifting and changing. But two, what we've inherited from them is a vision of the future or visions of the future. And I think it's important to recognize that because You know, the question is, where did these visions, these understandings, and what people are fighting for come from? They don't come from just smart people or think tanks or blogs or bloggers or, you know, tweets. They really come from collective participation in social movements. And so in many ways, I wanted to choose. particular movements that actually were driven by and developed or produced a vision of the future in their present. And in this case, it's the struggle for land in a homeland, struggle for reparations, socialism.

moving beyond a kind of Marxist framework to surrealism and, of course, a black feminism. And so that's what the book tried to do and the context in which it was written. Before we get into what's changed since then, back then in the waning years of the Clinton administration. What living visions did you feel like you were able to offer your students to attach to? I chose movements that were fighting against tremendous forces. where it seemed like there was no hope, you know. Like what does it mean to struggle for land at the end of reconstruction at the rise of Jim Crow? When... the possibility of land ownership was crushed, you know, and the rise of the clan and white terrorism was, you know, had prevailed. What does it mean to fight for socialism, you know, in a... during the Great Depression, or to imagine an anti-imperialist movement that could transform the entire Earth by ending colonialism everywhere in the 1950s and 60s. So these are hard times. At the same time, there's certain things that these movements had in common. One, that working people... the oppressed, the dispossessed, would inherit the earth. The dream wasn't about becoming a billionaire, which seems to be the dominant dream right now. But the dream was to end a society built on the accumulation of wealth. and the exploitation of others. It was a society that did not have the oppressions of gender and sexuality and race and class and age and disability. These were societies where, you know, the collective struggles. were the driver to create new social relationships. You know, if anything, it was, it mirrored Dr. King's understanding of the beloved community.

which he defined as this constant struggle to make community, to sort of end the distinction between friend and enemy. And it's a community that's always built around tension in difference and struggle, but one that could resolve itself or resolve these tensions through a constant commitment to one another. You know, and, you know, it's an interesting way to think about this. I mean, of course, this is, this was always a dream of socialism or utopian societies. But I also make the argument, and I don't actually use the word utopia that often, that the definition of utopia was nowhere. You know, I mean, that's technically the definition. And I always love to quote the late poet Jane Cortez, who was a friend. And she had this beautiful poem. She says, no, somewhere in advance of nowhere, which is the utopia that people are struggling for. And as you know from the book, at least the first edition, so much of that dream for me personally. came not only from my own participation in various social movements as an activist, from my own reading as a student of history, but also, if not primarily, from my own mother, who raised us to imagine life as a collective and just endeavor. where we are at one with one another and with the earth itself. I mean, that's the world I grew up in. And I thank my mother for that. That's one of the measures of social movements, isn't it? The types of relationships and identities that people build within the movement, the extent to which... they kind of prefigure that that beloved community that they would like to envelop the whole world. Exactly, exactly. And at the same time, whether we call it prefiguration or something else, to prefigure the future is not to create, to idealize a kind of fixed way of being. Because this practice of prefiguration is always shifting and changing. You know, one of the things I try to address in Freedom Dreams is, you know, are the contradictions in movements. Like, you know, you could look at movements like the Revolutionary Action Movement or the Black Panther Party or even various black left formations and see. within them, contradictions around the continuation of patriarchy, for example, or the gender divide, or the imposition of kind of heteronormativity. You know, at the same time, those contradictions produce space, at least, you know, if the space were allowed, to...

reimagine what a prefiguration could look like. And so suddenly you're being challenged by women, LGBTQ, femmes, who are saying, look, your dream of freedom is a pressing mind, you know. So we need to rethink that. And that's where the chapter in the book about black feminism. which culminates with a discussion of, you know, the Combahi River Collective and thinkers like Barbara Smith and Angela Davis and others, where they are putting forward what Barbara Smith calls identity politics as a way of... of recognizing and incorporating every single modality of exploitation and oppression and addressing them, you know, recognizing the intersections of racial, gender, class, sexual oppression, right? And so... In their efforts, they keep opening up the space, opening up the space, expanding it for what we could call prefiguration, what the society that we want might look like. This is very different from a kind of market-oriented way of thinking about the world where... You know, you see people succeed and you're like, what resources do I need in order for me to be like that person or to be, you know, the next billionaire? That is not what the movements I write about we're trying to achieve at all. And it's, you know, we're pretty distant from that. I feel not entirely. Maybe I'm being unfair. Yeah, well, I think it requires deeper reflection to think about reparations being more than a payout, but a change in how the economy works and for who. Your new introduction gets into this about how the rise of decolonization and the land back movement really challenges the idea of reparations because you can redistribute land. It's still land that was stolen from the original people of this continent. Right, right. I mean, one of the biggest lessons of many lessons is that you can't separate the question of decolonization from the question of reparations. Because as I write in the book, what does it mean when, for example, many of the all-black towns that were sites of liberated space, at least momentarily? were established on homestead lands, lands that were stolen.

You know, and not just, I mean, all the land was stolen, but land that was taken in violation of basic treaty rights and then redistributed mostly to white settlers, but also a few African Americans were able to get some of that land. What does it mean to build a future or to claim land as property, right? Which is what I talk about, you know, property and wealth. To think about land in a decolonial way is to think about the earth not as property, but as life itself that needs stewardship and care. And so rather than see decolonization as something that has passed, it's something that colonialism and racial capitalism continues. you know, to this day, keeps continuing, and the work of decolonization is hardly over. You know, so I learned a lot, for example, from my friends at the Red Nation, people like Negestes and others, who actually provide a beautiful and powerful plan for decolonization that incorporates not just indigenous peoples, but all the peoples of the earth. You know, and I always say, If I had to live under any kind of sovereignty, I'd much rather live under sovereignty of indigenous peoples than the U.S. state as it stands right now. Speaking to Robin D.G. Kelly, about his book Freedom Dreams, the Black Radical Imagination, which has just been re-released in an expanded 20th anniversary edition. You do something really interesting in the new introduction that was like a stop and think moment for me. You talk about the project of Afrofuturism, the kind of creative explosion in the world of art and fiction. You talk about as a kind of counterpoint to black nationalism, which in your estimation looks to a romanticized past. And I was wondering if you could. elaborate on that because it's something you just you touch on and then move by it seems like such a profound point so yes you know i i wrote about this idea of freedom dreams as a portal to new tomorrows and as it say afrofuturism uh and part of the critique of nationalism, which by the way, it's a loving critique because I still feel like my politics is shaped by black nationalism, which I argue in the text, when you look at it. you know, carefully at groups like the Revolutionary Action Movement and others, it's really black internationalism, you know, that they're struggling for, not nationalism. They're not looking necessarily to create a bounded nation state through exclusion. Even the idea of, you know, taking the black belt south and making it a nation for the provisional government of New Africa.

is not the same as the kind of exclusionary border patrols of the U.S. state because the provisional government of New Africa is not one that excluded, or at least wasn't intended to exclude. So to go back to Afrofuturism, I see how Afrofuturism is tied to or linked to what Amiri Baraka called Afro surrealism. you know, or the contemporary black surrealist, D. Scott Miller. And this is where I highlight some incredible artists who, again, you know, are shaped by black nationalist traditions, but really break with them. They embrace a kind of marriage of surrealism and black radicalism. People like, you know, Aaron Christavall and Amir George, you know, filmmakers and curators use really amazing stuff. And not just amazing, but really connect with indigenous movements and cultures. I think about, you know, one of the artists here in LA, one of my favorite artists on the planet is Lauren Halsey, who, you know. creates art that is both a tribute to her community, South Los Angeles, that is a stand against gentrification and erasure, that is about recognizing the beauty in black urban landscapes, but also understanding that behind that beauty lay things like, you know, security cameras, the police, bulletproof glass and that sort of thing. And so she was able to not just create this beautiful art, but create a community center. called some of everything based in South Los Angeles. So during the pandemic, they were providing organic food. for the projects for free, you know, creating community food bank, delivering, you know, all this locally sourced produce. That is the radical vision, I think, of Afrofuturism that, again, has roots in these nationalist movements, but they take a very realistic view of what's before them and know that.

that the future is this like work in progress. It's not the utopia to achieve, but this is this constant making and remaking. And it requires, the remaking work requires moving outside of our communities. That's the voice of Robin D.G. Kelly, Gary B. Nash and Dow chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He recently published a revised and expanded 20th anniversary edition of his book, Freedom Dreams, The Black Radical Imagination. We'll continue the conversation about the book in just a few minutes. I should remind you at this point, this is a rebroadcast. We originally recorded this interview in February of 2023. which hopefully explains why you hear some references to it being Black History Month in the interview. It's not. That's February. And also why we're not talking about the dynamics of the Second Trump administration. That administration had not happened yet when we recorded this interview. Nevertheless, seemed like an appropriate interview to bring back to the airwaves on this holiday. especially given the fact that when we originally recorded it, we were in the midst of a fund drive, so we had to reduce the length of the interview to make room for fundraising. We'll be back with this extended cut of Robin D.G. Kelly on Freedom Dreams at 20 in just a few minutes. Right now, it's time to tell you that this is up front on KPFA. I'm Brian Edwards Teakert, and at 7.30. Time for the news. Welcome to 2026 talks, where we're following our democracy in historic times. Have a little bit of faith in the President of the United States. The idea that he is going to strike a deal that's been bad for the American people, it's preposterous. Vice President JD Vance is defending the 14-point memorandum of understanding signed by President Donald Trump and Iranian officials. The deal would end sanctions on Tehran's oil and would create a $300 billion investment fund for rebuilding the country. It leaves tough questions over Iran's nuclear program and ultimate control of the Strait of Hormuz to be negotiated. That's angering Republican Hawks. Democrats are arguing a ceasefire. is good, but the costly and deadly war is leaving the U.S. with a much worse deal than President Barack Obama made a dozen years ago. Oil and gas prices have eased and may slowly continue. The agreement is deeply unpopular in Israel, and that country looks likely to continue strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in spite of it. Citing the closing time window, a federal judge said she'll only consider challenges to Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting that impact this fall's election, leaving other issues until after November. California's Attorney General praised another part of the ruling for denying an administration motion to dismiss lawsuits by Democratic-led states and voting rights nonprofits. The Justice Department is seeking to intervene in a first-of-its-kind reparations program. The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, provides $25,000 to offset property costs to every black resident whose families were impacted by

city policies promoting housing discrimination. Responding to a suit by residents who are not black, the DOJ argues the program violates equal protection and the Fair Housing Act. A record number of women are serving as state governors, and a record number are running to lead their states in the midterms. 14 states have women as the chief executive, 10 Democrats and four Republicans. Kelly Ditmar, with the Center for American Women in Politics, says more could be done to bring in their valuable experiences and perspectives. Even in a year that looks good for women candidates running for governor, we're seeing women still be underrepresented in the pool, and we're seeing these partisan disparities that are persistent. Californians will vote on a billionaire tax. this November. The 5% tax on all people or trust with incomes over a billion has officially qualified to be on the ballot. It's dividing progressives for more centrist Democrats, including governor and likely presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom. The Postal Service wants to close more than 400 post offices nationally, but postal workers are fighting to keep them open. The postal unions argue the offices, often in small towns, are crucial for maintaining their community and democracy. American Postal Workers Union Vice President Debbie Zeretti says the proposed closures come on top of hundreds that have already happened. and undermine the bedrock of universal mail service. They're destroying our democracy. They're destroying our service. A lot of our customers and community members, they don't realize that they have the right to have a voice. In another sign that the tide of the war may be turning, Ukrainian drones have struck Moscow and badly damaged another Russian oil refinery there. Russia is reportedly suffering gas shortages due to Ukrainian strikes. I'm Zimon Peres for Pacifica Network and Public News Service. Find our trust indicators at Public News service.org. It is just past 7.33 in the morning. The show is up front. I'm Brian Edwards Teakert. We're spending the hour with Robin D.G. Kelly. He's Gary B. Nash and Dow chair in U.S. history at UCLA. He's just published a revised and expanded 20th anniversary edition of his book Freedom Dreams, the Black Radical Imagination. And that's mostly the topic of our discussion for this hour. When we left off before the news break, we were discussing a contrast he makes in that new preface to the book. between black nationalisms, which he says always look to a kind of imagined past for unity, and Afrofuturism. Let's go back to the interview. There is a tendency among those who write about Afrofuturism. There are people who like try to date it to something, to some moments, and I think that's kind of a mistake. I can't think of any people. that are not future oriented.

I mean, who's more future-oriented than people who are farmers, for example? The whole idea is that you're trying to anticipate what people need for the future. And even if you think of time in terms of cycles, each cycle presents a set of challenges and opportunities. You know, what is no science fiction except for the challenge of the end of the world? So I think that there's many, many different sources, but I do caution that what passes as Afro Futurism sometimes actually does mimic or mirror, not a white future, but a future that looks very much like a high-tech version of the present. But I think about, and I'm going to get myself in trouble for this, about... the Black Panther franchise, the series, the two films about Wakanda. And there's a lot of excitement around Wakanda as Afro-Futurism. But I just can't get with it. There's certain elements that are very much about, very much mirror. are a contemporary morass. That is, this is a class society that's run by aristocracy that makes its, reproduces itself through the extraction of a precious mineral, in this case, vibranium. And though it's, they're supposed to be a peaceful people, have an overabundance of weapons.

And, you know, and you see these scenes, especially in the most recent film of Wakandans waging war with indigenous underwater people who actually are committed to destroying imperialism ones and for all. And by the end of the film, although there's a gesture at solidarity between them, the outcome, and again, this is a cartoon. the outcome ends up being Wakandist makes the global North safe for the continuation of imperialism until another day. I don't know if the future or Afrofuturism in its most radical manifestation is one in which... You know, you still have the same technologies, destructive technologies. You still have the same class relations. I mean, I would love to see a Wakanda with social housing instead of, you know, high-tech planes flying over sheepherders living in huts. I mean, I just make a lot of sense to me. But what do I know? You know, that is not the... the clear-eyed future that I think people are struggling for, and certainly not the future that the figures in freedom dreams are struggling for. Robert D.C. Kelly, I did not expect this to turn into a takedown of Wakanda. I know, I know. People are not going to talk to me about that because there's so much love for Wakanda. And I'm not... I'm saying that there's some great acting. It's a very powerful film. The director is fantastic. But it is a cartoon. Well, it's also, I mean, I think this is interesting because it's a plot line that was initially, a storyline that was initially created by white writers at Marvel. Right. It's a, it's a studio whose power structure is very white dominated. Right. Right. And Ryan Coogler got to take charge of the character and the storyline, but within constraints of an industrial mass culture operation. Exactly. And so I'm not going to blame him. I mean, he's a terrific director whose politics are, you know, are just quite noble and clear. I mean, his film, Fuvail Station, is really a beautiful film about life. and not necessarily about death. It's about what's lost through state violence. So I don't blame him for that at all. I recently wrote a piece for the nation about the film Till.

which I think has been misunderstood and misrepresented, and I think it was a spectacular film. And what I think was missing. is that in everyone's fear to be traumatized. And by the way, we use that term way, we overuse that term. Everything that black people experience is trauma nowadays. But the idea of this trauma discourse, that trauma is the reason not to see the film. miss what the film was really about, which is about not the killing of Emmett Till, but about the love between a mother and son. Once he is taken from her, she can turn that grief into struggle, into movement. But most importantly, it wasn't just her. It was the community around her. I mean, the film shows these amazing images of Mount Bayou, Mississippi, which is an all-black town. Mount Bayou is historical. It's not the future. But it's one where you have these amazing, courageous black people in the midst of hell, in the midst of Mississippi, in the midst of the heart of white supremacy, building an economy, taking care of each other, trying to find ways to fight and resist and survive. So I think there's a lot to be drawn from our history if we're trying to imagine a different kind of future. But it requires... really challenging the status quo of what constitutes society. A couple points in this conversation you've done things, I think it would be fair to describe as mutual aid in the free food program in your area in Southern California or what you were just describing. And that's like present through the book, but in your new introduction, you say you feel like that's something you overlooked in the first version of freedom dreams. Did you overlook it or just like not have the language for it? Well, you know, I think I probably didn't have the language for it. I went back and I looked at a 10th anniversary edition of my other book, one of my other books, Your Mom is Disfunctional, where I actually do talk about. overlooking, I don't use the term mutual aid, but I do talk about overlooking forms of what was called self-help. That is how people are prefiguring the future by creating a caring culture.

when so much of your mom was dysfunctional was about making the case for the restoration of state provisions, saying that, you know, as citizens, which is already a problematic term, we have a right to state provisions, to a social safety net, to a social wage, right? But I think I learned a lot, especially from my daughter, Elizat Kelly, who's now a professor of African American Studies in English at Yale University. and has been writing about the way that people, African Americans have turned, you know, enclosure into new commons. And in here the key word is the commons because as I wrestled with terminology like mutual aid, which has its limitations, by the way. One of the complaints is that if you don't have mutual aid that's based on mutual respect, and mutuality in terms of the culture, what you end up getting is a gender division of labor, where women end up doing a lot of the work, mutual aid work disproportionately, and where the work becomes just draining. And so it should not substitute for... remaking social relations and gender relations, and it should not substitute for state provisions, right? At the same time, the word I was really struggling for and have been living with for a long time is the concept of the commons. Because I think that's even more accurate. I think about the work of Silvira Federici and others who basically are arguing that restoring the commons. is more than just common access to land and resources. Now, there's a critique of the commons from Indigenous thought. which is the argument that land is not something that necessarily is collectively owned because that would make it property. But land was under the stewardship of particular communities in nations. And it all comes back down to the very idea of freedom dreams. That is, the struggle to kind of make a future. that is about belonging in care and justice. The language that the Panthers used for programs you might describe as mutual aid programs was survival pending revolution. Exactly. It sounds like you're saying the survival's a form of revolution. It is, and it's not.

Meaning that survival alone itself is not a form of revolution. However, I think that what the Panthers meant was that, okay, if we're going to survive, what can we build in the process? How do we survive together in ways that, again, to go back to what you raised before, I think was very important, the idea of prefiguration. You know, when the Panthers... were in their heyday. This was an age when, you know, movements were talking about communes and communal living, when the liberation movements in Angola, in Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau were creating what they call liberated zones. That is those spaces that they were able to hold that the Portuguese could not hold anymore. And when they hold that space, the question is, what do you do? They had to create a social infrastructure to survive. But the question is, what is that social infrastructure? So they created schools, for example. Well, what's taught in those schools? They created forms of governance. Well, how do you govern in ways that are both equitable, inclusive, based on... deliberative rather than representational kinds of democracies. And that is socialist to the core. So that's like going even beyond survival to you create this liberated zone and within it, you try to figure out ways to live together and govern and redistribute resources and teach and learn from one another to become a better community and better people. It's interesting to me that it's your daughter who's pushed you to think in those terms. I mean, mutual aid, that's the language of anarchism, right? Like you point out, different movements had different words for doing the same thing. It would have been the language of people doing grassroots relief effort through common ground after Katrina. It was the language of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Do you think that that's partly a generational drift towards anarchist politics, anarchist ideas? Well, I think so. I mean, I could say very specifically how my daughter got me to think differently about it, is that she literally, in high school, she was reading Kropotkin's mutual aid. And she was thrilled by the book, and she said, Dad, you need to read this. I thought it was amazing not only because of the argument. but because of the manner or the method in which Gropot can actually try to demonstrate the importance of mutual aid through animal life by saying that, you know, in the animal world, the animal world is not, and that is the non-human animal world, is not based on competition or mutual destruction. It's based on mutual aid, even across species, you know.

To go back to your question, I do think there's an attraction to anarchism for a couple of reasons. One has to do with this long-standing debate over the role of the state. And when you look at some of the struggles in Latin America in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and the creation of autonomous zones in places like that, one can see whether it's named. or not, a kind of anarchist practice, you know, taking place. One can see or imagine a kind of anarchist practice in the Zapatistas, for example, though, you know, they wouldn't call themselves that I don't think. But the idea is, like, how do you figure out a way to govern, to hold the land, to defend your community and resources against the state? without demanding that the state be the organizer of the social distribution of resources. And again, I'm not taken aside. I think that in the 21st century, this divide between anarchists and various socialists or Marxists continues to be kind of arbitrary because what people actually practice on the ground defies. the old 19th century political divisions, in early 20th century political divisions. And the fact that we have inherited this tired, longstanding debate about class reductionism versus race reductionism is an example of what it means when you cannot get past old ways of thinking. In your first introduction to freedom dreams, I think maybe you were starting narrating the beginning of this journey. You kind of talked about your move from a strong affinity for pretty doctrinaire Marxism to finding some inspiration in surrealism for the way that you put the book Freedom Dreams together. Maybe. Maybe you could first of all explain what you mean by surrealism. We often think of surrealism as an aesthetic, you know, when in fact it was a political movement that emerged certainly in Western Europe within a particular context. The context was the vast destruction caused by World War I, the rise of or discovery of psychoanalysis. the limits of social democracy. And what I mean by that, it's not against social democracy, but social democrats in that period believe that you can bring socialism by way of the vote, by way of parliamentary procedures. But what we learned in Germany was that it was the social Democrats in power. who called themselves the inheritors of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who ran the state that killed Rosa Luxembourg, you know, and killed what was then called the Spartacus movement or the left within Germany. But part of the convergence of these things is to think really hard about what does freedom mean.

Is freedom simply about the material freedom, or is there a psychic and emotional and spiritual freedom before us? Black people in the African diaspora and Africa itself were not surprised by surrealism's injunction to... plumb the unconscious. Because that is the spiritual life of much of the world anyway, especially coming from the African diaspora in the black world, that alone, indigenous worlds. That was attractive to me in having kind of come up in a Marxist culture that rejects or that sees almost everything in terms of historical materialism. Anyone who knows me knows it comes from my reading and studies with the late Cedric Robinson, who wrote black Marxism and making the black radical tradition. He wouldn't call himself a surrealist, but certainly what he was finding in the black radical tradition were elements of that thing. that made surrealism recognizable. And I've gotten in so much trouble. To this day, people still beat me up because they think I've abandoned Marxism, just like they beat up Cedric Robinson. But it's not an abandonment. It's more like what Gracie Boggs and Jimmy Boggs say, who I also acknowledge as a source for this very book for Freedom Dreams. To think dialectically is to always be open to contradiction. And, you know, anyone who doesn't see the contradiction between a purely material life and the spiritual needs of people, is like not paying attention, you know. So that's the thing that I try to understand and embrace and still trying to understand and embrace without necessarily leaving behind, I think, the best elements of what I learned from Marxism, plural. It's interesting to hear you name check the bogs because late in life, that's really the direction that her work in particular took, right, was... I think her catchphrase was building the new world and the shell of the old. Mm-hmm. They had started out very rooted in like an Orthodox socialist politics of looking to the black working class of Detroit as the engine of dialectic social change. Exactly. And wound up in a deindustrializing city that was almost like a blank canvas for building something new. Exactly. I mean, that's exactly right. Because first of all, no one expected in, you know, when Grace got there in the 1950s,

No one expected that Detroit, the center of American industry, the place with high employment and decent wages and kind of job security for the black working class would end up. on the verge of bankruptcy would end up with empty homes and just, again, a shell of its former self, right? And so they had to respond to that. They had to act in response to it. They also had to deal with what was a movement that did not look like a working class rebellion. What they end up doing is coming up with various theories about how revolutions are made and about the self-activity of oppressed peoples. And so suddenly things like, you know, black power, civil rights, anti-colonialism, these things become not bourgeois. democracy, but really the cutting edge of creating social change, full of contradictions, of course. Gracie Boggs was one of the great philosophers of our time, and she was also a philosopher who never left the community. Never. I mean, that means a lot, because that was the world in which she was thinking through. And what they were able to do with Detroit Summer and with urban farming was to take the leftovers, to take what was the consequences of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organize abandonment and try to turn it into sustainability, turn it into collective world making. and figure out ways to not be dependent on the state and capital, you know, as a kind of hedge against that, but also as a way of, as Grace and Jimmy always said, we have to remake ourselves. You know, it's not enough to remake the world. We have to remake ourselves and take responsibility for that, you know, and that's hard work. You know, especially hard to work for, you know, so-called intellectuals who think they have answers, you know. And they're above and outside of the things they think about. Robin Dici, Kelly, you certainly aren't. Thank you so much for your writing and thank you for taking so much time to speak to us about it. I appreciate it. Had a great time talking to you. Robin D.G. Kelly is the Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. history at UCLA. He's just published a revised and expanded 20th anniversary edition of his book, Freedom Dreams, The Black Radical Imagination. That does it for today's holiday up front. A big thanks to our producer, Kimya Akbri, our engineer Kirsten Thomas, and to Max Pringle for the news headlines. My name is Brian Edwards. A Root Awakening with Sabrina Jacobs is coming up at eight.

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