"Some of the most self-serving and institutionally reactionary academics—those who pose a real danger to collectives and communities engaged in radical forms of movement—are the ones who publish books and articles about radicalism and revolution as well as convincing critiques of policing, racism, antiblackness, gendered colonial violence, sexual violence, prisons, and so on. I bet the organizers you’re referencing in your question are understating the case, too: at least the corporate executives, mainstream media elites, cops, and state officials tend to be far more honest with themselves and others about who and what they are—there’s no pretense or mushiness about their institutional and political loyalties. By contrast, some academics who fuck around with radical, progressive reform, and other social justice and “social change” focused organizations and movements are delusional or dishonest about their intentions, commitments, and loyalties.

Something i’ve learned over the last three decades is that people in my profession have earned default suspicion from serious radicals and revolutionaries, especially when those academics don’t actively participate in collective projects that attempt to move toward radical or revolutionary horizons. I recently participated in a conversation convened by AAPI Women Lead, a feminist abolitionist and pro-sex worker organization based in the Bay Area, in which we emphasized the importance of thinking about “community” as a verb rather than a taken-for-granted noun. In the context of trying to build radical and revolutionary projects, the work and experimentation of community is especially precious and vulnerable.

These communities-in-the-making are everywhere: in the U.S. context alone, there are variously scaled movements to confront and abolish antiblack and colonial state power, including sustained struggles for police abolition in Portland, Minneapolis, and Stop Cop City in Atlanta, Indigenous water and land defense at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea, the everyday work of organizations like Ujimaa Medics and Dissenters, strikes in U.S. prisons and detention sites, and militant labor organizing all over the place. These examples show how the term “social movement” is sometimes inadequate or inaccurate when identifying what people are actually creating through radical, autonomous, liberationist, and revolutionary forms of community—again, i’m thinking of “community” as an activity, not a static or predetermined constituency. These community projects—which can also be framed as collective experiments in radical and revolutionary power, sociality, and insurgent becoming—are likely to confront overt state repression as well as liberal counterinsurgency and extra-state opposition from business and corporate interests, conservative religious and cultural groups, and reformist social justice and nonprofit organizations.

Academics can pose special security risks to these projects, experiments, and movements. They generally don’t have the training or practical preparation, much less the militancy of commitment to enter these communities without creating additional vulnerabilities for other people (and sometimes themselves). Sometimes academics’ sensibilities are deformed by liberalism and pacifism—many academics, for example, have a knee-jerk aversion to guns and firearms, which raises concerns about how they might respond to community projects that are prepared to militantly defend against reactionary attack and militarized state repression. There is also a long record of academics exploiting organizations, movements, and communities by playing the role of curious opportunists who don’t make themselves available to the collective in ways that aren’t self-serving.

These are lessons as much as they are criticisms. I think it’s both possible and necessary for the academic to be sacrificed and figuratively immolated for the sake of enlivening and emboldening the radical scholar or “guerilla intellectual,” a notion that Kalonji Changa, Joy James, Jared Ball, and others at Black Power Media have thankfully revived in recent times. (I constantly think about the late Dr. James Turner, who sat me down in 1995 and explained the charge of becoming an “intellectual guerilla fighter.”) 

I’ve learned from collaborators and fellow scholars, people like Michele Welsing and Yusef Omowale at Southern California Library, that it is necessary for university employed scholars and teachers like me to present ourselves to committed radical, liberation focused collectives and communities with full transparency. A condition of shared responsibility is the understanding that suspicion of “the academic” is a historically informed, principled political position rather than a petty personal attack; there’s no room for the thin-skinned academic here. It’s not about you".

Dylan Rodriguez