For Us, To Us, About Us: Racial Unrest and Cultural Transformation

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 135 For Us, To Us, About Us: Racial Unrest and Cultural Transformation Dana A. Williams and Kendra R. Parker As the official journal of the oldest and largest professional association for faculty and scholars of color who teach languages and literature, The College Language Association Journal (CLAJ) has consistently contributed to humanities scholarship in unique ways that speak to scholarly imperatives. This special issue, For Us, To Us, About Us: Racial Unrest and Cultural Transformation, is no different in this regard. But it is unique in the sense that it attempts to do the work that many of CLA’s scholars are committed to doing every day in our communities and in our classrooms: to keep in mind the scholar’s role as public intellectuals uniquely poised to help meet certain needs of the masses. This issue was born, in no small part, out of a belief that Black academics have a moral and ancestral obligation to embrace our roles as tea leaf readers, as interpreters of the drums. To be clear, there is no shortage of “think pieces” and commentaries by Black people about this storied moment in our history. But how many of them are intentional about speaking to and being in conversation with Black communities to which they belong? How many use language, tropes, images, and themes with which the full range of readers will be familiar? This is the work this issue tries to do. Using as springboard the calls for change initiated by George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin, For Us, To Us, About Us aims to explore the possibilities for meaningful and systemic cultural transformation, which we interpret broadly to include everything from the removal of confederate flags and monuments to statements of solidarity by arts organizations to a flood of mea culpas about the ways mainstream institutions (from universities to book publisherstoawardsandprizecommittees)havebeen—andwillnodoubtcontinue to be—complicit in authorizing institutionalized racism. This interrogation of culture is at the heart of what we do as language and literature and humanities scholars. Accordingly, the contributors to this issue grapple with the full range of “hot topics”—from anti-racist reading lists to navigating grief and anger. But, too often, the humanities work we do is done in isolation instead of in community, disjointedly from one challenge to the next, and for scholarship’s sake instead of for the express purpose of Black people’s liberation. We reject this tendency towards isolation and disjointedness; For Us, To Us, About Us is guided by the spirit of Toni Cade Bambara who worked to“produce stories that save our lives”(41), because as Bambara warned us, salvation is the issue. 136 CLA JOURNAL Dana A. Williams and Kendra R. Parker As we work to rectify these (sometimes self-imposed) silos, we don’t claim to speak for the streets. In 8:46, Dave Chapelle said it best: “These streets will speak for themselves, whether I’m alive or dead. I trust you guys.”Indeed. The streets, the grassroots organizers, the people doing the work—seen and unseen—speak for themselves, whether we, behind the walls of academia speak up or not. We know this. We also know as Black educators we are inheritors of a specific tradition. A long tradition. A tradition that compels us to be responsible for the minds we have the privilege of engaging. Accordingly, we—and the contributors—approach this with that tradition in mind, providing contexts and lenses for our students, which helps them hear from the streets with a clear recognition that we don’t claim to talk for the streets except to the extent that we are in them. “And still I see no changes”? Certain aspects of this moment feel eerily familiar. There’s an element of rememory present. When Marvin Gaye released his eleventh studio album What’s Going On? in 1971, for instance, neither of us had been born. Yet, our souls were present for its debut. Its relevance almost fifty years later calls to mind the sanctity of one of Black culture’s most compelling tropes—the “changing same,” which Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) coined in 1966 in relation...