This is the first question and answer from Black Agenda Report’s interview with Dylan Rodriguez, a professor at UC Riverside and the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. When you’ve got time and energy, read the whole interview!

Roberto Sirvent: You were recently interviewed on the podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism about counterinsurgency in various corporate and non-profit spaces. The conversation has helped many academics re-think their relationship to the university and the academy, a distinction you emphasized in an interview with BAR last year. Why do you think it’s so hard for academics to hear about their vocation’s predatory, counterinsurgent, and colonial structuring forces?

Dylan Rodriguez: I generally don’t care, or more honestly, i try not to care, about most academics’ feelings. I think academics don’t like being reminded (or maybe being told for the first time) that they are generally, at best, politically irrelevant. At worst, they are actively providing (diversity) cover and training on behalf of an occupying, extractive force—that is, the college and university—that’s a skip and a sneeze away from the actual machinery of violent global racial capitalism and empire. Academics get in their feelings when people suggest they are operating as apologists and, at times, disempowered operatives for an institutional/state liberalism that is central to the antiblack colonial empire war machine.

Continue reading “A Peculiar Combination of Insecurity and Political Flimsiness” →

An excerpt from a 2016 interview with professor, author and organizer Dylan Rodriguez, re-posted from theblackscholar.org

The following interview was conducted by Casey Goonan, an editor with True Leap Press. It originally appeared in the independent, open-access journal Propter Nos. 

Casey Goonan: The US white-supremacist state operates today through a different set of discourses and cultural structures than in previous epochs. Your work interrogates such shifts at a level of depth and nuance that is of particular importance for emergent struggles against racist state violence. “Multiculturalist white supremacy,” “post-racial liberal optimism,” “white academic raciality”—such terms are utilized throughout your work to interrogate a myriad of theoretical and historical conundrums that define the post-Civil Rights era, particularly in regards to racial violence and subjectivity. Can you, in very broad strokes, lay out what you are trying to accomplish with these interventions in the discourses, practices, and forms of embodiment that so violently delimit the possibilities for radical social change in the United States?

Dylan Rodríguez: The aftermath of American apartheid’s formal abolition has been overwhelmed by a grand national-cultural vindication of “Civil Rights” as the vessel of fully actualized gendered-racial citizenship. This fraud has, in various ways, facilitated rather than interrupted the full, horrific exercise of a domestic war-waging regime. For the sake of momentary simplicity, we can think about it along these lines: the half-century narrative of Civil Rights victory rests on an always-fragile but persistent common sense—the idea that national political culture (“America”) and the spirit of law and statecraft (let’s call this “The Dream”) endorse formal racial equality. Bound by this narrative-political context, the racist state’s mechanics shift and multiply to rearticulate a condition of normalized racist violence that is condoned or even applauded by the institutionalized regimes of Civil Rights. (It is not difficult to see how the NAACP, JACL, LULAC, Lambda, NOW, Urban League and other like-minded organizations condone or applaud domestic racial war, so long as it is directed at the correct targets: gang members, drug dealers, “violent criminals,” terrorists, etc.). In other words, the contemporary crisis of racist state violence is not reducible to “police brutality” and homicidal policing, or even the structuring asymmetries of incarceration: it is also a primary derivative of the Civil Rights regime.

Continue reading “Banal Liberal Calls to Unity” →