The Radical Road to Reform

Salma: As we’re writing this, we’re counting down the hours to a long awaited meeting with Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion Roland S. Davis, and Associate Dean of Student Engagement Alexander R. Miller about our UC Proposal for a Physical Space for Belonging on campus. Throughout the process of advocating for this space, we’ve received a lot of feedback on our methods; surprisingly, mostly praise comes from people who commend us for being “reasonable enough” to be willing to sit down with administrators, to work towards a solution that is moderate enough that works for all of us—“reasonable enough” to compromise. With these comments often comes an implicit disdain for other people “constantly yelling on the steps of University Hall”, placing us above them in their strange mental rankings of who does advocacy work best. We’re pushing back.

Nicholas: This is not an apology for Black moderates. In-system reform work too often is a perpetuation of the status quo, becoming an insidious way for structures of oppression to sustain themselves. But, Salma, I don’t think either of us would fit into any definition of “moderate.” For every person who’s praised our “sensible” strategies, there’s a Crimson commenter accusing us of inciting race wars. For every time we’ve sat down across from a dean to hash out policy details, there’s another when we can be found chanting in the streets. We are not unique in this regard. Black activists constantly toe the line between working in- and out-of-system, because Black radical activism must balance our end goals—a world severely, radically different from the one we live in—with the complexities and nuances, the limitations, of the here and now. Both our detractors and our supporters must accept this fundamental ambivalence in Black activism.

S: In the specific case of our work pushing for a physical space for belonging, all of our success so far has rested on the threat of protest, the threat of public shaming, the threat of a smear campaign against Harvard. Students of color on this campus are angry. We are frustrated, we are exhausted, hurt, broken, drowning—and we’re ready to take action. We’re ready to rally our folks and march in the Yard until our protests are garnering national attention.

Administrators know this. They’ve heard the rallying cries at town halls, in Crimson columns, in emails, in conversations with students. They know there is a fire brewing on this campus, and that there has been for quite some time. Without this threat, there would be no real danger in remaining apathetic for administrators. It is because of our coalition, our friends and allies who are rallying and organizing and raising hell, that administrators are even willing to sit down with us and listen.

N: The point is that there is not simply one way to do radical activism, and that we should never use one to condemn the other. In fact, the two—the work we do at the table and the work we join our friends and allies on in the streets—sustain each other, and cannot survive apart.

We have to play the game. It’s life or death. And so Black activists meet with neoliberal politicians on Capitol Hill, and teach radical Black theory at white institutions, and yes, sit down with Harvard College administrators. Because while the master’s tools may never dismantle the master’s house, we still must live and breathe. We must survive. The work we do at the table is about survival.

But we must dream too. We cannot survive for survival’s sake, because that, in the end, is just another kind of death. We must live for something impossible. And it is only by uniting our work at the table with the spirit of radical Black activism, it is only by refusing to buy fully into the master’s game, that this becomes possible.

S: Last semester one of my TFs told me that I wasn’t a reformist, but rather, a radical. Honestly, I freaked out. In my history classes I had always learned that the radicals were the ones who never got anything done, that Malcolm X and Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were the ones raising hell without ever pushing the needle forward. I hated the label of radical. I wanted to shed myself of it. But I didn’t understand how radicalism and reformism have always been linked, that they rely on one another—that both are necessary to advance the project of justice.

Such is the case with our work towards a Physical Space for Belonging on campus. Without the threat of a radical response to complacency, any kind of progress towards a better vision of our community would hardly be possible. They operate in tandem. They are codependent.

N: Exactly. The binarism between radicalism and in-system work is ill-founded. But it is not the case that we and those in the streets are “two sides of the same coin.” Rather, we must collapse the binary entirely. We are in the streets and at the table. Our work at the table is informed by, led by, our work in the streets. They cannot exist apart.

In 1964, a photo was taken of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. meeting for the first time. The photo captures the two en route to sit in on a Senate debate on what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the pinnacle of the in-system work of Black activists. These activists were often the very Black folks—like King himself—that radicals like Malcolm X would so often be pitted against (normally by white moderates). And yet here Malcolm X stands with King, both equally invested in this project of reform, a project that is hand-in-hand—not in contradiction—with radicalism.

En route into the master’s house, to sit on the master’s chair and listen to the master’s game take place, the complexity of Black activism rests and takes its place, and dreams of a better world.

Salma Abdelrahman ’20 is a Sociology concentrator in Leverett House. Nicholas P. Whittaker ’19 is a Philosophy concentrator in Adams House. Their column appears on alternate Tuesdays.