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The Black Studies Podcast is a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.
This is Ashley Noovie, and you're listening to the Black Studies podcast, a Mellon Grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars, senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, cultural workers, political organizers, and everyone in between in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Black Studies podcast with me, Ashley Newby, and John Dravinsky.
Speaker 2:It's good to see you.
Speaker 1:Today, we have doctor Kanye Marshall, who is an assistant professor of American religions in the religions and classics department at the University of Rochester. Welcome, Kane. Thank you so much for being here today. How are you?
Speaker 3:Great. Thank you both so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we really want to get your perspective on black studies. And to start, we wanna talk about how did you get into black studies as a field? What drew you in? And what keeps you committed to the field of black studies?
Speaker 3:What got me I I guess what wrote me in, you might know a little bit about this, Ashley, is, or doctor Noovie rather, is McNair. Being a McNair Scholar, I don't think I had it on my radar. I think I wanted to be a social worker. And, I got wrapped in through McNair, and it had me thinking about different questions. During the time I was at McNair, it was, I'm dating myself now.
Speaker 3:It was Obama was running for president, and the first time. And, they had come against his pastor that time, the doctor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, for some kind of inflammatory language in his sermons. And, I didn't understand why. As an undergraduate student, I had heard people on Fox and other news stations kinda go at this pastor, and and to me, I didn't hear anything different from what I had heard in, you know, my churches over the course of the year. So that took me to seminary, and then, after after looking into some African American preaching courses and stuff like that, I knew I wanted to go and, explore black language, black consciousness a little bit more, that I didn't find in the seminary.
Speaker 3:I definitely went over theology and homiletics and stuff like that, but it didn't give me it didn't that those fields didn't give me what I needed in terms of, Black culture and Black language and that kind of relationship thereof. So that's McNair took me to graduate school, and graduate school sent me to black studies to answer those questions.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to ask you about how you imagine the field of black studies. I mean, it hasn't, you know, like like every emerging field 50, you know, 2, 3, 4 years ago, so a recent origin story. And its origin story is really in student protests and faculty support or resistance. Every protest has its resistance. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so it's really born of this political moment of activism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But part of what sort of came along with that, and I think part of what drove that that political movement to establish black studies was a desire to have the black intellectual tradition represented. And so, you know, what's always interested me about the field both, historically, but also in terms of, it being a field that we always have to think about, you know, in the present and and think about its rein constant reinvention is how to think about that tension between the political demands and the really politicized moment of its founding, but also the desire to focus field of Black Studies around the study of the Black intellectual tradition. So sort of intellectual tradition, radical politics, these are both such an integral part of of what black studies was at its origins and it seems like we're constantly negotiating that one way or another. Just curious how you think about the sort of origins of the field and, you know, how you imagine it in the present and, obviously, also into the future.
Speaker 3:Thank you for that question. It's interesting because we I hear you, I hear the history of the Black Studies, kind of like, you know, on Sandy, what was it San Diego State, whereas the students were protesting, to create the 1st flex studies program.
Speaker 2:San Francisco stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3:San Francisco. San Francisco. I love San Diego. But,
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 3:So nice. My my apologies. But for me, it's a it's it's a little bit more recent than that. When I was at my last institution, as the director, they wanted to bring someone in to kind of direct black studies at Lebanon Valley College. That was based out of student protests.
Speaker 3:The position was created out of student protests. So that that was 2016, and that that would have been the first tenure track, black person they had at that institution, and it's over 200 year history. So that was, you know, coming out of graduate school, I was I I was positioned right into, a more present history for that. Yeah. And similarly here, there was, protest for, black studies here at Rochester, and this has been its inaugural year of becoming a department.
Speaker 3:So I kinda find myself, of course, not experiencing what they experienced then, but on the kind of groundwork of trying to push those and and wrestling with those ideas. How political are we? Are we are we protesting? Are we doing these things? And I think that's right in line.
Speaker 3:So for me, it's not too far back. And I was I was on the search for the director of this or the department chair, as well as their first two hires. So, it's kinda right now for for me. And I think even as we we met to think about the curriculum for black studies here, and the only PhD in Black Studies in the curriculum meeting, thinking about what that means. Alright?
Speaker 3:What is Yeah. What does what is this gonna look like? And, knowing where I came from. So it's it's always it's always positioning. So I think the history is kind of ever present here.
Speaker 3:And now even at Rochester, I think they've hired a couple more people, and I think that they've done an excellent job. Shout out to the department chair, Jeffrey McCune, doing a phenomenal job. They just got an amazing grant. They hire more people, and I'd say the future is what they're doing. And one of those things is centering identities, that haven't been censored in the past.
Speaker 3:So, you know, they're mindful of of, hiring people and adding people to to the faculty who are, doing phenomenal work in feminist studies and queer studies, and things like that. So I I see it ever present. I mean, they're building. And so what way to build like that for the future, I think, is is phenomenal. It's bold, and, hopefully, it's working.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's interesting hearing you talk and and sort of saying, you know, the the the past conditions are, you know, so similar in the Lebanon Valley state example or experience you had. It is also interesting for me thinking about how just 10 years ago in the Black Studies department arguing for hires was, you know, what we do in the contemporary university is grow Black Studies. But I do think, especially just over the last 3 or 4 years with this this freak out over, critical race theory,
Speaker 3:we're kind
Speaker 2:of back to that moment of, like, it's actually pushing boundaries and pushing buttons and inviting can
Speaker 3:can I say this aloud? It it's much different than it was 10 years ago, I felt I felt personally emboldened to do these kinds of protests and things. Whereas now, I feel a lot more silenced, and scared about that kind of activism, for sure.
Speaker 2:Which I just have to, you know, underscore that you're in Rochester, which is where the North Star was founded. Just given its abolitionist history, this is,
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was published in the basement of a black shirt, Amy
Speaker 2:Firth. And so For sure. So that kind of fear about activism is just sort of a a wild historical sight to be having that.
Speaker 3:So Right. Yeah. It is that's ironic for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not sure. I you know, irony is the only word I could come up with as well, but I think I think there's a lots of unspoken Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Qualifiers on that one. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Probably. Yeah. Unspoken, I like.
Speaker 1:So kind of building on that. Right? And I know because we did get our PhDs together. How that process looks to get a PhD in African American and African Studies. How our program was situated so that you had your core courses, but then we also had to take courses in more traditional disciplines.
Speaker 1:Right? So currently now, being someone who initially had that first job where you were supposed to pretty much start this black studies program, and now being, technically in the department of religion and classics, but still very much a Black Studies PhD and work that is rooted in the field of Black Studies, how do you situate yourself in a relationship to the disciplines? Like, how do you see yourself crossing these multiple disciplines that you have have you have had to interact with, whether by choice or by nature of the way things have played out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I like I love how you asked that question. I'm gonna try to piece it together because we did go to grad school, and so you can you can call me on this if if I'm wrong because it's something I think about all the time. So you let me know. And so the way doctor Newby laid it out is in our under or in our graduate, program.
Speaker 3:You took our core core classes, and then how I see it oh, I don't wanna because I think everyone was fabulous there. How I understood it was that we outsourced our methods. And I've always seen that for Black Studies. And, so my methods, quote unquote, were outsourcing rhetoric department. So I learned theory and methods of rhetoric, while being Black Studies major.
Speaker 3:So then in building it, I think about, are we outsourcing our methods? What are methods of black studies? And I think so many traditional, disciplines gets they get to name their their method. They get to name their theories. And, so often, black studies doesn't.
Speaker 3:And I don't know. Right? I I was in that position for only a couple years and didn't see, as much traction as we would have liked. But that was something that was essential to me. Now that I'm in religion, my tenure comes from religion, I see myself navigating all of those disciplines.
Speaker 3:I'm interdisciplinary in nature, looking at African American feminist rhetoric, religious rhetoric, homiletics and theology. So I'm always kind of CRT. I'm always trying to have these in conversation, but always censoring black women. So I have to I really try to get most of my theory, if not all of my theory and method, from black women. Right?
Speaker 3:I don't know if black studies are gonna claim these methods and theories. Usually, they are from, ethicists, homileticians, and, rhetoricians, usually, typically black women. That's kinda how I negotiate the disciplines, and how I've seen it happen. I'd love to see black studies, just lay state on some of these things. We talked about, the history of it building, the black intellectual kind of building.
Speaker 3:And I think that's when it was maybe you know officially started right or right when you have you have David Walker and and the boys making some some great claims in theory, and potentially methods as well. So I'd love for black studies to kinda lay claim in that, so that we don't outsource it to sociology or education or rhetoric. But I do know that on this side, it is difficult, because we hired no one from Black Studies. So that's not a dig. That's the they were amazing qualified candidates that I endorsed 1000%.
Speaker 3:But then what does that look like? You know? It happened. So and I think our Black Studies department was probably the same way. I don't know that anyone had a PhD in Black Studies.
Speaker 3:Right? We it was history.
Speaker 1:Right? Because wasn't yeah. I think that they were just getting the first ones out when we were there. Right? And so there weren't.
Speaker 1:It was all different traditional disciplines, but I think that part of that is was rooted in the, you know, deliberate under resourcing. The fact that we were a program and not an department. We didn't have anybody who was fully in the African American and African Studies PhD program. Even our chair was 50%.
Speaker 3:So Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. There weren't any.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's so that's difficult. Right? That's difficult when you're in Yeah. I I can see it on so many sides, and I'm I thank you for bringing in that perspective of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know? I I think that the I believe they got the Mellon Fellowship. They have a lot of backing to hire who they want, and I think they're doing a a phenomenal job of getting black studies people. But I don't I don't know.
Speaker 3:I I think that's up for debate, but for me, that's how I felt feel about it, in terms of black studies. And so if someone tells, you know, what is in black studies methods, you know, most has been outsourced.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that idea of the outsourcing of methods and bringing it back inside the area study, I mean, that ends up being kind of the borderlands between area studies and disciplines. Right? It's the question of what is your distinctive methodology.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I remember giving a talk not to just, you know, talk about myself, but
Speaker 3:No, no, please.
Speaker 2:Anecdotally, I gave a talk, a class, a talk on Spike Lee a handful of years ago at the Society For Media and Cinema Studies and I had half the paper was what I called a Black Studies cinema method and or method for reading cinema. I had some pithy way of putting it at the time, but that was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about because it was like, oh, we never thought these were not black studies people. They never thought like, well, maybe there's something distinctive about black studies. It's not just sort of where you keep black faculty away from the disciplines or where you keep people who work on black texts, but instead that there's this. But I, when I was writing it, there were so few resources in terms of I couldn't I didn't have this big critical apparatus to say I'm working with this as a background and doing this nuance thing, which is what so many disciplines are able to do.
Speaker 2:Right? I love that imperative to develop a sort of theory of methods or collection of methods. So
Speaker 1:Which I think is even harder, right, when you don't have a, you know, critical mass of black studies PhDs who have been trained in methods that be could be considered black studies. When you do have so many people who are from traditional disciplines, amazing, do critical, do great work, they were trained in that discipline. And so those are the methods that they're bringing with them to these departments as well. So Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 2:So on sort of on that note, I'm,
Speaker 3:you
Speaker 2:know, I'm interested, you know, you did your PhD, as a doctoral student in in black studies. You worked in black studies, you know, devise, not design designing a program. And now you work in a religion and classics department, which I love that as a combination. But, you know, that's for another conversation.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 3:totally That's Martin Luther King or something.
Speaker 2:Totally interesting. But I, you know, on this note of sort of methodologies, on the one hand, there's a sort of field and what does the field have in terms of a sort of quill of methods to approach different topics or different areas of interest. So there's that sort of broad, you know, area of study question, but there's also the specific question doctorally educated, I don't know if that's the way you're supposed to put it, but getting your doctoral education in Black Studies and then now working in the non Black Studies department on Black Studies material. And just how that mixture of approaches to be working in a discipline. I think religious studies could be called a discipline.
Speaker 2:You know, the fact that you can say homiletics, right, tells you that it has disciplinary features at the very least. But how so working in a discipline has or starting to change your approach to black studies material or how your black studies education is changing as you encounter these different approaches to religious studies and its questions? In other words, sort of
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How one training and then being in a discipline, how these are impacting you as a thinker and as a teacher as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I love the question. I do wanna say another little piece about the the underfunding and,
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 3:The difficulty. I love being at l l v c, my little little college, and, it had its its trials, but I loved it. Another one of the hard things was, bringing on people that I thought would be valuable to the program because, you know, you're you're piecemealing like we did or, you know, bringing people, and there were disciplines that just outright did not wanna be a part. So, yeah, that's that's a piece of it too. What can you get from it, but also where we may need to go on the future.
Speaker 3:But in terms of my and in terms of which is informing what, black studies is informing everything for me. I'm always asking the question of research where and when do I enter, you know, which I think black studies, critical race theory asked us to do. And I think other other disciplines asked us to do, but may have forgotten to ask some people to do. So when I'm looking at Hamlet, so the art of preaching and and this kind of historiography of who we're privileging as preachers and, you know, Augustine and all of these other Greco Roman, philosophers. There you are.
Speaker 3:What does that have to do with me, you know, and how we use rhetoric, within black black spaces? So I think, for me, it's all about definitely using the lens of black studies to guide how I'm understanding the other disciplines for for sure for sure. Because I think if I don't I don't know if I'm doing black studies. I think I'm doing something else. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:I like I mean, one thing that strikes me listening to to talk about that is how that strong foundation in black studies makes a totally different relationship to the strength of disciplines, which are sometimes centuries old in the way they are so imposing. But when you have that really strong foundation in an area of studies like African Americans or Afrikaner studies,
Speaker 3:all
Speaker 2:of a sudden, like, encountering those disciplines is like, you assimilate it in the sense of, like, you know, when you eat something, it becomes part of your body, but it's still your body. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I really like that as one of the one of the reasons to really see the importance of that, of a PhD in black studies. Yeah. Because those other disciplines don't overwhelm. They just become a contribution to the field.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you know what? I think it's I think it's a little extra work. My colleagues don't have to know black religious traditions, And I have to know Euro Western religious traditions. I have to know, because if I can't insert, our certain hermeneutics or interpretation of what's going on, which all of it, it's kind of filtered through interpretation, which is what I think critical race theory is trying to get us to understand.
Speaker 3:So it's a little bit more work on our end, and I think you were asking about switch disciplines. So, doing a PhD in black studies and then going to kinda try to start a black studies program. I'm trying to figure out, you know, how do I get all of these pieces? We had a historian, we had a philosopher, we had, how do I get these people to kind of, come together for Black Studies? And it was more difficult than I imagined, right, that that chairs were like chairs were like, absolutely not.
Speaker 3:Don't talk to my professors. Shout out to the psych department at Lebanon Valley College. Which is for me for me especially hurtful, because I love France Phenom, and that's his training. And so to know that my students wouldn't be able to kind of have that kind of I mean, they would, but, but from that kind those students wouldn't get that kind of, welcome to to another kind of discourse. And then coming to religion, I know I have to you know what?
Speaker 3:It's I wish I could just say, oh, yeah. It's this love of black people and all of these things. I loved LVC, and I would have stayed there until I retired. Humanities probably was not gonna stay there much longer. Wow.
Speaker 3:So it was it was the writing was on the wall there. The religion department, the blacks that I mean, everything was folding. Yeah. So as everything's folding, do I look to say, okay. I'm gonna find another black studies department and figure out what kind of questions I was asking at the time.
Speaker 3:I really did have to figure out where the market was going. And, I was asking religious questions through the lens of black women. So, this job came about and it asked it was looking for someone who was doing the things I was doing with black studies. So, and for me, it was a little less scary even though it's still in humanities, than than the smaller college, who wasn't probably able to give the humanities what it needed, financially. So while, yes, it's theoretical and, you know, some emotive responses to the decision, There's a lot of practical decisions about where humanities work.
Speaker 3:I'm a fellow right now on sabbatical through our humanity center who brings in fellows every year, here at University of Rochester. We even have a a presidential dinner tonight. So that's a lot different than the humanities where I came from.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So not switching gears completely. Right? But, like, in that same vein, you know, I did education was my specializations. That's where all of my methods Yep. Came from.
Speaker 1:But we have had many conversations about teaching. We have taught in each other's classes. Absolutely. Many conversations about the professors that we have had. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:How do you think that your work as a teacher is informed by black studies?
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. Yeah. We start well, we started this off about kind of the tradition of Black Studies, how it came to be the activism, the protest. One of the things that even in developing that first Black Studies program was a relationship to community, and I ensure that I I do that in my class all the time, whether it's creating a community amongst the class, but getting us out in community. Like you said, we're in Rochester.
Speaker 3:I did a talk, and I'm like, you all have never been through the underground railroad, passages around here. There's never been, there's no path here. There's no mark it's just it it's beyond me that this is here and nobody is teaching it. Nobody's teaching Frederick Douglass. No one's, teaching about the Underground Railroad.
Speaker 3:Now they are. I haven't been teaching the Underground Railroad, but, I think that that's foundational to black studies is to be in community, to serve. And so I try to make those those connections in all of my classes. Absolutely. So one of my classes, we, and we'll do it again.
Speaker 3:We virtually did the underground railroad tour, and then we actually took the tour. It's a little underwhelming and that, you know, it's parking lot. Most things are like parking lot. It's out I mean, it was underwhelming to me. Maybe not as soon as much, but, we did get to, you know, fill those parking lots with stories of history, that Frederick Douglass pin that, a lot of people pin about the richness of this, space.
Speaker 3:And so I think it robbery. That do I not get my students in this community and such this community and figure out, you know, we watched Harriet, we read about Harriet, and to know that this is the space, this is the space that was referred to as the last 100 miles by a lot of, enslaved people trying to reach freedom, trying to get to Canada and the part that Rochester plays in it. So I think that the epicenter, the the starting of Black Studies, even the connection to I I didn't get that in religion. I didn't get that in rhetoric. I didn't get that in, maybe sociology, but in French.
Speaker 3:What else did I major in? French, so yeah. I didn't get those in those other major you? Yeah. I did do that in math.
Speaker 3:So theology, religion, and French, that's what I did in undergrad. But they you know, there was a call to maybe observe communities, but not to be in monks that entity, and to live it. So, you know, on my teaching, I want students to be there. At LVC, we we travel to these different religious communities just to see, hey. I mean, at and Lancaster, they have the most churches per capita in the world.
Speaker 3:They have the largest Amish population, and Mennonite. Most of us had most of us, including myself, had never even been in a Mennonite church. I was like, can I go? What did that look like? So to, I get that from black studies to be in the community.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. We have to be connected because then what are we doing? Right? What are we if it's not for the people? So I think I get that from you too.
Speaker 3:I think you definitely design, keep community engaged classes that I try to model for my students as well. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:That was directed towards Ashley, not me. I'd love to take credit for that, but it's not a strength of my teaching.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Not sure how sure it is, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's true.
Speaker 2:Well, let me ask a, sort of big speculative question. You know, it's, 5 plus decades of black studies to look back on. And I'm curious, when you look back on the on the the field, what do you think the field has done particularly well, but also what you think the field has not done particularly well in the past.
Speaker 3:In the past. I think it's a great question. I do think that it is because I can see it here at Rochester, it has began to open up to different, identities, in terms of maybe sexual orientation and and gender a little bit more. I've seen as a discipline, and have been a product of developing PhD students in the discipline. I think they've done that well.
Speaker 3:I think they've produced a lot of a lot of scholarship that pushes against normative traditions of of ways of knowing. Right? So I think they really have pushed it, and I think that they can continue to do that and even more so, I think, what was it? Futurism? Black Afrofuturism became huge in the past, like, 15 years or so.
Speaker 3:Yes. So you get to see some of that. I'd like to see I'd love to see it begin to, do some more critiques of its own institutions, like the religious traditions. But I've I'd like to see it grow. Like, I've we talked about methods.
Speaker 3:I'd like to see it lay some stakes in methods. That's that's a huge one for me. I'd like to see it do something with the it's it's it's kinda scary, honestly. We talked about it a little bit, but it's kinda scary in some states where, some of its theories are politicized in a way where it's almost illegal, to teach it. So I don't know what we do with that.
Speaker 3:I I don't. I'd like to see us continue, I'd like to see us continue pushing theory, in these big areas. I'm in religion. I don't for I don't see us pushing too too far, but I'd like to, I'd like to see us push even further. There's a small sect of human humanists, and black communities, but I think that's not representative of the actual community.
Speaker 3:I think there's probably more now. But I'm interested in Gladstone. I'd love to see it, growing. I thought that it was at a place and coming up because we were at Michigan State, where we did have this program that was producing PhD.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, again, at Rochester, we had this institute, the Frederick Douglass Institute for so long. I don't have the answers. I wish I did have the answers, but I don't know if the answers are departmentalized. Right? I don't know if it's to lay state in a method.
Speaker 3:I don't know that I have the answers, but I do want them to continue to push narratives that have not included them. And that's that's what I would like to see happen continue to happen, and push disciplines. So there are some disciplines that are around because of the strength of black studies and area studies. I won't list them, but there there are some I could, but, there are some that are that are still here because of the strength of Black Studies. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I just like I I like to see it, but I I don't have the answers. I know we hired an ecologies and, a black ecologist, I believe, recently, and queer studies. So I think it's it's amazing to see where we're going, where we're pushing certain narratives, to be honest.
Speaker 2:If if I could follow-up with the sort of fixed question, if that's alright, because there's this question for me, and you've you've sort of, you know, gotten right to the to the sort of doorway of it. It's a question I ask myself all the time. It's obviously a speculative question since we're not in charge of universities or higher ed broadly. But, you know, there it strikes me that there are 2, I mean, there are other ways too, but sort of 2 bookend ways of thinking about Black Studies, that it was founded because there's something lurking maybe as, you know, you've come back to this question methodology a number of times, you know, like a latent methodology, an intellectual tradition that the academy had not represented. And now with Black Studies, it's developing and sort of becoming, you know, moving from area studies to something like a discipline.
Speaker 2:Right? So that's one trajectory, you know, one way to understand the trajectory of Black Studies. The other way, which I think often gets to the campus politics of it in the late 1960s early 1970s, which was if you went to an English department or a history department, philosophy, religion department, there's no study of Black folks there. So you need Black studies to establish a scholarly sort of paper trail or paper pile or mountains and mountain ranges of research on these. Now, one trajectory that can take is to say that in the end, the point of black studies is to no longer need black studies.
Speaker 2:So that if you want to understand black literary history, you go to an English department, black religion, you go to a religion department, art history, etcetera. Right?
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:So one is sort of black studies is designed to eventually no longer be needed, and the other is no black studies is its own thing so long as we take these questions, you know, of of the intellectual tradition and its methods and reckoning with black life seriously. So I'm curious where sort of how you would think about this these two trajectories, which is sort of more appealing, more convincing, more intriguing, or maybe more productive. You know, maybe one seems terrible as an idea. Maybe both seem like great plans, but this is more of like a speculation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. No. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 3:We do these scenarios all the time. So it's in my will house to do. I would love if, you know, we didn't need it, but we're, what, 60 years removed maybe from the first. That would it it would assume racism is over, in terms of, like, big r, racism, right, is is absolved. That would be amazing.
Speaker 2:I I just have to I just I was just reading this essay the other day, a Richard Wright essay on, I forget his I think it's like the literature of the Negro American or something. It's in the Black Power collection. And he says, you'll know that there's an end to racism when black writers are no longer writing black stories.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And that's sort of what sparked that that line from Riot Juice, always being audacious and sometimes Yeah. Offensively so, sometimes interestingly so, But it's sort of like you when it's Absolutely. It came to mind when you said, you know, if racism was over, then maybe we could talk about the end of Black studies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That'd be amazing to talk about at that time. You know, I think I think that'd be great.
Speaker 2:Does not seem to be around the corner.
Speaker 3:Not up not the not this corner. Not yet. But, you know, I'll, you never know. But, yeah, I think I think that that's a good perspective to put it in. Right?
Speaker 3:There's so many different directions that it could go. Is it is it an ad hoc kind of supplemental area studies, or is this something that we want to engrain? I think that I think that disciplines are asking themselves that question or should maybe ask themselves their question because
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I am we just hired another black person who's gonna start next next year, maybe the year after. But I was, you know, the the one to do to represent black religions here in the religion department. Right? So, do we have one of those in English? Yes.
Speaker 3:Right? So I think that's not just a black studies question. I think the disciplines have to ask themselves that question. I think religion overall as a discipline has tried to native American religion, Asian religion, Judaism. Typically, these are the kind of world religions people have.
Speaker 3:So to see that they're valuing the, African because our religious studies department that I got my religious studies degree, we had a black person, but they weren't teaching black church study where, black. They weren't they were just teaching religion. They weren't teaching anything about black. So, yeah, I think that's I think that's a lot of onus to put on black studies. I think It should operate in as many facets as it can until maybe it's not needed anymore.
Speaker 3:That I think that would be my my take on it and I try to operate within this discipline. Right? But, you know, and and I can't do it all, right, because, you know, they're like, I asked history of, you know, people who get credit from my African American, history of religions and they're like, well, are you gonna do Africa? And I'm like, goodness gracious, Africa, like all of Africa? Like, you know, we do Africa.
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 2:of lot of square miles.
Speaker 3:That's a lot. I'm like, we need another hire. Get someone to do Africa, I guess, to the Caribbean. But that's it's it's what I love is that their students want to know. So there is a need for it that you they are not teaching.
Speaker 3:So I love the need. It'd be nice if the disciplines took this into consideration, and there'd be no need for it in the first place, but they haven't. What will they do? And ultimately, what we do, I think I think that's an interesting position though that hadn't considered, to be honest, to filter Black Studies. Do do we wanna filter Black Studies PhDs in different places?
Speaker 3:And I even know, actually, when we were in school, a lot of people got double PhDs
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because of, I think I won't say that this is the truth but I'd say it was probably the anxiety of the market. Right? Yeah. Our all of our methods were outsourced. Ashley's PhD is just as education as the people that got an education PhD at Michigan State.
Speaker 3:However, with a black studies degree, can she teach an education? Black studies allows that for everyone, but does every other discipline allow it for Black Studies? That has not been the case traditionally. So it'd be nice, right, that if I could get a if black studies PhD could just get a religion job, but I'm sure that my masters of theology from Vanderbilt had some leeway there. Right?
Speaker 3:I don't know. Right? So that would be nice, though. I I like that idea. I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't know. But I I really like that idea. People like the idea of assimilation and then decided that that probably wasn't a good idea. So I know.
Speaker 2:Well, I do always think just as a side note, and then I'll I'll let No.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 2:Turn it back over to Ashley, but I always think when the sort of is is the future of Black Studies as a as a field to continue to be Black Studies or to to dissolve back into disciplines. I always look at, you know, it's your partner in your department, classics. I mean, there are not ancient Greeks or ancient Romans walking around. But classics remains a thing because it does have its own methodologies and concerns that can't be reduced to discipline. So strangely, probably the most hostile group, like, as a as a field to the idea of black studies, you know, ever I mean, Martin Bernal, I think, put us on this path with classics.
Speaker 2:But, they're actually an interesting case study always for me. Like, they they persist because they have such distinct questions, and I'm like and I I I I think we should. So we can be the classic at some point.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's interesting. It's interesting. What I'll I'll leave it with this or something. One of the preachers that I'm examining her sermons, she gives one at Duke, and she talks about it's on Martin Luther King Day.
Speaker 3:And she she says, should we erase the entire legacy of Martin Luther King? And then she goes into listing off, a lot of, like, Alexander, what's his name? Solon Solon Colin and Cicero and Churchill and all of these people's famous quotes for the necessity of history. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:She says, you know, it's these people that say we need talk about history, but yet we don't wanna talk about, MLK's commitment to economic equality, and then it just kinda falls flat.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But yeah. Yeah. They I mean, classics. Yeah. Or mhmm.
Speaker 3:Classics is interesting and necessary.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for your time. I do know that, you know, you are working on your work. It'll come out next year. Do you wanna say a little bit about that before we end?
Speaker 2:Please. Please.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. Sure. I'm sure. And I'll try to talk about it through the discipline of black studies. How about that?
Speaker 3:So they will work with it there. Yeah. My book is, on, it's entitled, ain't I a preacher? Flat or womanist religious rhetoric. So let's see.
Speaker 3:Or Theo rhetoric, and it's looking at 3 black woman preachers who are self proclaimed womanist and black intellectuals, so they're teaching as well. And I'm looking at their sermons in the way that others have looked at black women's, speeches and saw this kind of liberty kind of social justice narrative to a lot of their speeches. When it comes to black preaching and black church and black preaching and in general, the monolith is that they're all black men. And we get a lot of great, ideas about consciousness and and language from black preaching. But black people who do, black scholars who do, rhetoric, they love the church for being the large provider of black rhetoric and black consciousness, but they don't examine the the sermons of black women.
Speaker 3:So that's what I I attempt to do here, and I look at their sermons and generate a theory of how to do that in the future with other black women. And so I'm looking at black women homileticians. I'm looking at black ethicists and rhetoric to kinda develop what am I seeing, empirically from these sermons, and it's been phenomenal to kind of look at I was able to talk to you all just now about what one of the women did at Duke University and kinda, kind of putting the audience in their scene about Martin Luther King, which I think is a rhetorical tactic. She uses cultural texts as complimentary texts to the bible, to insert a certain type of authoritative subjectivity. I think they all do, and that's what the book is about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm wrapping up chapter 3 this week and interested in getting it out there. So thank you for letting me talk about it is in terms of black studies. I center these women's stories that start off with Sojourner's truth, infamous, and I and I a woman speech. Right?
Speaker 3:That's where I get the title from. And even in that sermon, she does rhetorically, she breaks down, poverty, relationships to, Christianity that don't include her own subjectivity. Right? She says, where does your Christ come from? A woman and God, there was no man there.
Speaker 3:Right? So that all her own hermeneutic of suspicion, right? This idea that what are you talking about? And I'm a woman, and God doesn't even come. So that same that same spirit of of trying to figure out, and she wasn't invited there.
Speaker 3:Right? So this kind of authoritative, subjective kind of rhetoric to see it. So that's that's what the book is trying to do. If I could be half as great as Sir Garner, the book will be great. Sure.
Speaker 3:But the the the women I look at are amazing. 3 preachers, one is Ebony Marshall Terman. She actually has just sued the, Abyssinian Church in New York City, for, gender discrimination for, for being a pastor there, which I think shows the stakes of of my work that a predominant black church, is not ready for a predominant or for a woman to pass to the church. That says a lot. Theresa Fry Brown, she's the Bandy professor of homiletics at Emory University, and then Vashti McKenzie who has was the 1st black woman bishop for the AME church.
Speaker 3:So these are women who are exceptional in their field. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to read this. Sounds fantastic.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:Super important. Really important.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 3:Thank you both for having me. This has been great, to talk about black plays. I'm definitely gonna tune in to some others for sure. I'm so excited about it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:I loved hearing all of this.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:No. Thank you. And I apologize so much for being a little tardy. I didn't get the Internet to work. You're absolutely fine.
Speaker 2:Alright, y'all. Take care.
Speaker 3:Alright. See you. See you.