 So welcome everybody here to the Martin Segal Theatre Center at the Greater Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka and I'm the Executive Director of the program. And we have, I think, a significant guest here tonight, Julius, who's a great scholar, an emerging scholar who is a research we feel is right at the heart, at the center of what theatre research should be about and also of what we here at the Segal Center are interested in. He came to visit Ms. Samminab, Professor Hilary Miller, who is also joining us. It gave and I was there for that evening and we decided to have a larger discussion here at the Segal Center. Normally, we have the old days, just public events. In the corona time, we did all our events on Zoom online. So right now, when an event is a discussion, most of our viewers join us via HowlRound. So I'm welcoming everybody from the HowlRound audiences, which is a national U.S. non-profit theatre platform and we are very honored to be there. So thank you to HowlRound, Vijay and Emily for hosting us. It will be around an hour, an hour and 15 minutes. There will be time also for you for questions. And this is Julius and this is Hilary and I'm going to hand over the mic to Hilary. He's one of our great students here at the Graduate Center CUNY, who now is a professor teaching part of our CUNY consortium system. And so thank you for taking the time and being with us and tell us a little bit about you and about Julius. Do I take this one? Thank you so much, Frank. You're going to make me feel old, but yeah, I've been around. I'm Hilary Miller. I teach at Queens College CUNY and I'm a affiliate faculty here at the Graduate Center in Theatre and Performance. I'm so excited to welcome back to the GC and to the Siegel Center. So thank you, Frank. Julius Fleming, Jr., to discuss his book, Black Patience. And it's my honor to be able to tell you a little bit about him before the presentation. And then we'll have a short moderated discussion. And please, any questions that you have, we'll have time for as well. So Julius Fleming is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland College Park, where he also serves as director of the English Honors Program, specializing in Afrodisporic literatures and cultures. He has interest in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience, Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, NYU Press 2022. And the link to buy the book was on the invite for this event, so I encourage you to click upon it. And that won the Hooks National Book Award. It received honorable mentions for both the John W. Frick and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Awards. And it's a finalist for the George Friedley Memorial Award and the Bernard Hewitt Award. So it's my pleasure to introduce Julius Fleming, Jr. Thank you so much for being here. I think that's some good evening, everybody. Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me? All right. So before we begin, I'd of course like to thank Frank and the Segal Theater for the kind invitation to be here. Thanks so much to my comrade and co-conspirator, Hillary. It's always great to be in conversation with you and to think with you. And thanks so much to all of you for coming out this evening. I think, you know, we're small enough. I have a lecture kind of academic formal lecture prepared, but I actually might deviate from that a bit and just have a conversation with you all before the big conversation. So if you indulge me for about 15 to 20 minutes, I'll give some general framing remarks about the book and then we'll have a broader conversation. Right? So I want to just begin today with an example that I came across in the archive while doing research for the book. This points to a January 1930 speech that was given by General John Christian Smuts, who was a former prime minister of South Africa. He was speaking to at the time what the media called an audience of, quote, New York Negroes. And in this speech, what Smuts did was to, quote, criticize what he called our attempts to force white civilization on African-descended peoples because he said it would only make them, quote, inferior Europeans. So we don't want to force black people to be inferior Europeans. He said that he praised black people for being what he called, quote, noble and dignified, and for also, quote, singing contentment amid suffering and tragedy. He goes on to describe black people as, quote, docile animals before making this claim, quote, the Negroes are next to the ass, the most patient of all animals. Troubled by the prime minister's rendering of black people as patient animals, Dr. Robert Russo Moten, who was then a principal at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, quote, stood to his feet, raised his deep voice and challenged this relationship that the prime minister had drawn between blackness and patience. Indeed, his framing of blackness as patients. I know I oughtn't say this, Moten fumed, and he was furious by this point, right? And keep in mind, this is 1930, and the way in which he was angry at a white former prime minister of South Africa in public was a really radical and daring move. He said, I know I oughtn't say this, and I know my wife would tell me not to. I wish I did have patience, but I haven't. But what I want to ask General Smuts is what he meant when he associated the Negro with the jackass. I mean the ass, what he meant when he called us docile animals. Scrambling to defend these remarks, General Smuts suggested that he, quote, only use those word in a spirit of admiration. I have all respect for the patience of the Negro race, he declared. I think it is something we white people might learn from Negroes. We'd be much happier if we did. So I'll begin this talk with this kind of tense exchange between Dr. Moten, who again was a black principal at historically black institution, Alabama, and General Smuts, who's a white former South African prime minister, because to my mind, it highlights the importance of what I call in my book, a black patience, right? To not only this historical moment, but to the broader formation of race in the modern world, right? In other words, asking black people to be patient is central to how race comes to be developed in the modern world. And ultimately to what Saidiya Hartman calls, who's a literary critic here at Columbia, she calls the after lives of slavery, right? So slavery was critical to slavery from the moment slaves were captured and forced to wait in the belly of slave castles to the moment they were put in the belly of slave ships. And they had to make sometimes a three to six month voyage across the Atlantic to the new world. The waiting that they had to do on the auction block, right? Waiting was central to the experience of race in the new world. But also after slavery ended, what I want to argue is that waiting, waiting remains central to the social and the political fabric of this world. It's a foundational element of blackness as it comes to be constituted in the modern world. Does that make sense? Right? Patience at the heart of modern recent formation. So there's the violence of black patients, but I also start with this example, because what the archive tells us is that on the one hand, whereas Dr. Moten sort of stood to his feet and raised his deep voice, there were other members of the New York Negroes, right? Remember that phrase? They didn't, they weren't as vocal as Dr. Moten, but the archive tells us that they quote, set up straight and they went. Right? They set up straight and they went. So on the one hand, Dr. Moten was very vocal. On the other hand, the rest of the New York Negroes used embodied gestures, right? They used their bodies to signal their disagreement with General Smuts claim that blackness is equivalent to patience, right? And I want to, if you know anything about black culture and you know when a black person sits up and a black person went, is right? It speaks volumes, right? It speaks volumes. So I want us to think about how that embodied gesture is just as radical and important as Dr. Moten's more vocal descent to General Smuts. By 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court gave a nod to outlawing racial segregation in public schools, such uses of black patients were rampant, right? And the reason that black patients was so important, particularly by the middle of the 20th century, is because those people who were sort of anti-black racial antagonists, they were afraid. They were afraid that the architecture of the modern world was changing, right? And they had to develop some sort of tool to slow down that progress, because all of a sudden, here was the highest court in the land saying that we have to desegregate the schools. And the line from the court's decision that really infuriated people was that we have to desegregate these schools with quote, all deliberate speed, right? All deliberate speed. This is what the court said. So this really angered people. And one of the people that it angered was our very popular writer, William Faulkner, right? Very great modernist writer. So as black people's demands for freedom now began to crescendo after the court's ruling, William Faulkner was so angry that he turned to the pages of Life Magazine, in which we know that in the middle of the 20th century, Life Magazine was a very popular outlet with a very wide readership, right? So this canonical, iconic, white modernist writer goes to the pages of Life Magazine. This is what he says, talking specifically to black people in the South. He says, quote, wait, wait now. Stop and consider first. I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional integration, go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. So you all get what Faulkner is saying, right? And you see how it exists sort of in contra distinction to what the court is saying, particularly in terms of the speed, right? The competing sort of paradigms of speed that are at work. On the one hand, the court is saying, we need to desegregate with all deliberate speed, even though we know the court really didn't mean that, right? This is what they said. And Faulkner is saying, wait, wait now. Go slow. And so a part of what Faulkner is invested in is what a literary theorist, late literary theorist, Lauren Belant, I argue in the book, has called cruel optimism. So Faulkner doesn't say stop your fight, right, completely for equal rights. He doesn't say stop your demands for freedom now. He says, wait. In essence, he issues an invitation to black people to pause, to slow down. And a part of what I argue is that that constitutes a sort of race specific brand of what Lauren Belant calls cruel optimism, right? It's not an attempt to sort of put the fire out of black radicalism, but it says go slower. It says wait. It says tomorrow will be better than today. And by cruel optimism, what Belant essentially means is that there are structures of oppression in place, right, that keep us hoping, structures of oppression that keep us dreaming, right? This is the optimism, right? But what's cool about it is that those futures, those hopes and those dreams toward which we strive often don't come to fruition. What I argue in the book is that under the violence of black patients, under the violence of black people constantly being told to wait, cruel optimism is exceptionally violent, right? In other words, for black people, especially those futures, those hopes and dreams often don't materialize. This making sense? So William Faulkner, of course, from Mississippi, and I'm from Mississippi. When you all hear the word Mississippi, what comes to mind? Tennessee, what else? Abortion bans. And even before, you know, our contemporary more, how does Mississippi, when you're Mississippi, what comes to mind? How do you feel? Slow. Yeah. Not scary. Yeah. Poverty, right? It's last, almost in everything, education, socioeconomic earnings, all those things, right? And so it's easy to say, well, Faulkner's a backwards white man from that backward state in Mississippi. But while I was doing research for the book, I also came across this, and this is just pointing to Eisenhower, right, who's president of the United States, right? And Eisenhower was so interested to me about him is that in terms of time, in terms of speed, in terms of pace, this is precisely the moment where the United States, because the Russians are beating us, right? That they want to speed up the pace of the social world. And Eisenhower essentially says, I don't want that, because by now the Russians have launched Sputnik 1, right, the world's first artificial satellite. And he basically authorizes Congress to appropriate $100 million to establish what we now call NASA, right? With the sole purpose of beating the Russians to the moon and literally of speeding the pace of the social world up. And he says that we need to do this in some ways with algebra speed. At the same time, right? The same president who's all about time and speed and those sorts of things. When it came to black people's efforts to speed up the rate at which they were moving towards their rights and their freedom now. And at a July 17, 1957 press conference, Eisenhower said this, I personally believe, and this is a quote from him, if you try to go too far too fast in laws in this delicate field that is involved the emotions of so many millions of Americans, you're making a mistake, right? If you try to go too far too fast, you're making a mistake. We have to put that claim by the same president who wants us to go to places out of space that mankind had never been. And he wants us to go to those places at record speeds. At the same time, the heat like falcons telling black people go slow, slow down. And what is so fascinating and ironic about this is that not only is there the kind of development of spaceships, for example, but this is a moment when technological, what we call technological modernity writ large is starting to accelerate, right? We have faster trains. We have faster planes. We have faster financial tools that can speed up the turnover time of capital. In other words, the rate at which money moves across international boundaries, right? All of these, we have television, right? News can flow at record speeds at the same time that black people are being told by William Faulkner, by the president to go slow, right? And there are many other examples I could cite John F. Kennedy, for example, right? He told black people to go slow. His brother, Robert Kennedy, who was attorney general, went down to the south and he told sit-in activists, we need a period of what he called cooling off, right? In other words, take your feet, take your foot off of the gas. So this call for black patients was rampant and not restricted to political party or racial ideology. So as I wrote this book, right, and I gathered enough evidence, it became clear to me that there was this structure, this racial structure that was invested in black people going slow, right? It was not only invested in black people going slow, but it was invested in the way in which black people would wait, right? Because we can, there are ways that we can wait without being patient, right? If you've ever been a child, I grew up in a black southern home and my mom often told me to wait or, you know, I can wait with an attitude and likely get a pension or something like that, right? Or I can wait patiently, right? And that is what they wanted. They didn't want black people to just wait. They wanted them to wait patiently. They wanted them to engage in performative modes of long suffering and endurance, but to also appear to be okay with it, to not wait with an attitude, right? And so for me, black patients on the one hand is about the temple, we call the temple dimension, which is to say the time part of it to wait, right? To go slow. But it's also about the affective dimension, which is to say, how do you feel while you wait? We want you to enjoy to be okay with the process of waiting. So it's both a temporal and an affective thing that I call black patients that clear, right? Because also what they were afraid of is that we know that also one can lie in wait, right? And usually when we lie in wait, what are we about to do? We're about to attack, right? And so they wanted to be very clear that the kind of patients they were calling for would not lead to an attack. So in the book, here's a kind of definition of black patients. It's a large scale racial project that demands performances of patients among black people as a way to fuel and reinforce anti-blackness and white supremacy. Very simple definition there. So in the book, I want to theorize black patients as a kind of structure of race in the modern world, right? As a way of managing race in the modern world. At the same time, and this is a part of the reason I'm here this evening, what I want to do is to invite us to rethink the civil rights movement through theater. In other words, the question is of what was productive, what was useful politically and also aesthetically about theater during the civil rights movement. And a part of what motivated this question is that I was taking a course in the 1950s and almost all of the kind of cultural scholarship that I came across related to the civil rights movement, prioritizing probably can guess which kind of technologies and which cultural forms. Or in other words, what are kind of the most, where do we get the most iconic images of the civil rights movement? From what technologies? Cameras, right? Cameras, photographs, right? And television. And you all are likely familiar with many of these images, right? Yeah, we get them from photographs, we get them from televisions, the dogs, biting protesters, the sit-in movements, the marches, the march in Washington, the gel in. But what I was doing research for this book, what I realized after reading magazines like Jet and Ebony, the Negro World, the Chicago Defender, and I went to archives in Louisiana, Mississippi, in New York, at the Beinecke, Yale, and as far as Amsterdam, right, in the Netherlands. And at every turn, what I realized is that Black people found theater a useful tool, a useful technology, if you will, not only for sort of Black cultural and artistic creativity, but also as a weapon of civil rights activism. And in fact, they believed that theater, and this is all throughout the archive, could contribute to the civil rights movement in the same way that something like a voting rights drive or sit-in or a gel in might. This is a photograph of Oscar Brown Jr.'s kicks in co-ed 1961 play that I'll talk about a little bit later. So what I'm going to do now before we open up the conversation, right, is just turn to some of these places. You all know Lorraine Hansberry is raising in the sun, right? Perhaps the most popular play still by a Black playwright. And in the book, I'll talk a little bit about raising in the sun, for instance, you know, this is a play that was celebrated by White critics. And many of the White critics said, you know, this is, and the word that they use over and over and over again was this is the triumphant play, right? And even when the FBI planted an agent in the audience, he said, essentially, hey guys, you don't have to worry about this play. It's not too radical. It's essentially about what he called Negro aspirations, right? It's a triumphant play. But what we notice if we read that play carefully, right, across his three acts, by the end of that play is not about triumph. Every dream, every hope that that Black family has does not come to fruition, right? The daughter wants to be a daughter. She's a doctor. She's not a doctor by the end of that play. The son wants to be an entrepreneur. He's not an entrepreneur by the end of that play, right? Mama wants a new house, right? And the play ends with the family waiting on the movers. But before the curtains close, we never actually see that family move into that house. Right? Like other Black playwrights during that time, the way that play ends was with Black people in some ways in medius ray in the middle of things, on the horizon, right? Waiting for the thing that they dream of in the ways that Lauren Belant signals with the horizon, cruel optimism. This is a picture of me. I like this picture. I hate this picture and I love it. I was doing research for this play. I'm raising the sun, of course, here on Broadway, very popular play. You know, this is how Hansberry became famous. But also, during the Emancipation Proclamation Centennial in 1963, when Black people were celebrating 100 years of freedom, quote, unquote, they turned to a raise in the sun. And they said, you know, this is not a play about triumph. And also the story of Black people in the wake of slavery is not a story of triumph, right? They said 100 years after slavery, we are still waiting for freedom. In other words, we are still being forced to perform Black patients and to do that, they often stage showing Hansberry's raise in the sun. I'm not sure if any graduate students are in the room, but I hate this picture and I love it because this is when I first started doing archival research for this book. This is in Indiana. And I didn't know to cut my fingers out of the pictures of the photographs of the book. And so then when I went back to crop it, if I crop it, I would lose like this far. So I just couldn't use it for the book. And it was just like a good lesson, like, you know, just be a better archival researcher. So don't fret. Mistakes were made while writing this book. I just want to show you now before the conversation, some of the theaters I look at, this is the Free Southern Theater, very popular radical Black Southern Theater, Grassroots Theater in the Civil Rights Movement. They performed primarily in Mississippi and they intentionally wanted to go to Mississippi because they wanted to go to the place that they saw the bastion as the bastion of racial inequality, the kind of ground zero of racial inequality. And they said that we believe that if theater can do anything in the world, it can do something in Mississippi, right? So they turned to Mississippi in particular, but also perform in other parts of the South. And they said, again, when they establish a theater that we believe that theater is just as important as something like a Bowdoin Rights Act, a drive or a sit in. This is the Free Southern Theater performed in Mississippi. What's so notable is that, you know, while Lorraine Hansberry's play had the kind of, you know, luxuries of Broadway, they were performing, can you all tell what this is? It's clearly outdoors, but what kind of space is it? It's a field, right? It's a cotton field, right? And most of those people there in terms of occupation, they're sharecroppers, right? So what they would do is work in those fields by day. And then at the end of the day, when they needed that time to wash, to cook, to raise their children, they chose to come and see these plays that were put on by the Free Southern Theater, effectively transforming the very meaning of that land from a site of Black labor exploitation under sharecropping to a site of theatrical performance, right? To a site where the sort of radical Black artistic and political consciousness can be cultivated in the same ways that they were cultivating cotton during the day. Also, when they had formal structures or theaters, they were often bombs. They were often mysteriously burned, right? And the fire departments would say, oh, we don't know how this thing burned down. We can all guess who burned it. Might be KKK, right? This happened over and over. So they said, okay, we'll turn to the cotton fields. We'll turn to other places. They put on place like, I don't know if you all saw Pearlie Victoria's here. Anybody? Yeah, amazing, amazing, amazing. So they stage Pearlie Victoria's. They also stage plays like Waiting for Godot. And what's so interesting about that, Pearlie is a quote unquote Black play, right? Through and through. They use a slapstick comedy, use a call and response. But they also use plays like Waiting for Godot, which is, of course, by Beckett, this high modern, and who studied that play here before? It's a hard play, right? And keep in mind that people in this audience for the most part have an eighth grade education, right? So they're staging plays like Waiting for Godot. And a part of what was so powerful about this play in particular is that that theme that can see that the heart of that play, right? Waiting for someone who's not going to come, those Black people with eighth grade educations, they got it. And they said things like, we are the ones who've been waiting for Godot. In particular, you all know Fannie Lou Hamer, very popular civil rights activist. She stood up at Intermission, right, at one of these performances and said, you can't sit around like these men, Vladimir Estregan, Waiting for Godot. This is the reason that Black people are as far behind as they are, right? This is what she says is one of those performances. This is Amiri Baraka at a performance of his play, The Toilet here in New York, all Broadway. This is a performance from Detroit. And so I just want to give you a sense of the different kinds of plays that I write about in theorizing this thing that I call Black patients. So with that said, I will go over and just start the conversation with Hillary and I'm looking forward to any questions you might have. All right, thank you. Thank you. Great. And you said it's right for the sound. Okay. Hold it close. All right. So we'll use this. Is this working? Okay, excellent. Cheers. Thank you so much. So I have so many questions I want to ask, but I think I'll start with the finger in the archived moment because what I really wanted to ask you about was you talked a little bit about the process of realizing that theater was the space that was really you needed to go toward. And I'm just curious to hear more. You found such amazing archival material, you traveled. Is there a moment or two where you felt like this is my expansion of the archive? I'm just curious if you could share one or two of those moments. This is funny. Before we came up, we were having a little conversation about what's our good side and which side we should sit on. So if it didn't go, if we didn't get it right, forgive us. So yeah, so two moments of kind of unbuilt importance. I think one, I mean, this is sort of an embarrassing moment, but I was a graduate student at Penn. I was writing my dissertation. I was studying in theater and I was trying to suck up. I met Bob Moses at a conference at Princeton and I was like, Hey, you know, you're an important civil rights activist. I'm writing a dissertation about the civil rights movement in theater. And he turned to me, he said, Oh, I really like that project. Of course, you have a chapter on the Free Southern Theater. I had never heard of a theater. And what was so interesting is that he said, Well, you said you're from Mississippi and you went to Tougaloo, which is the historically black college that is my alma mater. This is where that theater was founded. So I spent four years at that institution and had never heard of it. So I, you know, and I was pretty active as an undergraduate. And I said, if I don't know about this theater, I think it's the case that a lot of people don't know about this radical theater. So that unveiled sort of for me, the necessity of the work to expand our consciousness of theater's importance. Then I think the second moment was while I was writing this chapter about I'm forgetting Paul Gray Harrison, sorry, who's a black male playwright who was called the philosophical father of the theater movement, right? And I came across a play of his and he was in Amsterdam. He was a black expatriate. I was like, what is this black man doing in Amsterdam during the civil rights movement? There was an entire huge, expansive black expatriate community in Amsterdam. And they were visited by people like Martin Luther King, Nina Simone, John A. Williams, right? And it was thriving. And so he wrote these plays in Amsterdam. And then he even staged what he called a march on Washington in Amsterdam, where he got a huge crowd of hundreds of people in March to the US Embassy to Stacia sympathy march on Washington in Amsterdam, but also wrote very important plays about the movement. So that was the second moment. It's remarkable. It leads me to something that I think is such an incredible contribution of the book, which is that not only do you theorize and provide a theoretical framework for plays that so often people are not looking at. I mean, I'm thinking about something like A Metal for Willie, which is a play that's anthologized all the time, but is so rarely given scholarly attention by William Branch. And then you also look at plays like Langston Hughes's work, Jericho Jim Crow, which is not one of the Hughes plays that people think of when they think about maybe like radical politics, let's say. And I'm curious about how you went through the process of saying, I want to include that. I mean, because as you said, there was so much theater at the of the period that hasn't been really explored. So how did you how'd you make those calls about? Yes, the Jericho Jim Crow is going to be in there or that's a tough question. In part because the answer is just like it's a pretty crash answer, which is as a scholar, you want people to read your work. And there were so many and there are so many understudy playwrights who people just don't recognize. So I say, oh, hey, this is the more fascinating play, but I know nobody knows this playwright. So a part of what I had to do kind of methodologically is to balance those unknown figures with the more canonical figures. So certainly I came across plays that I found more interesting than Lorraine Hansberry's at Reason is Un, but people know Hansberry, right? And so they'll come to the book to cite it to talk about it. So it was this balance of trying to blend the iconic, the canonical with the unknown. And so that's what I try to do. So as I as I write about Langston Hughes, for example, I go to a play like Jericho Jim Crow that we don't know as much about. And it's a play that essentially pushes against black patients, right? It exposes black patients. But at the same time, when it was performed, black people in those audiences were invited to sing along with the play. They were invited to clap. And it almost took on this kind of black church like atmosphere. And so that was a part of the approach, blend the iconic with the unknown so that I can give people point of access, but also introduce them to the things that they don't know or might not know. You didn't have the opportunity to discuss some of the concepts that I think really stand out in the book in terms of what scholars are really going to be able to take and apply in their own work. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, well, I mean, you could really take your pick. But one of the things that I was imagining was maybe we could talk about, well, I had them written down. Hang on. It might be on the back. Yes. The idea of Afro-presentism, is that the phrase? I'm losing it on the page, so I apologize. So a part of what I argue is this, sorry, oh yeah, this is all making sense, too. And if it's not at any time, just tell me to stop and explain or clarify. So in the book, I'm interested, of course, in the ideas that I talked about, go slow, black patients. A part of what I argue is that what black people do is to say, no, we're not going to wait, we're going to demand our freedom now. And what I argue that that constitutes in the book is something I call Afro-presentism. You all have likely heard of Afro-futurism. Afro-futurism is everywhere. And I love Afro-futurism. I love speculative fiction. I love Octavia Butler all days of the week. But what we know is that we have to think about not only a kind of Afro-futurism that enables black possibility or that enables black futures, but also the ways in which white supremacy has strategically used Afro-futures. Which is to say that if we get black people to invest in a future, to invest in possibilities that are on the horizon, that are not yet here and that often don't come, then we can keep in place those structures of oppression that have defined the modern world. As a way of pushing against that, I argue that black people come up with what I, something I call Afro-presentism, which is about demanding their freedom in the here and the now. Right? It's about demanding their freedom in the here and the now. That's not to say that black people shouldn't engage in Afro-futurist projects, whether they shouldn't, right, engage in what Robin Kelly calls black freedom dreaming, but we have to think about the ways in which that dreaming often never reduces the results that are at the heart of it. I want to open it up. Maybe I'll ask one more question. I have a couple more, but we'll see if people have questions to ask. And one of the things that I want to ask was, you had an image, I think, from the Detroit, was a concept East Woody King's Theater. And I actually had a question about it. It's, there's a point in the book where you talk a little bit about the very ephemeral nature of looking at these theaters, because by their very nature, they were precarious. They were frequently not supported. They had very short life spans. And I guess I'm just interested in sort of how you think about this book in terms of trying to reconstruct in some senses those, not just the plays and not just paying attention to the playwrights and the plays, but the actual spaces. You think a lot of, you do a lot of work in terms of spatial thinking in this book. And I'm just really taken with how you sort of maintain the focus on the space as well. So I'll be honest, while I was writing this book, I was sometimes sad because some of the theaters that and some of the plays that I was most excited about often didn't quote unquote live long. All right. So I told you that when the Free Southern Theater performed in Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South, their performing spaces were often burned. They were often bombed. And McColl, Mississippi, for example, one of the actors says in his journal that they threw bombs at us on the stage, right? People in the audience, KKK members threw bombs. And once when they were performing in Mississippi, they were arrested by the police and they were taken to the police station. And the police asked questions like, how does that white pussy feel black boy? What are you doing down here, Nica Lover? Right. And they were released from the police station. And the police called the Ku Klux Klan and said, we just released a nigger and two nigger lovers pick them up for us. And they hid in weeds. And that was the only way they were able to evade the KKK. At the same time, you have someone as canonical as Amir Baraka. We all know Amir Baraka, right? His plays were staged here in New York. And the New York police vice squad like the FBI planted themselves in the audience and they shut the play down because they said it violated their obscenity laws because the play had essentially queer sex in it. The play moved out to LA, the LA vice squad did the very same thing. They shut it down for a obscenity. In Detroit, it was shut down for a obscenity, right? And sometimes they were petty and they would say things like, well, the theater owner hasn't paid, hasn't renewed his license, so we have to shut the theater down, right? And so what we realized is that in the play that I showed the photograph of Oscar Brown Jr.'s kicks and co, this play opened in Chicago and it was called by critics in 1961. It's called a surefire contender for Broadway. It played to sold out audiences. But once critics saw how radical the play was, it didn't make it out of tryouts to get to the New York state. So to answer your question, a part of what interests me about what I call in the book the kind of social life of theater is that it has such a kind of proximate relationship to black life, which is to say in the same ways that all of these black plays are surveilled and subjected to death, in the same ways that their lives are ended prematurely, that opens up a way of thinking about black life. And what happens in the field of black studies at least is that black studies doesn't focus on theater enough. And a part of what I argue is that we don't need to leave the study of theater to black theater studies, black performance studies, right? The field of black studies needs to take up theater in a more direct way because of those similarities. You kind of got to one of my questions, which was, well, if you just answered it, don't worry about it. But I was curious, since you sort of live between many different fields and subfields, how you've found the reception in terms of the book. I mean, the reception's obviously been fantastic. But whether you've gotten revision ideas, or people sort of like questioning how you're making interventions into any one of the subfields that you are. I feel like I probably should be bourbon so I can get into this room. Yeah, no, I can't pretend. So the book is one, a number of awards and recognitions and that kind of thing, especially from the theater and performance studies world. And also it won the Hooks National Book Award, which is an award specifically for studies of the civil rights movement, a black studies award. And so one place I haven't necessarily received an award from is the field of history. And I applied for several history awards, and I'm not saying that the book should have won an award in history, but- I'll say it. I'll say it. It should have. But I knew that this would be a tough crowd, right? Because in many ways, it challenges the heart of what a lot of historians have been doing in terms of writing about the civil rights movement. They're the ones who are writing about the photography and the television. And also, one claim that they made in particular is that we need to stop studying what they call the short phase of the civil rights movement. And this is the period from 1954 to about the death of Martin Luther King in 1968. And a part of what one group of historians in particular says is that we need to write about the long civil rights movement. And we need to focus, if we want a more radical civil rights movement, we go back to the 1930s and 1940s. And do you know the people that they say we should go back to, to identify radicalism in the civil rights movement? White communist. So in other words, you're telling me that in the 1950s, and one history even says that in the short period, we get a lot of men in suits. Men in suits. But what we don't emphasize enough is that those men were often bombed. Those men were often fired for participating in those civil rights demonstration. They were often put off of former plantations as sharecroppers because they registered the vote. Their wives and daughters were raped, right? Dogs were put on them. They were burned with cigarettes at the lunch counter. So then why do we need to go back to communism of the 1930s and 40s to locate radicalism? And so, you know, I got one positive review in the Journal of Southern History, which was like praise the Lord, thank you, Jesus. But I don't know how the book is landed with historians. We had talked a little bit about, I think at some point when we first met, we talked a little bit about this question of how you frame the civil rights movement with this very discussion that you're describing in history. And you say in the book, I think very clearly that less, less of an interest in expanding geography or time period is your interest in expanding the archive and expanding the limits of the archive. And I wonder, you know, especially just given that a number of us here are teachers or grad students, how have you been doing that in the classroom if you have found ways to do it? Have you been able to do that work of expanding what we're looking at in the period through the teaching that you do? Yeah, for sure. So I know he's going to hate that I'm going to call him out. So I have a collaborator here who visited my class. Actually, I taught a course on Black Nightlife. And so a part of what we did in that course was to think about different Black Nightlife spaces across history. So, you know, we studied the civil rights movement and we're like, oh, you know, the voting rights, the marches, the prayers at churches, the court houses, Rosa Parks sitting on a bus. I don't know if you all saw this recent story. People were upset because they found out that Rosa Parks' husband had actually owned a car. No, you all didn't see this. You should check it out. It's funny. I mean, it's sad and funny. And people are like, oh my God, you mean we celebrate her and her husband had a car this whole time? She just got on that bus to be messy, you know, which it's funny, right? But it's also why we need to do the work to really disseminate knowledge of the civil rights movement to the public. It's not that, you know, who knows if she had a car, I don't know. But the point of it, it was staged, right? It was staged to prove a point. So, a part of what I want to do in the book is to just, you know, getting back to this Nightlife point is to say, for example, where were people having sex during the civil rights movement? Where were they partying during the civil rights movement, right? They just weren't out there like running from police dogs and registering to vote. They also have full lives. And a part of what I want to do is to kind of invite us to think about the holistic nature of history, perhaps the erotic and intimate nature of history. And I think in order to do that, we have to broaden the archives that we use. I'm going to stand up to force myself to take a question because otherwise we'll keep going. Does anybody have questions? Oh, you're going to do that, Frank. Thank you. Questions, comments. Yeah. And Frank will bring the mic. And if you could, if you feel comfortable saying, just identifying who you are, that would be great. Sure. Hi, everyone. Hi, Julia. I am a doctoral candidate in sociology at UCLA, currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for LGBTQ Studies and the Center for Place Culture and Politics. So hanging out. And yeah, I think I really love you saying that, Julia, because it really coheres nicely with this like larger idea of black placemaking and how it's very assets-based. And that's something that has very much influenced me in the way that I think about queer placemaking and talking about language, about like comparative studies and space and place and taking that a lot more seriously in disciplines that are not just geography or urban planning or things like that. So my question is about the Afro-presentism and really where it lies in terms of intention and inspiration. When I hear that, I hear a little bit of pragmatism, right? It's like, it's cool to be out there, but like what are we doing in the here and now? But I also hear a little bit about the spiritual project of being present as our way of finding peace and joy, right? And I think about that increasingly through the lens of Buddhism. And so, yeah, I'd like to get a sense of theoretically speaking, where is that lying from you? Is maybe it's a little bit of both, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, that'd be really interesting. Thanks. I had no idea you were in New York now. Gosh, it's good to see you. Yeah, so this kind of tension between the present and as a kind of pragmatic project and the future. So there's a debate, right? A very popular debate in queer theory between Lee Edelman and Jose Munoz in particular. And a part of what Munoz does is to kind of encourage a certain pragmatics. We need to be pragmatic, right? And Munoz says, yeah, okay, pragmatism is what it is, but we also need to be thinking about futures. We need to be dreaming. We need to be hoping. We need to be investing in what he calls critical idealism, right? But a part of what Munoz says is that the present is a prison house, right? He's so celebratory of the future, he says the present is a prison house and a quagmire. And a part of what I want to do is to take a piece of Edelman's pragmatism and say that black people have to be pragmatic because the futures towards which they work often do not come. They historically have not come, right? And when they've come, we've always found a way of going back. So when I teach my classes, I tell my students, for example, there's a reason why once slavery was abolished, we get sharecropping, we get lynching, we get the chain gang, right? There's a reason why after the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act, we get repression of those very gains from the civil rights movement, right? We get the dismantling of affirmative action. There's a reason why after the very first African-American president, we get everything we've had recently, right? In terms of reproductive rights, you know, so in other words, this is a pattern. This is a structure. It's not by accident, right? So if we know this, and we know that kind of the singularity of anti-black bias or the way in which these violence has hit black people in particular, then we have to brace for it. We have to, in other words, prepare for the reality that these futures might not arrive, even as we keep dreaming toward them. So that requires a level of pragmatism, a level of investment in the now. Does that make sense? Yeah. In what way, then, does that relate to or what's the relationship of that to afro-pessimism? Because it just was like the natural follow-up. Yeah. Are you all familiar with afro-pessimism? Yeah. Maybe say a sentence or two, follow listeners. Yeah, so afro-pessimism is a kind of strand of scholarship. And I don't want to give a definition of it because I don't think I can. I don't know who can. But one of the claims that, in other words, it points out how the things that I was just saying, how structurally devastating the world has been for black people. I agree with that, right? History tells us that. But the claim that they make is that black ontology, because of this devastation, is connected to what they call the slave. In other words, black people will always ontologically be slaves. I don't agree with that. And I don't agree with it because black people and black archives have told us that they don't see themselves as slaves. So that moment that I talked about in 1963, where black people are 100 years from emancipation, they're saying things like, we're half-slave and we're half-free. We're not just slave, right? They recognize that 100 years have passed. We're not a perfect democracy, but we also aren't in slavery. Or at the same time that the media is saying, oh, look at the black people in Indiana celebrating a century of freedom, the black press is saying, we're commemorating. We're observing 100 years of freedom. You get the distinction, right? Versus celebration versus commemoration and ops. So in other words, black people aren't naive. They see the plot, and yet they don't reduce black being to the slave. And I tend to slide with those black archivists. I have a comment question. Hi. Thank you so much for your talk. My name is Alicia, and I'm a second year art history PhD student. And I kind of had a sort of two pronged question. One, which was when you were trying to define black patients, you used a lot of the sort of metaphors of like the transatlantic crossing. And that really reminded me of sort of scholar Harvey Young's idea of stillness in embodying black experience. And so I was wondering how, but I am really intrigued by your premise because it seems more gives more agency to the black people. And so I'm really interested in how you kind of differentiate those two terms or see maybe being in conversation with this idea or not. And then sort of the second part of that question is that stillness has really taken up and specifically the history of photography as being a really useful framework and looking at photographs, particularly of the civil rights movement. And I wonder how black patients might be a way to look at the visual in addition to performance. And also, Hillary, because we like work so closely in our areas, feel free to jump in on any of these questions, right? Yeah, so I mean, my book wouldn't be possible without Harvey Young. Any theater and performance people in the room? Yeah, so my book would be possible without Harvey Young because he has this theory of the weight and my book really builds on that theory of weighting and stillness. A part of what Harvey Young's book is responding to, there was a moment in black theater and performance studies where there was this idea that black people are stuck. Black people don't move because historically it's been hard for black people to move. For example, you couldn't leave the plantation without a pass, right? So black movement has been limited. So a part of what the field of black performance studies in particular argues is that we have to go back and recover those moments where black people have moved on stage, right? Whether you're a chorus girl or a boxer in Harvey Young writes about Jack Johnson, right? And so there was a moment where performance studies was all about movement, movement as freedom, movement as possibility, right? And there's a speaking of spatial theory. There's a geographer, Yufu Tuan, who argues that freedom, the definition of freedom is the elementary power to move. But a part of what Harvey Young says is that movement is important, but also there's power and stillness. There's power when one sits, right? And so I really wanted to build on that to think about the importance of both. We need movement and we need stillness. So those moments where the sitting activists are at the lunch counter, what I argue in the last chapter of the book is that this is them transforming black patients. This is them turning black patients on his head. In other words, they're saying that we're willing to sit still, not because Faulkner told us to, not because Eisenhower told us to, but because we want to be patient. And we're going to sit at this lunch counter, we're not going to move, we're going to sit in this jail, we're not going to move, we're going to be still because that stillness is a form of movement. It's us moving toward a kind of citizenship that allows us to sit at this lunch counter even though the law says that we can't. So I argue essentially that performance studies needs both stillness and movement. And I just wanted to add also that I think one of the really exciting sections of the book in terms of when I, well, when we read it last semester in the Civil Rights Theater and Performance course is the part that talks about visuality and black playwrights who as a very radical act turn the gaze on white characters. And at the time we're incredibly criticized for it. How could Hansberry write about these Greenwich Village behemians? What is she doing? But in fact, I think your writing on it really helps us understand how visuality, how the visual works in those plays in terms of these white characters. Yeah, so one of the chapters that Hilary is referring to is a chapter about whiteness. And one it argues that at the same time there's so many white people calling for black patients, white people are being extremely impatient, right? And what this looks like is you know plays like Lucifer, Mr. Charlie, Alice Childress, trouble in mind. He has the irate white director who is always angry, right? So it's like the same time black people have to be patient, there's white anger and inpatients everywhere. That's a part of the book. I also argue, and this is to Hilary's point, is that we can't ignore theater because at the same time that we turn to photography and television as these important visual technologies, theater is a visual technology. When you come to the theater, of course you hear, but you also see, right? And what's so powerful about theater is that those black actors on the stage, they can look back. They can look at you looking at them, right? Which I argue disrupts a kind of voyeuristic looking that happens during the civil rights movement. So what happens during this period is that you take up, you all know Emmett Till, right? People agree that that photo of Emmett Till's damaged body changed the course of the civil rights movement. So we have to ask the question, what is it that they saw that provoked something so profound and powerful that it could shift the tide of the movement? At the same time in Brown, we've heard of education with the Supreme Court, which was a white Supreme Court at the time, said was that the piece of evidence that convinced them was the image of the damaged hearts and minds of those little black children. So a part of what was happening visually is that the world was turning to images of damaged blackness. Till's body, those little kids, right? And a part of what black playwrights and other black intellectuals are saying at the moment is, why are we turning to black people to think about the problem of race? We're not the ones who created it. And this is actually said in a special issue of Ebony Magazine called the White Problem in America. So what these playwrights say is that we need to turn to the people who created the problem. And so they start to write plays like Blue Sir, Mr. Charlie. We know Mr. Charlie is kind of slaying for white men. Lorraine Hansberry's rights, les blancs, right? The whites to study what they saw as the problem of whiteness and to use theater as a visual technology to invite the world to look at white people. And the last thing I'll say is that a part of the, when you study this historically, a part of the reason this is so powerful is that there have been laws on the book that prevent black people from looking at white people, right? Called reckless eyeballing laws, which ordered black people when they passed a white person to look down. So the powerful act of looking at whiteness head on is key to transforming the nation during the civil race movement. Any other questions? If that question would be, so I'm like bringing it to today. Like what do you see like that radicality and do you think it's in the speaking about it? Or is it in the form as well? And what do you think about, you know, radical black theater today? It's an open question. We will see. Yeah. So, I mean, of course, there's the, you know, theater is a commercial enterprise at its heart. And a part of the struggle during the civil rights movement, the reason I play like Blue Sir, Mr. Charlie closes because even the white liberals who came to see it weren't quite ready for a play that radical. And a lot of black celebrities had to muster up a lot of use a lot of social capital to raise money to keep that play open. And so we know that black playwrights have to deal with the fact that these plays need to stay open and need to make money. So that necessarily impacts the messages that they put on the stage. That's one part of it. At the same time, I think what we have to do is to go to those moments of radical black theater that might not register as such as theater. So I'm thinking, for example, related to black patients. And, you know, I think about two decades ago now, the University of Chicago, which is a, we know, a multi billion dollar institution, they close their trauma center at the University of Chicago Hospital. Because essentially, there were a lot of gunshot victims from the south side of Chicago coming there and being treated and they weren't paying their bills. What that meant then is that people black people live on the south side of Chicago, whether you were shot or whether you had a heart attack or your mother who has like her sugar drop or something, you have to go all the way to Northwestern Hospital, which is a 45 minute ambulance ride, which could mean the difference between life and death. And a part of what the activists did was to stage what they call a dying, right, to literally perform death in front of the doorstep of the University of Chicago. I would count that as radical theater, right. And the last thing I'll say in terms of black patients in the contemporary moment, you know, it wasn't just Faulkner and Eisenhower in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit. Do you remember those images of black people waiting on the roofs of their houses for the federal government to help them as the waters of Hurricane, the waters of the Mississippi Rose, right? Or if we think about kind of the black people who have to wait for kidney transplants more than anyone else, right, or even my parents who are in Jackson, Mississippi, they're still waiting for clean water. And of course, we all know about Flint, right, Flint, Michigan. So in other words, you know, or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is still held up in Congress. So we need radical theater right now, but also black patients is still a very robust racial project right now. And maybe just a comment we once had Richard Schachner here for I think it was his 80s birthday. And actually he was in Tulane University. His TDR was not actually a theater drama review, it was Tulane drama review. And he was part of the theater and he told that he was there when the schoolgirls in Little Rock were taught how to walk, which is also an interesting thing that the photos we know, the way they moved and look, you know, it was goes to your theater, it was performed, it was staged. And that has not been fully realized, you know, how significant that contribution actually was. That's right. Yeah, Schachner, right. Yeah, hugely influential to the establishment of the civil rights movement, but also particularly theater. And I think this is a part of the story that has to be told over and over again. That theater was an interracial theater. It was a theater of black people and white people working together in the deep South to transform this nation. But there came a point, right? And this is what happens in scholarship. What happened before I wrote this book is that there was a movement from what we call African American naturalism and social protests. This is a period like the 40s and the 50s, the richer rights and those folk to the black arts movement. And a part of what scholars were suggesting is that there was no artistic front, we might say, to the civil rights movement. But if we turn to a theater like the civil rights movement and Richard Schachner, who was fabulous and so important, he raised money in New York. He was at Tulane, TDR here, resources. These were poor people. They were writing letters saying, hey, y'all, we still need like a couple thousand dollars to make this thing happen. And this white, powerful white man at the time had certain connections that paid off. But there came a moment in 1964, as black politics were shifting to the black arts movement, where they said to Schachner and other white actors, we want you all to leave. You no longer need it. And there were similar movements in other civil rights organizations as we shifted to black power. And I think there were consequences to that, because essentially the theater would die. And they would have a funeral for the theater. And many other black theaters died during that moment. So I think, you know, Frank can bring that up. One question to link it to your to your question. Also, one thing we can think about as a public really is, how do we work collaboratively? How do we work as co-conspirators in a way that doesn't water down the current reality of our political moment, that doesn't water down our histories and dismiss them as critical race theory, right? How do we work collaboratively with these knowledges in mind? How do we funnel financial support to black theater in ways that don't need the message? I think that's the big question standing before black theater in particular. And people have had responses to it. You know, I've been in theater productions in DC. And for example, some black directors have said, okay, now all white people leave the theater. We only want black people in the theater now. I'm not sure that's the answer. In the same way that I'm not sure that color-buying casting is the answer. So I think in short, this is a moment of opportunity where we can work harder to figure these things out. I also had the question of the president. That would have been a clear question. So the question that I have, I hope it's going to be clear. And I want to ask you about temporality because I've noticed the tension. And maybe it's just my projection that when you mentioned sort of, you talked about Afro-Futurity and you talked about the Afro-Presente, which I found very interesting. And I also thought about Munoz. And I also thought about how his future, as I remember it, it's usually it's tied into the has have been sort of this present perfect. And I find it so interesting how, so again, it's a question. I don't want to project anything that, as if there was a very ambiguous relationship of how to incorporate the past into this project while you are studying the past. But I see the future is, I see the present is, but I feel there is that disconnect. So I don't think that there is that has been or that the present perfect. That's a really good question. He is interested in the has been. And one other phrase that Munoz gives us, this is a theorist that, back to your question, we were talking about, he kind of celebrates what he calls the not yet here. And I want to celebrate the not yet here. We also know that for black people, the not yet here often doesn't come. So we have to be careful. But in terms of the past, if we look at that picture that I showed you, the photo of the cotton field, that is, in other words, what I argue in the book is that that is an example of a palimpsest, right? Those fields were worked by enslaved folk. Those histories of working that land, those histories of labor exploitation, the sweat that drip from their body, the blood from their body, right, when they were killed and when they were beat, that's still there. So a part of what they do in staging these plays on those very grounds is to bring past and present in close proximity in relationship, right? At the same time that they're imagining what we might call black futures. So something like that field as a performance space for me indexes that palimpsest, that kind of coming together past present and future that you're talking about. Would you say that it's in our bodies and it's how our bodies experience this present, but but it maybe it's removed from narrative slash ideological or some somewhat removed? I mean, I don't know if you can actually remove that. But yeah, so of course, you know, the body is a space so the body remembers body is a container of history, right? At the same time, even when we think about the history of slavery in a place like New York, and what was going on with the Dutch, I want us to go back and recover those slave histories and to think about the buildings that sit on those grounds right now. And so I think back to Hillary's point about the importance of space. Sometimes when we engage in these spatial histories and spatial analysis, I think we can get that more layered entanglement of past present and future. Right. And back to this nightlife class in DC, for example, so one of the projects we're working on now we're mapping black nightlife spaces in DC that basically don't exist anymore. Right. These whole huge warehouse clubs. And so that's the past, right? What one question is, you know, what is the president? What's there now? Condos that say, starting at $1.5 million for two bedrooms, better hurry up, only two left. Right. And in terms of the future, you know, what's going to be right there with these black clubs used to be places to come bring your dog to get a smoothie that costs $15 to get avocado toast. That's $14.25. Right. That's the kind of thinking I think we have to do and to recover those histories that have been suppressed and marginalized. There's also that I'm still thinking of what you were mentioning before about, you know, the arguments that broke up and the real disagreements that broke up free Southern theater and how challenging it is in the archive to tell those stories. You know, just like the stories of the friendship that made those possible. And for me, that's sitting somewhere in the past, present, future conversation too, because if you can trace sort of the dissolution of how people collaborate, how people work together, you know, we like to talk in theater about how it's this most collaborative art form, but how challenging it is for historians to actually sit down and say, this is war, this is where it broke apart, right? This is where children couldn't work any longer with that white producer, whatever it might have been, you know. That's right. I think it's so right. And I think a part of what you said, we have to be willing to tell the truth about history until your point about ideology, right? Of course, we all have some ideological leanings that we bring to the work that we do, right? But you have to be willing to suspend those sometimes. And so when I was writing this book, of course, I wanted all the black theater workers to get along and to be hunky during have this like radical black theater thing. Well, but sometimes they were really problematic. So even the free Southern theater, as much as I celebrate them for their radical art, they basically came down to Mississippi as Northerners and were like, you know, oh my God, look at these backwards Southern folk down here. We have to civilize them in some ways. It was a civilized admission and I have to be willing to name it. And the same way that I can't pretend that all those black people in the audience like those plays, right? There was a moment where black people got up and walked out and said, this is boring. Or one performance in Greenville, Mississippi, children tore up the program and made spitballs and started throwing spitballs at the actors, right? One more example, Mississippi, there was a black man, they were performing on the back porch of a shack. And this was a black man who didn't want the white people to think he had anything to do with this radical performance. So he turned on his lawn more to drown out the sound of the performance, right? So to your point, would we encounter those moments? And even if they go against our arguments, we have to be willing to embrace them and to call them out. Maybe just as a comment, it may be so obvious and I apologize if it's so clear, but I followed the no tipping movement here in New York City. Danny Myers said there shouldn't be any tipping because it's unfairly distributed by the rest on workers who tend already to be segregated. The beautiful white blonde girl says hello and then slowly, you know, the person who takes your order, you know, but be overly different than the person who takes your plate and then in the kitchen, you know, it's the reverse. And he said what shocked him that he said after the civil war, I think that black enslaved people could not find work and restaurants owners would say, well, you can work here, but we will not pay you. You get money from the patrons, you know, if you do a good job. And so this idea of the waiter, I never thought of it until now that to wait, I guess they also wait. And the idea of the waiter as a word, you know, and how closely connected that is also to your idea of the black patients, the waiting, but also to be a waiter. And I think there are so many significant connections that do come out what is so obvious that I mean, I never thought of that. That's such a good point, Frank, because that moment that you're talking about historically where black people are really taking on work and being underpaid in the wake of slavery, part of the reason that they're willing to work under those conditions, for example, and to have their labor exploited is because there were laws called loitering laws, right, that were invented after slavery. And what these laws said is that you could not loiter at black people. And we all know what loitering is, right. It's to sit still, it's to sit and be aimless, right, to have no purpose. And so a part of what we have to realize is that the history of this country is one of forcing the black body to move quickly, to work rapidly. This is what the slave drivers did. They told the slaves, you're not working quickly enough. And Nina Simone's Mississippi goddamn, right, she says that the country is saying go slow, but she never told me to go slow when you were telling us to wash the windows, right, or in Langston Hughes, he has this really nice column in the Chicago Defender called The Simple Narratives and Simple, who's the main character as a cousin whose name is Minnie. Minnie is a country girl from down south. And she's saying, well, why are these big time white men telling me to go slow? She said, they never told me to go slow when I was in Mississippi picking that cotton, right. So when we look at something like the loitering laws, which says that black people can't be steal, you should be moving slavery, you should be moving, you should be washing the windows quickly. We have to wonder, what is it that's so powerful about black freedom now that forces them to say, finally, black people go slow, right? Because it goes against the whole history of the modern world and the rate at which the black body has been moving. Are there more questions? Anything among anyone? I mean, I, oh, did you have a question? Go for it. Testing. I was wondering, I appreciate, oh, sorry about that. My name is Caleb and I'm not a student or an artist. I'm just here with my girlfriend. But I appreciated your comment about, at least what I think alluded to like gentrification, it's, you know, avocado toast. I'm wondering what your perspective is on analyzing political economy and understanding the role that capitalism plays with gender racial oppression and all oppressions and how even class conflict within the black community or within the white community affects struggles for liberation. That's it. Yeah, Caleb, right. That's a really good question. I think, I mean, you put your finger on it. We have to start thinking about capitalism. We have to start thinking about political economy. And one of the things I think that we know is that in places that are most oppressive or moments that are most oppressive, right? So in the last few years, we've had some of the most creative black art that we've had in a long time, just because it's such a thick moment of oppression. Or if you look at a place like Mississippi, there are food deserts where my wife is from in the Mississippi Delta. Their version of a grocery store is the Dollar General for miles and miles. So one question is, what are we doing in response to that? So there are all of these black and white people, Mississippi, for example, that are creating some of the most fantastic co-ops. They have farms, they have community farms that they're working. You never hear anything about this, right? So a part of, I think, what the solution is, capitalism isn't going anywhere. And particularly what we call racial capitalism isn't going anywhere. So I think a part of the solution is what are those small scale acts, the farm, the sustainability projects that we can engage in to support each other. And the book that I'm writing now, it's a book about outer space. And it really was inspired by this project. It shows the depth of capitalism and the depth of empire. Because in the wake of the decolonization and the anti-colonial movement, empires recognize these colonies that we held are no longer going to be ours. So we need to craft a plan for the future. And a part of that plan included essentially colonizing outer space, right? So everything that's happening now in terms of space force, in terms of the battle of the satellites in outer space, there are multinational corporations right now that are fighting to mine the moon, to extract commodities from outer space that they can then sell here, right? And this is being aided by the United Nations at the time, because keep in mind that these rocket launches have to happen near the equator. And what are the countries that are located near the equator? The countries that were colonized, Brazil, Colombia, right? And so a part of what the UN does is to basically rewrite international space law to say that the air above your nation isn't your sovereign territory. It belongs to all mankind so that we can get out to outer space on equal terms. Well, who had the space shift to get out of space? The empires, right? So in other words, the structure of oppression is so thick and just so intransigent, right? That we can't hope to topple it anytime soon, I think. But what are those small scale acts in which we can engage to make tomorrow a little bit better? That's the right place to end. Yeah, thank you so much, Julius. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.