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Episode: Dreaming of a Black Utopia in Trump's America

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:37:19

Episode Shownotes

In his new book, The Black Utopians, author Aaron Robertson tells the story of how Black folks have created many different versions of utopian communities throughout history — and why those communities tend to be especially meaningful during times of political tension and racial unrest.We want to hear from our

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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Before we get into the episode, I wanted to take a minute to ask for your help. We want to hear from our listeners about what you like about Code Switch and how we could do better.

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You can tell us what you think by taking our survey at npr.org slash Codeswitch survey. Thank you. Hey, everyone. You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker.

00:00:43 Speaker_04
And I'm Gene Dunby.

00:00:47 Speaker_05
Do you think it's possible for us to ever live in a utopia?

00:00:50 Speaker_04
You mean like some place where people are skipping around with tie-dye on, you know what I mean? Making, I don't know, various nut milks with like-minded people in this current climate? No, absolutely not.

00:01:01 Speaker_05
I mean, all you need is a blender and some time, but when you put it like that, it sounds silly.

00:01:07 Speaker_04
Why? Are you trying to live in a utopia or something?

00:01:09 Speaker_05
I don't know. I think I just need the possibility of a place where I feel safe. or I guess rather where Black people feel safe.

00:01:20 Speaker_04
Have you ever had that before?

00:01:23 Speaker_05
Well, from Baltimore, which already feels like a Black utopia.

00:01:27 Speaker_04
Wait, what? Really?

00:01:29 Speaker_05
I mean, it's a predominantly Black city, and it was a space where growing up, I was surrounded by Black people who felt proud and were allowed to be who they were unencumbered.

00:01:44 Speaker_05
And honestly, it wasn't until I was surrounded by white people in middle school that I started, I don't know, feeling bad about myself.

00:01:52 Speaker_05
And then I went to a black high school, I went to an HBCU for college, and then I felt great again, I felt good again.

00:02:00 Speaker_04
Okay, yeah, okay. But I'm wondering if there's a difference between a space that felt safe for you and a utopia. You wouldn't say your HBCU was a utopia, would you? And also,

00:02:12 Speaker_04
Black folks are not going to agree on what safety even looks like, you know what I mean?

00:02:16 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, not to say that Black folk don't have our own problems, but I am a Black woman in the world today, and especially in this political time. Hostility towards people like me becomes more brazen when people in power seem cool with it.

00:02:35 Speaker_05
And I think about safety and security, and I find myself yearning again for a space where I feel safe and free. And it has me wondering, does that have to be a Black space?

00:02:52 Speaker_04
Right, because if you're trying to make an intentional utopian community somewhere, doesn't some shared ethos, you know what I mean, some common cause matter more than a common identity?

00:03:04 Speaker_05
These are all questions that Aaron Robertson was puzzling through in his new book, The Black Utopians. In it, Aaron explores the black enclaves that came about post reconstruction all the way up to today.

00:03:19 Speaker_05
And he asks this big question, what does a black utopia look like? It can be a lot of different things. And one of the places that fits the bill for Aaron might surprise you.

00:03:35 Speaker_00
Detroit, the city that tends to be thought of, I think, as a kind of American dystopia. All right, Parker, let's hear it.

00:03:47 Speaker_02
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00:04:20 Speaker_03
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00:04:54 Speaker_05
I started out talking with Aaron Robertson about what makes a black utopia. And he told me that some of the places he thinks of as utopias are pretty surprising to the people who haven't experienced them firsthand.

00:05:08 Speaker_00
as soon as you leave Detroit and tell people where you're from, people will ask, so what's it like being there? And I think when I was a kid, I would internalize a lot of that and I would be so focused on images of

00:05:24 Speaker_00
dilapidated homes and abandoned factories, and less concentrated on the stories of the people who were there, who were always making their home into a much better place.

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So I was curious about what it would be like to tell a story about Detroit and about other places where black people have thrived that was a counter narrative of sorts, you know.

00:05:52 Speaker_00
And also, I grew up going to this small town in Tennessee, west of Nashville called Promise Land, where my dad's dad was born. We would go down there every summer for family reunions and gatherings.

00:06:07 Speaker_00
And when I was a kid, I didn't have a great appreciation, I think, for the historic weight of a place like this. But as I got older, I realized that, okay, not all black people come from towns like this, which is a very simple thing.

00:06:25 Speaker_00
But there were so many other stories of black towns throughout the country, like in the South and the West.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
And I wanted to write about these spaces that black people have created throughout time, these safe havens that in some ways were outside of mainstream narratives.

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And I wanted to trace a broad history of these black utopian spaces and ways of thinking about these spaces too.

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Okay, so in your mind, what is considered a black utopia? Like, is it just simply a safe space or a safe haven for the black collective?

00:07:07 Speaker_00
I think black utopia can have so many meanings, like, which is the great and frustrating thing about it, right?

00:07:14 Speaker_00
I think there are these real physical spaces that African Americans have carved out in order to experience a sense of community, sure, but also

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These are spaces where black people have been able to imagine alternatives to the social, economic, and political restrictions that historically have been imposed on black people. So, you know, utopia is a way of relating to other people.

00:07:44 Speaker_00
It is ways of reinforcing the dignity of yourself, and of your neighbor.

00:07:53 Speaker_00
And I think when you live in a world that has been trying to tell you as a black person that maybe you aren't worth much, finding spaces where you can push back against that, I think is fundamental.

00:08:08 Speaker_05
I'm going to do something terrible. I'm going to read you to you. And I want to apologize immediately. You ask this question early on in the book. You say,

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How have black people, together and alone, created good places from the various nowheres to which they have been consigned for centuries?

00:08:28 Speaker_05
The dark town, the ghetto, the reform school, the internment camps, the segregated church, the former plantation site, the riot-scarred street, and as in my father's case, the prison. Did you answer that question for yourself?

00:08:43 Speaker_00
In part, yeah. So a part of the book is about my own relationship with my father, for example. From the time I was eight until I was 18, we were separated because he was incarcerated. And we exchanged letters during that time.

00:09:04 Speaker_00
And I would sometimes, you know, like visit him as a child, but there was always some kind of distance between us. And I know that he was grappling with his life in prison. He was grappling with the life that he had, but also the lives that he had

00:09:22 Speaker_00
envisioned for himself, but life was not going to play out exactly how he had envisioned it.

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And to be fair, for my father and for other people in the book who I'm writing about who experienced life in prison, it was a place of repression and suffering and often abuse at the hands of prison guards.

00:09:44 Speaker_00
And yet, for some people, it became a site of resistance too. So one of the people I write about is this black nationalist artist named Glanton Dowdell. He was born in Detroit, like right before the Great Depression started.

00:10:00 Speaker_00
And when he was a young man, he went to prison on a murder charge, and he was there for about 10 years. And He was also a brilliant visual artist, and it was during his time in prison where he began to really refine his skills as an artist.

00:10:19 Speaker_00
He also led movements among the prisoners to resist abuse by the guards. But one of Glanton's jobs in prison was to teach other inmates how to paint, how to create art. And one of the lessons that he taught the people he was around

00:10:38 Speaker_00
They would be outside walking the yard and Glanton once picked up a stone and said to some of the inmates, you don't need a canvas really to create a work of art. You can paint something on the stone that's right in front of you.

00:10:57 Speaker_00
And that, I think, is kind of a lesson that is so representative of what it means to take this space of duress and find some small way to make it more livable, but also to find ways to make your life better. Imagine what life could be otherwise.

00:11:17 Speaker_05
What distinguishes a Black utopia from a general utopia, in your mind?

00:11:23 Speaker_00
When you think within the context of American history, so many of the white utopian narratives that we grow up with are about westward expansion and the development of the frontier.

00:11:39 Speaker_00
These visions are so often predicated on the dispossession of indigenous Americans and also the disenfranchisement of black people within the US.

00:11:52 Speaker_00
And so I wanted to draw attention to the ways that black Americans in particular, despite these kind of historical realities, have attempted to create a better life. And so

00:12:10 Speaker_00
really like what it often comes down to is what are the counter structures and counter institutions that black people have created throughout time, whether it's political parties or creating credit unions and mutual aid societies, whether it's imagining in some cases, the creation like of an all black state, as in the case of, you know, a group like the Republic of New Africa in the 1960s,

00:12:38 Speaker_00
and 1970s, this organization that was such a part of the counterculture of that time. And they had envisioned taking five contiguous states in the U.S. South and essentially creating an independent country within the borders of the United States.

00:12:59 Speaker_00
And it was meant to be a refuge from the punishing American legal apparatus that had been so awful for so many black Americans. it was also meant to be a space where Black people who were against the Vietnam War could go for refuge.

00:13:17 Speaker_00
So, there are creative ways to attempt to escape oppressive structures. And that's... that, I think, is the thing that really sets Black utopianism apart.

00:13:31 Speaker_05
Yeah. You mentioned already your family's homestead of Promised Land. But... What was the historical context behind the place?

00:13:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, so Promise Land was this town that was established in the years after the Civil War. You know, Black families largely started to move there beginning in the 1870s.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
A lot of the, you know, founding families of Promise Land had worked on one of the iron plantations that were in Dixon County, Tennessee, where Promise Land is located about an hour west of Nashville.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
When the Civil War happened, so many of the kind of factories in the region had been destroyed as a result of the war. And so you had a set of families in the region who still needed a home. And so black

00:14:29 Speaker_00
families started to come together to pool their resources to then buy land that eventually became Promised Land. And Promised Land as a town really existed for about 100 years or so.

00:14:46 Speaker_00
I mean, you know, its height in terms of population was probably in the 1910s and 20s. And over the course of the 20th century, you know, black families there started to move away.

00:15:02 Speaker_00
Many moved north for better, like, job opportunities or because they had relatives there. And in the 1970s, like, there were still some families there, but it really was kind of becoming a ghost town of a sorts.

00:15:18 Speaker_00
But even then, like, even when people moved away from this town, It was still the site of family gatherings. It was still the site of these annual festivals that were meant to appreciate what a town like this meant for so many black people.

00:15:38 Speaker_00
It was a refuge from white terrorist violence during the era of Jim Crow. unlike so many other spaces like this, Promised Land was largely untouched by racial violence.

00:15:52 Speaker_00
It kind of was one of those lucky spaces that seemed to have been passed over in a sense. And it was also the place where many African Americans owned their own land. They built homes and shops and churches and a one-room schoolhouse.

00:16:10 Speaker_00
And even now, the only buildings that remain are the one-room schoolhouse and a Methodist church. But now, you know, these are used as community centers and spaces to bring people together in a very new way.

00:16:27 Speaker_00
And I think even the reuse of these spaces is that kind of a sign of the ways that these spaces can persist, like even if the historical conditions that birthed them have completely changed.

00:16:44 Speaker_05
There's a moment in the book, in that town, there's a talk about this utopia, the violence was passed over, but was it more so like our grandparents, great-grandparents, just glossed over it?

00:16:58 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of both of that, I think, right?

00:17:02 Speaker_00
Like, I think a lot of the people who grew up in Promised Land, so I'm thinking people of my grandfather's generation, many of them did not witness the kind of racial violence that so many other black families at that time were experiencing.

00:17:22 Speaker_00
But also, I do think that even their parents were very intentional about kind of concealing or trying to protect their children from some of the worst that was out there.

00:17:37 Speaker_00
So for example, my grandfather's cousin, a woman named Kay, she is in her late 70s now. She is sort of the great historian of this town, has been a real big advocate for Promised Land.

00:17:53 Speaker_00
And she told me the story about her dad, when she and her siblings were growing up, Her dad would not allow them for a time to walk into the nearby town of Charlotte to get what they needed, groceries and clothes, etc. That was his job.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
He would take their feet and place them on pieces of cardboard and he would trace the outlines of their feet. And then he would take that piece of cardboard and go into town, go into the stores, and bring them back their shoes.

00:18:32 Speaker_00
And sometimes Kay would ask her dad, like, what was it like? Like, what did you experience on the way there and on the way back? And Kay's dad essentially told them, like, don't worry about it, mind your business.

00:18:46 Speaker_00
And the idea was that he very well may have experienced some kind of racist aggression there, but he wanted his kids to feel safe. So it's a little bit of storytelling in order to make your life more

00:19:05 Speaker_00
more bearable, you always sense that on the edge of promised land were these more kind of nuanced and complicated stories about what life actually was.

00:19:18 Speaker_00
But I think it was important, at least for my grandfather and for his siblings and other relatives, to feel, even if life was not going to be a paradise for them,

00:19:34 Speaker_00
that they had these moments in their life where they didn't have to worry about what was going to come down the line.

00:19:46 Speaker_05
Coming up, we're talking more about the pursuit of a black utopia. Stay with us.

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00:21:33 Speaker_05
Parker, just Parker, code switch. We're back with Aaron Robertson talking about what makes a black utopia.

00:21:40 Speaker_05
One of the examples that stood out most to me in his book was a church called the Shrine of the Black Madonna, which was created by a man named Albert Clegg Jr. So I asked Aaron, what made this church so special, so uniquely utopian?

00:22:00 Speaker_00
The Shrine of the Black Madonna was best known in the late 1960s and early 70s for being a black nationalist church that was also at the forefront of what is sometimes called black liberation theology.

00:22:19 Speaker_00
And this is the idea that essentially that Christ is a Christ of the oppressed and that Christianity is really a narrative about protecting those who have been disinherited and dispossessed

00:22:36 Speaker_00
Clague was known as sort of the great practitioner of black theology.

00:22:41 Speaker_00
That was the mantra of his church and of the movement that he started there, which he called black Christian nationalism, was that nothing is more sacred than the liberation of black people.

00:22:54 Speaker_00
And that phrase shaped not only Clague's theology, his religious beliefs, but also his belief in the importance of political involvement, of economic self-determination, and of spiritual change.

00:23:14 Speaker_05
You said, in describing his belief that, like, African communalism was an appropriate response to white egocentrism.

00:23:23 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:23:24 Speaker_05
And I think I started to, like, that felt very apropos even in maybe 2024.

00:23:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's right. I mean, Albert Clay called himself either a black realist or a pragmatic realist. And one of the things that he stood against was this sense of kind of selfish individualism.

00:23:49 Speaker_00
He grew up in this kind of affluent black family in Detroit, was the first black doctor to be hired by the city of Detroit. And so really, the Cleggs were known as socialites. They were covered widely in the black press.

00:24:08 Speaker_00
And so Clegg had a privileged upbringing. And he was also, at one point, as a young man, he worked as a social worker.

00:24:17 Speaker_00
on the east side of Detroit, where a lot of poor black people and immigrants from different parts of Europe were often crowded and in really horrible living conditions.

00:24:31 Speaker_00
He saw that, and he saw the kind of the circumstances of his own life, and was really kind of appalled by... by those contradictions. And, uh... Opposition to greed and accumulation for its own sake became an important part of his work.

00:24:53 Speaker_00
Instead of focusing on the fate of individual people and acquiring for your own sake, he was interested in, okay, how can we actually create communities? How can we bring people together to focus on communalism as opposed to individualism?

00:25:17 Speaker_05
Okay, a question that I kept asking myself while reading the book, and it felt dangerous to think because it's such a slippery slope question. Is segregation necessary to create a utopia?

00:25:36 Speaker_00
That's a great question.

00:25:38 Speaker_05
Is it?

00:25:39 Speaker_00
It is.

00:25:39 Speaker_05
It stressed me out.

00:25:43 Speaker_00
I mean, it is a complicated question, I think. Like, what is the import or what is the use of like a black utopian space? I guess the question that people have nowadays is what does a sustainable social movement look like?

00:25:57 Speaker_00
Is it something that is multicultural and inclusive I think the answer is yes. And I also think it is important to pay attention to the very particular struggles that certain groups have experienced.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
But what I wanted to write about were movements that were focused on black people, not because the point of these movements was to exclude other people, but it was really about reinforcing the dignity of those who were within these spaces.

00:26:35 Speaker_00
I started to write the book in 2020, and this was before the January 6th insurrection, where the term white Christian nationalism really became popularized, I think.

00:26:50 Speaker_00
And I knew, oh man, like I'm writing this book about a group called the Black Christian Nationalists. And you know, I'm going to have to explain that it's not just like white Christian nationalism, like with a black face.

00:27:02 Speaker_00
But I do think it's important to say that white Christian nationalism and black Christian nationalism both use the kind of terminology and symbolism of Christianity to mobilize different groups of people.

00:27:21 Speaker_00
But white Christian nationalists, their mission, their purpose is to impose a very strict sense of what it means to be an American on everybody else, right? If you are not a

00:27:39 Speaker_00
white, Christian, heteronormative, et cetera, you pose a threat, I think, to the sort of ideological coherence of white Christian nationalism. Black Christian nationalism is not interested in imposing a sense of what life should be on other people.

00:28:00 Speaker_00
It was really about carving out spaces for black people to experience self-empowerment and collective liberation.

00:28:09 Speaker_00
they had a vision of a kind of beloved community that was very different from the more hate-filled, like I think, orientation of tried and true white Christian nationalists.

00:28:25 Speaker_05
Yeah. One's about dignity and the other is about encroachment.

00:28:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, encroachment and disenfranchisement and ideological rigidity.

00:28:39 Speaker_05
Why are so many of the black utopias that you've written about not better known?

00:28:46 Speaker_00
so many of these black movements begin in the shadows a bit. Because there is something about, I think, the privacy of creating these spaces that is important. It's kind of like a place like Promised Land, for example.

00:29:02 Speaker_00
It was this unincorporated town, and there are so many spaces like it that have not been formally mapped out. Most of these places are not well-known, or their histories are not well-documented.

00:29:16 Speaker_00
We might see that as a tragedy in part, but I actually think that there's a usefulness to being a bit hidden, to working underground, especially when you aren't certain whether your work and whether what you stand for will actually be embraced by other people.

00:29:40 Speaker_05
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you after the election instead of before, because I also wanted to know what the results were going to be.

00:29:49 Speaker_05
But I wondered if the election shifted your perspective of your book or what that Black Utopia idea could look like now.

00:29:58 Speaker_00
Yeah. You know, the essay that the book grew out of, I had the idea for that in 2019. So in 2020, when the pandemic happens and when the spate of police violence against black people is the focus of national attention,

00:30:20 Speaker_00
I'm already attuned at that moment to what black utopian initiatives and projects look like. And so when all of the chaos is happening, the things that I'm really looking for in the news are stories about

00:30:38 Speaker_00
for example, the proliferation of mutual aid groups that start to pop up in communities of color throughout the country.

00:30:49 Speaker_00
I'm paying attention to the importance of like food security networks in cities across the country, which are so necessary at times of economic and political turmoil.

00:31:04 Speaker_00
When it's hard to really envision what the future looks like, that tends to be when these kinds of utopian movements really pick up. And so, you know, now Trump is reelected. And although for me personally, it's tiring and sad and scary.

00:31:25 Speaker_00
I just know that there are so many groups out there whose work is going to continue and is going to pick up even. I think of the importance of what was called the solidarity economy, right?

00:31:37 Speaker_00
Like, which is essentially an acknowledgment that the world that so many people are striving for, the kind of world that I personally want to see, is one that is about sustainability, that is about kind of slowing down and reorienting what we care about, right?

00:31:58 Speaker_00
I guess I try to find some encouragement in what tends to happen when things go really bad.

00:32:05 Speaker_05
I mean, yeah, it's also important in writing about utopian traditions.

00:32:19 Speaker_00
and histories to be real about it, right? The need for creative responses, I think, to systemic oppression is exhausting. And the fact that we keep experiencing these moments of shock at what we are like as a nation, right?

00:32:39 Speaker_00
I mean, it feels in some ways that we are regressing. And it's like the alternative is what you sort of stop and stare at the wall and you know and don't don't do anything. I just I

00:33:00 Speaker_00
I think in part I wanted to write the book because I was tired too by a lot of what I was seeing in 2016 on. I eventually got to a point where I was thinking the people who have the maybe the most right to to give up are the people who have

00:33:22 Speaker_00
done everything within their power to make the world different and better.

00:33:28 Speaker_00
And so I wanted to, like when I learned about the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a lot of the black Christian nationalists who I spoke to for the book, they were my age in the 1960s and 70s when the Vietnam War was raging. It was not clear whether

00:33:49 Speaker_00
like black liberation movements wouldn't endure because of the effects of counter surveillance operations, right? The suppression of these kinds of groups. There were a lot of forces that were marshaled against these young people too.

00:34:06 Speaker_00
But I wanted to talk to people who lived through that period and then also saw what was going on like with our country now. Many of them I think held on to a sense of hope, they were kind of inspired by what was happening in 2020.

00:34:25 Speaker_00
And so it felt important for me to connect with people who had lived through terrible periods of their own. And I think I took some encouragement from that.

00:34:35 Speaker_05
All right, I don't mean to be a downer. I immediately, I apologize.

00:34:42 Speaker_00
No, no, I think it's normal and natural. I mean, I'll speak from a very personal place.

00:34:50 Speaker_00
So Cousin Kay, who is my grandfather's cousin in Promised Land, she's getting older, and she wants to ensure that the memory of a place like Promised Land is preserved. by younger people.

00:35:04 Speaker_00
So she has looked to me, to her daughter, to think of ways that we might use a space like this for good. And I find myself now at a point where I'm really concerned about the attacks on freedom of expression.

00:35:23 Speaker_00
There are real dangers that the next Trump administration will pose to the attempt to educate people about history as it is, right? It's all extremely scary and threatening.

00:35:39 Speaker_00
And I wonder, can a place like Promised Land be used as an artist retreat or some kind of co-op where people can come together to tell the very kinds of stories that the Trump administration is going to be trying to suppress, especially throughout

00:35:58 Speaker_00
the American South. And so I guess the answer to that question is, it's sort of about thinking like, what do we have in front of us that we can recycle in a way to use for good?

00:36:13 Speaker_00
It's not that we necessarily need to create entirely new ways of thinking or new political structures. Like maybe we do, who knows? But it may be a little more manageable to think about, okay. What is it right in front of me that I can do?

00:36:31 Speaker_00
What are the things that my own interests tap into that can motivate me to try to resist all of the horrible things that might be coming our way? So it's not blind hope, but it's kind of about

00:36:48 Speaker_00
holding the frustration and the fear and disappointment alongside our creative impulses. And I don't know exactly what that will look like for me, but we'll see.

00:37:01 Speaker_05
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