Beyond the Classroom and the Cell: An Interview with Marc Lamont Hill
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Marc Lamont Hill and Mumia Abu-Jamal are two of the most visible intellectuals of my generation. Separated by the walls of injustice, The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America brings these two giants in the struggle for justice together.
Discussing family, life and death, hip-hop, love, politics, incarceration and so much more, this book highlights their prominence and passion in the fight to “make America again.” As Susan L. Taylor describes in her endorsement of the book: It “gives voice to what is rarely heard: African American men speaking for themselves without barriers or filters, about the many forces in their lives.” Inspiring and illuminating, informative and insightful, The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America is a conversation about issues and about these prominent figures. Amazing as the book is, I had the opportunity to talk to Marc Lamont Hill to discuss the book and its power.
David J. Leonard: How did the book come about?
Marc Lamont Hill: The book really emerged naturally out of my relationship with Mumia. I have been working on his defense, advocating for him for years, but it was in 2008 when we actually started a direct personal relationship. He called me out of the blue, right in the middle of the Democratic primaries, and we talked. He reached out and told me that he read my work and that he had seen me on TV; he appreciated the work. It was all love so we rapped about the work; we talked about Obama, we talked about whether or not he could beat Hilary Clinton and that almost became the source of our weekly conversations.
He would hit me every Friday at 5:30. We would just talk and as we began to talk more we developed a critique of Obama and what it meant for him to become President. We also talked about our lives, about our children, and about the other intellectual interests we had; we talked about culture and so much other stuff that we developed a bond and friendship that continues until now. After a while, we said lets do some work together.
Initially we thought we would write a book, a more traditional book on black life in America. It was an interesting project. We started to write essays together and the thing that we noticed was that we were melding our voices into one; we were losing our distinctiveness, we were losing the thing that made our conversations so rich: we had similar politics, we had similar values, but we also different perspectives, we came from very different places, we occupy very different social locations.
We decided that instead of trying to transform these conversations into something else we would spotlight the conversations in the tradition of Cornel West and bell hooks, and James Baldwin and Margaret Mead.
We decided to do a book of conversations, talking about the things that matter to us, the stuff that we care about. Politics came up, issues of life of death, leadership, education, love and relationships. Over the course of a year, we talked every Friday at 5:30 and that became the basis of many of the chapters in the book. Between prison visits, letter writing and phone conversations we produced this book, which I hope reflects the depth and breadth of our conversations as well was the deep love, commitment and respect we have for each other
DJL: When I was reading I was thinking about the West-hooks and Baldwin-Mead dialogues of the past, but this book felt different because of the level of respect and the love between the two of you; it felt more intimate than what we often get with dialogues and discussions between two prominent public figures. You give readers not only your assessment about the world, but also insight about yourselves.
MLH: That is what we wanted to do. We have each written a lot; we each occupy public lives and because of that, certain parts of who we are get exposed all the time; our ideas, our perspectives, our ideologies all get revealed. But we wanted to locate ourselves in this work. We wanted to give more perspective on who are we, but we really wanted to go deeper, to show who we are, to expose our anxieties and fears; we wanted to link the ideas to our personal stories. We wanted to tell a different story and we also wanted people to know that people conversing in this book are people who care deeply for each other and can model a kind of love ethic necessary for social change. It should feel more personal because it was.
DJL: I thought the chapter on love was very powerful. It brought the entire book together, because the conversations and the book itself seem to come from not just the love and respect you have for each other, but also the love and respect you both have for the issues, the communities, and the voices and histories so often unloved and disrespected. I thought it was a powerful way to anchor the book, as it is a living example of the power of that love ethic
MLH: We hope so. That was our goal. This is the stuff that moves us. This is the stuff that wakes us up in the morning; the ideas we wrestle with every single day. The love chapter in many ways anchors the book because that is what this is all about: a profound love for each other, a profound love for our people, and people everywhere. We hope the book puts a spotlight on the issues that matter most to the people who have the greatest need. We hopefully we can then link that to change, to social transformation. But it all comes back to love. We are trying to model a different level of love, to explore that level since we don’t have the answers since we are wrestling and struggling with this stuff as much as anyone else. We are willing to do that in public and that takes an ethic of risk that will pay off in the end.
DJL: Indeed. As opposed to essays, the conversational approach allows you to wrestle with those larger issues, going back and forth, reflecting on the complexity and contradictions, revealing that vulnerability so uncommon amongst intellectuals, public figures, and politicians. We are so often trying to prove that we have the answers. The conversations highlight the exploration, self-reflection, and vulnerability.
MLH: That is what it is all about. We live in as society where its not OK to wrestle with anything, where it is not OK to have contradictions, where it is not OK to change your mind. Think how we beat up on political candidates. Change should be a good thing, where people develop and grow, but we live in a world where people are expected to have all the answers and not having the right answers is seen as a sign of weakness.
We come from a tradition where the more we learn, the more we explore, the more we realize what we don’t know. And the more we realize what we don’t know the more we become committed to investigation, to inquiry, to sitting at the heel and learning at the elbows of people who know what we don’t know. That is what we try to do with the book. We offer a lot of knowledge but also talk about our shortcomings, what we struggle with, personally and ideologically. Even as we go over issues of race versus class, talk about the contours and contradictions of masculinity, or the sources of the prison industry, we are struggling with this stuff, with each other and ourselves. We want people to know that is OK. You can’t be a committed cultural worker, an active engaged intellectual if you constantly don’t wrestle with yourself, constantly don’t struggle to develop a sharper and more coherent vision of the world.
DJL: When I originally heard about the book, my assumption was the it was going to be primarily about incarceration and the criminal justice system. I thought it would be an anchor and a central theme in the book, and while incarceration is a theme (and a chapter in the book), it does not dominate the book. Did you both make a conscious decision not to limit your conversations to that place?
MLH: It was and wasn’t. At one level, we just let the conversations go where they took us. Mumia had just finished Jailhouse Lawyers and he has obviously written Live from Death Row. He has really engaged the prison question in great depth. I also have written and lectured on that topic. We are both excited by that conversation and focus a great deal of our energies on criminal injustice and prison industry. But we also wanted to expand the conversation; we did not want to reduce our intellectual scope and interest to that thing.
It was unconscious in that we just explored the topic we are about. It was conscious because we called the book The Classroom and The Cell but did not reduce it to prisons and schools, our areas or expertise. We called it The Classroom and The Cell because in many ways those two locations speak to the condition and possibility of black folk, along with our respective positionalities. As we do the book, he sits on death row, although recently move to slow death row. And I am in an Ivy League school. To that extent, the classroom and the cell was about us, our condition, rather than the scope of the book.
DJL: One of the most profound aspects of the book rests with its ability to challenge what Angela Davis has described as prisons’ ability to magically make people disappear.
MLH: We are grateful for that opportunity to challenge that belief. Prisons, like slavery, are instruments of social death in so many ways. Yet, people are still fighting and struggling. When we have people like Mumia Abu Jamal screaming from the wilderness, it is a reminder that people who are locked up inside the dungeons of America’s prisons, are still alive, still kicking and have so much to offer. It is so easy to think about the people locked in these dungeons not as human beings. It is easy to lose sight of that humanity. It is easy once we put that label of criminal on them to see them as a class, as an element of people who don’t deserve our support, our love, and our investment. Mumia reminds us that these are people and these are people with possibilities. If we listen to Mumia’s voice, if we cared what he was saying, if we read the prison writings of so many brothers and sisters who have been incarcerated, many unjustly, we would have a whole different posture on prisons, on vulnerable people.
DLJ: This comes through the book as society systemically imagines those incarcerated as living in another world, yet the book reveals the dialectics and engagement between those who are “free” and incarcerated peoples.
MLH: A day doesn’t go by where I don’t get a letter from incarcerated brothers and sisters. What would be shocking to many is how much they are engaged with the world, how much they are unpacking the complexities of the world, how much they are reaching out folks, advocating for themselves, and bringing serious critique to bear. They are so alive and kicking. It is easier to hide that fact; it is easier to pretend that they are just sitting in a cage somewhere.
DJL: We see this through the dehumanization of incarcerated people, through the efforts to represent those locked up as “animals,” all in an effort to sanction, rationalize, and justify such an inhumane system. Your conversations highlight the agency, the love, the families involved, the beautiful insights and the humanity, which collectively disrupts the dominant narrative and the efforts to erase people from our consciousness.
MLH: Yeah, brother, that is was our goal.
DJL: You end each chapter with a list of books for further reading. Talk about that
MLH: Karla Holloway in her great book, Bookmarks: Reading in Black and Whites, talks about the tradition of black writers leaving their bookmarks, who they have read, who they were reflective of what they were engaging. It was also about affirming the humanity of black folks, the intellectual capacity of black folks by showing that literacy, so often seen as the seat of reason and signpost of humanity, was something that we had. We are not so committed to proving that we are literate but following in that tradition. We also wanted to leave a map of what we have read, what informs us; these are books that shaped us. I can’t think about masculinity without thinking about [Mark Anthony Neal’s] New Black Man. I can’t think about love without thinking about bell hooks. Michelle Alexander shapes my understanding of the prison crisis. We want people to know where we came from. In a practical sense, we hope that people would keep going with the conversation, and listing the books will hopefully help in that process. Just last week, I got a letter from a brother in prison who requested James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time because it was on the list. They wanted to go deeper on this love thing
DJL: It highlights the ways that the conversations reflect on the past while imagining a future. Was there anything from your conversation that surprised you or left an indelible mark?
MLH: There are so many moments. It is easy to think about radical figures and political prisoners as very serious, as revolutionary action figures. Going more deeply with Mumia, and I realized his full humanity – I had lost sight of that as well. He is one of the most playful and funny people you could ever meet. He is hilarious. He is one of the most loving, caring and gentle people you would ever meet, something you would never know from the public representations of him. He really represents a complex masculinity. All of that comes through our conversations. He is so strong. He has been on death row for a crime he didn’t commit – he is an enemy of the state – yet he is so strong. You can lose sight that he hurts sometimes, that he endures pain like everyone else. He is away from his family, his life; he has been animalized for 30 years. As we are fighting for those incarcerated, as we are advocating for political prisoners, we must remember that they are full-people, with a range of emotions and we have to keep track of all of them.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
Marc Lamont Hill is Associate Professor of Education at the Teachers College of Columbia University. Hill is co-author, with celebrated political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, of the new book The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations of Black Life in America. He is also the author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogyand the Politics of Identity and host of Black Enterprise’s Our Voices.
