By Danielle West, Micaela Hyams and Rachel Nicholson

On Tuesday February 23rd 2016 our class had the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Beard on her work connecting the rhetoric of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Lisa Beard is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon in the Political Science department. Lisa Beard came to do this analysis when she decided to “slow down with Baldwin.” She is particularly interested in the political theory of Baldwin’s kinship narrative which relies on invoking a familial relationship between white and black people as a way to call white people into anti-racist action.

In class we watched a news clip of Blitzer and McKesson, in which McKesson, a young Black social activist male, was being questioned about the “riots” happening in Boston after the failure to indict the officers in the Freddie Gray murder. Beard was particularly interested in how Blitzer framed his questions to provoke McKesson into placing blame for the violence of the protests on the African American participants. Blitzer focused on the injuries that the police sustained, reiterating the question of peace over violence, interjecting his own opinions of how Martin Luther King Jr. would feel about the incidents, as well as a statement from the current president, Barack Obama. On the other hand McKesson drew the focus of the conversation back to the people and, though he agreed the protest should be peaceful, he said that he “doesn’t have to condone [violence] to understand it.” Blitzer’s focus on peaceful protest ignores the violence that led to this moment, placing the burden on protesters to create peace where there has been none.

In opposition to Blitzer’s continued focus on loss of property and non-fatal injury to police, McKesson would mention the many lives lost as a direct result of the interactions that African Americans had with law enforcement. In our analysis with Lisa Beard of the short clip, she connected equal concern for loss of people and property with chattel slavery and the slave trade. Beard’s main argument centered around the dissociation that Blitzer and other white Americans have from the live, pain and suffering of Black Americans.

Another important insight from analyzing the interview between McKesson and Blitzer and Baldwin from “Price of the Ticket” a documentary on James Baldwin is the way that the white interviewers perform a separation from white racists by invoking popular and respected black figures–Dr. King and President Obama–in order to corner the interviewees into agreeing with the trope of peaceful protest. Using the words of Dr. King and Obama ultimately indicates Blitzer’s consideration of black people as interchangeable, while Blitzer allows himself to separate his individual beliefs from the rest of his race’s. This was Beard’s main interest in the interview and she connects the current reaction that white Americans have to police brutality that Black Americans are experiencing now, with that during the time of James Baldwin. Particularly by analyzing the similarities in how the white racial identity “requires emotional separation from pain, death and destruction (but physical is much more apparent).”