Arday may not have been strung up to a lamppost or a tree, but a mob came for him and beat down his will to live. We saw this happen to Kalief Browder; the sixteen-year-old Bronx kid falsely arrested for stealing a backpack. Because he refused to cop a plea, could not afford bail, and had to wait for an overburdened criminal legal system to find a court date, he spent three years locked up in Rikers, beaten, starved, placed in solitary, denied the basic constitutional right to a speedy trial. Rikers broke Kalief, physically and mentally. He tried on more than one occasion to take his own life. On June 5, 2015, exactly two years after he was finally released, he succeeded. He was just twenty-one.

Coincidentally, Arday’s ordeal—the worst of it, at least—also lasted three years. I had the distinct honor of meeting him at Oxford University in early June 2023, three months into his tenure as professor at Cambridge University. I was invited by my friend, Oxford University professor Stephen Tuck, to participate in a conversation with Dr. Chantelle Jessica Lewis, a sociologist in Black British studies who headed the “Race and Resistance” research program at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Lewis and Arday were friends and collaborators who coauthored, We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, a superb book published by Princeton University Press just last year. In fact, “Race and Resistance” brought together a small but tightknit community of Black British academics, all of whom admired Arday. It was clear why: he was very sweet, generous, genuinely humble, with a disarming smile. He also looked tired. He confided to Stephen and me that the hate mail and death threats began almost as soon as he was appointed. He was doing his best to survive the stress and strain of constant scrutiny under the unforgiving glare of the spotlight. In other words, the attack on Jason Arday did not begin a couple of months ago when right-wing eugenicist Nathan Cofnas accused him of plagiarizing his doctoral thesis, or when the press began questioning his entire personal narrative.

I do not need to repeat his story here. I only want to address two questions: what exactly were his “crimes” and how do they measure against some of our colleagues who committed more egregious violations of ethics and yet were rewarded? Why is Dr. Arday’s life, behavior, and possible missteps the focus of attention rather than the organized right-wing attack on him—and by extension, on all of us who work in fields related to critical race studies?

So, what were Jason Arday’s crimes? He lied or exaggerated about some things: how many successive marathons he ran and how much charity money he raised. He did run marathons and he did raise money for charity. He didn’t steal from charity or pretend to be a long-distance runner. What does any of this have to do with his scholarship or his credentials? Yes, he had a couple of books listed on his CV that he apparently never finished. But he did publish numerous articles, a co-edited book, a co-authored book, and a short monograph titled, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova (Routledge 2020). Cool Britannia is a study of racism and popular culture that tries to do for 1990s Britain what Paul Gilroy did for the 1970s and 1980s in his There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), but lacking Gilroy’s rich cultural analysis, scope, and sophistication. Comparing anyone’s first monograph to what is arguably a founding text of Black British Cultural Studies is completely unfair. Nevertheless, Arday produced a fine academic monograph. Perhaps his strongest work is the co-authored We See Things They’ll Never See, mentioned above.

He also co-edited with Heidi Safia Mirza, Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (2018), a collection of twenty-two essays exploring aspects of racism in higher education in the UK. Arday’s largely autobiographical essay, “Being Black, Male and Academic: Navigating the White Academy,” is in many ways a story foretold. It opens by discussing what most Black academics—myself included—know all too well: impostor syndrome. He writes, “there is a self-deprecating aspect of me which often queries whether I have the characteristics, capabilities and credentials traditionally associated with being an academic. Perhaps, my experiences in education and in some ways the deficit position I started from contribute to this particular view, in addition to the professional experiences I have encountered in academia.”

We are familiar with the “deficit position” to which he refers—diagnosed with autism, late speaker and reader, etc. But we are less familiar with his encounters in academia. In fact, the essay lays out a robust critique of DEI policies, drawing on Critical Race Theory to show how the implementation of diversity initiatives without addressing relations of power and the uncritical application of meritocracy “suggests that in fact universities are deepening and perpetuating inequitable cultures which reinforce poor diversification and racial inequality. This becomes contradictory of the egalitarian utopia espoused by universities, especially when they continue to create inequitable systems through recruitment processes.” (165) He applied for several senior academic posts over the years but was turned down almost every time.

To claim that Cambridge hired him only because they wanted a Black face belies his experience and that of nearly all Black scholars. He goes on to share stories of the sort of racism many if not most Black academics have faced on both sides of the Atlantic: white colleagues surprised by your capabilities; students questioning your credentials; and on the flip side, colleagues attributing your ability to connect with students to race as opposed to hard work (“being Black is the new cool” Arday was once told). He wrote of the “personal, mental and physical cost” academics of color, especially Black scholars, are forced to “endure for the entirety of their professional careers within academia.” (170) He concludes what might be obvious to most of us, but whose veracity is under attack: racism is endemic to the university and eliminating it requires transformative policies and politics.

The point is that Dr. Arday has done work—work that examines ongoing structural racism and ableism within the academy. Work that is, in fact, critical of DEI. Has he produced the most groundbreaking scholarship in his field? No. Is some of his work flawed? Of course. Whose work isn’t? The same can be said about a large number of his colleagues at Cambridge. This shouldn’t surprise anyone in academia, certainly not U.S. academics who work at institutions whose faculty and administrations are overrun with mediocre white dudes who earned tenure many years ago. The truth is, Jason Arday’s scholarship was serious, and like that of young scholars everywhere, uneven. It’s not that he was unqualified and Cambridge wanted window dressing. Rather, as historian Paul Tiyambe Zeleza observed, Cambridge chose to sell his story “through a narrative of adversity and triumph” rather than promote his work, turning him into a flag for their flagship rather than recognize his structural, organic role in the ship itself. He didn’t have to be perfect to hold that position, for if he had then we ought to scrutinize the entire faculty at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and so forth. He had the right to be good, thoughtful, and inventive, and to be wrong, mistaken, to fail sometimes in the work. And when there is pressure to publish a lot and quickly, one is bound to make more mistakes and to overlook more things.

I can tell you what Jason Arday did not do. He did not masquerade as a Black or Indigenous scholar in order to benefit from the financial and/or cultural capital that comes with assuming those identities. He did not lie about his degree. He did not make his own book required reading in his classes in order to generate sales. He did not steal from his students. When I was on the faculty at NYU, a white male colleague literally took the core idea and archival information from the prospectus of one of our graduate students and wrote an entire book, preempting her work and forcing her to significantly revise her project. He was rewarded with a National Book Award for said book. What happened in this instance may not have been plagiarism, but it surely was unethical and caused more harm than Arday copying a few passages from another dissertation without attribution.

But let’s talk about plagiarism. It is now fairly well-known that another Cambridge professor, historian William O’Reilly, had lifted large sections from two papers written by a student he was supervising for an article he published in the Journal of Austrian-American History (2018). The student filed a formal complaint in 2021 demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that O’Reilly stole their work and passed it off as his own, but the university tribunal concluded that O’Reilly’s use of the material was unintentional and therefore suspended him for one term. After being reinstated, O’Reilly was found to have committed several other acts of plagiarism, the most recent case exposed on the websitePubPeer just three weeks before Arday’s death.

The U.S. academy has had its share of high profile cases of plagiarism and lying, though who is held to account often depends on race and politics. Historian Jon Wiener wrote an excellent book, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower (2005) investigating a few of these cases. It is a book worth revisiting. He tells the story of Stephen Ambrose, a serial plagiarizer who made millions writing popular histories. Despite evidence of plagiarism in several of Ambrose’s books, it did not end his career or completely sully his reputation. Several colleagues came to his defense, including historians whose work he copied without attribution. All he really had to do was make a few public apologies. There is also the case of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys had lifted extensive passages from Lynne McTaggart’s book, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times (1983). Goodwin’s case was especially egregious because she paid McTaggart hush money to keep quiet about it and had her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. McTaggart not only readily agreed to profit from Goodwin’s ethical lapse, but she even wrote a respectful review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Fifteen years later, however, the secret agreement came to light, and Goodwin had to do damage control to protect her reputation. She hired a political consultant and got support from major historians (Wiener, pp. 184-185). Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, David Halberstam, John M. Blum, John Diggins, and Sean Wilentz were among the signatories to a letter published in the New York Times (October 25, 2003), refuting the charge of plagiarism since Goodwin “did not intentionally pass off someone else’s words as her own.” (Of course, unintentional plagiarism is still plagiarism.) In the end, the careers of Goodwin and McTaggart were not significantly impacted. Goodwin today is a multimillionaire.

Wiener also tells the story of Joseph Ellis, a leading historian of the American Revolution who, for years, told his students that he had fought in Vietnam as a platoon leader and paratrooper with the celebrated 101st Airborne Division, and served on General William C. Westmoreland’s staff in Saigon. After his discharge, Ellis claimed, he became active in the antiwar movement and went to Mississippi to fight for civil rights. None of it was true. He was in ROTC in college but deferred active duty after he was admitted to Yale’s graduate program. He later taught history at West Point and spent two months in an officer’s training course but the only “combat” or protest he saw was in his imagination. (Wiener, p. 168-70)

When the Boston Globe exposed his lavish lies in a 2001 article, leading historians, the New York Times editorial board, Judith Shulevitz in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and other prominent figures gave him a pass, either downplaying the impact his fantasies may have had on his students or the profession or insisting that he is such a good historian that his lies should not be held against him. Jack Beatty published a puff piece in the Atlantic castigating the Globe’s exposé as “a front-page mugging,” unwarranted for someone who is not “a public figure.” (How a major prize-winning historian is not a public figure defies explanation.) All that should matter, Beatty insisted, is the quality of his work which was “beyond reproach.” (Wiener, pp. 174-75) The problem with this argument is that teaching is also part of the “work.”

Ellis faced some consequences: one year of unpaid leave from his position at Mt. Holyoke, the temporary loss of his endowed chair, and a ban on teaching courses on Vietnam. Even after the story broke and his punishment was announced, Ellis learned that his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, won the Pulitzer Prize in History. By 2005, his chair had been reinstated, and all was forgiven. He would go on to publish eight more books, including one just last year: The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding (2025), which merely repeats what scholars of slavery, dispossession, Black and indigenous history have been writing for decades. Actually, that’s being charitable because Ellis doesn’t exactly argue that slavery and dispossession were foundational to the development of the early republic but asks why the founders “failed” to end slavery and the theft of Native lands.

Why anyone would pose the question this way suggests that he did not want to back pedal from decades of praising the “founding fathers” as visionaries. In a review of The Great Contradiction, Gerald Horne wryly takes Ellis to task for having spent his entire career ignoring scholars of Black and Indigenous history and suddenly concluding that slavery and dispossession were problems for the early Republic. “One such area where I wish Ellis had gone further is in resurrecting the other side of his tale,” Horne writes, “those Black writers, past and present, who sought to raise searching questions about the republic’s roots. . . . In general, a deeper appreciation of Black studies and the scholarship it has produced would have aided The Great Contradiction immeasurably.” My point here is that Joseph Ellis not only got a pass after his serial lying escapades but continued to reap rewards from the profession and then profit from a slim volume covering ground generations of Black and Indigenous scholars had examined without citing most of them—Horne included.

To be clear, I’m not dismissing the charge that Arday may have plagiarized but rather suggesting that we all should be held to the same standard. It’s curious to me how Arday is being touted as an undeserving beneficiary of special treatment for the sake of diversity, when white celebrity historians have consistently benefited from the “affirmative action” of powerful public figures and institutions. The robust defense of their own unethical behavior is unearned and unwarranted . . . and yet, here we are. Besides, white scholars (except for Marxists) are treated as individuals whose mistakes are merely individual human foibles, whereas the errors and missteps of Black scholars are more often than not treated as an indictment of “the race,” evidence of the folly of DEI. This is Nathan Cofnas’s thesis and the reason why he targeted Dr. Jason Arday in the first place.

Nathan Cofnas is a U.S.-born, third-rate researcher and open racist who peddles theories of hereditarianism. A throwback to the early 20^th century, he uses IQ test scores and brain size as evidence and cites the thoroughly discredited work of Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. In 2019, the journal Philosophical Psychology published an article of his promoting a correlation between race and intelligence that was so bad, so poorly argued and sourced that the journal’s editor was forced to resign. But Cofnas is not concerned with advancing scholarship; he has a political agenda. In April 2023, he published an essay on the “Heterodox STEM” blog titled “How to Take Back Academia.” The culprit is “wokeism” and Jason Arday was one of several targets. The most effective way to crush wokeism, he argues, is to purge the academy of leftists and unqualified minorities. These people have taken over higher education because they were hired illegally over far better qualified white men. “Many of these people have nothing to contribute to scholarship,” he writes, “and are only here to push their ideological agenda. The activists are now so numerous that it has become almost impossible to be hired by a university without their approval. If they are allowed to control graduate admissions and faculty hiring for another generation, it is game over. From our perspective, there is no path to success that doesn’t involve removing the activist non-scholars from these decision-making processes.” How? By a right-wing revolution lead by the Republican Party: “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and activist Christopher Rufo are leading the effort to use political power to advance our cause.”

It is not hard to imagine what it feels like to believe you’re superior to an autistic Black person on Cambridge University’s faculty and you can’t land a tenure-track job. But Nathan Cofnas and his backers were not operating out of jealousy—at least not entirely. Cofnas is no crackpot, and Jason Arday’s demise was no accident. He was a target of a broader, international white nationalist assault. Many of us have seen this coming for years, but it is hard to see so long as the Jason Arday’s of the world are treated as spectacle, the object of gossip and speculation, while “good” white scholars are not only able to weather scandal and ethical lapses but continue to reap rewards.

Nevertheless, she was subjected to vicious public attacks by the group Accuracy in Media, which formed a fake organization called UC Irvine Hates Jews. She endured rape and death threats, doxxing, and a billboard truck driving around campus displaying her picture alongside a caption labeling her one of “UC-Irvine’s Leading Antisemites.” The university administration not only allowed the billboard truck free rein but did nothing to protect Professor Willoughby-Herard, one of its most distinguished faculty members. Instead, the university brought her up on charges of violating the faculty code of conduct.

What does that mean? A committee appointed by UCI’s academic senate had to decide if Professor Willoughby-Herard had, among other things, intentionally disrupted university authorized functions or activities, incited others to disobey university rules, forcibly detained or threatened to physically harm another member of the university community, or engaged in abusive and/or unethical conduct. The charges were ridiculous. Still, they handed down a split decision: two members of the three-person committee found her guilty of some charges and recommended a one quarter unpaid suspension and the inclusion of a letter of censure in her file that would be removed after five years. The other committee member voted against any sanction. During her suspension, she would retain all of her rights and privileges as a senate faculty member and continue to meet with her graduate students.

For Chancellor Gillman, however, the punishment was not enough. He unilaterally overrode the committee’s recommendations, denying Professor Willoughby-Herard access to campus, including the library, and stripping her of her faculty voting rights, her right to supervise graduate students, and all of her healthcare benefits. Consider what this means for someone who is not only recovering from serious, life-altering injuries caused by police violence but who also suffers from long-term chronic health issues. It is beyond cruel; it is vindictive. And yet, it is not surprising for those of us who have worked with Chancellor Gillman. He is the face of the new University of California (well, maybe not-so-new….). He holds the vaunted position as Chancellor precisely because he has a track record of crushing dissent, adopting corporate-oriented policies, protecting the university’s bottom line at the expense of intellectual growth and “diversity.” In 2013, when Irvine recruited Gillman from USC (my former institution) to become Executive Vice-Chancellor, a large group of UCI faculty sought to block his appointment but did not prevail. His racist, sexist, and politically motivated treatment of Professor Willoughby-Herard is consistent with past behavior and in lockstep with the University of California’s attack on dissent and free speech. Ironically, Gillman’s latest book is Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Erwin Chemerinsky, published this year by Yale University Press (an updated version of their Free Speech on Campus [2017]).

A committee of concerned faculty circulated a petition, which has more than 5,000 signatures, demanding that the university immediately drop all disciplinary sanctions against Professor Willoughby-Herard. You can sign that petition here. And while you’re at it, consider writing Chancellor Gillman at chancellor@uci.edu demanding that he drop the charges. If you do write him, please bcc: tiffanysolidaritycommittee@gmail.com

It is important to document these letters, not because we believe they will persuade him to suddenly become an ethical and just administrator, but rather to ramp up mass political pressure on UCI and the University of California system as a whole. He needs to be removed. Above all, we want all sanctions against our colleague lifted and all back salary paid immediately.

Finally, Professor Willoughby-Herard is facing a dire financial situation. Currently, she will have no income until the end of the calendar year, she has no medical insurance, and her legal fees are insurmountable. She needs help now! You can help provide much needed financial support by donating here

You can also help by spreading the word, especially to those outside the bubble of academia. These people are coming for all of us, not just academics and activists. And they don’t all look like Trump and Stephen Miller. Sometimes they come in the guise of free speech champions and liberal constitutional scholars.

But if this is a national fight for democracy, history teaches us that we can’t win without the South. Every significant struggle for democracy and freedom in settler occupied turtle island began in the South. I’m not exaggerating. In 1739, thirty-four years before the Boston Tea Party, there was the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, a revolutionary movement to end bondage everywhere, organized and executed by kidnapped Africans themselves. And the South, during Reconstruction, was the first attempt to make this country a multiracial democracy, only to be overthrown by violence, terror, and the installation of Jim Crow. Southern labor and civil rights struggles lit a fire under the rest of the nation, and Memphis happened to be an epicenter of both movements. Even the current wave of left candidates has southern roots. The year 2013 marked a turning point, not because Bill DeBlasio became mayor of New York (DeBlasio, by the way, is no Mamdani, not by a longshot), but because the people of Jackson, Mississippi, elected longtime revolutionary Chokwe Lumumba mayor of that city.

Justin J. Pearson’s run to represent Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional district is one of the most consequential races in the country, and yet the media has almost nothing to say about it. (The primary is August 6) He’s gotten endorsements from Bernie Sanders, AOC, the Working Families Party, and the Justice Democrats. The 31-year-old Memphis native is progressive, ethical, thoughtful, and committed to working people and the poor. His agenda focuses on addressing our vast and growing wealth inequality, raising the minimum wage, affordable housing, healthcare, gun violence legislation, environmental justice, opposing AI data centers, as well as defending what’s left of representative democracy. He refuses to accept corporate PAC money, has spoken out against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and opposes U.S. militarism. He told a writer for The Nation, “I’m not going to be supporting the sending of billions in bombs overseas, when people in my own district—their houses are sinking, and their kids are hungry. It always amazes me that America will always find billions and billions to fight wars, but won’t do anything like that to fight poverty and hunger.”

Justin is also brilliant speaker with a proven track record as a member of Tennessee’s House of Representatives. In April 2023, just months after he and fellow representative Justin Jones had taken office, they were expelled for protesting the Republican-dominated legislature’s failure to pass gun law reforms in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville that left six dead. (Gloria Johnson representing a district in Knoxville also participated in the protest but the motion to expel her lost by one vote.) The expulsion was completely unconstitutional and racist, but both Justins easily won back their seats in a special election held that August. Despite the Right’s effort to silence them, Jones and Pearson made national news by standing with the families of the victims of the massacre and for delivering eloquent, bold, and courageous speeches from the well of the chamber and outside the state house, calling out the callous and undemocratic actions of their colleagues.

Justin had been fighting for justice since he was a fifteen-year-old student petitioning the local board of education for new textbooks for his school. I first heard him speak in 2021 at an online convening called “Breaking Up the Solid South,” where he represented Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, an organization he co-founded that stopped major oil companies from building a 49-mile pipeline through the predominantly Black community of southwest Memphis. He was then, and remains, an active member in the Poor People’s Campaign, founded by Reverend William J. Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis. A year later, on April 4^th to be exact, we were both speakers on a panel commemorating the 55th Anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, pathbreaking speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was an amazing event, organized mainly by folks at the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center in Detroit and panelists including Andrea J. Ritchie, Crystal Cavalier, Nse Ufot, Stephen Ward, and the legendary organizer Zohara Simmons. Even over Zoom, Justin was transcendent and inspiring, possessed of the spirit of Reverend King and Ella Baker but the sensibilities of his generation. I remember he announced his intentions to run for the Tennessee House of Representatives. He was expelled exactly one year and two days later.

Justin Pearson is special, to be sure, but his campaign is significant for other reasons. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s obliteration of the Voting Rights Act, the Republican-controlled state legislature sliced up the ninth congressional district in order to eliminate the state’s only majority Black (and therefore Democratic) district. Under the new maps, all nine of the state’s congressional districts now lean Republican. Moreover, Memphis is quite literally under martial law. The Trump administration’s so-called Memphis Safe Task Force, a domestic military force that includes members of the Tennessee National Guard and personnel from over a dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshalls, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Drug Enforcement Agency. The Task Force is responsible for killing four Black men just since May: Darrin Pigram, Jonah Neal, Tyrin Johnson, and Alfonso Ivy.

Tennessee may not be a swing state, but that doesn’t make this election any less critical—both for the country and for the people of Memphis. We need organizers like Justin Pearson, not because electoral politics will save us or stop fascism in its tracks. Rather, Justin understands what former Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant, arguably the most effective socialist to hold political office in the 21^st century, had demonstrated in action: that the only way to govern on behalf of the mass of working people is by mobilizing class power outside the halls of government, not by making backdoor deals and offering milquetoast compromises. Justin’s politics are grounded in principle, not the slick maneuvering that has come to define the Democratic party.

Speaking before a gathering of the Poor People’s Campaign just a few days ago, he told the crowd: “I’m a seventh-generation Tennessean, and a Matthew 25 American and public servant. And to me, that means there’s nothing more patriotic than fighting with everything you got for the least of these. To make the best place in the world for everybody. And when we say everybody, we mean everybody.”

To learn more about Justin J. Pearson and support his campaign, go here Please give what you can and spread the word.

If the history of music is a struggle for freedom, imagination, the liquidation of all barriers and boundaries, then the future is here. Greg Tate’s latest project, “Burnt Sugar (The Arkestra Chamber)” is the big band of the new millenium. Flexing at times to over a dozen on the bandstand, “Burnt Sugar” is a kind of gypsy band of young musical masters (regulars and guests) who mess with all manner of electric and acoustic instruments—Michael Morgan Craft, Rene Akhan, Kirk Douglass, Vernon Reid among the electric guitarists, Nioka Workman working the cello, Suphala on tablas, drummers Swiss Criss and Qasim Naqvi, Vijay Iyer on piano, Bruce Mack synthesizing, bassists Jason di Matteo, Jared Nickerson, Maximina Juson, Lewis Flip Barnes on trumpet, Micah Gaugh on tenor, a flock of floutists including Atiba Wilson, Monet Dunham, Satch Hoyt, various vocalists—singers, poets, moaners and hummers—ranging from Justice X, Lisala Beatty, Eisa Davis, Shariff Simmons, to Latasha Natasha Diggs, and DJ Mutamassik on the “wheels of steel,” and still too many music-makers to mention.

Burnt Sugar is Tate’s extension of Bitches Brew, what we might call his homage to Miles Davis. And he is committed to building on what Miles started in the late 1960s—groove-based, funky, free improvisation rooted in a true musical conversation rather than a dozen cats all talking at once. Tate, who plays guitar but primarily occupies the conductor’s spot, moves his musicians in and out of the groove in the manner of a DJ. What the artists bring to the groove, however, is improvised, generating fresh spontaneous responses from other instrumentalists/voices as well as from Tate himself.

We can hear the process so clearly on “Sirens of Triton” from Burnt Sugar’s debut album, Blood on the Leaf (2001). After calling for Vijay Iyer’s spare, funky acoustic piano solo, Tate gradually surrounds him with rich, thick textures from electric guitars, synthesizer, and electronic and acoustic percussion. “Gnawalickenlallibella” opens in 6/4 time with Iyer’s steady arppegios overlaid with “choked” staccato lines from electric guitar and synthesizer, giving the song the feel of needle on vinyl. Three minutes later here comes Swiss Chris banging out drum n’ bass beats, until Tate moves the band into another mode where the guitars sound like sitars playing scales reminiscent of an Indian raga. The amazing thing about Tate’s concept is the way it draws on aesthetics of sampling and yet it is completely improvised instrumental music.

Burnt Sugar’s follow-up 3-CD release, That Depends on What You Know, has really thrown a wrench into the increasingly calcified “jazz canon.” “Two Bass Blipsch” from disc 1 (an obvious reference to John Lewis and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Two Bass Hit”) opens with Vijay Iyer playing the piano strings with such rhythmic precision that it sounds like it’s been “looped”; once Tate brings the drums in percussion becomes the improvisational driving force. While everything is improvised, Tate uses conduction to create particular conversations and dialogues, as in the way he brings out Eisa Davis’s voice interpolating triplet figures.

The masterpiece in all this innovative music is their thirty-eight minute “Fubractive Since Antiquity Suite.” Built on a repeated North African-sounding chant that is “remixed” or rather “reconducted” several times over in different rhythms, tempos, instrumentation, it too is completely improvised while conveying a kind of turntablist texture or sensibility. Tate understands that rhythm is everything, it’s the lifeblood of the music; it’s the rhythm that drives the entire suite. Part III, for example, is an exciting contrapuntal marriage between drum n’ bass rhythms, piano obligato, Vernon Reid’s monster solo, nicely interrupted by a bass line that travels from the Dirty Dozens brass band to old school (read: Negro) 50s Rock and Roll to heavy funk to heavier metal. Segue into Part IV, a dense funk groove with a lot of conduction going on. As a result, we hear in the final section of the suite what Miles always tried to achieve when he told his band members to improvise by asking a question and then answering it.

We also hear something else: that sampled music and computer programs will never replace live musicians playing tonal instruments, for the spontaneity, experimentation, imagination, and the wonderful mistakes improvisation generates can never be replaced. New technology can certainly enrich possibilities for new modes of improvisation, and it has already shaped the way musicians with open ears have approached improvisation. But there’s no substitute for the raw, natural smell of burnt sugar.

The students didn’t know what hit them. For the second lecture, “Hegemony, Opposition, and Memory: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives on Popular Culture,” I paired Tate’s essay, “Cult Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” with articles by Stuart Hall (“Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”) and George Lipsitz (”Popular Culture: This Ain’t No Sideshow”). Maybe it was a lot, but in those days the study of Black culture was serious business. Students struggled with “Cult Nats” because it addressed complex issues on such a sophisticated level, and in prose so hip it could only be described as interstellar. Tate’s erudition sent them to the library; his writing made them want to move to New York. Here is how he ended that essay:

The future of black culture demands that this generation bring forth a worldly-wise and stoopidfresh intelligentsia of radical bups who can get as ignant as James Brown with their Wangs and stay in the black. Give me such an army and we’ll be talking total cultural black rule by the time the eco-system collapses, SDI bottoms out Fort Knox, the Aryan Brotherhood is officially in the White House, and Wall Street is on the moon. (Flyboy, pp. 236-237)

[For the uninitiated, ‘bups’ is short for buppies, SDI stands for Strategic Defense Initiative, the Reagan administration’s expensive fantasy of waging war in space dubbed “Star Wars.” We thought no one would be that stupid to try and resurrect that idea.]

Funny to read that today. Turns out it was no joke. More like a premonition that has come to pass—all except for the part about “total cultural black rule.” Greg wasn’t being serious about that part because he continually warned of the culture’s vulnerabilities to both theft and weaponization. The powers that be as well as the deluded white folks who believe they share in the power will take, occupy, and claim Black culture. Everything But the Burden, y’all! So maybe we didn’t take power, but our culture is everywhere, selling stuff while being the perennial punching bag to shore up white supremacy and class rule. I mean, Dylann Roof loved hip hop music, and the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, rocked James Brown. (I can only imagine what Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas were digging as they plotted our disfranchisement.)

Tricia Rose’s articles simply blew my students’ minds. They came into the class thinking nobody can’t tell them nuthin’ ‘bout hip hop, but she forced them to think, to listen deeply, listen differently. She laid out how the wedding of technology and oral traditions have been central to understanding the dynamism of Black music-making--not only in contemporpary times but throughout the history of the African Diaspora. Her critique of Western music and investigation into the inventive uses of technology in the studio brought to light aspects of Hip Hop no one had sufficiently talked about. And her approach to gender did not simply treat women as objects but as agents. Two years later, April 1994, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, came out, inaugurating the field of critical Hip Hop Studies. Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Musicology has never been the same.

The simultaneous reissue of Flyboy in the Buttermilk by FSG, and Black Noise, in its 30^th anniversary edition, marks an epic moment. First, these books were born together, in love and struggle against a neoliberal culture that generated greater precarity, insecurity, police violence, and wealth inequality, while cashing in on Black culture’s rising market share. They were also part of an incredible Black cultural renaissance in New York at the time (one you can read about in Michaela angela Davis’s beautiful memoir, Tenderheaded). These are landmark texts that should be required reading by anyone who wants to understand modern popular culture, the United States, and that moment at the end of the 20^th century when Black thought, art, and creativity were at the center of the world.

Both books are personal for me because Tricia and Greg were friends, comrades, and teachers of mine. Tricia and I met in the spring of 1987, at a conference in Chicago for graduate students who were recipients of the Dorothy Danforth Compton Fellowship—back when funding aimed at so-called minorities was still legal. The purpose of the conference was to “professionalize” (or discipline, take your pick) us so we could enter the professoriate with the proper manners and habits. Our shared unruliness made us fast friends. As I wrote in my foreword to the 30^th anniversary edition of Black Noise, “I found in Tricia a fellow renegade, less interested in the requirements of tenure or disciplinary boundaries than in understanding and transforming Black lives, like the people she grew up with in the Bronx. She was then, and still is, a force of nature, whose intellectual acumen and energy was unmatched and boundless. She could school and slay simultaneously, sometimes with a single retort that left you questioning your entire education. Brilliant, funny, dynamic, brutally honest, she was—bar none—the hippest academic I’d ever met.” And we both loved hip hop, which in those days was still in its infancy.

Black Noise is a book to read and re-read. The new edition (which you can purchase directly from her website: www.triciarose.com) also includes beautiful essays by Marc Lamont Hill, Nasir Marumo, George Lipsitz, and Andre C. Willis, as well an interactive feature that connects new readers to this extraordinary musical archive. However, I want to encourage you all to read—actually take the time to read. The book is as relevant as it was 32 years ago. Here is another except from my foreword:

The book appeared at a moment when debates were raging inside and outside of the academy over Black popular music and its role in representing Blackness. At the heart of these debates was whether or not we can speak of an “authentic” Black culture. By insisting on Black culture’s dynamic hybridity and critiquing the notion of Black music as a kind of spiritual transcendence whose essence remains somewhat constant over the centuries, Tricia avoids the trap of claiming that black music possesses some kind of timeless, transhistorical essence. Indeed, by emphasizing culture as a social and aesthetic practice deployed by, rather than embedded in, Black people, she bypassed debates over the problem of authenticity, the definition of the “Black aesthetic,” and whether the concept was essentialist, anti-essentialist, or anti-anti-essentialist, and other such cul-de-sacs, thus opening the way for a conception of Black creativity as capacious, elastic, and multiplicitous. Black Noise demonstrates, for example, how Hip Hop’s political and ideological variations render any definition of “rap’s politics” elusive. Tricia never succumbs to simple “either/or” binaries. She deals with rap’s misogyny and its feminism, it’s opposition to and celebration of the marketplace, and the most vexing binary of all: whether Hip Hop is a site of resistance or co-optation.

I first met Greg Tate at Tricia’s apartment in New York. I remember it was the third week of October 1993, because our little trio—my wife at the time, Diedra Harris-Kelley and our three-year-old daughter Elleza—was in the city celebrating Tricia’s birthday (October 18). Among the many guests at her crib that night was Me’shell NdegéOcello and her young son who was about Elleza’s age. She had just released her debut album, “Plantation Lullabies,” that very week. Me’shell had been a member of Tate’s band, Women in Love. I remember Tate talking about her album, about critic Armond White, and then went on about this new rapper who was about to change the game, how his phrasing and use of language was unlike anything he had heard. His advocacy was uncharacteristic because Greg was rarely effusive with his praise. This kid, he explained, grew up with the music; his dad was cornetist/bluesman Olu Dara. Some were intrigued, others skeptical. About eight months later this kid, Nasir Jones, dropped his debut album “Illmatic.”

When my family finally moved to NYC three years later, we became part of Greg’s big circle of friends, admirers, and interlocutors.

Greg helped me become a better writer, a sharper observer, and discerning listener, and I like to think I was his favorite source of arcane and obscure historical knowledge about revolutionary Negroes. I’d run into him on the streets often and we’d end up engrossed in conversation for sometimes an hour or more. These were Tate’s office hours, so to speak. He and Arthur Jafa and Michaela angela Davis would occasionally drop by our apartment in the Village. When I taught a seminar on Thelonious Monk and American culture at Columbia University, Greg came just about every week. Whenever his various bands were playing in the city, we were always there. I was completely enamored with his ensemble, Burnt Sugar, which was more than a band. It was/is a phenomenon, a living monument to Black music and all that it has swallowed up over the last 400 years. I wrote an essay on Burnt Sugar, which was really a love letter. You can read here:

There is more to say about Greg. Soon after he passed, I did a conversation with South African writer Bongani Madondo about Greg’s brilliance and his legacy, including the significance of Flyboy, which you can read here:

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such tributes and remembrances and conversations about the genius child everybody loved. But in the end, the greatest tribute is the reissue of Flyboy in the Buttermilk, because to know Greg Tate is to read him. Long form, short form, any form. He not only had something to say about the culture—all of it—but he had a way of expressing it that no AI program will ever be able to replicate. I mean, he birthed an entire generation of writers who have tried to emulate his style and failed—though their efforts did raise the bar for the next generation of self-anointed cultural critics. In that way, Greg was like Thelonious Monk.

No one, for example, listened to Cecil Taylor like Greg. As he wrote in 1983, he was fond of Cecil’s solo piano work because it had “Debussyan decorum and Chopinesque restraint going for it, such Ellingtonian sweep and Monkish symmetry, such Worrellian grace noting and Theraconian movement. Not to mention a quality of calm-in-motion akin to Aikido that may say much about being black and by yourself in Japan at 2:30 in the morning making music that does not speak for itself alone. Music that in its transmutation of virtuoso technique into articulate syllables and jabberwocky in the same breath reminds me more of Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three’s strafing and swooping rap-off “The New Rap Language” than any other music I can compare it to.” (Flyboy, p. 16)

And in his meditation on Miles Davis’s electric turn, he writes that the difference between, records such as Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, and In a Silent Way, and his master work, Bitches Brew, is akin to comparing Alex Haley’s Roots and Gabriel García Márquez’s novels:

Where Haley prosaically told a people’s hellish collective history and redemption, Márquez through more poetic language uses history as a means into his folk’s collective unconscious, that Jungian hideaway where the spooks really sit beside the doors to the kingdoms of heaven and hell. Where J.B. and especially Jimi and Sly took music isn’t something that can be summed up in a few quotidian riffs any more than a Márquez novel can be experienced through synopses. It’s at once a thought process, a textural language, and a way of reordering tradition and myth unto itself. On evidence of Bitches Brew and the music thereafter, Miles seems to have believed that to go as out there as them he would first have to lose some ego and enter their worlds not as a master but as a disciple. And in time as he became a master of their language, he would affirm Jung’s observation that in ritual sacrifice, the sacrificer gives of himself to become one with the sacrificee.” (Flyboy, pp. 71-72)

Lastly, as critical as he was of Amiri Baraka in his later years (an assessment I disagreed with—though I might be alone in my appreciation for Baraka’s Marxist-Leninist period!), few wrote about him with such clarity and love as Greg Tate:

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned from the breadth, depth, and volume of Baraka’s work is not unlike the one I learned from Langston Hughes. Which is: Yes, my sister/brother, you can actually make a career out of vexing the King’s English until it speaks in tongues. Even more instructive has been Baraka’s recombinant splicing of black life and Western literary modernism, which sez yo, homegirl/homeboy, you can talk that arty talk and walk that walk, slide in your stride, zip in your hip; so go on ’head with your baad self, mix that intellectual shit in with a few healthy doses of yang and you’ll still be cool.” (Flyboy, p. 188).

What Greg learned from Baraka, many of us learned from Greg. For the young people, Greg Tate still has much to teach us. So stop scrolling and check out Flyboy in the Buttermilk and Black Noise for yourself.