Wellesley Writes It: Interview with Dr. Crystal M. Fleming ‘04 (@alwaystheself ) on her new book, HOW TO BE LESS STUPID ABOUT RACE
Crystal Marie Fleming, PhD, is a writer and sociologist who researches racism in the United States and abroad. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University and is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming writes about race, sexuality, and politics for publications including The Root, Black Agenda Report, Vox, and Everyday Feminism, among others, and she has tens of thousands of followers on social media. She is the author of Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, which was published by Temple University Press in 2017, and How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide, which was published this past fall by Beacon Press. Dr. Fleming is also writing a children’s book Rise Up! How You Can Join the Fight Against Racism, to be published by Henry Holt in fall 2020.
Wellesley Underground Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Shelly Anand, and Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes It Series Editor, E.B. Bartels, had the opportunity to speak with Crystal about her new book, her evolving education around race and racism at Wellesley and Harvard, and her thoughts on the state of race and racism in the U.S., France, and the world.
Crystal: Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my book and to feature it on Wellesley Underground.
Shelly: We saw people talking about it on Twitter and both E.B. and I had a chance to read it over the holidays.
Crystal: Thank you for reading it!
E.B.: Of course! I am always excited to read a book by a fellow Wellesley alum.
Shelly: We were both interested in hearing about your process for how this book came about and when you realized that you wanted to write it. How did you make this book become a reality? What sparked the idea of I need to write a book about how people need to be less stupid about race?
Crystal: The short version is after the 2016 election I was feeling a lot of things: disbelief, despair, and anger, but also really motivated to write a book for the general public. My first book, Resurrecting Slavery, was an academic book, which was based on my dissertation. That came out in 2017. And while I was really happy with that professional milestone, I didn’t want to restrict my writing to a small group of academic specialists. So, I wanted to write something for a broader audience but I wasn’t sure what it was going to be. Then, finally, the idea for How to Be Less Stupid About Race crystallized in the aftermath of the 2016 election. As you can tell from the title, it was really about me being fed up with a lot of the racial ignorance I saw across the political spectrum. After I came up with the title and the pitch, I found a literary agent (Michael Bourret of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret), wrote a chapter that spring, and then really completed the bulk of the writing between summer 2017 and early 2018.
Shelly: E.B. and I loved the book’s blend of your personal experiences, pop cultural references, and citations to academic works in sociology and critical race theory. How did you find the balance in what voice to use, as both an academic and a younger black woman on social media?
Crystal: That’s a good question. I would say that blogging and social media really helped me bring together the academic topics with language that could, hopefully, reach more people. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to write clearly about my scholarly work and interests on social media, where millions of people have read my writing over the years. I wanted to write beyond an academic context so my blog was a space for me to reactivate my creative writing and to share some of my thinking in public and that was very different from strictly academic manuscripts. Once I started writing on my blog, and then eventually on Twitter, I developed a new way of distilling and explaining really complex ideas.
The great thing with social media is that people will tell you what they think about what you are writing. Sometimes folks will ask you: “What do you mean by that?” That helps with that distilling and clarifying. I started getting feedback from people and what I found was that a lot of people understood what I was saying, which was pretty reassuring.
Academics usually don’t receive any special training for writing in an accessible manner, so it took me a long time to develop that skill and find my own voice. I really wish graduate schools and doctoral programs included more opportunities to learn to write clearly so that academics can broaden our teaching and impact, but instead we typically learn to write with a lot of jargon.
E.B.: Shelly and I also were hoping you could talk more about your academic work, before you started writing for a broader audience.
Shelly: Yeah, we were both also really interested in your dissertation and your research on white supremacy in France.
Crystal: Really?
Shelly: Yes! I’ve been to Europe and have experienced racism there as a brown woman. In France, people have always assumed that I am of North African descent. When I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me, and read all his glowing passages about the “lack of racism” in France, I got really annoyed.
Crystal: Me too!
Shelly: Coates didn’t touch on what Algerian French, Moroccan French folks have gone through. What Muslim French have gone through.
Crystal: Or black French people, right?
Shelly: Right, absolutely. You touched on this topic in your book a bit, but we wanted to hear your thoughts about this widely lauded writer, particularly on topics of race, glossing over the black French experience in his book.
Crystal: I found that part of Coates’s book annoying as well, but also pretty typical. I also understand it as a genre of African-American expat writing that fits well into the narrative white French people want to tell about their country. Coates is far from the first first black American writer to go to France or some European country and feel that they are experiencing some personal liberation from U.S.-style racism. That’s a long history.
Shelly: Yes, he definitely adopted from Baldwin. That was another question I had.
Crystal: Baldwin though was more sophisticated in many ways in terms of his racial analysis and his analysis of racism in France. I don’t agree with everything he says about racism in France. One of the things he said that was that the Arab or North African is “the n****r of France,” which is problematic because it erases black French people and France’s history of enslaving Africans and their descendants and building the world’s largest plantation economy and what would later become Haiti. But, nevertheless, Baldwin did have analysis of French racism. I know that Ta-Nehisi Coates has some awareness of it, but, in his book, I didn’t see any rigorous engagement with the work and experience of French people of color or prominent black French writers, for example, with Franz Fanon, to just name one black French intellectual, activist, and anti-imperialist who has been widely ignored in France but is well known in Francophone studies outside of France. So I was disappointed, but I was not surprised. It’s part of a long tradition. It’s understandable for me, but it’s lamentable, this tradition of black U.S. citizens myopically focusing on how well they are being treated and not paying attention to the racialized minorities, most of whom are there in Europe because of a colonial and racist relationship.
E.B.: So, while we are criticizing Coates, another critique of Between the World and Me is that he was writing it for a white liberal audience. I know a lot of black people who have read his book felt like he wasn’t writing anything new, and clearly he was pandering to and writing for this white liberal crowd. You said that with your newest book you were trying to write for the general public, but who was the intended audience of your book?
Crystal: That’s a great question, thank you. I wanted to shift from a strictly academic audience to a broader audience to help educate and inspire people to mobilize against racism. But the way that I write, the tone that I take, the nature of my critique, the fact that I am wig-snatching people across the political spectrum, I thought, Wow, I am going to alienate a lot of people. I have no idea what kind of reader is going to be ready for this. I wanted to write the book for myself first and foremost, and I wanted to express what I had to say about racism and white supremacy and what I know about the topic from studying it in a way that was authentic to my style and that was reflective of my values and knowledge. I wanted to be uncompromising in that. But I also knew because my style includes occasional cursing and sentiments like fuck the New York Times, all of that presents a certain kind of challenge in figuring out who your readership is going to be. Although I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of reader could roll with my punches, I had some reason to believe there was an audience for this book. One was my community of enthusiastic readers on social media. Having tens of thousands of followers, as well as millions of readers, engaging and supporting my writing has been very powerful for me as an author. And I also had a lot of brilliant academic colleagues, scholars and experts on race and racism, who encouraged me to write the book and told me it was necessary. My girlfriend also encouraged me throughout the process, when I worried about how the book would land with audiences. To tell the truth, I’ve pleasantly surprised––throughout the book tour, and seeing people react to the book online––that it has indeed resonated with quite a few people. And that has been surprising to me, because I didn’t know who those people would be and I was sort of hoping they would exist! The response has been incredibly positive. The book has only been out a few months and it’s already sold thousands of copies!
To answer your question: It was not my intention to write to only a white liberal audience. The book explores my own reflexivity and my own difficulties dealing with and understanding these issues as a black woman, so my imagined audience included people like me: black folks and people of color, because we have a learning process, too. As I say in the book, no one is born woke, and no one is except from internalization of racial ignorance. We all have work to do. And for those reasons, I didn’t want to just write this for white people.
E.B.: Thanks for explaining that, Crystal. I always feel like you can tell the best writing is when the writer is writing for themselves, and people who get it, will get it.
Crystal: It’s tough though! Part of me wants to find the widest possible readership. Everyone wants to have a bestselling book, of course. But, ultimately, I am committed to saying what I have to say and in the way I need to say it. If you can hang with me and engage with what I have to share, that’s great. If not, it is what it is. I’m not religious, but I did grow up in a Pentecostal church, so, to paraphrase Jesus: “Whoever has ears to hear me, let them hear.” What’s really paramount is knowing that I have my integrity, which for any writer or artist or creative is really the most important thing.
Shelly: You were very self-reflective in your book about on your education in critical race theory. We were wondering about your education at Wellesley. You talked about coming into your own in terms of critical race theory in your 30s, ten years after your graduation from Wellesley. So how did your education at Wellesley start or not start that process for you? And what should Wellesley be doing to help students learn about these issues sooner rather than a decade after graduating?
Crystal: My time at Wellesley laid the foundation in very important ways, for my understanding critical race theory years down the line. When I write and speak about my education, I often say some pretty critical things about my experience at Harvard. Comparatively, I have much fonder memories about my undergrad education, though I can’t say I was particularly happy socially at Wellesley. But I learned about systemic racism for the first time at a sociology class at Wellesley and that was life changing for me. I took a course on African-American Sociology with Professor (emeritus) Judith Rollins, a black woman sociologist, and the course introduced me to the works of W.E.B. Dubois and other black sociologists and critical thinkers. At the time, I did not have the historical and political literacy to understand the significance of all that work at the time, but it was an opening for me and it paved the way for me to eventually deepen my knowledge of race, racism, and white supremacy. For example, we had to read to read a book in Dr. Rollins’s class entitled The Death of White Sociology, an anthology that came out in the ’70s and, it appeared to me, I was twenty-one at the time, to be a super radical text. I didn’t understand why black sociologists had to write a book challenging “white sociology”. I didn’t realize the extent to which white scholars imposed their epistemological frames and practices to the exclusion and marginalization of black people and people of color. It would really take me a number of years to really understand what occurred in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. It was an era where it became increasingly difficult to discuss white supremacy because of the rise of empty rhetoric around diversity and inclusion, the myth that we have already arrived in post-racial america. As I learned much later, this was exactly the problem that critical race theorists were dealing with when the legal system and political culture pretends to be color blind.
The Death of White Sociology is really not taught widely outside of Black Studies and African-American Sociology courses that very few people take in school. I am one of just a handful of professional sociologist who have taken a course like that because it is not required. So indeed, Wellesley really laid the foundation and opened my eyes.
What can Wellesley do to improve? That is really good question as I imagine the context has changed somewhat since I graduated in 2004. I am not sure what courses are being taught now in Africana Studies and Sociology. We’d also need to know more about what the institution is currently doing to meet the needs of students and faculty of color. They can always do things to diversify, not just the faculty but also the administration. We can see that now with President Johnson, but frankly, it shouldn’t have taken so many years for us to have an African-American president. But diversity is not enough. We also need to make sure our institutions, our educational institutions included, are centering perspectives of people of color. It is not always a guarantee that just because you have brown black faces that you have radically different pedagogy, curriculum and institutional practices. This is all ongoing work.
E.B.: Great points. Thank you.
Shelly: There were two things I wanted to ask for our Wellesley Underground readership. I really appreciated your discussion of being a woke black woman in a biracial relationship. I know there are a number of alums, myself included, who are folks of color and are in social justice and racial justice circles and are partnered with white folks. I know personally people who are surprised when they learn that my husband is white. What advice do you have for people when they encounter that? And my other question is for people who are dating: what are the signs that you would look for in a white partner, that this person shares the same values as you? I know for me one moment was when I was in a mostly white space with my now-husband and a white person referred to another white person using the n-word and my husband called out that person. I was like ok I can be with this guy.
Crystal: Did this happen this during the trial period [of your relationship]?
Shelly: Yes we were still dating. We were at this party and a white woman called out to her friend hey my n-word and my husband was like woah woah woah you don’t get to say that! The woman said, haven’t you ever heard of reappropriating? And my now-husband said, you don’t get to reappropriate shit!
Crystal: So she was appropriating reappropriating?! Oh my god!
Shelly: After that, I realized that I could be with this guy. I didn’t need to do anything. So my questions kind of dovetails into two areas: dating white folx but also how white folks need to call out other white folks, both of which are topics you address in your book.
Crystal: Well, first, I definitely identify with people acting surprised when they learn you are in an interracial relationship. I was recently on C-SPAN and some ignorant woman called in to say your message is that you are hating on white people and I want to know what you think about interracial relationships, I would guess that you would hate that kind of thing. I told her I had a whole chapter of my book just for her--the chapter on interracial intimacy and love, where I actually discuss being in an interracial and interethnic relationship and share scholarship on the subject as well. There are people who have a really warped, racist understanding of anti-racist activism, who assume that people of color who want racial justice and human rights hate white people. It’s a deeply racist perspective and a typical racist trope. It’s absurd, offensive and it is gas-lighting. But you know, it’s also not particularly surprising, because racist whites accused peace-loving Martin Luther King of being a hateful terrorist. The FBI treated him like an enemy of the state. So we have to be mindful of that. I also think there’s a general problem, that your question is getting at, about white people being unaccustomed to calling out white racism. So when whites who are used to ignoring and tolerating racism encounter a black person or a person of color who opposes racism, many assume that person hates them personally. It’s a sad commentary on the poverty of their understanding of love––which seems to require keeping quiet about oppression. People with good sense and a functioning moral compass understand that being anti-white supremacy is not the same thing as being “anti-white”.
Shelly: I go through this with my children who are biracial––people say, how can you talk about white people when your children are half white? When I talk about white people, I’m not talking about specific individuals, I am talking about a system. And when white people get defensive, I always say, don’t make it about you.
Crystal: Very few people would ask women who partner with men, well, if you are dating a man, how can you talk about sexism? How can you talk about gender inequality if you are dating a man? Since when does forming a relationship with a member of a majority group mean that you can’t address power dynamics and critique the behavior of the majority group?
In terms of things to look out for when you are dating, I mean, I think it’s important to assess whether the people you let into your life have a moral and political commitment to standing up against all forms of injustice, including racism. There are very obvious things, right? Does the person you are dating or partnered with make racist comments? I mean, if they do, and you keep dating them, what does that say about you? I mean, that’s a pretty low bar. I recommend a higher standard. What are they actively doing to build a better, more just society? What are they doing to learn more about the experiences of marginalized groups? How willing are they are be self-reflective and check their own privilege? What are they doing to address discriminatory policies and practices in their community or workplace? How do they handle uncomfortable conversations about race, gender and other forms of difference? If they aren’t even willing to have the conversation, then what are you doing with this person?
Shelly: That is really good advice. I always tell my friends who are dating that they need to bring up something [about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.] so they know what this person is about.
Crystal: Exactly. You need to know someone’s politics. You don’t want to waste time dating someone who is a committed racist or a transphobe. That’s pretty bad. At the same time, you know, I think we all have blind spots and problematic politics. We’re all learning. So being willing to get called out by--and learn from--the people we love and the people who love us is critically important.
Shelly: But POC are often burdened with having to be the person to bring up these issues, talk about these issues, explain these issues, in addition to experiencing daily micro- and macro-aggressions. So what are some self-care things that you do for yourself, and self-care tips you would recommend to POC, especially women of color?
Crystal: Self-care and community care is such a complicated conversation because it has to do with resources. My access to resources has changed over time. I remember what it was like trying to practice “self-care” when I was broke, and it’s a challenge. Of course, over the years, I’ve progressed in my career, and now have access to the more resources. But when recommending self-care we have to remember that we don’t all have the same access. That’s important to acknowledge, and the self-care conversation can get really annoying when that is not addressed. Therapy, for example, is a really important part of self-care, and I am grateful to have excellent insurance that allows me to access that, but not everyone does. Another part of my self-care is making time for my spiritual practice, which includes mindfulness and meditation. And also making time for fun and pleasure! I love to laugh. When some people read my book they may be surprised to find humor woven into a very painful and serious topic, but that’s because of the kind of person I am. I use humor constantly, my partner and I crack each other up every day, and taking time to laugh is really part of my self-care. I also love really good massages. I get a massage as often as I can afford.
Shelly: That’s actually what I am off to do right now!
Crystal: Good!
E.B.: Now I want to schedule a massage.
Shelly: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, Crystal!
If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Fleming and you live in the Boston area, be sure to come to her talk at Framingham State University at 4:30pm on Monday, February 4, 2019! E.B. will be there!
