Building Bridges with CAAAS: A conversation with Dr. Rabaka

Yellow Scene spoke with Dr. Rabaka about the recently opened CAAAS —Center for African & African American Studies — the first of its kind in the Boulder area. Dr. Rabaka is not only the Director of CAAAS, and also the Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, he still finds time to teach some of the most popular courses at CU Boulder. His infectious enthusiasm brought the conversation to new heights as we explored the nuances of liberalism and racial justice within the context of the Boulder community. Dr. Rabaka’s classes at CU are full of passion, energy, and contextualization that bring to life the songs, lyrics, and albums that have been illuminating the way towards liberation for decades.

Some questions have been paraphrased for clarity

Dr. Rabaka and students at the CAAAS. Photo provided by Dr. Rabaka

YS: Tell me about CAAAS

Dr. Rabaka: The whole point of my center is to build a bridge from the campus to the Boulder County community. There’s a part of this that is my profession, and there’s another part of it that is my passion. This gives my life meaning, this gives my life purpose.

YS: Whenever I talk to people about what their passion is, it inherently makes the interview much more interesting.

DR: I don’t think it’s possible for somebody like me to live a passionless life. And, again, because we’re just coming off Juneteenth, you might imagine that the majority of my ancestors didn’t get a chance, they didn’t get a choice. They couldn’t choose their profession, they were told what to do … Don’t get caught up in the system that will make you a consumer, make sure that you’re doing something that you actually love. I’ve had to do a lot of odd jobs but I was always working towards something, [you have to] set goals for yourself. And maybe that’s why 18 to 23 year olds keep vibing with me.

YS: How do you see the CAAAS expanding forward in the near future?

DR: Maybe that’s the humble contribution I’m making to the great State of Colorado, I want to make African American Studies accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It’s not just about do you vibe with this culture? Do you resonate with this culture? I’m a specialist in the Frankfurt School coming out of Germany. There was something about those brilliant Jewish-German folks and their critique of anti-semitism during the Nazi holocaust that that I resonate with. I’m not the only African American to vibe with this incredible critique of anti semitism. There’s a lot of anti-democratic tendencies that take place in these societies.

YS: You really capture the energy on campus. I see why students are vibing with you. You’re making connections with people that are young and you remain relevant, that’s really cool. What do you want to share about what you are teaching?

DR: African American Studies is open to folks’ cultural curiosity about the African American experience. For me, in K-12, I didn’t get any African American Studies. On top of that, I didn’t get any Native American, Mexican American or Asian American Studies. Some of these students are paying a lot to have access to African American Studies. I want to make it a space where if there is a legitimate sincere question that you may have about African American history, or culture, or the African American struggle, I want to do my humble best to answer that question. 

YS: How do you use music to relate to the struggle for equality?

DR: Every class I’m starting out with a piece of music that sets the tone for whatever we’re reading that day. Some of my students say ‘I realized I missed half of the lyrics on ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ by Kendrick Lamar because I didn’t have this background in terms of African American history or culture. Now that I do, I can actually see that it’s a very BLM [Black Lives Matter] themed album.’ If you think about Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” or Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” I can just go on and on and on. You’re not gonna be able to understand that music if you don’t understand what’s happening in Black America at the time.

YS: You spoke about how moved you were with the communities that showed up in the Black Lives Matter movement.

DR: Many of us were very moved by the solidarity that many other non-white folks, and even many of our white allies, showed with BLM — which as you know, started 10 years ago. It reinvigorated me as a professor intellectually. I’m an artist, I’m not just an intellectual. African American Studies isn’t just for African Americans. It’s for anybody that wants to learn about the history of American culture … It seems to me that you hear some of the human experience, some of the human condition when you listen to Motown, or Aretha Franklin, or that new Beyonce. Teaching African American Studies in Boulder presents me with a lot of challenges, but it’s also rewarding. It’s kind of like George Clinton says, ‘funk is its own reward.’ African American Studies is its own reward, no matter who you are.  

YS: One of the things that resonated with me the most was how MLK Jr. touched on the white moderate being one of the biggest stumbling blocks in progress. There’s overt racism, and structural racism, but a lot of times it’s the people just content where they’re at, not wanting to stir up trouble, and not wanting to open their eyes, that are holding things back. How do we activate them, especially with people that say they’re on the liberal side of things, who are not actively fighting for racial progress?

DR: I want to start  by saying … there’s a certain kind of courage that it takes to ask somebody like me this question. I’ll start with the fact that in African American studies and in critical race theory we argue that in many vanilla environments — like Boulder — it is possible to be liberal when it comes to gender and sexuality, but conservative when it comes to race and class. We need to push people to define what they mean by their liberal positions if they’re not including race in a very culturally homogenous environment. We learned from the Black Women’s Liberation Movement that somebody could be a feminist and a racist. The fact of the matter is somebody could stand up for gender justice, but be complacent or silent with respect to racial justice.

YS: Is this where intersectionality comes in?

DR: My conception of intersectionality is actually insurgent. It’s become a buzzword to help people get tenure and go on TV and talk about intersectionality, when really, in Boulder, most times when people say intersectionality, they only mean gender and sexuality. Those are important, but that’s not what Kimberly Crenshaw was really articulating. [She’s] talking about the overlap of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability and disability, immigration status, religious affiliations, — or non-religious affiliation — if somebody is incarcerated, or formerly incarcerated.

YS: How can someone who is interested in racial justice but inexperienced in the knowledge or the history of the BLM movement begin to understand it?

DR: “The New Jim Crow” is one of the textbooks in my BLM class. That book drops in 2010. Three years later, we have a movement called BLM. So that’s a handbook, if you will, for the movement to help us understand the prison industrial complex. 

YS: I love how you connect across cultures, races, and classes to touch on these topics. How do you bridge that education, generation, and racial knowledge gap?

DR: This whole so-called “Hip Hop Generation,” those born after the March on Washington in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 … born after this landmark civil rights legislation, there’s a series of social movements in the 60s and the 70s that shaped our worldview. And so although we may not be in the same ‘race’ it sounds like you and I share culture. We share a particular world cosmology, a worldview we share because we are the first generation to come of age in an awkwardly integrated American society.

YS: I love how you bring the interdisciplinary connections and build bridges with everything you’re talking about, whether its music genres or social justice movements, we’re bouncing back and forth between it all, truly embodying intersectionality. I love that it’s not just a buzzword for you. You seem to be that bridge.

DR: I really appreciate you noting the interdisciplinarity part of my work. What makes my work different, [what makes] African American studies [different is that] as compared to an old school Black Studies course, where it was focused on straight Black male studies, only straight Black male studies, [we include]  all the views, from Black feminism, to Black queer studies, to Black trans studies, and so on and so forth. My thesis is that between 1967 and 1979 funk and disco are actually articulating something very powerful that’s going on.

YS: I think that music is such a perfect way to tap into culture. Music and food, I would say are the perfect way to start tapping into something that you’re unfamiliar with, and finding bits that are familiar but also challenging to yourself 

DR: I would only add literature.

YS: How did I miss that as a writer?

DR: It’s like pulling teeth to get people to read. It’s a dying art, maybe not dying, but we certainly need a renaissance. When I give my students “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin, or I give them the autobiography of Angela Davis, or the autobiography of Malcolm X, they begin to see, ‘wow, I can relate to this part of Angela Davis’s narrative’ or Malcolm X’s narrative or whoever it may be.

YS: What are some of your literary influences?

DR: I like reading widely, not just African American literature, but American, European and Latin American literature. That, to me, shows our shared humanity. There’s a “oneness.” Love connects all of us. That may be the theme of my life. I’m actually trying to remind people that we are relatives. We are cousins and kinfolk. I’d like to think at its best a democratic America will acknowledge our shared humanity.

YS: Your message resonates so strongly with me. I studied anthropology in college which says that, at our core, humans are humans. We can look at the differences, and the nuances, but to try to break it down into different hierarchies is where you run into problems. There’s no hierarchy. There’s different ways of doing things. And different ways to learn things. What I find, unfortunately, is that conversation stays in the academic world.

DR: I’m considered a public scholar. I tried to lecture as much in public as I do on the campus. I want folks like my family members who’ve never had a chance to go to a college or university to get a sample lecture so that they can see what I’m doing in these hallowed lecture halls at the University of Colorado Boulder. I want to make sure that I not simply fulfill my professorial obligations, but I’m also giving back to the community.