Dialectic, Democracy & the Phenomenology of Double Consciousness
…You've gotta let them lead the dance, and you've gotta learn how to get in step, get in sync with the rhythm of their moves, if not, then to me, you're violating a fundamental ethical principle of hermeneutic justice, patience and generosity.
Give the writer his or her say. Learn to dance with them.
Learn how to get in step. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. Give them their say. Open yourself up to them.
…this was a central concern and (Martin Luther) King said, look, I'm not talking about erotic love, I'm talking about Agape love. So part of it is getting worked out: What do we mean by love?
…let's talk this through. We call it dialogue, listening, asking questions prior to rendering final judgments, being open to the possibility of changing oneself
…That process is crucial to having a stable, viable community.
…we call it democracy
Esteemed philosopher Lucius Outlaw Jr is professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University. In this conversation with Andrea, he shares his remarkable journey from growing up in segregated Mississippi to becoming a respected philosophy professor, closely acquainted with influential figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Eric Fromm. The discussion weaves through topics like double consciousness, agape love, the philosophy of Hegel, and the transformational power of language.
Outlaw also reflects on how shared experiences, dialogue, and love can create a more inclusive, understanding world, even in the hardest of times.
"…love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.."
Loving Your Enemies," from this sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church November 17, 1957 by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Valentine, 1840-70, Anonymous, MET collection
00:00 Introduction to Hermeneutic Justice
01:30 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
01:39 Lucius Outlaw's Journey
02:04 Exploring Double Consciousness
03:43 Phenomenology and Du Bois
07:49 Challenges in Recording the Episode
10:38 Lucius Outlaw's Early Life in Mississippi
36:01 Academic Struggles and Determination
37:03 Intellectual Growth and Honors Program
37:16 Gender Dynamics and Respect for Women
38:24 Choosing Fisk and Academic Rigor
40:45 Dartmouth Experience and Scholarship Offer
42:38 Return to Fisk and Black Power Movement
48:33 Student Government and SNCC Chapter
52:14 Graduate School and Intellectual Influences
01:02:01 Hegel, Marcuse, and Dialectical Thinking
01:07:07 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
01:12:00 Reclaiming Negative Terms: From Black to Queer
01:14:17 The Struggle of Identity and Language
01:16:29 Navigating Predominantly White Institutions
01:19:33 Rehabilitating Whiteness: A Controversial Notion
01:23:52 The Role of Dialogue in Understanding
01:25:23 The Legacy of Reverend James Morris Lawson, Jr.
01:40:50 The Power of Nonviolence and Love
01:47:30 Final Reflections and Continuing the Legacy
Lucius Outlaw, the philosopher
Lucius at Vanderbilt University
Lucius with Angela Davis
Give
Lucius is the W. Alton Jones Chair, Emeritus Profeessor at Vanderbilt. His research areas are: "racial matters in socio-political life, in the United States in particular, and in legacies and practices of European and Euro-American Philosophy; Social and Political Philosophy; Africana Philosophy (African; African American, for example, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, among others); American Philosophy.SpecializationsAfrican, African American, Continental, History of Philosophy, Social and Political"
Representative Publications
"On Cornel West on W.E.B. Du Bois" Cornel West: a Critical Reader, George Yancy, ed. (Blackwell 2001).
“Multiculturalism,' Citizenship, Education, and American Liberal Democracy," Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, Cynthia Willett, ed. (Blackwell 1998).
On Race and Philosophy (Routledge 1996).
"On W.E.B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races'," Overcoming Racism and Sexism, Linda Bell and David Blumenfeld, ed. (Roman & Littlefield 1995).
Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack
TRANSCRIPT
Lucius Outlaw: [00:00:00] reverse the symbolic weightings of key terms.
Take a negative and turn it into a positive. So, You've gotta let them lead the dance, and you've gotta learn how to get in step, get in sync with the rhythm of their moves. if not, then you're, to me, you're violating a fundamental ethical principle of hermeneutic, justice and patience and generosity. Give the writer his or her say learn to dance with them.
Learn how to get a step. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. It's, you've got to give them their say. Open yourself up to them.
Now, if they can So this was a central concern And King said, look, I'm not talking about erotic love, I'm talking about agape love. So part of it is getting worked out. What do we mean by love?
So let's talk this through. We call it dialogue, listening, asking [00:01:00] questions prior to rendering final judgments, being open to the possibility of changing oneself
Well, you said something. Yeah, but I didn't, but I thought you meant no, no, that's not what I meant. Oh, but I thought, I understand you thought, but here's what, Oh, I misspoke. Oh, I miss heard. Okay. Well, let's try it again. That process is crucial to having a stable, viable community. Well, what do we mean?
In some sense, we call it democracy,
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today is a really special episode, also a very challenging episode for many different reasons. It is with Lucius Outlaw, and he's gonna tell you about his journey from growing up in a segregated small town in Mississippi to becoming a philosophy professor.
A very well respected one who knows everyone. He's been in the same room with everyone, from Eric, Fromm to Martin Luther King Jr. To [00:02:00] many of the leaders of today, as you'll hear in this conversation. And we're also talking about one of my favorite philosophers, who is WEB Du Bois, who came up with this phrasing Double consciousness, which you've probably heard me talk about in other episodes.
For example, with Mina Salami, we talked about double consciousness and extending that into thinking about it through the ecological world. We also talk about Hegel. Someone you hear me talk about a lot here. And the idea of holding paradox, of course, but this doubling this idea of the third space or stepping to the third way in order to see the two sides that have seemed oppositional Hegel might.
Be discussed as doing this through synthesis or the dialectic. and Du Bois is talking about these two kind of irreconcilable, seemingly irreconcilable notions of self. That one often [00:03:00] experiences the self of your first person phenomenological experience, and then the way you're perceived by those around you.
It's a kind of tuni, an inward tuna, which is also part of your social relation because of however the society around you is defining you. there's a lot of links to that, to Hegel of course, but also to other writers. I love like Emerson and, and Du Bois was also studying at Humboldt in Berlin for a little while, which is where I did.
My degrees too. So there's a lot of connections here. And even more so one reason I really wanted to talk with Lucius, not only just because I wanted him to tell a story, which is really what this is. ' cause it's very interesting You know, there's also Nikki Giovanni makes an appearance. But also because he brought phenomenology together with Du Bois, which is something, I mean, I think Du Bois was already doing phenomenology and he had studied it in Germany. He knew about it. Um, but in Lucius's Outlaws work, he. [00:04:00] Discusses this directly, uh, and phenomenology that we could do a whole episode on that.
In fact, someone asked me to do a research diary and I will, but just for purposes here, it's. When you study consciousness or my OR, or our experience of consciousness from the first person point of view, from the point of view of how you experience it, So you're really looking at the structure of that ongoing dynamical experience that you're having or that one is having and taking that seriously.
There's these names, which like Hersel Edmund Hersel or Sat, or Mary Lou Ponti is very important. My, Uh, the person I work with at in Heidelberg, Thomas Fuchs, we did a nice talk together. He's coming out of that tradition, uh, in Germany, and also with like Carl.
Carl Jaspers was at the University of Ted Heidelberg, which is where I am. So there's all these connections, which you don't need to care about, but what's important for this discussion is that. Lucius brought together Du Bois and Phenomenology, and he did [00:05:00] that through the work of Alfred Schutz. He did this all the way back in his dissertation, which we talk about here, and Alfred Schutz was a phenomenologist who also brought some different threads together because he brought the work of Edmund Hersel together with the work of Max Weber or Max Weber.
You might know the name. And this connects to other ideas like sense making, participatory sense making, relational philosophy, process philosophy. A lot of these are different turns of the kaleidoscope.
Towards trying to understand how we are part of one ongoing process. We also have individual experiences. Those are co-created by everything that we're interacting with, by what we call our social environment or our ecological world. And how do we understand this, that it's just going on all the time.
We're separate, but we're also never separate. You probably remember some of these themes from discussions with Ezekiel DiPaolo and Mirko and Hannah De Jager [00:06:00] and Rebecca Todd. Shea Welch. Elena Cuffari, Evan Thompson for sure. So in different ways, a lot of these philosophers and neuroscientists and thinkers have been trying to understand this, how, how we are first person, we are having individual experience coming into awareness of it.
And also doing that in a social, relational, ecological process. And Lucius and this discussion discusses it from the angle of WEB Du Bois and the experience that he had when he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, for example, which he wrote in 1903, by the way, where he was already reading all of this phenomenology, but also Emerson and Hegel.
And the phenomenology of spirit And I find this phenomenology of double consciousness. Just so helpful and. I really hope that we can think about it in our academic work and write about it and read Du Bois and read Lucius Outlaw and his writing we [00:07:00] don't wanna lose these works narratives and that perspective. And it also opens up other worlds if we can sit with it and try to understand it as part of the life world that we're hoping to be able to expand enough to feel into, to understand as.
Connected to all of us. So all that said, and that's a bit clumsy because you know, I just talk when I turn on the mic for these intros. 'cause that's just this podcast. But, uh, this is also just a difficult conversation because of where we are right now in terms of how we are able to talk about these kinds of subjects.
And I guess this is gonna go low down in the algorithm. That's what usually happens lately when I talk about something that's difficult. But I don't care because it needs to be talked about. It's hard also because his internet kept going out. I think we talked for three hours and there were huge pauses and so much trouble with the audio, and We actually had this conversation a year ago and it's taken me that long just to be able to get through it [00:08:00] and actually get it into a presentable enough audio form that I can put it online. And that you can actually listen to it. So this has just been, you know, quite the challenge in so many different ways.
Also, as you'll hear, just the subjects are really tough if you. Feel like you're ready. Please do listen. If you don't, that's okay. I do hope you'll go look at WEB Du Bois and double consciousness, though. Think about the philosophy of that, and especially in relation to something like dialectic and Hegel and other threads of phenomenology.
All of that we talk about here. And Luc just says some really interesting things about Hegel, for example, Think about that word, double consciousness. This doubling that is actually not a doubling at all. If we can begin to understand thinking and consciousness in a more kaleidoscopic way, that's a word I use a lot, or as a constellation.
And this whole research channel is documenting people who are trying to do that from different directions and different ways. And this is another one, a very important one I think, to bring in WEB Du Bois again, double [00:09:00] consciousness. The work of the philosopher Lucius Outlaw, who you'll hear discuss here.
You'll hear him discuss his work here how that relates to Husserl, Merleau Ponty, and Hegel. I'll try to do some. Separate videos on all these different topics. for those who are coming to a new, don't worry if you've never heard any of these words. I mean, this is just a little tiny corner of the universe.
There are many others, but the things we're trying to understand here are, and that all of these people I've mentioned are trying to understand are how we are individuals and. Part of the world at the same time and what that means and what consciousness is and how we can live, live it more fully, more sensually and perhaps even begin to open up new worlds for one another of love, I hope and of care, which is where this conversation goes in the end.
connecting to Martin Luther King Jr. And that whole spirit of love that I feel we really need right [00:10:00] now. It's still here. Yeah, don't be afraid to fill it and notice it and live out of it. It's really needed and, uh, it's really part of us and it's really a wonderful way to live when you can live from love.
so it's not always easy, but it's worth the persistence. Thanks for being here.
Hello, Lou. Good morning. So good to see you.
Lucius Outlaw: Likewise, Lady Andrea. Thank you for having me join you in the discussion.
Andrea Hiott: So there's so much about your work I want to talk about as I was just telling you. but I think to start, let's start in Mississippi in 1944.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah. So I was born and grew up in this small town in Mississippi, Scargaville, which is, sort of East Central Mississippi, about 60 miles south of Tupelo, Mississippi, 120 miles slightly northeast of the capital of Jackson, Mississippi, in an area [00:11:00] called the Golden Triangle.
There's a state institution there, Mississippi State University, which was segregated. At the time I was growing up, the first Negro knowingly admitted, was that summer, of around 1965 was actually one of my best friends and classmates who integrated Mississippi State University in the summer.
I was an only child.
My mother said she, prayed and made a promise to God that if he gave her a child, she'd give it back to him. So, as a consequence, I spent more time in more Negro Baptist churches than I ever have to spend the rest of my life, thanks to my mother. But, which led to her making sure that I was in a lot of churches for most of my life. my mother did day work mostly in the homes of white families cleaning, you know, as a maid.
And my father was the janitor of a large white Baptist church. First Baptist Church, we were members of Second Baptist Church, which was what we call the colored Negro Church in Starland. And it was, as I was growing [00:12:00] up, and of course, you've got to be trained early on in the rules, the laws, the unwritten local norms and protocols of hierarchical racial segregation.
And ordered around. Negroes and white people, etc. Superiority and inferiority and all of that. so, you know, you grow up in that context and for a great deal of normal everyday life, living in a sort of segregated world, You know, interestingly, it may, you might think that a segregated, racially segregated Mississippi has really very sharp boundaries, physical boundaries between Black folk and what we now say, you know, Black folk, colored people, etc.
I was born on one side of town, on one street, and we moved when I was four years old.
it was on West Main Street, which is the west end of [00:13:00] Main Street in Stockville. if you would leave my house and go downtown, there would be about a block of West Main, which would intersect with Long Street on the other side of Long Street. That was a boulevard with a divider in the middle, one way up and one way down.
That was a block long. That block was all white homes. Now, when you got past that block, you would go down a hill, another block, on one half of that block to the right there were white homes, the other half of that block were colored homes. And the next block, on the right side of that block, Was the back of the white Methodist church on the left side of that block was the colored Methodist church and a couple of Negro businesses.
And then you were in the next block, there were all these businesses downtown, but if you turned left into that block, [00:14:00] it was the beginning of a whole colored neighborhood. So my point is, the proximity of white people together was. You could walk across one street, you're in a white neighborhood, cross another street, you're in a colored neighborhood.
If I went to Longstreet and turned right, all those houses to the next block were white homes. If I turned left, all those houses were colored homes. I mean, so there were divisions by streets and et cetera, somewhat, but it could be as subtle as one house here is white, The next house is colored, so it's kind of interesting, but as I, grew up and was going to school, one of the striking things is, okay, why are there different churches? There's one God, everybody chose a God. Okay.
Right. And so, you know, my father's working in this big white church and by nine years old, I was working at that same church cleaning the building where that served as a nursery [00:15:00] school and etc. So, you know, by the time I was older and in high school, having discussion with my father about this, he would often say, the church where he worked with white people was pretty much failed on Sundays.
And he took that as a kind of measure of the commitment to their faith of these white people, etc. And, you know, you say, you know, Negroes need to go to church. You know, look how the white people go to church, etc. You know, Negroes meet sons there. I said, yeah, well, they fill up the church on Sunday, but they're going to call me nigger on Monday.
So I don't see why that's, you know, doing much good. But the church is segregated. I'm still gonna be called by many of them on Monday. So, I was just never convinced.
Yeah. and of course, that began to trouble him because, I was in high school, he was like, you're always going to get in trouble.
I got in trouble in school for, Challenging the [00:16:00] principal about something and the principal got really upset and sent me out of the office and called my father over to the school and the assistant principal was a cousin of my father and they called me down to the office and the issue had been when James Meredith.
integrated the University of Mississippi was a big deal. You know, there were federal troops brought in and etc. And it happened over a weekend. And actually something had happened where the white, some white students in Strongfield were protesting that Meriden had been admitted to Mississippi State. So they were marching through town, through colored neighborhoods.
protesting. And we, my mother and I, I had been driving my mother to a church function. It was coming back in. We ran into them. And at first I couldn't figure out why is there a parade on Sunday on the highway? She was like, get out of here, turn around quickly, turn around. So we had to take a different route home and got home and found out what they were protesting.
Well, the next day in school, and one of my classmates was the [00:17:00] principal's granddaughter. So she was arguing that, you know, Americans shouldn't have been going to the schools, Negroes need to stay in their place, and mine was, my daddy pays taxes at the state school, we should have, you know, as much right to go to interstate school as anybody else.
So she got really upset and went downstairs to the principal's office to her grandfather and told her grandfather what I said. So we're sitting in this classroom, the principal comes over to intercom to that class and says, Mr. Stewart, is Mr. Outlaw in your class? Yes, he's in the class. I have him come to the office and she looks at me.
She's like, oh, Lucius, why can't you just be quiet? So then I got to go down to the office where the principal and the assistant principal are giving me a hard time with my father. And I'm just not having it, you know, I simply would not back down And actually there was a maternal uncle who was The principal of the elementary school at that [00:18:00] time who lived with us on weekdays and would go home to the country on weekends. he was the principal of the middle school, so he stayed with us during weekdays while he was, serving as principal, and he went home to the country on weekends.
So when I got home that afternoon, he and my father and my mother were sort of in the living room, ganging up on me about dealing with this explosive issue. And I just. Wasn't having it, you know, and so my father was like, you know, your mouth is going to get you in trouble. So he sort of fear, you know, I was going to get into trouble.
He was always advising me to lay these political matters alone, they would get worked out, shouldn't be pushing them. So I just was never convinced, about, That strategy, though I sort of followed it in one sense, that is, I didn't deliberately go around protesting and doing things, but I was sort of a rebel in my own mind, and I just never accepted that those terms were appropriate or should be acceptable.
Andrea Hiott: That's interesting. You were already [00:19:00] philosophizing in a way, but it's, it's interesting too because what you said sounds like. Right. Was the comment, I mean like, it, it, it was just looking at things the way they are, but your, I guess, your dad and mom, I gather, were worried that if you said like, something like that in the wrong context, you would be in a lot of danger, so it was kind of a protective thing, right?
Not that the people didn't agree with you necessarily, but, or, or do I misunderstand?
Lucius Outlaw: No, that's right. And remember, I am, what I call, I'm a member of the Emmett Till generation. So when Emmett Till was killed, supposedly for being fresh with a white woman, that impacted and conditioned my life forever and a day.
Andrea Hiott: parents looked at you and didn't want that to happen to you. So there was probably a huge amount of How do we protect our son in this world that's not fair at all?
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, so that was part of it. one of the significant things that [00:20:00] happened one day, my father and I were downtown on Main Street, and we were walking west on Main Street together.
There was an older white man on the sidewalk walking east, so he was walking directly towards us. And he walked up to my father and said, move over boy and let a white man pass. And my father never raised his voice, he just looked at him directly and said, I am not a boy. He will not disrespect me in front of my son.
And the white man just sort of lowered his eyes and stepped around my father and went on. And my father never ever said anything to me about that encounter. He never said a word to me about it. And I witnessed it all. We never discussed it, but I never ever forgot it. And I came to understand something about the nature of the man that my father was.
I mean, he wasn't going to get involved in protests. He didn't want me to be [00:21:00] involved with protests. He was, I'm trying to figure out what, you know, what words you might say for him. It was going to all get worked out in time. Like he had, A brother, for example, there were other black people who left and went north because they thought life was going to be better in the north.
He had a brother who had done that. And his thing was, eh, I don't think there's anything special about the north. It's going to really get worked out in the south better than the way in the north. And for him, he was a gradualist, right? And he didn't believe in direct confrontation and stuff like that.
in the meantime, he had developed a very I mean, something one is he was clear to himself about who he was, and he was not going to be disrespected. he accommodated certain kinds of things, but he was not going to accommodate disrespect. But he wasn't going to be involved in protest. So he was an interesting strategist about how he negotiated [00:22:00] the entire situation.
I mean, he said to me once, he said, you know, son, what you've got to learn to do is you've got to learn to handle white people with care gloves. You've got to Learn to persuade them to do what you want to do and I've watched him in a number of occasions do that I mean he there was a way in which if he were shopping for something like a new television and the white person He knew really well.
I gotta have a new TV. Okay says well, I can only pay so much for the TV It's like well Lucius. I'm sorry
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I lost you again Lucius.
Saying, Lucius, That's the last thing I heard about the TV.
Lucius Outlaw: So, the businessman would say, well, you know, Lucius, I'm sorry. This is what it's cost. My father was just quietly saying, yeah, I understand, but I can only pay you so much.
And he would sit there. and continue this back and forth if it took two hours and eventually the flight man would say oh god all right lucius [00:23:00] yes you can have it for that price oh thank you very much miss lee and then they'd arrange for the delivery i mean he would get what he needed but he would Simply continue softly, gently to negotiate.
I'm sorry, I can't do that. I need a loan. My son is going to college. Got to have this mortgage. I mean, I got a second mortgage. I've got to have this loan. Well, no, I can't pay that much. Now, here's what I can pay. he would get the terms back to me.
He could meet, and that was part of the way in which he worked, and he was, very highly respected. the other thing was, he learned, and I learned through him, and, Paris and other white folk, is that, not all white people are the same. the distinctions that I grew up with was there are good white people and there are bad white people.
You need to know which ones are the good white people because they can make a difference between life and death. which ones are bad, [00:24:00] you should avoid. We would say now, well, who are the white people that are really racist, who are the white people that are less racist, who are some of them are not really racist, et cetera.
You have to learn those distinctions about people and develop relations, et cetera, with them. And that was something I learned growing up, but again, the whole thing didn't make sense. So I went off to college, majoring in philosophy and religion, because I was originally going to go into the ministry, but by my sophomore year, finally reached the conclusion that eh, that religion stuff doesn't make any sense for me, and I'm not doing the God thing anymore.
Which led to a real break with my mother. I was
Andrea Hiott: about to say, I bet your mom was not happy.
Lucius Outlaw: Oh, she, happy is not the word, she was distraught. So, I had written her a letter about it and I got one that was Letters from her sort of dear. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, sort of, you know, metaphorically to stay in letters.
What are you doing? Why did I send you to a place with eight years and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I go home that at the end [00:25:00] of that academic year and one evening, I know that she's dressing and she gets dressed to go out and there's nothing to do at night, you know, there's no club. She and my father didn't go out drinking or anything like that.
And it's not Wednesday, so it's not prayer meeting at church. So where is she going? But she gets dressed and goes, there's a knock at the door. She goes to the door and opens it. My father's not working in the yard and she opens the door. It's our minister. she sort of steps out and says, there he is, I'm sitting in the living room watching television.
The minister comes in and she leaves and I'm sitting there myself, okay, this is what this is about. He's not going to win this argument, so the minister comes in and we talk. I don't remember anything about what we talked about. I don't remember anything from the conversation. The only memory I have is.[00:26:00]
My mother returns, the minister gets up and starts to leave. He gets to the door and he says, he's putting on his hat and he says to my mom on her way out the door, There's nothing wrong with the boy, leave him alone. And he walks out the door. Now there's a whole bunch in the background about my relationship with this medicine, all of that in my life, blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, I made up my mind and, you know, my mother was still distraught. And one time I finally said to her, I said, look, God and I have made a deal. He doesn't mess with me. I don't mess with him. And she ripped out crying. So I literally stayed away from home for about two years. I just said, I'm not dealing with this.
I said to her, look, I'm going to live my life on my own terms. I'm not going to live my life on the basis of a deal you made with God. You don't make deals with me. I'm going to live them on my terms. You can't pray me into heaven.
You can make the deal, but I'm not going to live [00:27:00] that deal. This is my life.
Now, by this time, I'm studying philosophy. I had a course in existentialism that was interesting. You're reading Sartre about freedom and etc. talking with classmates about this, and it was actually a classmate who had to say, you don't have to do this religious stuff if you don't want to. And I'm like, I can't.
I have to. And he's like, no, you don't. You can choose. And I sort of had a breakdown and crying.. It's like, yeah, you're right. I don't have to do this anymore. I'm not doing this. I hate it in any way. I'm not doing this preaching stuff. God called me to do this. I'm just not doing this anymore. My life, I'm living it on my own terms.
Period.
Andrea Hiott: really not easy thing to come to. I mean, all of us trying to. What our parents want for us, you know, it can be hard to go against it, but this is like really hard because your mom from sounds like from the beginning almost your health in her mind and your kind of it was almost like she was worried if you didn't do what she'd promised God then Like she would fear for you or something.
Lucius Outlaw: strength. Oh yeah, and for herself.
Oh [00:28:00] wow, Now, so there's
a whole bunch of stuff built into this seventh son business.
Andrea Hiott: Whoa. Yeah.
Lucius Outlaw: to deal with, right?
The seventh son, a gift from God. Yeah. Okay. But I'm not going to play the God game anymore. I'm out. I'm taking myself out of that. And so it was years later and she was working at a local. two year college, I was invited down to give a talk. So my wife and I and our baby firstborn son, her first grandchild, we go down and I give this talk and we're back in her apartment later and we just sort of lounge around in the apartment and she said to me, she said, you know, after listening to you tonight, I realized that There's a lot of different ways you can minister out there and I said, yeah, and by this time I had, you know, while I was at Fisk my freshman year, one of the things that was happening in Nashville was that the nonviolent direct action sit in movement was still very much underway.
[00:29:00] Now my parents, so Martin Luther King Jr. came to the campus to speak one Sunday. I'm at Nashville at Fisk University,
Andrea Hiott: Du Bois went, very famously.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, Du Bois went there. my sophomore year, I'm living in Du Bois Hall. King comes to speak in the gym. It's packed. I go here, Martin Luther King Jr. There's demonstrations going on every day. People are marching downtown, sitting in, and et cetera. My parents said, don't get involved in this.
It could be dangerous for you. It could be dangerous for us. If people found out back here, we could lose our jobs, et cetera, et cetera.
Andrea Hiott: This was early sixties, around 60. I went
Lucius Outlaw: to Fisk in 1963. So this is 63, 64 a year.
right. So, you know, that was one day that, you know, I mean I had classmates people in my dorm who were going out demonstrating they get arrested, the university would call and raise money get them out on bail they'd come back.
Taking showers, singing freedom songs and going right back out on the street. And one day I was spending on the [00:30:00] sidewalk watching as they were marching off and I couldn't go and I was just sort of standing there crying and I just said, okay, if I can't be in the street now, I can figure out how to devote my life to supporting this and being a part of this in a different way.
Andrea Hiott: that's very powerful.
You said you could do it another way. You could, that connects very well with what your mom ended up eventually seeing too and the way you think about teaching and, that was that moment, right?
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah. Because, I mean, that was kind of core lesson of a couple of realizations.
So I'm living on this campus where a lot of faculty live. It's an interracial faculty, international faculty. It was a place where a number of persons who were European and Jewish and escaping the Holocaust came to the United States and taught at Fisk. So my professor of German was a person who was escaping from the Holocaust.
there were people from India on the faculty, from the Caribbean, from [00:31:00] Africa, from Europe, white American faculty members. People living on the campus, et cetera, et cetera. So it was this really interesting little oasis of integration in a racially segregated city and state, but it was a private institution.
So it could do things that a state based historically Black institution couldn't do. So it was this really interesting place. And when I looked at how faculty who taught there, but also lived on the campus and came to me like, This isn't just a job. This is a way of life. And I was really intrigued by the intellectual life stuff, which is why I started paying attention more to academic philosophy, because I just found it intellectually very intriguing.
I was trying to figure out how to make sense out of stuff. So I was like, Oh, maybe these are people who make sense out of things. I'm going to study this philosophy thing, but I also want to become a college or university professor. And so it was okay. Then here's a way in which I can take up [00:32:00] this endeavor of seeking justice and et cetera.
And I can do it perhaps as a teacher. And so that sort of became my life commitment by the time I was sophomore heading into junior year. This is where I'm going.
Andrea Hiott: That's beautiful because it reminds me of your time at Haverford. where you were kind of living that life in a way, but we'll get to that.
But I took you away from, you were about to say about Martin Luther King, and I really want to hear about that. So this was this time period at Fisk and he came to speak.
Lucius Outlaw: yeah, so he spoke in the gym on a Sunday night and you know, I'm there and it's a packed place. I go back to my dorm. I'm sitting around with, you know, friends, we're probably talking about, you know, Here's something, no, here's this historic figure already, because this is 1960s, early 1960s.
So, someone started yelling out on the hallway, hey Lucius, there was, at the time, there was like one phone on each hallway, a pay telephone. So, someone started yelling, hey Lucius, the phone had, you know, [00:33:00] was ringing, somebody go and answer the phone. And so I said, hey Lucius, phone for you is your mother.
Okay, so I go, Take the phone. It's my mother who has heard by way of one of the powerful radio stations in Nashville or somehow that Mondo the King Jr. has been in Nashville has spoken at Fish University. So she was calling me like, don't you get involved in this? So that was one of the complicating factors, you know, okay, I won't not do what they say, but I will make a commitment to figure out how to do this differently and better.
And so that's, What got me started down this road, and of course, at some point, I don't remember what year, you know, I read, you know, early stages of, early chapters of, you know, The Souls of Black Folk,
which
is one of the texts that anchors my dissertation.
Andrea Hiott: By Du Bois. So, were your parents, did they talk about Du Bois
Lucius Outlaw: that happened while I was in college. the whole time I was in high school. You know, I knew nothing about Du [00:34:00] Bois in high school. There was nothing that. there were things that was happening. Like my mother was very active in church things.
And so she would do certain things like, for example, one of the popular songs that we would sing at church meetings, you know, stuff was Kumbaya. And so my mom, my mother would use that song in church dramatizations as how it was a coded message that slaves would use to say, Hey, come back here. We're going to be over here in the secret place. So that kind of stuff. But there was no active Negro history month stuff going on in my school.
I didn't learn the Negro national anthem in school. I basically learned it as my wife and we'd be taking a road trip. We'd teach ourselves. Suns the song, and that's how I came to learn the song, where she learned it in school. We didn't learn it in school. I mean, the principal, just didn't allow that kind of stuff to go on in our schools.
And so it was a completely interesting place. So Fisk was a very pivotal, impactful place for me. I mean, it set me off on a course of life. I mean, it was a very [00:35:00] demanding place academically. Right. for example, I had a classmate who had gone to boarding schools in New England. I didn't know colored people went to boarding schools. His father was A multimillionaire. I didn't know there would be grown millionaires. So here's this kid, father's a millionaire. He'd gone to boarding schools in New England. He'd had a sister graduated from Fisk. His father, I think may even have been on the board of trustees or something like that.
So I'm a very wealthy family. After our first semester of our first year, at the beginning of the second semester, work was circulating that, Hey, did you hear about So and so, so and so, no, what do you mean? He's like, he's not here anymore. What do you mean he's not here anymore? It's like, he punched out.
Punched out was the expression for he's failed academically. So he's been expelled.
Andrea Hiott: what?
Lucius Outlaw: Father's a millionaire. He went to boarding school. His sisters are [00:36:00] graduate and they have expelled him for academic shortcomings? Okay, my father's a janitor, never went to college. My mother's a maid, never went to college.
They are not wealthy, so the only way I'm gonna stay at this is I gotta get my work done. Got it. So I busted my butt. I mean, for four years between Sunday and Thursday, I probably never went to bed before one or two or three o'clock in the morning. I mean, I studied so because. They would put you out for academic reasons, no apologies, no question, no matter who your mother was, who your father was.
You didn't perform. The joke among students was, if you don't perform up to par academically, the university will give you a comic book, a banana, and a one way bus ticket home. so it was a very demanding place. academically, but intellectually [00:37:00] very stimulating. I had very powerful teachers, black and white.
and so I just got in am up with an academic intellectual life. I was, became a participant in the honors program, but it was even more intensive and demanding. And, I was in classes with students, particularly women who were just so smart. And so I ended up having to develop a whole new appreciation for women,
pretty and sexually attractive, if that's the only way you approach them, there was something to laugh in your face. I mean, they were like, you gotta be kidding. You know, rather than what are you reading lately? Oh, okay. so it was a, it was a really, really interesting environment to be in. And so there was a whole kind of, that became for me a kind of, competitiveness is not the right word, but there was.
They begin, there were peers and upper class persons, you know, women and men. I mean, the four years I was at [00:38:00] Fisk, the four years, women were president of student government. I mean, you know, so when I was back on the faculty, oh, oh, we got a, you know, a female student government the first time. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not the first time. Two of the four years I was here, the student women were president of student government. there were lots of women. part of the reputation, the first time I heard of this was from a, a young guy who was studying at American Baptist Seminary. And I was talking about where I want to go to school, and I was thinking about going to our historically black institution, Tennessee A& I State University International.
And he said, well, you can't study philosophy, but you can do it at this place called Fisk. And I was like, oh, and he says, and by the way, they have the most beautiful black women in the world. My first day on the camp was, I saw exactly what he meant. And I, I mean, and my first week there when upper class women came in, I went to the dining center to have, you know, dinner.
dinner was always on Sunday at midday and I was sitting in there and all these upper class women started walking in and at that time, there was a dress code. So on Sundays, you had to dress up [00:39:00] to go to dinner. you couldn't wear jeans and shorts or whatever as a female on Sundays, that wasn't allowed.
And I'm
sitting there and these women were walking into that dining center. I couldn't eat. I had never witnessed anything like that.
Andrea Hiott: this sounds like such a rich time and also like nested within a really rich social and political time.
it's interesting thinking about what you said about your dad, about that story you told of him having this kind of poise and, this, this way of, of being strong and committed. And at the same time, I mean, when did you start to be able to step back and take perspective in that, in that way?
I'm still trying to figure out how you even got to Fisk. You just kind of said it a little bit, but you already wanted to study philosophy, but you were going to go for religion too. So you were already kind of combining those.
Lucius Outlaw: but part of my commitment was I was not going to go to a Negro school in Mississippi, that was out for me.
I simply wasn't going to do that. I wanted out of Mississippi.
[00:40:00] Okay.
Now my father says he had recommended Morehouse,
but
Morehouse was all male, he said I rejected it because I had said, I don't remember this, he said, I said, I'm not going to any school that doesn't have girls in when I get to first, there was just this enormously powerful place, you know, is this residential community teachers who care, but teachers who were really demanding. I mean, the institution was really demanding and they made no apologies about it. I mean there was an operative sense that Fisk was about producing a talented ten.
I had an experience where my junior year I spent a semester away on exchange at Dartmouth College. while I was there, I lived in the fraternity house, another interesting part of that story.
And near the end of my time there, one day, several of the guys in the fraternity in that house came to me and said, Hey, you don't have to go back to Fisk. We've talked to the dean. [00:41:00] You can get a scholarship to stay in Dartmouth. I'm like, you've got what? They're like, Yeah, go see the Dean. So I go to the Dean.
He says, Yeah, do you want to stay? There's a scholarship for you.
Now,
about a year ago, I got an email message from a person who said, Hey, Lucius, you may not remember me. You all call me Gus when we were at Dartmouth together. I was one of the people who went to the Dean to ask the Dean to get you a scholarship to stay at Dartmouth. That email was from Senator Angus King.
From Maine.
Andrea Hiott: Wow. I don't like you dad. I mean, we haven't even gotten into it yet, but all the people you ended up sort of encountering as you got scholarships [00:42:00] to different places, the Moten Center, and so on and so forth, but Fisk is important because for people who don't, like, so this is the 60s, everything is changing.
talking about consciousness and all this, but you were kind of skeptical, at least when I'm reading your work, it sounds like you were, You were doing really well in school. I think you ended up becoming the president of the student government and stuff, but you were doing really well.
That's true. Yeah. But you weren't, fully taking part in all of these things because of your parents, but also it sounded like you were still trying to figure out how you felt about all these, this kind of, incredible change that was happening.
Lucius Outlaw: so I come back from Dartmouth after the end of the term at Dartmouth in the first semester. So I get back at the start of the second semester at Fisk, So I'm in the student union one day, and the dean of students, a man is coming, and I go to him, and of course I knew him well, you know, me, a whole bunch of people, but anyway, I said to him, Dean, I need to talk to you.
He was with [00:43:00] another school official who was head of financial aid. I was on financial aid, so I knew him well, too. So I said, Hey, Dean, I need to talk to you. He said, Yes, Mr. Outlaw. We're standing in the student union building, and I said, I need to talk to you because I'm thinking of transferring to Dartmouth.
The dean immediately turned and walked away from me and walked out of the building. Didn't say a word, just turned immediately and walked away. Oh. And the other official said, Lucius, he's not going to talk to you here. You better go to his office. So I quickly walked out, followed the dean. We go over to his office.
And, you know, he urges me into his office and sit down. He closes the door and he sits down and he turns to me and what I remember is something like the following. He looks at me and he says, young man, we have been watching you.
We have expectations for you. What, what is he talking about? We've been watching you. We have expectations for you. And he goes on to sort of say in a sense, there's a way in which I have already [00:44:00] been distinguished out by him and other people as, okay, keep our eyes on him. We have expectations for him, et cetera.
And he talks to me about this, something I never knew. I had no idea about any of this. None whatsoever. And he talked to me about that and then eventually reached in his desk, took out a form, splayed it across the desk to me that I could use to withdraw from FISC. Conversation was over. I took the form and left his office and graduated from FISC.
Andrea Hiott: Did that, what did that, what was that, what happened in your experience? And was it like, cause we were talking about the Talented Tenth, we were talking about You know, everything that's happening, this moment on the street where you realize you want to do something was all that kind of coming together in a different way after that.
Lucius Outlaw: I mean, I had spent a semester at Dartmouth and I really liked it, but Dartmouth. One thing is about Dartmouth at the time it was all male. And so, I just found it [00:45:00] such a off putting experience to I mean I just was not going to play the course of game and so I just found the whole situation at Dartmouth. unappealing. So when I actually drove back to Fisk from Dartmouth with a car full of guys from Dartmouth who were white and they hung out for a week and I said, and when we drove onto the campus, there was a woman walking from one building to another, who was a friend.
We didn't date, but we were good friends. Stunningly, stunningly beautiful. I simply said to the guys, Hey guys, you see her? That's why I'm back at Fisk, you know? But you know, I did think about transferring, but then after the conversation with the dean was over, I No, I'm not. No, I'm not leaving. So that was in the spring, start of the winter session of 1966.
That summer, I spent seven weeks with some other students from Fisk in a special program in Scandinavia, where we were in Norway, Denmark, and [00:46:00] Sweden And it was while we were in Denmark. James Meredith was on that walk against fear in Mississippi where he was shot and where at the end of that march when other people joined in and they marched to Greenville, Mississippi, where Stokely Carmichael got up and gave the speech and said what we need is more black power.
Well, we're in Denmark. I don't know what the hell black power meant. There was one guy in the group from Tougaloo, another HBCU, who The whole six weeks we were traveling, we got to be friends. He was reading this one book that I'd never heard of called The Wretched of the Earth. And he said,
You gotta read this book. But when this whole black power thing broke in the news and it's international news all over and we'd wake up in the morning saying, okay, who's going to go out to the local village and get a copy of the international New York Times. And we can figure out what the hell is going on in the United States.
And this guy was a member of
SNCC.
so he ended up on Denny's television explaining what Black [00:47:00] Power meant and explaining to us what Black Power meant. So by the time we were back at Fisk in the fall of 1966, which is my senior year, the Black Power thing has broken. And so we're getting people coming to the campus like Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Baraka, I think you said
Andrea Hiott: came, Amiri Baraka, Leroy Jones, there
Lucius Outlaw: was an annual, spring arts festival.
And so one of the people at Fisk was John Oliver Killings, a very prominent, Black writer, who taught writing, but he had to bring in all these people, anybody and everybody who was a Black intellectual writer, the young people, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leroy Bennett. You named them, they were coming to Fisk and they would have these seminars and stuff, and these exhibitions and whatever, and you were expected to go to them, so for a week or more, this was happening, and I'd go to this talk by Baraka, and I'm sitting [00:48:00] there, and I'm like, When that was over, I waited and, went up to him after and I said, you know, I came to Fisk as a colored man, but I'm going to leave as a black man.
So this is in, spring of 1967. So the whole black power thing is happening. It is impacting. And, you may know of a, a black poetess, a woman named Nikki Giovanni. Nikki Giovanni was a classmate. Now, Nikki and a bunch of students were petitioning to have a chapter of SNCC on campus.
The administration didn't want a SNCC chapter. I'm president of student government. The student handbook says any new student organization has to be chartered by student government. The problem was nobody knew what it meant to charter a new student organization because it hadn't happened during our time at Fisk and there were no guidelines.
So then the president said, we'll, we'll give you a guideline. So they, he and some board members wrote up guidelines and called me to a meeting and said, here are your guidelines. And the first was the organization must have a stable national leadership. Well, Stokely Carmichael was president of SNCC.
[00:49:00] They weren't going to regard Stokely as a stable. I'm like, Oh no, I'm not going with this. Cause I had gotten elected when I was running for president, I was classed as the radical because, I had called for a student strike, And what was the issues of the strike? Long hours in the library, better food in the dining center, and long weekend hours for the girls.
And I had come from Dartmouth where me, the radical thing for me was student power, because this was part of what was happening with the anti war movement, the black power movement, it was all centered around student power.
So that was my issue was, hey, I'm student government president. I got elected calling for student power, right? So when this issue about a SNCC chapter came up, the SNCC people were politically miles ahead of me. I was committed to student power. They were actually for other kinds of power. And so we were having this intense battle.
So they're pressing me for some things. The administration is pressing to contain that another way. [00:50:00] So student government is in the middle. So I'm in the middle between these two pressure points, right? So one night we're having this meeting and the people from SNCC come in and they beat us to death.
They call us lackeys of the white trustees, you know, just all kinds of derogatory stuff. And I'm just worn out. I'm trying to get them to chill because I know they are trying, the administration is trying to set them up so they could have a chapter. And I'm trying to say, look, you got to give us some space to figure this out because they're trying to set you guys up, but I'm not going to go with that.
But you've got to give us a break till we figure out how we can do this really well. So one night after a long, contiguous, heated meeting, we leave, I walk out of the meeting room, I'm standing in the hallway, Nikki Giovanni, who's been in there calling us everything but a child of God.
Walks up to me, kisses me on the cheek, and says, We love you, Lou. It's okay. And walks away. And I was just standing there like, What the hell just happened? Right? Because I thought it was all [00:51:00] personal. And all she was saying was, it's not personal. It's political. We love you. And I saw her years later, and actually I got to introduce her at Fisk about a year or so ago, she was back to give a jubilee day, address.
And they asked me to introduce her. And I began by saying, it was the strangest kiss I ever had. And I was like, wait, so now you can have an understanding of what the dissertation was about.
Andrea Hiott: Well, actually before we get to that because you mentioned friends, Fanon already, and you mentioned, language.
Those are two important things and this change like you, you, you yourself are thinking you're gonna become black in this way of language. And, but we haven't talked really about, The problematic that you use there is Du Bois, who we have talked about, but this idea of double consciousness. So were you reading Du Bois at this time?
Lucius Outlaw: I had read. The Souls of Black Folk while at Fisk. Du Bois is a major figure at Fisk, right? I had a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, and I had read it and I don't [00:52:00] remember being particularly moved by it in any particular sense at the time, but by the time I get to graduate school, so I'm in Boston, from 67 to 70.
So, well, Boston is one, you know, is a major academic center in the United States. When I was in graduate school, there was something calculated to be like a quarter of a million students in a 25 mile radius of Boston, downtown Boston. So there were lots of political things happening. And of course, my first year, I'm there in the fall of 67, in the spring of 68, I'm in a seminar with all graduate students and professors talking about, how we do teaching and other kinds of stuff as graduate fellows,
There's a break in a seminar. There was a white woman who was a year or two ahead of me, comes rushing in and said, Hey Lou, did you hear? I said, did I hear what? About Dr. King. Now, what about Dr. King? She said he was killed. Well, I was the only black person in the graduate program. Right. And when she said that to [00:53:00] me, The only reaction I had was, I've got to get out of here.
So I just got up and walked out. I didn't say anything about it. I just left. I made my way back down to go to Central Ball. I lived across the street from the Prudential Center and I was just lost.
I left, I go back to where my apartment was down near the Prudential building, I just go walking along the streets, people are crying, there's rioting, there's sirens, and I can't figure out what to make of all this.
They killed Martin Luther King Jr. and so this is a pretty turbulent period. So my roommate in the apartment was actually one of my roommates and best friends from Fisk. He was at Harvard Law School study. And this was the friend who had a conversation with us, sophomore, you don't really have to do this religious preaching thing if you don't want.
He was really influential and stuff. So anyway, so he had a back bedroom with the one that overlooked the Prudential building, which at the time was the tallest building in Boston. I was in the [00:54:00] front bedroom. So I'm in there reading for a seminar on Sartre's, being in nothingness. And my roommate starts saying, Oh, roommate, roommate, wait a minute, come here, hurry up, right quick, right quick.
So I go running back to his bedroom and he points out the credential and he says, Let's go burn down the proof. I said, roommate, you can't burn down the credential that's made of concrete and steel. He says, that's not the point. Let's go burn down the proof. And I'm like, what the hell is wrong with this guy?
He is a black guy from, you know, hot springs, Arkansas, studying law at Harvard law school, somehow. Let's go burn down the Pruitt. And I'm here thinking, how do I explain to my parents that I'm in Boston getting a PhD, but I've been arrested because I had a can of gasoline and matches heading over to a concrete steel building because I'm going to burn the damn thing down, which can't burn.
This makes no sense. He kept saying, you don't understand. You don't understand. Let's go burn down the Pruitt. I'm like, no roommate. I don't know what the [00:55:00] hell's wrong with you. And he finally said, well, you know, he's at Harvard level.
He's at Harvard Law, he's got this fierce background, he's studying law, and they are making clear to him at Harvard, we're not interested in questions of social justice, period. We're not interested. Your job is to learn to think like a lawyer, brief the case, tell us what the law says, etc. And if you don't like that, you can go somewhere else.
he's really frustrated. So he's like, we need to go do something, let's go do something. I'm like, yeah, I understand your frustration. But trying to burn down a prevention building, which can't burn? Ain't no way to do it. I'm not doing that. He's like, you just don't know. And so I had to go figure out, well, what am I going to do?
I ended up joining an interracial organization, working on stuff. I became editor of their newsletter and I had to find outlets for what I was doing. And then it was like, okay, what am I going to do in a dissertation? And I chose this problematic that had to do with the call for black power. And I had [00:56:00] been reading Fanon, that chapter on the Negro and language, and I sort of hit upon this problematic, What is the call for Black consciousness all about? And for me, it became, perhaps, here is a means by which to resolve this double consciousness. That what shift of language from Negro to Black. The embracing of what had been a derogatory term as a positive and as a way of talking about black consciousness and self consciousness.
In order to do that, you'd have to have resolved what had been a negative duality, just separation between oneself and being black. You had to get past that. So, The dissertation project became my way of contending with all of that intellectually and setting myself a trajectory.
And when I, proposed it to the chair of the department, he just sort of looked at it and said, [00:57:00] you're going to be on your own. there was a way in which they were accommodating me in an interesting way. It was like, basically, let's not mess with you. It was like, okay.
You're going to be on your own at that one. I found a professor who said, yeah, I'll supervise your dissertation. He had no reading in any of this. I had discovered Alfred Schutz's work.
Walking in a bookstore, I saw a title called Phenomenology of the Social World. I was like, whoa, what the hell is this? And I bought it. one of the things you were allowed to do in the graduate program was design reading courses on your own.
So I just set up, I designed my own reading course around Schutz and I started reading Schutz Even when I'd left and went to Nashville to teach at first, I would order my books from this bookstore called Mandrake because they had all these great books.
Titles from all around the world and particularly all this stuff from Phenomenology and Existentialism. The whole, Northwestern University had the whole series in Phenomenology and Existentialism. Kane had a series of it. [00:58:00] So I happened to see these books and so I started buying these books by shift and I just designed a reading.
program. And this professor agreed to advise who became my dissertation advisor, but he knew nothing about any of this.
He was learning with me. And he later on started teaching Schutz and all this stuff. I started reading Schutz. And then, for example, one of the other reasons that came up along was, George Herbert Mead.
Because I was looking at it.
And so the whole notion of how you socialize children and etc. I had to try to figure out how to bring together into a coherent project.
Andrea Hiott: And
Lucius Outlaw: that became the dissertation.
Andrea Hiott: Well, you had already, you mentioned German before that you had some German classes.
And I think I remember reading somewhere that you had had a really good teacher in Hegel and Kant. and I remember also that you got turned on to Marcuse. and the Frankfurt School at some point, because I think you, someone dragged you to a lecture and you didn't even know what you were going to, and it was Marcuse.
Maybe that was at Boston College, too.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, that was at [00:59:00] BC. The first day I got to Boston College, another graduate student, Otai, had to pipe the whole persona stuff. I was introducing him. He took me over to, The Eagles have creatures of cafeteria stuff, to meet some other graduate students who were actually in my cohorts.
So these two other white guys. Now, one of the white guys had graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. I didn't know him. He was from Little Rock, Arkansas, white. He was dating. A black woman at Fisk whom I knew I'd actually tried to date her and she said, I'm already seeing somebody else.
And then she later said, Hey, I hear you're going to Boston college. My boyfriend is going, make sure you meet him. I was like, okay. So I get that at first day at meeting. It turns out that was him. Then that was another white guy who had long hair and a beard. At Boston College at the time, it was a male owned school, [01:00:00] whether we're in the School of Nursing or the School of Education, but not in the College of Arts and Sciences.
And all the young men in the College of Arts had to wear coats and ties to school. I walked onto this campus in the summer, I've got on A button down short sleeve shirt. I've got a camera because I'm in the photography and I see all these young white boys running around in coats and ties.
I'm like, what the hell is this? I must, how could I be? I'm on the wrong campus because this is nothing like I had imagined to be. So I get to the, to the, snack bar and meet these two white guys and the one with the long hair, he's from, Going to school in California. He was from Oregon. He's dating a woman whose family is from South America.
And he's looking around stroking his beard and he's like, man, this is such a weird damn place. I'm like, yeah, that's what I think. We're, we are good friends to this day. He and his wife, three of us, all of us got married within a year or so we became a very, very tight group of people, et cetera.
Andrea Hiott: Meeting then, [01:01:00] lucky you.
Lucius Outlaw: guy from Oregon who had gone to school in California, near San Francisco said to me, Hey, I'm going to get this lecture done at BC. You should come go with me. So I go to this room, a standing room only. And this, bald guy comes up to the podium and start giving this lecture and it was riveting.
And I'm like, who the hell is this? And he said, Hey, that's Herbert Marcuse, right? I'm like, has he written a thing?
So then I'm in this seminar on Hegel with Jacques Tumineau from Louvain. What do you do? We had the Bailey translation of the phenomenology and he would have us, you know, one of us read a paragraph or so, and then he would explicate it. He had. a German edition.
He had a French edition. and he would extricate paragraph by paragraph by paragraph by character. That was a seminar.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So you learned that kind of movement that I bring it up for a reason because I feel like in your dissertation and double the doubling double consciousness, the way you bring phenomenon, I I'm interested in this.
your understanding of this dialectical [01:02:00] pattern or whatever, too, and how that might've been important in your thinking, because also with the Frankfurt school, because Marcuse was your intro into that, but you ended up, you know, we can talk about it later or another time, but you know, that Frankfurt school group, even meeting Habermas and there's a lot of this pattern of this dialectical kind of reconciliation, I guess, is what I'm wondering about, you kind of started learning that maybe in that Hegel class or
Lucius Outlaw: Hegel class was very, very influential. I mean, I tell people, if you read Hegel, you may not agree with Hegel, but you would not be able to think in the way you did before you read Hegel, that if you really begin to understand, if you can, if you, I used to say to students, you know, reading Marcuse or reading Hegel, it's like learning to dance with or to make love with a partner for the first time.
It's really kind of awkward at first because you don't, Your bodies are not coordinated. I mean, I said, it's like when you kiss somebody for the first time, it's awkward. You don't know who's [01:03:00] going to turn their head which way, your bum noses. But after you dance with somebody with a partner for a long time, you begin to know how their body moves, their rhythm, how they coordinate their rhythms with your rhythms, et cetera, et cetera.
And I said, to me, learning, To understand someone like Hegel, it's like learning to dance with a partner. You got to learn the rhythm of his thinking. How does he structure his sentences? How does he organize a paragraph? What's the rhythm of the logic in what he's saying? And once you get it, to me, it's really easy reading.
I mean, once you understand the rhythm of the logic and how it flows
Andrea Hiott: I mean I've always thought the same about Hegel that you're almost learning more of a, of a new kind of movement or calibration, or you talk a lot about praxis and practice and action and thought, and there is something about if you can read Hegel from a certain way, you learn a new thought movement.
It's not necessarily about what he says. I totally don't agree with all this. junk he talks about in terms of history, but it's more the movement that you, [01:04:00] you learn this movement, right? Which I'd also sense in other writers, not just Hegel, but you, and I think it's in your dissertation too, you're doing something of that movement, but yeah, I'm so glad you said that, because I think that's a really important distinction that I don't really ever hear made.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, I mean, and I try to tell some students, every writer has a rhythm. So it's about, Learning. You know, that's why I always say to students, your first responsibility is always to give the writer his or her say, not to judge them, but to hear them.
You've gotta let them lead the dance, and you've gotta learn how to get in step, get in sync with the rhythm of their moves. if not, then you're, to me, you're violating a fundamental ethical principle of hermeneutic, justice and patience and generosity. Give the writer his or her say. Learn to dance with them.
Learn how to get a step. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. [01:05:00] It's, you've got to give them their say. Open yourself up to them. Now, if they can persuade you to dance, now you could end up dancing saying, but I don't want to marry you. I enjoyed dancing with you. I don't want to sleep with you every night, One time may be enough, but Nah, that ain't, nope I don't need to do that again, you know Appreciate you for the person that you are it's, it's, I mean, and once I begin to get that rhythm and I
I had this conversation with Taminio when I was taking the Hegel seminar, cause you know, I'm trying to understand the U. S. How can Hegel help me understand the U.
S.? I mean, now I'm in, originally I had gone there, Graduates were thinking I was going to focus on analytic philosophy. We've got all this anti war, black power, all this stuff going on. I'm sitting around analyzing sentences. I'm like, no, this makes no sense. I need another strategy. So I'm reading Hale and trying to understand, how can it help me understand my situation, the U.
S., et cetera, the life I've had. I'm trying to contend with this race stuff. And so I have a one on one [01:06:00] with Tamidio and we started talking. You know, then, you know, space has A lot of negativity, but there's no real appreciation for negation. And it helped me to appreciate Hegel in a particularly new kind of way.
Then when I started reading Marcuse, in particular, if you read in one of his texts, there's an introduction to one of the texts called, A Note on Dialectics. It's a really interesting way of accounting for dialectical thinking and logic within the context of Hegel.
And he has this whole thing about that if you read Hegel, he argues it is shot through with historic grounding and implications. It's not just speculative abstract stuff, you know, so that was helpful. And so all of those are sort of resources that I'm trying to draw upon and put to work in a particular way.
One of the other really significant happenings while I was in graduate school [01:07:00] is this person comes to campus to speak.
being
given by a man named Harold Cruz.
Now, Cruz had published this book called The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Now, there were two kind of seminal moments for me in graduate school. One, I went to a bookstore in Cambridge one night browsing, and I see on the stand a journal called The Black Scarlet. And I was just stunned by those two words being together in a way I had never seen before.
Scholar and Black. Put those two things together. Now remember, I'm still working through this whole Black Consciousness thing. Cruz gives this talk about, based on his book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. I read the book and there's a deep critique going on about Negro intellectuals, well, already in the Black Power Movement, there's a distinction between being Negro and being Black.[01:08:00]
One is negative and one is positive. So I got, I'm reading through this and saying, by Cruz, there's a whole tradition of Negro people being intellectually inclined in certain kinds of ways, and why that is problematic, and you need to be thinking a different kind of way. Oh, wow, there's a whole new agenda.
There's this new journal called the Black Scholar. Well, and in fact, one of the founders of that journal, I just got to know this died a couple of days ago, Nathan Hare. So there's a whole, he's the head of the first Black Studies program in California. I mean, so all of these influences are happening at this fertile time in my life.
And
now I've got a whole new notion of what it might mean To be an intellectual, I couldn't get with the notion of a scholar.
I
was planning on being a college teacher. I wasn't thinking about scholarship, but I see a possibility in this notion of being an intellectual, which fits with me because I like the intellectual stuff.
What might it mean to be an intellectual? And intellectual, [01:09:00] who is black, committed to social justice and helping to make conditions better for black folk and white folk in the United States, And they have an international spectrum because there's anti war stuff and Vietnam and Pan Africans, all this, and how might I bring all this together?
And so the dissertation became that kind of project of, I think there's a way I can bring this all together.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It was like a, you, you call it a kind of hermeneutics of the transformation of consciousness, or at least that's how I I'm thinking of it. Then that's why it came to me.
So I think we have to pause for just a second though, because this will be probably a little bit wrong and you can correct me, but here's kind of how I'm thinking of all this to try to thread these things together. I know like a lot of listeners will know some of this and not other parts, like Hegel maybe or not this or, so okay, we were talking about your consciousness situated, nested in time period, and there were many kinds of ways we could have thought about your consciousness but in a way we've been talking about a [01:10:00] transformation of consciousness in a sense.
And then we were also talking about the philosophical part of that. so there's this, and we talked about this feeling of, this kind of dialectic of things doubling, like double consciousness in Du Bois, or when we think of Marcuse and Hegel, this dialectical movement that two seeming opposites are kind of, recognizing one another and in so doing opening a different path so that it wasn't really opposites but there's some kind of movement there or patterning that's a doubling in a similar way to Du Bois in terms of setting something against itself or having to, in maybe the way you did as a child, looking across the street and there's a white church and there's a black church and it doesn't make a lot of sense, and there's a kind of doubling there, or the way Du Bois talks about it of the black experience where you have no choice but to realize that, where the white people don't have to really realize that, but, so there's all these themes, right, that I see as connected, and I guess what I'm trying to get at now is, You were just talking about negro and black [01:11:00] and that too has a history, right?
There's a time when those words are in this dynamical process of changing and you're kind of noticing That changing and it's tied to the transformation and this becomes part of your dissertation But I think for people who don't because you know You could start at different points in history and those words are going to mean different things and they're going to be You Or the people using them, meaning different things.
As you show in your dissertation, this is part of this reconciliation process that's going on. and maybe even part of how we're going to continue resolving a lot of things that bother us. But before we can really look at that, can you help people understand these two words? Like, they weren't necessarily always opposites, right?
Or were they? Or what was going on there? I mean I'm a little worried people won't really understand, or maybe that I don't even really understand how that was when you saw Black Scholar, yeah, I don't know, like, what was those thoughts? That movement.
Lucius Outlaw: think, think about it this way. So [01:12:00] if, as a kid growing up, right, if you really wanted to assault another kid verbally, one of the ways you could do it was to call them black, because all the connotations were really very negative, dirty, stinky, inferior, you name it, right?
Now remember, we weren't reading Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk in Stockville, Mississippi. So black was always. a negative connotation. So, part of the work of a lot of the young folk in SNCC and in what became the Black Consciousness Movement, drawing off of their readings of Fanon, the Negro in language, et cetera, et cetera, was, as one scholar later, Kelly Joy, was to reverse the symbolic weightings of key terms.[01:13:00]
Take a negative and turn it into a positive. So, Think of how we now might orient ourselves to the term queer. It used to be an epithet, but people took it, reinvested it with meaning, and gave it a new positive significance rather than an invidious significance. And so, that's what began to happen with what was called the Black Collection of Muse.
Take the term black, and instead of taking it as a weapon or thinking of it as a negative, rather, I'm black. And I'm proud. that shift in the language of self reference was psychologically very wrenching. It took a lot of time, effort, and work to go from a negative to a positive with these key terms.
And that's why I was focusing on it by [01:14:00] saying there's an awful lot happening in going from Negro to Black. it will give us an entree into some larger cultural political happenings in the life of Black people.
And so, you know, so much is about language, and I'm in some ways working on that still now, but I'm dealing with Ralph Ellison and reading Kenneth Burk and languages and all that, and a whole bunch of other stuff going on right now, but that, that was, The insight that was the enterprise that I was committing myself to, but it also led me further into Frankfurt School and down to Critical Social Theory.
And at some point, sort of pretty much exhausting my time with that. Well, deciding, okay, Harvard Ross, you, I've had enough. Let me go somewhere else.
Andrea Hiott: this is really, really important, I think, and I want to try to talk about it a little bit, because like you were saying, this is a whole lot of work. All this, we're only talking a couple hours here, but all this change of the stance [01:15:00] or.
Being able to turn the positive into a negative, I mean, it's a kind of internal, it requires something like the person, many people, like nested, you know, the individuals, but also these groups, becoming aware, first of all, of the situation in terms of, I guess what we would say Du Bois is talking about with the double consciousness.
So you're already, You're already aware of it. if you're the person who's being, I guess if you're in a particular, context, then you have to be aware that you're being seen in a certain way, but then you kind of become aware as you did in a way that this doesn't make sense. and then you began to, it's Aikido or a Tai Chi or some kind of, in the same way we were talking about with the Hegelian movement, you're, noticing that energy, becoming present to it, and then you're taking it as your own in a sense, or like owning it. And in so doing, changing this whole dynamic between, whoever it was using that term in a negative way. So this long process of [01:16:00] what we were talking about with consciousness, right?
I think there's a consciousness raising is this kind of phrase that you use transforming consciousness in a way is, Do you see this kind of, practice or praxis of becoming aware of something that's happening and, I guess owning that and then redefining that and not always consciously but sometimes consciously.
Is that part of all this?
Lucius Outlaw: yeah. Let's take, I mean, one thing we haven't talked about, going to Haverford. So, I went to Haverford at night. And, in 1980 to visit for a year. I moved away 21 years later. Now, accepting an invitation to go to Harvard for a year was a very, very, very wrenching experience.
A very difficult experience. Because I had been committed to working in HBCUs. I wanted to be in historical backgrounds. I wanted to be in the cell, etc., etc. So now for a whole bunch of reasons, I, [01:17:00] I'd leave Fisk, I'd go to Morgan State, another historical back college, it wasn't working well for me as a state institution.
So I get invited to go to this predominantly white institution. Well, I had been interviewed at other predominantly white institutions and didn't
Andrea Hiott: I think you'd even been offered, you could stay at Boston College and you'd said no, because you wanted, it goes back to that moment on the street of that was the part you were going to play at that time.
Lucius Outlaw: And so now I've got this opportunity to go to, and I'm really torn, so I go talk to one of my friends at Morgan State, who is still a close friend to this day, and I start telling him how agonized I am about this possibility, I'm turning my back on my people, he looks at me and he says, no you're not.
He says, look. We know who you are. You're going to be fine. Go to Haverford. We know who you are. You're going to be fine. It's okay. And I was like, God, he just sort of took this rock of guilt off my shoulder. I go to Haverford and then I come to another realization. Okay. If some of us who are involved in African American or Black studies, we've been critical of the way that literature has been [01:18:00] canonized, and the histories have been written, how racism has played in the writing of histories, the building of discipline, all of this, I come to this realization, well, Right. So I'm at Haverford. I come to this realization. If all of our critiques of the way in which canon's histories have been Constructed under the auspices of white racial supremacy and all of that. If I want correctives to that, part of that corrective has got to mean that successive generations of white children are going to have to be taught in ways different from the way in which they've been taught.
So while initially I was guilt ridden about going to Haverford, I came to the realization, well, wait a minute, white young people in college need a me As much as some black students need me, because if we're going to disrupt the cross generational [01:19:00] perpetuation of white supremacy, one of the ways we're going to have to do it is by educating new generations of young white people.
So there's a, there's important work for me to do here. And so, I spent the next 40 years working at predominantly white institutions. Because, and one of the essays I wrote for a particular volume, the title of it is The Rehabilitation of Whiteness?
You know, there's been a prominent sort of movement at one point called the abolition of whiteness, led by a black labor economist, a white labor economist in the United States, who has been arguing the way we want to solve the racial problem is getting rid of the notion of whiteness. The abolition of whiteness.
Now, I find that a deeply problematic notion for all kinds of reasons, but simply put, if rightful could take the notion of blackness and [01:20:00] rehabilitate it from a negative to a positive, why would I conclude that the same thing can't be done with the notion of whiteness? There's nothing inherent in the notion of whiteness.
that requires white supremacy or invidious notions of either whiteness or blackness. It's a term. We invest the term, we give the terms meaning. So what would we have whiteness mean? That's really up to us. And so when I reflect upon how black folk rework the meaning of blackness, I say white folk can rework the meaning of whiteness, Have it come to mean something completely different from white supremacy and all of that.
There's nothing inherent in the notion of whiteness. So I invite whiteness. Well, tell me how to deal with it. No, no, no, no, no. That's not my job. It's not my job to tell you what whiteness should mean for you. That's your work. [01:21:00] I didn't have you tell me what whiteness had to mean for me. I had to work that out. I'm inviting you, I will support you taking up the really hard work against the grain of centuries of working out a new notion of whiteness that has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism. Nothing. Now, I don't find that strange or odd since I've known white folk who were not committed to notions of white supremacy or racism.
So there's nothing mysterious about it to me. There have always been white folk who thought of themselves differently. it comes to me from,
Andrea Hiott: In your thesis, you talk about, in the dissertation or in other writings, you discuss this, that we need to understand this, the double consciousness is like this transformation of consciousness, this self consciousness of black folks, I think you say, and this consciousness, raising and all of this, It starts, you [01:22:00] basically, I feel like we all need to understand that, white or black or whoever, right?
and that maybe is part of what you're saying now about, I wonder if this, this pattern that you describe, because In the dissertation, it's pretty much a way to reconfigure these praxis of social cultural meaning and praxis, right? The life world, we don't have a lot of time to talk about the phenomenology, but it's really, you're really talking about lived experience, a transformation of lived experience, which is coming about through symbols.
So you can't really ever, symbolize fully this world. But language, with language, we kind of have this third space where we can externally represent and discuss all of this process. and through reconfigurations there, like the one that you describe with the actual language, what happens there is a shift of power and of meaning.
It's a reconfiguring meaning and it's reconfiguring practice and it's reconfiguring it for all parts because it's the process. And I feel like that can be [01:23:00] nested, right, into what you're saying with other groups of people and people who haven't had to engage in it in the way that black folks have, in the way that Du Bois was writing about with the double consciousness.
That's a specific experience of black people in America, but I feel like the pattern of it is, What you're describing in the dissertation a bit and also what other groups could do and you know, of course this group It's always we're representing something that's an ongoing process and has many different ways of being looked at But I guess what I feel like I'm trying to get at is that we all can learn from this double consciousness in a way that could help reconfigure meanings and practices of our shared life world in ways that I think you're getting at in terms of what whiteness needs to be concerned with.
Does that make sense at all?
Lucius Outlaw: Sure. So part of what I'm having to prepare for right now. A couple of weeks ago, a person who came, a very historic figure, that I had the good fortune of [01:24:00] coming to know, becoming good friends with, my wife, and becoming a major influence in my life, it's a man named, the Reverend James Morris Lawson, Jr.
Does that name ring a bell?
Andrea Hiott: Describe from your perspective.
Lucius Outlaw: So he died a couple of weeks ago. So he was a person who taught, direct action, civil disobedience to John Lewis and Diane Nash and a whole bunch of other young people in Nashville in the late fifties. So he had been at Vanderbilt.
He got expelled. Anyway, I was involved in bringing him back to Nashville as a distinguished professor, visiting professors for several years when I was an associate provost. So we got to be good friends. Well, he died a couple of weeks ago, but he had specified, instructions for his funeral service that I asked to give remarks at his funeral service.
So I will be doing that. in LA on July 6th. But [01:25:00] one of the things, that I am trying to figure out how to work into this is a conception that I've come to, I had a conversation once I called him and I said, I'm trying to figure out, what would it mean to try to be involved in the situation in the Middle East involving Israelis and Palestinians, right?
How might A movement of the kind that you were so significant in in Nashville and in the country and in Memphis and in L. A. and other places. How might that take place? And we talked a bit about it. So, one of the things I came upon and I shared with a couple of former students when I was at Haverford, it was a period where I had 3 advisees in the same class who were philosophy majors.
And they were at the time good friends. One was an African American woman, one was a Jewish woman, one was a Palestinian woman. Good friends, and I'm their advisor. So they were very special. I [01:26:00] always said to them, you, are my vision for the possibilities of the future. So recently I was talking to, the Palestinian woman and the African American woman, there's been some sort of Tensions in the relationships, I had been thinking about this, and I said to the Palestinian woman, that as for my generation, part of the battle took place, if you will, on the terrain of language, the transformation of black from a negative to a positive.
So for me, there's part of the battle for the future of a just situation in the Middle East. It's also going to have to be on the terrain of battle, and what I'm getting at is over an expression of a vision for what can happen in that region. So did feminists. So did queer, lesbian, bisexual, trans, gay, etc. People had to invest all of that with new positive meanings.[01:27:00]
So now we have Pride Week. We speak of queer studies in universities when it used to be an epithet. And the battle on the terrain of language as a way of being able to envision and give expression to new visions by which we can order our lives and move forward together is part of what I think has to be done in that region of the world,
And to me, part of what I will be offering in LA is the Reverend was one of the greatest gifts ever to the history of this country, because here's a person, I said, if you look at the United States after 9 11, they declare war, if you look at what happens in Israel after October, they declare war, and in both cases, the nations felt themselves justified, if you look at what happened to African people and their descendants, millions of people were enslaved, millions died, millions were oppressed, etc.
However, it has never been the case. That white people have taken that as a justification for declaring war on white people. And I find that utterly amazing. [01:28:00] Instead, you have a movement grounded in love.
That to me is utterly astounding. But I think that's a tremendous gift of the United States.
Andrea Hiott: I've read where you talk about, you know, there are no like real categories, but we need to make categories. so in the same way that like, there's this map territory thing in a way.
So you have this ongoing life world process. Where there's actually no distinctions. Everything is alive and changing all the time and changing each other. But when it comes, like language already, we are making distinctions. And language is the place where you're going to change, that process in a sense.
Even though the language itself is never fully representing that process. It's representing it, but it's not the territory. It's a map of the territory. But I hear you saying, actually the way we change the maps changes the territory. So it matters how we change the map. It matters how we change the language.
And what you're just saying is powerful too, but I think also it matters from what perspective The agency is being given, [01:29:00] like depending on where you're using those words or where you're listening to what you just said about them, they're going to be interpreted in a different way because the map isn't the territory, right?
So your meaning behind that, the way you actually mean it, might be being interpreted a completely different way. if someone's kind of using a different map, so to speak, you know? And same with, that happened, I think, a lot with the struggles we've been talking about, and you know better than me, where your dad knew how to kind of use the language to get what he wanted, in a sense, because he had to learn that.
that's a different perspective than the white person who didn't get any of that, you know? So I guess what i'm trying to say is it doesn't it get really complicated in terms of that there's so many different ways of using the same symbols such that sometimes we think We're talking about the same thing or expressing the same thing and we're not Or that someone might hear what you just said and hear it from actually through a completely different map than the one you mean it by?
Isn't [01:30:00] that a complication, too? And how does that get worked out?
Lucius Outlaw: By making a commitment to working it out rather than shooting it out. In the following simple kind of way, I hear what you said, what do you mean? Here's what I thought you meant. Is that what you meant? You play it back, and I say, no, that is what I said, it's not what I meant or intended.
So let's talk this through. We call it dialogue, right? Now, a dialogue, in order to be effective and have the potential for succession has got to be ethically structured. There's got to be some norms that structure dialogue, like fundamental respect for the participants in the dialogue, [01:31:00] listening, asking questions prior to rendering final judgments, being open to the possibility of changing oneself
Well, you said something. Yeah, but I didn't, but I thought you meant no, no, that's not what I meant. Oh, but I thought, I understand you thought, but here's what, Oh, I misspoke. Oh, I miss heard. Okay. Well, let's try it again. Right. That process is crucial to having a stable, viable community. Well, what do we mean?
In some sense, we call it democracy, but there's a whole bunch of philosophical anthropology, politics, ethics, et cetera, that has to undergird democratic praxis. Has to, if you want to have it. And one has to be committed to one has to give up on certain kind of epistemological commitments, namely, truth is going to come by very of a method I have worked out that guarantees me [01:32:00] successful acquisition of truth, and I've got the right method for doing, you know,
What is going to be truthful and best for all of us is what's going to come out of ideological engagement with what the issues are, what the desires and wishes are, that we work out between and amongst ourselves in a way that serves all of us as well as we can, given what we're working with, and that we have to continue to work at that, continue to work at that, and each of us has to be prepared.
And the other thing is There's another whole discussion we haven't had. So, so much of what I've been given over to, over the last couple of decades, growing out of focusing upon the notion of race, and this has to do very much with Du Bois, is to work out, for my own understanding, [01:33:00] what was Du Bois sense?
of human evolution.
I am convinced he was an evolutionist, that his notion about raciality, racial groupings was not an essentialist notion, that he was an evolutionist. And if I stand back and look at our human species, there's no way I know how to make sense out of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens without having an account of groupings.
Andrea Hiott: it reminds me of the way you talk about symbols and language in the dissertation. You know, this theme kind of continues on where there's a distinction to be made between the language and the symbol.
area, the map, I would call it, and the territory, which is the process, the ongoing, dynamic, ever changing, all of it, right? Where of course there's no [01:34:00] categories, there's no real such thing as a species because it's all always changing and moving, there's no, all these terms we use, of course, in that life world or process, it's all dynamic and always changing.
However, to be alive, to communicate, to have anything like a language or symbols or science or philosophy, We do use categories,
We do need categories.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah. I mean, part of what I'm drawn to now is that I'm convinced about is that our species is first and foremost a social species.
No group has all of the knowledge resource to solve all of the problems that come up in this world. So one of the things you need. is new information.
How do you solve certain kinds of problems? If you survey the world and see how people who live differently have come up, come up with similar problems and figured out how to resolve the [01:35:00] problems, you enhance the wellbeing of all. Take away that diversity. Take away that adaptability. All you need is a new problem for which we don't have a ready answer, and the game is going to be over.
You eliminate the adaptiveness. You eliminate adaptability. Game over. So the openness and learning that being able to encounter the new and the different to run the assessment without having to say, you're not like me, therefore I've got to condemn you rather than say, Oh, what's that new dish you're creating?
Can I taste it? Oh, wow. What's in this? What are its properties? How might this be helpful? Etc. those are the keys to the viability of our species. That's the insight that I think that Du Bois grasped really, really well.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well said. And do you think that That double consciousness is part of it is that is that [01:36:00] an old term or can we keep using that doubling to better understand this process,
Lucius Outlaw: they, what he Described as double consciousness was a problematic state.
So he wasn't recommending doubling. It was a consequence of a particular kind of situation and what he was opting for was a resolution of what had become a troubling split.
Andrea Hiott: I just, I feel like that's what I was trying to get at with this, um, this dialectic or this, this pattern, that the reality isn't that troubling split, but somehow through this recognition that we've seen it wrongly or that we've seen it differently, then another path opens up.
It doesn't mean we need that, um, but maybe there's other ways in which we can, get to a place of transformation [01:37:00] by noticing that we've doubled, I guess, or that we're seeing that we have this, um, double consciousness of, that others have it even. Maybe that it's, it's, it's because I, I feel like this, this, this theme applies to, A lot of either or situations that end up becoming incredibly destructive and painful for different groups.
It's not, it's not the same as the Black American experience in the way that Du Bois describes it, but you brought up like the queer experience, for example, and I think there's a double consciousness there, or Sure. You know, the other, you know, so maybe there's a way in which this pattern we can notice is happening in a lot of different places, in different ways, not to like say that it's all like exactly the same way, but I guess that's more what I mean.
Yeah,
Lucius Outlaw: right. And so part of, part of what I'm trying to learn to appreciate, and I've been writing and teaching to appreciate, is how do we [01:38:00] contend with that which differs? And part of what I'm trying to work through is an appreciation for If you will, the evolutionary throwing up of difference and diversity, and how, in some ways, that is an adaptive, a key to adaptive success, if taken up, understood and taken up.
In appropriate kinds of ways.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly, just as you show in your dissertation in that sense of it looks like a negative, but if you take it in a different way and make it a positive, um, yeah, that, it's almost like right now we think difference strikes us as something bad or that we need to be afraid of or that we need to resolve when instead it's like a portal into.
A transformation to put it in kind of terms, a, a transformation of consciousness that ends up [01:39:00] affecting both sides. It's a different way of thinking about all of that, that I feel like the world really needs right now.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, I mean, part of it is, um, to let go of the fears that mo, that we, that motive us, us to try to mobilize resources, to eliminate differences and establish what we take to be the safety of homogeneity. And I'm trying, there are dangers in homogeneity, that homogeneity needs to be tempered by new information that is heterogeneic, that homogeneity
can easily lead to stasis. And render us individual or group of people or some, uh, living being, render them [01:40:00] maladaptive because the homogeneity is built upon a certain amount of information, but that information can easily become maladaptive in a dynamic world. Our universe is not, it's not a frozen stasis.
It's dynamic.
Andrea Hiott: There is no homogeneity. If there was, we wouldn't be here in another way to say it.
Lucius Outlaw: So how do we continue but how we take up differences for growth and transformation.
Andrea Hiott: Right. Maybe noticing the patterns and appreciating the patterns without thinking they have to be corresponding to some specific substance in some specific thing. I mean, that's that map territory. Tori thing. Also, I have to bring up this word love here because this is love and philosophy and we're talking about all this and I don't, I've never, I don't know about like love and Du Bois, but I feel like what we're trying to describe right now is a kind [01:41:00] of does put you into a place of love. I mean, you've been with your wife, you said 50 years, I think, and you were talking about
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, 54 on the way to 55.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. So you must know something about, Um, seeing things from a different position or, yeah, I don't, I don't know. wonder, okay, if I bring up that word love, what does that, do you, how do you see that in this process that we're talking about?
Lucius Outlaw: Well, I mean, think about it. So this was a central concern for Mandu de King Jr.,
the movement for Reverend Lawson, et cetera. And King said, look, I'm not talking about erotic love, I'm talking about agape love. So part of it is getting worked out. What do we mean by love? And part of it in that moment was, there was a care for the rescue of white people from their racism, as well as for the rescue [01:42:00] of Negro people from the racism of white, that both things needed to happen, that you need to be As caring for the well being of white people beyond racism, as you cared for black people in rescuing them from racism, that everybody needed to be loved.
That love was going to be key to helping, caring for the very of all, right? And that means you have, for me, it means I have to reject opposition articulated by Malcolm X. very much. Who said, by any means necessary. My position is, there are some means I will not accept.
Andrea Hiott: Like your dad on the sidewalk.
Lucius Outlaw: That's right. That [01:43:00] is If I say by any means necessary, well, I'm not going to accept it. I don't think I am justified in using I don't have any means to achieve my end, that I need not have any regard for the of those against whom I struggle. I don't accept that.
Andrea Hiott: It doesn't seem like love, it doesn't seem like we can fit love onto that. No,
Lucius Outlaw: there's no way to fit love into that. I mean, I find the very notion of advocating by any means necessary morally reprehensible. I think it's one of the most reprehensible ethical things that Malcolm X ever said. I think it's morally reprehensible to advocate by any means necessary.
Any means? We've got plenty of evidence in human history of atrocities, but if you're going to endorse that, there's no distinction about atrocities versus humane struggle, where you, where you are committed to preserving the humanity of the people against whom [01:44:00] you struggle.
Andrea Hiott: I think it has to do with, yeah. I'm not committed. Yeah, when we feel like we only have one choice or the other, it's that thing too, where it's, there's never that.
Lucius Outlaw: And again, I, I just found it absolutely astounding that I have come upon no history of a principal commitment on a part of black folk to wage war on white people.
And I just found that utterly astounding. So you don't, what about
Andrea Hiott: like Marcus Garvey and this kind of,
Lucius Outlaw: Garvey wants separation. Garvey wants separation. Garvey goes to Klan meetings. Garvey has Klan people come to him. He says, because we agree on the same thing. We need to be separated from each other. He thinks, yeah, we don't need to be together. We can't live together. Let's just go to separate places and live. Y'all be y'all, we'll be us. Right? So he wasn't calling for war on white people. Again, that's the thing. Here's another example for me. Think of a [01:45:00] enslaved black woman working on a plantation where she's preparing food for the slave owning family and feeding them.
Now, one of her options might be, I could end this by poisoning the whole white family.
She doesn't. She could say, this is a cross generational project. They willed the slaves to other people. They've got a baby. Instead, she nurtures the baby sometimes. Let's the baby suckle from her own nipples to sustain the baby. Why? I mean, I just find that utterly mind blowing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think it's love. I think it's some connection with the reality.
Lucius Outlaw: My maternal grandmother said to me on more than one occasion, Son, the only way you can keep somebody in the ditch is that you got to get in the ditch with them. Don't get in the ditch with the white man. I think if they would laugh at certain things about white folk, they'd never propose hatred of white people.
Never. I mean, [01:46:00] I just find that spirit that runs across the entire history of African peoples in the Western world. To me, it's just mind blowing. I think it's such an extraordinarily powerful lesson and gift.
Andrea Hiott: it makes me think of Eric from a little bit in love who I know you talked to and knew actually, we didn't even get into that story, but, but that's, that's the kind of love that we're, a lot of us, that much of the world is still trying to learn.
And I think in those stories that you just told shows that it's actually here and it's been here, even in. The most painful of times, people have had that, so it's real.
Lucius Outlaw: It's real, and I'm saying, to me, that is why a person like Reverend Lawson, there are others. It's one of the most profound gifts to the United States.
And the other thing is, compare him to Osama bin Laden. They both have deep religious convictions. They draw on them for different ends and different [01:47:00] means. And those differences make a difference. One led to enormous destruction. And responding to Osama bin Laden by a declaration of war and going to war, got us what?
Got us what? Okay, Hamas commits atrocities. Okay, Go to war. Okay, so now you're killing a bunch of people.
Andrea Hiott: we put those patterns into the world, the ones we are using. So it's just perpetuating it somehow, I guess, without, but how do, how do people take a step? How do we, I mean, to, to just bring it full circle to try to kind of end, how do we, how, what's your advice or what's your feeling or kind of last, like thoughts just for this conversation, thoughts, um, about.
How do, for those who haven't, like, how do we develop that stance or that orientation, or the one of love that we're talking about now, or the one of taking a step back like you said and saying, do I know what you mean? [01:48:00] And is it, what's your, what's your feeling? What have you seen that is a good way for, trying to learn that or help teach that as you've been doing?
Lucius Outlaw: Well, you know, one of the things that I help Revit also helped me to understand for example is the commitment to non violence was not a commitment to passivity. He was not a pacifist, it was an active, engaging in struggle, tempered by certain principles having to do with love and nonviolence and recognition of the humanity of other people.
And that takes a tremendous kind of not only understanding but a kind of patience, uh, regarding human development and change And being willing to be patient and work through things in particular kinds of ways. That is, without violence. You know, um, he told a story once about how when he was, uh, doing a national movie, they had been on a demonstration.
He was walking back to the church from which they had set out to do the demonstration. [01:49:00] He got separated from the groups. He was confronted by a group of young white guys who were antagonistic. The margin. And so these white guys and one of them in a motorcycle jacket walked up and spit in his face. So he asked the guy who spit in his face, he said, do you have a handkerchief?
The white kid said, yeah. He says, may I borrow it? The white kid gave him the handkerchief, so he wiped the spit him off the face. He said, so you're wearing a motorcycle jacket? Do you? Do you have a motorcycle? You ride a motorcycle? And he says, yes. He says, I ride a motorcycle too. So then they had a conversation about motorcycles.
Andrea Hiott: That's beautiful.
Lucius Outlaw: And so then at the end of which he switched the headed the
Andrea Hiott: context. Yeah. He headed
Lucius Outlaw: the kid back. The handkerchief thanked him and walked onto the church.
Andrea Hiott: That's beautiful. That's a kind of example of. Of what you described to in terms of the language or the making the [01:50:00] positive and negative or switching the power of or definition of the word or this or the energy of the situation.
It's almost like a literal example of that.
Lucius Outlaw: Yeah, I mean, so, but in that situation, what are you committed to, if you think that's being have someone spinning your face is the worst of Nvidia's actions toward you that. justifies your response violently,
but that's not his own thing. For him that is nothing in that regard. And the story of his life was when he was a kid, his mother sent him to the store. He went to the store coming back home. He's walking along on the sidewalk. There was a car with some young white boys parked in it. As he got beside the car, one of the boys in the car called him a nigger. So he walked over to the car and slapped the shit out of him. So when he got home, he told his mother what happened and that he had slapped the kid and his mother looked at him and asked, And what good did that do, Jimmy? [01:51:00] And so he had to walk away and start thinking, what good did that do? Well, he now had to confront this question of what kinds of actions beget what kinds of actions.
And that set him on a road to thinking about violence and non violence. He's in the church reading the teachings of Jesus. He goes to India to study the teachings. Well, he refused to be inducted into the, into the Korean war. He's put in federal prison. He comes out, he goes to India as a missionary to study the teachings of Bhajan.
So he gets set off on this road of what good is violence and where he begins to think how do we, what he says, how do we break the cycle of violence.
What can we do to break the cycle? So if somebody spits at my face, I slap them. They feel justified and hit me back. [01:52:00] So now we've got this, seem to be a dialectic of back and forth, but there's, what's the resolution of that? Death of one of the others? Or do you say there's a different reaction that calls forth a reaction that in fact lays the groundwork for a resolution that embraces the of all rather than denigration or death?
It's that sense of how might we engage in the world in such a way that we break the cycle of violence. Well, then you got to put forward an understanding of people such that you don't engage in
I'm trying to figure out how to take off and follow, you know, the past I've been on inspired by him and having.
Become such a very close friend of his, and I'm still blown away by the way in which he came to regard me as such a close friend. [01:53:00] There's, we spent a lot of time together when he was back at Vanderbilt over the course of three years. I became, we became very close and the family knows that. And again, he writes down at my death, there's a service, you know, I'm like, Wow.
Wow. That's a, that's
Andrea Hiott: a real strong, strong moment in. Meaning of meaning. Maybe you can, um, if you could share with like where we could find out more about him and your, you know, this, I mean, it would be so I could share it with everyone who doesn't know him. One
Lucius Outlaw: of the things I worked on and helped to facilitate is that all of his papers.
And now, um, in the archives of Vanderbilt University, and they are all digitized.
you can access papers through the Vanderbilt University libraries.
Andrea Hiott: okay, I'll look for it.
Lucius Outlaw: Vanderbilt. edu and the libraries, [01:54:00] the James Lawson papers.
And also to accept these at Vanderbilt is the James Morris Lawson.
Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Social Movements. There's a whole story about how that came to be and working to help bring that about. So,
Andrea Hiott: that's wonderful. Even though I've been reading so much of your stuff, I didn't know about that yet. So it opens up a whole new, whole new thing.
So thank you. I am sorry for your loss. However, I do feel like that was a, obviously some, something has been given to the world through this, um, that will continue to be given. And, you know, we didn't even get into, I mean, we didn't even talk about so much Africana philosophy and all kinds of things, um, from your career.
But at least we, I think we got really deep into this feeling of, of love, actually, was what it ended up coming to, but, um, of, of philosophy, why it's important, and, um,
Lucius Outlaw: Maybe another occasion, but I thank you for [01:55:00] allowing me to spend time with you and talk about all this for your podcast.
Thank you.
Andrea Hiott: It means a lot, really. Thank you for sharing your time, and thank you for all that you've given in the world and done, and thanks for, you know, standing on the sidewalk that day and having that thought and following through on it of becoming a teacher, and uh, And a writer. It means something.
And it will continue to mean something. I know you already know that, but, you know, it's good to hear again. Thank you
Lucius Outlaw: Andrea. really appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrea. You take care. Thanks. Keep in touch.