This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalised shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
Dr. Joy James’ following post includes a transcript taken from a ‘Black August’ interview on RSTV/BPM with FTP organizer Kalonji Changa, from August 30, 2022; the initial transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity, and is followed by a reflection.
Advisory warning: This Black August 2022 blog discussion reflects on violence, rape, and murder; as well as political rebellion against antiblack captivity and torture.
Dragons as Guerilla Intellectuals
Kalonji Changa: Discuss your concept of George Jackson as a ‘dragon.’
Joy James: The concept of the ‘dragon philosopher’—in the August 21, 2018, AAIHS (African American Intellectual History) article, ‘George Jackson: Dragon Philosopher and Revolutionary Abolitionist’—evolved from a conversation I had with Harlem panther veteran and academic Kit Holder, who described Jackson as a ‘dragon’ and a philosopher. My degree in political philosophy and dissertation on Hannah Arendt suggests that I formally learned fairly nothing about Black people, political rebellion, or black liberation movements—well at least not from Jesuits, conservative whites, or employment in Ivy League schools. When Holder, in conversation, defined the dragon philosopher as a revolutionary who loves, I began to wonder what kind of philosopher I was in relation to the dragon philosopher.
George and his younger brother, Jonathan Jackson—who died on August 7, 1970, while George died on August 21, 1971—were ‘guerrilla intellectuals.’ Author of Soledad Brother and the posthumously published Blood in My Eye, George Jackson embodied the strategist who defines not just how to resist state dispossession and violence, but also how captives could build security and a ‘people’s war’ for liberation that could only be won through the destabilization of empire and conquest.
Dragons are also philosophers because they engage in meta-thinking; they think across all categories. When I read Soledad Brother, I see love. Then I have to reconcile seemingly diametrical poles: there is militarism or the war strategies; the echo of Malcolm X’s call for self-defense; and assertions of agency in which there would be ‘dying on both sides.’ There is also immense love that coexists with defensive force against state and white supremacist violence. Convention instructs with rigid political dichotomies—asserting that “violence” (actually, force through the exercise of self-defense) and love cannot exist in the same space at the same time—but that is a disciplinary soundtrack. That injunction does not reflect the reality of our existence as mutations from centuries of enslavement, colonization, and social violations. The love is profound in our communities. The violence is deep. We have to reconcile the two. To split the two apart does not make sense given what we have inherited over centuries of captivity, enslavement, rape, and terror; and how we survive. We love and resist in the same zones.
During a 2021 Black August interview on another podcast episode, I stated that “George is a Captive Maternal”; the interviewer’s response was: “He’s a hyper-masculinist—how could he be a Captive Maternal?” I replied that it was because he loved and he cared for people. If I talk about love in a less abstract way in order to reflect on revolutionary struggle, I distinguish force from violence and recognize that we have the right—even if we lack the political will—to use force against violence.
Kalonji Changa: Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara said, “Revolution is an act of love.” Freedom fighting is all about love. I don’t understand revolution without love. Revolution without love is criminal. It’s for the love for your people and the love for humanity that you fight. It’s the love for the planet that makes you fight and resist. People are confused and misconstrued when they say, “Why are you so angry?” I’m not angry. I’m in love. That love causes me to respond to violence by whatever means to put that fire out… What does the dragon mean to you?
Joy James: The dragon is a mutation. Let us examine. We are all born with personalities and some of us have strong personalities. I did not have a strong personality as a child. I had a strong will, but not a strong personality. I was a stutterer. I hugged trees. I hid in tree houses. I stayed away from people. There were probably times when the dragon was waiting for me at the corner, like the trickster Elegba. Dragons, as political rebels and philosophers for freedom and justice, meet at the crossroads. Sometimes, they let you know you’re late in arriving, as in: We’ve been sitting here for 20 years, but now that you’re finally here, we’re gonna do this; you can run away, but once we touch you, you know. That knowledge is clarity about the difference between acting for reforms that bring you back into the status quo, often as a minor beneficiary, and acting in the role of the dragon philosopher to critique and disassemble traditional politics for liberation movements. There is a dragon-as-freedom fighter inside of you. There is a dragon inside oppressed people. There’s a dragon inside the children who are born and who make it to long lives, and the ones whose lives are shortened or who never make it out of the womb. There are dragons in girls and women forced to carry the penalty of being charged with ‘homicides’ and who are thus reduced to captives in prison. Dragon thinkers or philosophers are everywhere, but rarely are they in academia where philosophy is professionalized.
George Jackson, who is honored or recognized in Black August given his writings, prison rebellion, and assassination in this month, seemed to have collected quite an amount of dragon energy and intensity—that collection makes sense. The seven years in solitary confinement, the indeterminate sentence of one year to life for a conviction of driving a car used in a gas store robbery that netted about $70, the racist violence in prison, the murder of his close friend and mentor W.L. Nolen by a guard/Vietnam veteran marksman in a tower—those experiences shape epistemologies as well as nervous systems. Nolen mentored and loved George; George loved him. Dragon philosophers are born out of love and despair. Mixed, the two do not necessarily produce passivity; at times they merge to form militant agency.
I first ‘met’ George when I bumped into his image, impressed upon a six-foot poster pinned to the wall of a home of a prominent abolitionist who closely knew him. Shackled, wry grin, defiant despite imprisonment and enslavement, he was jaunty and confident… so confident, in hell, striding to meet confrontation with the devil. Bumping into George, you brush up against the dragon. That can become a catalyst to increase one’s capacity to seek intellectualism and action outside of conventional politics and social decorum. The conditions of struggle are determined by the violence arrayed against the people we love. Read George. He constantly talked about the people he loves. He was a seer. He knew himself as a dragon, and so knew that he would likely not make it out of prison alive because he was not going to conform. He refused to be less than a mutation (hence, he was a revolutionary not a civil rights advocate). There are ways in which we’re broken by predatory people and structures. Then, we pretend that there is no dragon available within us to express our resistance to that harm and continuous predatory acts against us. Thus we become the broken people who refuse the energy of the fight which begins with ideas and critical thinking. Dragons are not anti-intellectual. They are highly intellectual. Of course, we are talking about mythological beings. But their capacity is material and real in our consciousness and choices. Their capacity increases because they appreciate the powers of emotional intelligence. As you said, Kalonji, if you do not love and you are engaged in certain acts then you’re just doing crime. That becomes, eventually or essentially, crime against the people, crime against nature, and crime against our own natures or ethics.
Dragons are feared because they cannot be tamed and turned into circus creatures. I would never keep a dragon chained up: they always manage to escape. Their flight seeks not mere revenge, but reconciliation through reparations and restitution. Restitution doesn’t always have to be monetary, material, or physical; it could be intellectual or spiritual… orisha and ancestors exist for a reason. Sometimes the only way to peace is through accountability that cannot be delivered through a check/cash payout or your first Black president, and Black female vice president. There are payoffs when some monetize Black suffering; but it’s cheap, pennies on the dollar within a culture that foster(s/ed) genocide.
“Long live the dragon,” as you say, Kalonji. Yet, most people cross the street when they have an inkling that there may be a trace of dragon philosophy within a thinker entering a movement, classroom, or manager’s office to make demands for justice. Dragon philosophers’ primary goal is freedom. Given the state’s impunity to torture, rape, and murder Blacks, George Jackson, as a guerilla intellectual, read the environment as a war zone.
Reflection: Gender Wars
I am not sure how we stitch or suture in a way that won’t fray so that we will have to stitch and suture again, but I agree that gender ‘wars’ or conflicts seem to alter our political theory and capacity to organize. Sometimes my work on radicalism or the Captive Maternal is used against feminism. I am not trying to leverage anything against feminisms in the plural (diversity is also found in ‘abolitionisms’). I am trying not to be boxed in by bourgeois or petit bourgeois thinking. As the heirs of families and communities forged out of chattel slavery, we have suffered quite a bit of harm over centuries. Whether or not one believes in epigenetics, we still have disparities in health outcomes that are pretty devastating concerning maternal mortality rates, birth rates, trauma, depression, medical neglect, poverty, and violence. Our mental health needs are significant. The market can play on that with promissory notes. For example, you are told that if you follow a certain Black feminism you will be stronger, a more vibrant leader, and safer in society. Or, you can be told that if you follow a certain kind of Black masculinism, you will redeem your dignity and manhood. Yet, there are lives shaped by the non-gender, a-gender, diverse gender, trans, and LGBTQ+ with additional and specific vulnerabilities to violence. Filicide (the murder of children), femicide (the murder of women), and genocide (the murder of communities and culture) shaped this state and social order. None of these categories of vulnerability exclude ‘males,’ who encompass men, boys, nonbinary children, or (self)identified trans. Trans women are key targets within the horrors of femicide. Yet, all gender categories are unstable or nonprimary under state violence or genocide. (Oddly, we emphasize the gender divide or divisions while the youth as intellectuals and organizers are dismantling or redefining ‘gender’ as a concept.)
Can ‘gender wars’ (which is not the same thing as femicide) become a deflection from confronting the predatory state? Under fascism, it is likely that gender is not going to be a big deal. If you’re designated for genocide, your gender is not going to determine if you go first or last. Angela Davis wrote “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” in 1971 while incarcerated in jail, awaiting trial, weeks after George Jackson was assassinated. Davis says that this text was a feminist tract and they were not quite aware of it as such at the time. The article is dedicated to George Jackson, the dragon philosopher. Dragons do not exhibit the persona of ‘black excellence’ or elite individuals who function well within the state as it maintains antiblack, anti-poor animus, and imperial mandates shaped on extraction—and exploitation—and captivity.
State employees as drivers of this racially-fashioned, imperial democracy include the Black ‘firsts’: the first Black male president (Barack Obama); first Black female Vice President (Kamala Harris); first Black Woman NYPD commissioner (Keechant Sewell); first Black lesbian mayor of Chicago (Lori Lightfoot). All have a policing function or mandate to extinguish dragons, as stabilizers or operatives for the state’s antiblack ethos and punitive practices. The community of slaves is to be disciplined not empowered. Gender remains an important issue—and gender/sexual violence has to be addressed as a priority—but the community is the target for disaggregation and pacification. Gender does not perform in a captive community the same way it does in a non-racially stigmatized or bourgeois/affluent community. In privileged sectors, mass poverty, deportations, murder, trafficking, exploitation, or the legacy of historical mass rape, theft of land, and poisoned environments/waters are not the norm. Within a specific corral, the community of slaves or Captive Maternals are coerced under punitive conditions shaped by a racially-denigrated status of Black/African.
Gender is not a stable construct under genocide. Mass murderers do not ask if you are a boy or girl, man or woman, before they push you off a cliff; or gas you; or drone strike you. You’re simply something to be eradicated. Under those conditions, gender mutates. We would have to follow those mutations and analyze precarity from external aggressors. Internally within our homes, communities, and movements, we must stop violence against each other. Since we’re talking ‘therapy,’ I suggest, as a survivor of several rapes, that we put rape on the list of movement priorities. (See here and here.) Move that up to the top 10. Understand that men/boys are also raped. To understand the violence against women—males raping females—also means to acknowledge males raping men and boys, and those incarcerated or in neighborhoods or in war zones.
Women/girls can also violate but do so less frequently and noticeably. I know of teenage girls that became madams and pimps. At first, for me, this was an oddity because I only envisioned a male persona as controlling predatory sex (I acknowledge the rights of sex workers not to be denigrated or criminalized, I am referencing here to predatory violence and labor exploitation). Predatory violence has to stop on all registers—emotional, intellectual, political, material, physical, and sexual. Gender mandates do not have the capacity to deal with violence on all of those levels and with the mercenaries, militarism, and imperialism protected by and emanating from the state. Gender mandates for equality, equity, and safety do good things. There does need to be a reconstruction or restitution of what it means to have a male identity without being perpetually shamed if one is cisgender. There should also be a reconstruction of the female persona so that it is not always seen as a victim or incapable of agency, resistance, and leadership. All genders betray freedom movements. However, high vulnerabilities to violence exist for Blacks of all genders: male, female, nonbinary, trans. Female, nonbinary and trans people, racially-dishonored, neurodiverse, differently-abled, and impoverished peoples are disproportionately neglected, disparaged, and targeted by police who use the label and acronym “No Humans Involved” (NHI) for those murdered.
Consider the case of Samuel Little, who died in 2020 from old age in prison after earning the notoriety of being the most prolific individual serial killer in the United States outside of a formal war zone. This African-American man raped and murdered 93 women. How do you hit numbers that high? Disproportionately and overwhelmingly, his victims were Black women. That is how you reach such a high count. The state did not care enough to thoroughly investigate those murders of women whose deaths spanned nearly forty years (1970-2005). Talk about ‘women’s rights.’ But if the state doesn’t care about the murders of Black or Indigenous women/girls then ‘women’s rights’ are selectively applied and enforced.
Author Da’Shaun Harrison informs us in Scalawag about the war against communities, families, and children. Harrison and Samaria Rice, who lost her twelve-year-old Tamir Rice to a police murder in Ohio, remind us how legalism fails to offer protections and justice. My past rapes from my youth were not inflected by women. In James Baldwin’s 1965 Cambridge University debate with white-power architect William Buckley, Baldwin notes that Blacks and whites were “integrated” in the US. Observing that his “American” lighter complexion differed from that of African students in the Cambridge University Hall, he referenced the enslaved “concubines” subjugated by white power in family history: “My grandmother,” stated Baldwin to the Cambridge gathering, “was not a rapist.”
Males have a lot of work to do in terms of what they have absorbed from a violent, enslaving, imperial culture. Females, trans, and the ungendered also have work to do. We need to address the violence against children, the feminized, female and male and nonbinary. Filicide, or misopedia (the hatred of children, more specifically here the hatred of their freedom and refusals), and femicide are key challenges. We fear each other so much because of the harm and violence. With high levels of violence, there is no liberation movement that we can develop with integrity. We would have to trust each other because we became disciplined in struggle and in anti-violence and the use of force against violence. We need therapeutic interventions and the material conditions to have stable households, sufficient food, water, and shelter. A ‘gender war’ can be a deflection from genocide if it does not address the material conditions of communities that are starved from resources and security. Genocide eliminates all genders through filicide and femicide. Gender battles can move towards correction, resolution, and rapprochement. The larger issue cannot be reduced to gender war or conflict; it must include a focus on the guerilla intellectuals’ or dragon philosophers’ responses to genocide and ecocide that encompass genders.
Only a segment of people will be open to the dragon or receptive to the contributions of dragon philosophers (female/male/nonbinary). Nonetheless, we can still demand discipline that assists us in refraining from denigrating or abusing children, women, men, trans and nonbinary, and the impoverished who bear the brunt of war and dispossession; defend ourselves, but not abuse ourselves or others—emotionally, verbally, physically, sexually. Whatever our pain is, whatever the miswiring or rage, we must figure out a way to deal with and deflect without inflicting harm if we wish to retain the capacity for lucent thinking amid fire and precarity. Everyone has the right to use force to deal with predators given the state’s deficiencies, and its own predatory history and functions. But the social network needs to be mended to deal with the state’s betrayals.
Back to Samuel Little. Little had an elderly black woman, who was also mentally and emotionally impaired, as his accomplice. He would lure or drag women into his car and choose women who were unhoused, abandoned, addicted, or intellectually/emotionally impaired. The older black woman who traveled with him dutifully cleaned up the back car seat wreckage from the rapes and strangulations after he disposed of the bodies. Testifying in court, swearing on the Bible with the persona of a black church lady, she affirmed that Little was with her at the time of the murders and incapable of the horrific violence. How do you get nearly one hundred victims? Target women/girls considered inconsequential by the state and society, i.e., those who are Black. Little understood the racial metric set by supremacists and policing as he chose his victims. Police terminology and affinity for NHI contribute to the high rates of disappearances and deaths for Black/African and Indigenous.
Guerilla intellectuals develop a security apparatus independent of the state in order to ratchet down the violence. Dragons as philosopher rebels who are disciplined do not burn down the entire town when its inhabitants designated as NHI are under their care. They are strategic in the protection and prolongation of life even as their own lives are sacrificed and shortened by captivity or Cointelpro. Those who rebel against exploitative structures and state violence can help discipline our consciousness that children and the most vulnerable, the incarcerated, unhoused, and impoverished across all genders require our care and political ethics.
I do not romanticize that some dragon will magically appear to ‘save’ me and my kin, or create new liberatory concepts. I will decide what type of philosopher I am willing to become given my understanding that there is no intellectual or emotional access to political theory as dragon philosophy without sacrifice and struggle. The risks that George and Jonathan Jackson took out of love, desperation, and desire to free people and themselves reflected their commitment to freedom as a battle; thus, they became dragon philosophers. We are not them. Some of us, though, as thinkers retain traits that allow resistance to state violence to mutate. There are things we do in everyday living that lessen aggression and violence—practices which dragons cultivate while seeking liberation from captivity, denigration, poverty, and war.
Joy James’ most recent book, created with community-based intellectuals and podcast pedagogues, is In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; and her forthcoming book is New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner.
Joy James
Joy James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. She teaches courses in political theory, feminist theory and critical race theory. She is the author of Seeking the 'Beloved Community," and editor of The New Abolitionists, Imprisoned Intellectuals, and the Angela Y. Davis Reader. In her forthcoming book, FULCRUM: The Captive Maternal Leverages Democracy, James expands her study of images and practices of black community captive caretakers (discussed in her essay "The Womb of Western Theory"). Joy James’s most recent book, created with community-based intellectuals and podcast pedagogues, is In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; and her forthcoming book is New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner.
