Associate Professor Hilton Als Interviews Charles M. Blow for The Harry Belafonte Black Liberation Speaker Series

By
Angeline Dimambro
March 05, 2021

Associate Professor Hilton Als recently sat down with acclaimed columnist and political commentator Charles M. Blow to discuss Blow’s latest book, The Devil You Know. The event was part of The Harry Belafonte Black Liberation Speaker Series.

The series, made possible by a partnership between The New York Public Library and Kenneth Cole, brings together influential thought-leaders around the issues of racism and equality in hopes of advancing and enriching Black culture, as well as Belafonte’s mission to provide open, free, and equal access to education and opportunity. 

Blow lives in Atlanta and is an acclaimed journalist and op-ed columnist for The New York Times who appears frequently on CNN. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2014). In addition to teaching at Columbia University School of the Arts, Als has also taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He is an acclaimed theatre critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017. His first book, The Women, was published in 1996, and his most recent book, White Girls  (2013), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014, explores various narratives of race and gender.

In The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, “Blow envisions a counterintuitive but impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, he sets out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.” 

In his opening remarks, Als called the new book a “wonderful and singular work about the ways in which race and class affect the human mind and body, and also shape contemporary politics." The book itself is written in six parts, moving between methodical research and Blow’s own personal history. Born in Louisiana, Blow lived in New York City for many years before recently relocating to the South, a move, as Als noted, which is tied closely to Blow’s “dream of a Black community—a community of safety and understanding.” In his book, Blow proposes that  “As many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible should return to the South from which their ancestors fled.” The proposal has been called a “call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy.”

Als asked Blow to talk more about his own childhood growing up in Louisiana. After his parents separated when he was very young, Blow’s mother raised and supported him and several siblings. “In a majority Black town, a small town, in this place, there’s a Black legacy. The school that I would eventually go to, the high school, had started in the late 1800s as a school to educate the sons and daughters of freed slaves...the school never divested of that legacy. There were pictures of the old buildings, which the students had actually made themselves…You always knew that the place you were at was not a conversion of a white space. It had always been borne as a Black space.”

The fifth chapter in the book, entitled “The End of Hoping and Waiting,” tackles the concept of hope. “Hope as a theological concept, as a guard against falling into despair, is incredibly useful, but it is defined by its lack of power,” Blow said. “Hope as a political concept is folly. It takes the place of active work and resistance...If you look at the persistence of the hope narrative in the political appeals to Black people in particular, it has an incredibly long lineage. And you think, ‘Why is this? Why always tell us to hope?’ Rather than diagramming the path to access actual power.”  For Als, this chapter in particular communicates how Blow wants to make despair active rather than passive. Quoting Blow, Als said, “As Frederick Douglass once wrote about escaping slavery, ‘I prayed for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.’ Black people must pray with their legs.” 

This event was produced in partnership with The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Watch the complete conversation here. Readers who wish to purchase copies of The Devil You Know can do so at The Schomburg Shop, whose proceeds benefit The New York Public Library, or their local bookstore.