U of C’s Cathy Cohen is awarded $250K to continue movement work in and outside academia for the BIPOC community: ‘You have to be involved in the struggle, no matter where you’re located.’
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You must be doing something right when the accolades and awards keep coming in.
That is the case with Cathy Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, who is a part of the new cohort of Freedom Scholars — a $250,000 honor given by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to academics who provide critical data, analysis and ideas to movements working to shift the balance of power in society.
Freedom Scholars are helming research in abolitionist, Black, feminist, queer, radical and anti-colonialist studies. The annual award, established in 2020, counters the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements. The cohort of scholars will each receive $250,000 in unrestricted funds, distributed over two years, to utilize as they see fit.
“These scholars’ bold ideas and visionary leadership are critical to the modern liberation movements that our society desperately needs,” said Dr. Carmen Rojas, president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, in a statement. “Universities today are functioning more and more like corporations, and too many scholars working at the frontier of their fields do not have true academic freedom if they do not have greater financial freedom — specifically, the freedom to pursue the work that scholars know will be most useful for the greatest possible good.”
Cohen follows other Chicagoans who were awarded the prize in 2020 — Charlene Carruthers of the Black Youth Project, a research body that looks at data concerning Black Americans ages 18-30, of which Cohen is founder and publisher. And Barbara Ransby, historian, professor of Black studies, history and gender, and women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“I was going to say there is something in the water when you name all those people and, of course, we all know each other and we all work together,” Cohen said. “I do think, it’s something about (Chicago) this community. Chicago is a very special place. It is a place for scholars who are interested in not just studying movements but supporting movements. There’s an easy way in which we can build community with activists and advocates and with those, even philanthropy who are similarly kind of interested in supporting this type of justice work. Chicago makes it easy in part because of the long history of white supremacy and segregation, so many of us find ourselves in and around the South Side, are attached to institutions that for a very long time have been anchors in Black communities. And it’s in those environments where there’s cross-pollination, there’s discussion of ideas and how ideas might energize movements, provide some theory, maybe even help with strategy and structure. To me it’s a beautiful place to be committed to doing scholarship and activity around justice and liberation because there’s just this incredible community of both scholars and activists and advocates.
“It is something about the ability for people to support each other both in the work we’re doing in the academy and to have that work spill over and be meaningful outside the academy, to support movements for freedom and justice and liberation,” she added. “That’s what we want. At least that’s what I want to be doing and I feel honored to be recognized.”
Cohen sees herself as an engaged scholar. She’s active in a number of political groups, including Scholars for Social Justice, which provides a place for scholars committed to social justice to come together to organize and provide support to movements. At the moment, she’s on the formation committee to create a Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at University of Chicago. The department will look at “race, understood by social scientists and humanists as a social construction that defines difference and shapes relations among people; diaspora, formed through processes of migration and practices of collective meaning-making; and indigeneity, which refers to the categorization and self-identity of people dwelling on a given territory that has been subjected, often violently, to occupation or settlement, are increasingly viewed as interrelated and co-constituted.”
“We’ll probably know by the spring if this is going to be, but it is on the track to being fulfilled as a new department,” Cohen said. “There’s struggle on many different fronts outside the universities, but also inside. The goal was to transform these institutions so that they are accessible to communities in the fullest sense. This is another example of the ways in which you have to be involved in the struggle, no matter where you’re located both in and outside of the university.”
We talked with Cohen about her award, one of many including the Hanes Walton Jr. Career Award presented by the American Political Science Association, which recognizes political scientists whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to the understanding of racial and ethnic politics, and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and what the future holds for its use with her work with the young Black community. The interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: What were your plans for the award money?
Cathy Cohen: I’m trying to figure that out. I think it will go in the same places it has gone before in terms of other research money — so it will support research, it will support movements, it will provide a little joy in my life and my family’s life. I haven’t figured out the specifics of how the money will be utilized, but I know it will be used in large part to continue the work that I’ve already been doing.
Q: With your lens on the young population here, have you encountered any surprises? A data curveball? Something your colleagues and peers weren’t expecting or an issue to rally the troops on?
CC: I think in political science, where I’m located, there’s been a traditional focus on the electoral arena — getting people to vote, thinking about representation, whether it’s descriptive or substantive representation. I think what the data tells us over and over again, and not just BIPOC young people, that they feel a deep alienation from the systems of government as they are currently constituted in terms of feeling represented and feeling like those institutions are responding to their needs. This is a generation that will have more student debt than any other generation we’ve seen. These are young people who are less likely to own a home compared with their parents and others. These are generations of young people who for the first time may do worse than their parents. And they want not just reforms . . . I often see in the data they want systemic change. We saw that in 2020 when young people, despite COVID, went into the streets to demand justice, not just for George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, but justice for themselves. A new way of thinking about the economy, protections and the opportunity to work and have good jobs, an opportunity to have access to higher education. What I’m seeing in the data is that young people are thinking broadly, they’re reimagining what politics might be and how it might be responsive to them. I think that lines up with what we saw in 2020. I would say to colleagues that you have to start thinking outside the electoral arena to see the kind of real struggle for justice and liberation that young people are involved in.
Q: Were the survey results of the young Black population during the Trump administration vastly different from those in the Biden administration?
CC: If we’re really focused just on young African Americans. Yes, there was much more support for a Biden administration. They felt deeply alienated as we would expect from a Trump administration. But at another level, what we find is that young folks of color, and in particular, young African Americans, often feel alienated from institutional politics. They don’t feel represented, so they’re happier with Biden, they’re not happy with Biden. We ask this question: Do you feel like a full and equal citizen with all the rights that other communities have? Almost 50% of young African Americans say no to that question, and we ask it repeatedly. So it’s not that they don’t have formal citizenship, it’s that even with formal citizenship, they feel like second-class citizens. Do they feel better with Biden than Trump? Yes, but do they feel alienated and excluded in significant ways from institutional politics and power? That’s also a yes.
Q: What are young Black folks thinking about for 2022?
CC: When you say what’s coming up, I think defending Roe v. Wade, and reproductive justice. I’m going to say both of those together is what’s critical. It can’t just be Roe v. Wade, it has to be ensuring that women who don’t have the kind of financial means to have access to abortion are also given access to abortion; that we understand the connections between economics and reproductive power. I think that is a major focus in 2022. I have a daughter who will soon be 16 and I can’t imagine that she’s going to grow up in a world at a time when whether you have access and control over your body will be determined by what state you live in, it’s just unconscionable. We all have to mobilize around that. But again, I think that work will often be led by young people, who are invested in movement structures, who have resources, who have training and who can think broadly about the type of movements that can have an effect and bring people again back into the streets.
