“You have to figure out how to take people where they are, challenge them, hold yourself to certain standards, but acknowledge we’re going to have different points of view and that similarity is not going to be the basis for community—if it is, there won't be any.” 

As a first-semester student in fall 2017, I was too young to appreciate the rarity of the cotaught classroom, at Brown and in academia more broadly. Rarer still is the combination of fate and talent that allows a married couple to coteach. Blues People is the only such at Brown. 

“There aren’t too many partner-based courses out there, and certainly not very many Black ones, because it’s extremely uncommon to have [Black] couples who are both college professors also working in the same place,” explains Rose, the Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. At Brown, cotaught classes often necessitate that professors reside in different departments in order to lend an interdisciplinary approach to the coursework; Willis is a professor of religious studies, while Rose is a sociologist who pioneered research on hip hop. And for a topic as delicate and unwieldy as Blackness in America, in an era as politically tenuous as this one, the ability to perceive questions through entirely different frameworks proved not only fruitful but essential.  

“The reason why we thought about this course when we did was that we wanted to figure out how can people—not just intimate partners, but people who see themselves as part of a chosen community—vociferously disagree? And how can you stay connected to people in those territories of disagreement?” Rose asks. “Because really that’s what community’s going to require. You have to figure out how to take people where they are, challenge them, hold yourself to certain standards, but acknowledge that we’re going to have different points of view and that similarity is not going to be the basis for community—if it is, there won’t be any.”

In the neighboring Zoom box (both professors join the class from their respective offices to avoid “getting all up in each other’s space”), Willis nods emphatically, adding that their different academic traditions and specialties enable them to address a range of daunting questions with nuance and assiduity. 

“We really wanted [to] tackle the big issues that were at the heart of thinking about Black life when we were younger. It’s gotten so elaborate intellectually that it’s hard to remember what the core of some of these issues are for everyday people, when we were in the barbershops and  beauty salons debating.”

“There was one particular week about how there need not always be writing about Black suffering, and it was conflicting ’cause I feel like that’s such an important chain and struggle within the Black community,” Ede-Osifo explained. “But this author made a pretty good point about how our experiences should not be reduced to the pain we’ve experienced, or to this trauma porn within the Black community.”

“In the past, white people have been the audience for these conversations, but there are ways we can have this conversation that don’t need to include white people,” she continued. “The class has given me a blueprint for beginning and continuing conversations with people on these issues and thinking about how we’re all working towards the same goal of Blackness that is not defined in contrast to white oppression, while also grappling with the very real implications of white oppression on the Black identity.”

A sample of potential debate topics includes questions like “Can Blackness exist without whiteness?”; “Is African American culture distinctive or derivative?”; and “Does African American culture support or resist white supremacy?” On this particular day, however, class opens with a reflection on Black love that will prove to be deeply symbolic. 

“What Black folks have brought to the world is an understanding of love that adds to the Greek conceptions of love, right?” Willis says, beginning the brief lecture that always precedes a subsequent debate. It is the laying of context for what will follow, an imperative setting of stage.

“The Greeks have bequeathed to us three concepts of love: eros, erotic love; philia, brotherly love; and agape, neighbor love,” he continues, “and what I think Black folks have uniquely brought to the modern world is a different way to love: love as self-revealing. To reveal yourself as a Black person is a way of self-assertion, and this has been instantiated in the best of our expressive traditions because we have something to reveal that’s very unique in terms of agents in the modern world—as cultural workers, so to speak. This ties into that lecture on Du Bois that I never got to finishing….” 

It is a rare community that enables students to be both human and scholar, to feel as though through mere conversation, any one of us could be on the brink of discovering something entirely new about the Black body and its closely-surveilled movement through the world.

A bit selfishly, what I remember most fondly from my semester was Professor Rose’s birthday, a sunny day in October when I arrived in class to find a massive box of cupcakes dwarfing Professor Willis’s desk. Lecture was replaced by singing and snacking, and pointed debate swapped out for a free-form conversation where students were permitted to pitch the professors any question we wanted, whether about their research, family life, or anything in between. These classes are exceptionally prominent examples of both professors’ ability to integrate intimacy and academia, but every day held some of that same flavor, rooted in a desire to move from merely discussing community-building to laying down a concrete foundation. 

When we think about race, there’s going to be three mistakes we always make, and I hope all of you can put this in your notes somewhere and maybe make it a poster on your wall,” Willis says, now onto a new subject: “Never essentialize, knowing you always will; never romanticize, assuming that’s probably going to happen; and never dogmatize—that is, do not be flat-footed about certain assertions you want to make.” 

“Can I add something to that?” Rose interjects, and then after a moment of consideration, adds, “Or are you in a hurry?”

“Nah, go ahead,” Willis responds by way of concession, “I ain’t in no hurry.” 

“What’s important is not just to avoid these extremes, but to realize that, ironically, for any group that you are attached to and want the best for, any full measure of their humanity would require that you not essentialize, not romanticize, and not dogmatize,” Rose says, “because the full humanity of who we are is about being able to fully accept the range of human behaviors that we all have.” 

“Mmm, that’s good,” Willis responds before rapidly shifting gears. “Now, Professor Rose, we got some questions for you—quickly, ’cause we got to get to the reading. Does Black History Month foster anti-Black racism or undermine it?”

“Even in their dialogue, I could feel the love that was expressed, and that element of support was something that I didn't really see a lot in Brown academics. And I think that was when I was like, ‘Yo, this is something else. This is what Black love is like.’”

Rose considers a critical element of the class to be these moments of epiphany, moments she remembers longing for during her own college years. 

“College is a liminal state between childhood, family, some general sense of a place, and some future that’s really uncertain,” Rose explains, “and I think there’s something reassuring about knowing that there are possible futures that have a long arc and a sense of connection in them.”

And yet, with faithful inevitability, it always seems to come back to love.

“I had a lot of students write to me and say that they really appreciated being able to see the arc of our individual and collective journey, and that was something that surprised me,” Willis says. “But that’s one of the reasons I dig this, because now I know there’s some brothers out there hearing us that are like, ‘Okay, maybe I can shift some of the ways I relate to women,’ or men or any kind of intimate partner they’re trying to have. Like we can add a layer of possibility to their means of connecting.”

For Jones, the shift in his conception of love was subtle but powerful, and continues to shape his relationship to community even after the semester ended.  

“I’ve learned the role that support plays in love, especially Black love: It’s a thing that works two ways,” Jones says. “In a lot of ways, Professor Willis supported Professor Rose, and he did so with admiration for her—always showcasing her work and celebrating her. And then Professor Rose, in her own way, supported him.” 

“Even in their dialogue, I could feel the love that was expressed, and that element of support was something that up until this year, I didn’t really see a lot in Brown academics. I saw it somewhat within my other kinds of communities, but not to the same degree, and I think that was when I was like, ‘Yo, this is something else. This is what Black love looks like,’” he continues. “Granted, I’m not sure if that was in our notes or anything, but it was that level of support that really hit.”