non-Fiction
Timothy Patrick McCarthy in conversation with Paul Blezard
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar and educator, public servant, and social justice activist who has taught on Harvard’s faculty since 2005.
He holds a joint appointment in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, Graduate School of Education, and John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he is Core Faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course, a college humanities course for low-income adults and co-recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. Twice named one of Harvard Crimson’s “Professors of the Year,” he is the recipient of many awards for his commitment to students, including the 2019 Manuel C. Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Kennedy School’s highest teaching honor.
Shaped by the anti-apartheid and AIDS activism of his college years, Dr. McCarthy has devoted his life to public service and social justice. Since 1990, he has been a Big Brother to Malcolm Green, now 34, whom he met while volunteering in the Cambridge public schools.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy: History, Identity & Dissent
by Jesse Larner
How does the individual relate to his or her times, to the flow of history in which he or she comes of age and moves through life? How much do we internalize the dominant set of assumptions about the world we live in – the “master narrative,” as Harvard historian and social activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy puts it – and how much do we rebel against that narrative, challenge it, change it? In a nominally free society, how free are we to choose not only ideas, but identities? What does it mean to live in a society in which categories of identity are inherently and unavoidably political, in ways both liberating and sinister?
These are questions that emerge from this discussion of McCarthy’s work, and his description of the events that shaped him and impelled him toward a life in teaching and activism. He has a remarkable career: he is a lecturer on history and literature and public policy at Harvard University, where he holds a joint appointment in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature and in the Graduate School of Education at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is a member of the core faculty at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy. He's also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course, a college humanities course for low income adults, and the co-recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. He served on Barack Obama’s LGBT Leadership Council during his 2008 campaign, shaping the Democratic platform and ultimately the policies of the Obama administration. He has written histories of the American radical tradition and of LGBTQ social activism.
there is no greater practitioner of identity politics in the United States… than the white non-Hispanic majority. But “whiteness” is established as normative. The fish doesn’t notice the water it swims in.
Life experience is not necessarily determinative but can be foundational. Coming up in a family with immigrant roots, with parents and grandparents who were teachers, union activists, and factory workers, McCarthy was invited to view that “master narrative” from the outside, to question its authenticity and rebuke its power. This upbringing prepared him to engage critically with the domestic and international disasters and opportunities that shaped his young adulthood: the Chinese government’s massacre of protesting students in Tiananmen Square, the AIDS crisis and AIDS activism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And always, the pulsing current of a continuing Civil Rights Movement, the perennial demand that America make good on its promises, today resurgent and led by Black Lives Matter.
In his teaching work and in his social activism, he has looked to the truth of a broad-based, multicultural and democratic history that counters the traditional, easy stories of presidents, generals, captains of industry; rather, the history of the people “who have been left out of the master narrative … not just African-Americans throughout American history, but the laborers and the workers and the women and the LGBT people and the people who are on the… downside of discrimination and oppression… but also these people who have formed this radical tradition that I've spent much of my life studying and teaching and writing about. This tradition of dissent.”
McCarthy’s journey suggests the extent to which lived experience becomes a matter of identity, and how identities become expressed in a public-facing political persona. McCarthy points out that we are now, very suddenly, in a period of radical political ferment, one predicated on the urgency of justice for the excluded, the oppressed, the victims of our long national histories of institutional racism and misogyny and homophobia – and on the sense that we must finally get this right. It is a powerful and exultant moment of great potential.
It is also, as McCarthy points out, a time of great reaction and oppression, most obviously in the agenda and policies of the Trump administration. To hear McCarthy speak about his work suggests a particular and subtle danger in the duality of this moment, one that is not much discussed.
The danger lies in the cunning of the reactionary power. That power is expert in wielding identity as a weapon. It is convenient for those who reject change that social justice movements inevitably, by their nature, focus on groups, on the classes of disfavored and oppressed people – those who aren’t white, who are women, who are immigrants or sexual minorities – that have developed identities defined by those characteristics, in self-defense against the depredations of the majority.
For those who like things the way they are, this presents an opportunity to focus public attention on the evils of tribalism. For are we not all Americans, all technically equal before the law? Isn’t it divisive to focus on the specific condition of race, gender, sexual preference, rather than the unifying, mythologizing history that has brought us (well, some of us) so far? Identity politics is un-American! This claim admits of no reason why the American polity should be ashamed to accord public honors to its first president, simply because he was a slaveowner who tenaciously enforced our founding system of racial hierarchy.
The irony, of course, is obvious: there is no greater practitioner of identity politics in the United States, and of the traditionally hierarchical spoils system it feeds, than the white non-Hispanic majority. But “whiteness” is established as normative. The fish doesn’t notice the water it swims in. The power of tribalism can be easily deployed as an anti-tribal manifesto against demands for justice for the marginalized, and the sleight of hand is not observed by the objects of the ruse. No more than it is observed when the Supreme Court removes voting rights protections, calling them an atavism in a country in which racism is no longer prevalent enough to justify remedial action.
To engage with McCarthy’s work is to reflect on the heroism (and mistakes - let’s not simply create new orthodoxies) of radical movements, but also to be awake to the ever-present realities of backlash, to how a clever adversary plans to make use of identity-based freedom struggles. How many times have we been lectured on the ”radicalism” of Black Lives Matter? It is notable that, in evidence of its “Marxist” worldview, the movement’s critics are consistently incensed by its dedication to community, particularly its questioning of the concept of the nuclear family, and its preference for the extended family and the “village” as vectors of identity and responsibility. This is offered as obvious evidence of social and intellectual pathology. No more need be said.
McCarthy says quite a lot more. There is an important utility in examining the specific histories of group identities, and of the individuals who added form and substance to group aspirations: what they wanted, when they wanted it. The work of James Baldwin, say, or Dolores Huerta, understood not as the romantic leader bestriding history, but as the product of visionary and determined individuals in conversation with, responding to, shaped by and shaping the communities they represent.
This is the antidote to the determinist trap of the Leninist view of history as the impersonal, inexorable movement of blocs responding tautologically to “historical forces.” And it is also – as McCarthy, in his work, intends it to be – the antidote to the “master narrative” of Great Man history and American exceptionalism. It is this knowledge that will inoculate us against the weaponization of a quaint trust in universalism, the disingenuous call to faith in an imaginary equal justice. The fight is never over. We will need to know who we are – who we all are.
