Abstract:
This article first provides an overview of Layla Brown-Vincent’s public record relations with Black Liberation Movements and Revolutionary Socialist Parties that have avowed active committments of political solidarity with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

It then defines cimmarron pedagogy, a concept introduced to Brown-Vincent via Jesus “Chucho” Garcia. Following this it examines two academic works in the historic ethnographic vein written by Layla Brown-Vincent in light of her avowed committment to pan-Africanist revolutionary struggles.

Based on these examples of her writing, a clearer definition of cimmaron pedagogy is made: Academic publications within this rubric of scholarship is characterized by the use of loaded language, the making of claims that are unsupported by evidence, the provision of explanations that have relevant facts omitted and the use of unreliable sources all in the service of furthering personal political committments.

Keywords:
Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Subversive Academic Networks, São Paulo Forum

The Revolutionary Black Academic and Cuba/Venezuela Axis

Layla Brown-Vincent currently teaches at the University of Massachussetts Boston as an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the college of Liberal Arts. She recieved an M.A. and Ph.D from Duke University in Cultural Anthropology and according to her biographic description her areas of expertise are “Pan-Africanism, Black feminism, Blacks in Latin America, radical social movements in the African diaspora, autoethnography.”

Her undergraduate degree came from North Carolina Central University – where black liberation and Hands Off Venezuela activist Ajamu Baraka hosts national assemblies and the same university that graduated Tamika Thompson, a member of the Workers World Party – an organization that has for over ten years allied itself to political action networks allied to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s vision of a covert Fifth Socialist International modeled on network principles.

As is evident by the text and photo connecting her with Lamont Lilly in this article about the National Moment of Silence, Layla Brown-Vincent was also one of the co-organizers for this Workers World Party cultural front organization that sought to unite potential activists via appreciation of performance poetry and social justice following the justified shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

According to the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and her PhD thesis (more on this below) she and her uncle Bob Brown have travelled together multiple times to Venezuela as All-African People’s Revolutionary Party delegates. As you’d expect given their name, they are “a revolutionary Pan-Africanist socialist party“. According to the Boston-Cuba Solidarity Coalition Layla’s also travelled to Cuba with the assistance of the African Awareness Association.

In her doctoral thesis, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, she identifies herself as a trans-generational revolutionary and describes her attendance at the Network of Afro-Venezuelans organized Fourth Encounter of Afrodescendants in the Americas and the Caribbean for Revolutionary Transformations in the Framework of the International Year of Afrodescendants in Solidarity with Haiti as being a “major production with a seemingly large budget” and described multiple encuentros with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

In her article Seeing It for Wearing It: Autoethnography as Black Feminist Methodology she describes her engagement with activists connected to the Bolivarian Revolution: “Not long after I completed coursework and began to conduct fieldwork, my interlocutors in Venezuela would often ask me about what kind of political work I was engaged in at home.” She openly avows that these Bolivarian activists had a directive force on her political engagement, stating that her “attention was drawn back to my place of birth, the United States of America, largely as a result of the chiding of my Venezuelan comrades.”

Defining Cimarron Pedagogy

Layla Brown-Vincent came to my attention over a year ago during my investigation into academics that had engaged with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia – an ambassador to the U.S. from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and member of the communist-oriented Venezuelan Revolutionary Party, that was ejected from the United States. While no specific reason was ever publicized, charting his public activities one finds a significant number of him interacting with various socialist and black ethno-nationalist organizations such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference.

The above images come from this interview with Chucho and in it one learns of his and his academic comrades strategy of promoting revolutionary educational activities via educational institutions sponsored by Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil when Lula was President and UNESCO.

Before starting the research for this article I knew nothing about UNESCO but I can now understand why it was that President Donald Trump recently withdrew the United States from it. Bivol, a multiple-award winning investigative journalism outlet from Bulgaria who focuses on corrupt practices have highlighted a number of UNESCO scandals.

By reading Bivol’s coverage of UNESCO I’ve learned that the director of the organization during the period that Jesus “Chuco” Garcia refers to above was Irina Bokova, and that she was the daughter of “one of the ideologists of the communist regime of Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov and editor-in-chief of the official print newspaper of the Communist party Rabotnichesko delo (Workers Actions), where he published his own glorifications of Stalin” and that before her role in UNESCO she was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. This fact is interesting in light of Layla Brown-Vincent’s avowal of an multiple-generational socialist lineage by iteself. But it is all the more so given that Audrey Azoulay, a member of the French Socialist Party, was elected to Bokova’s former position and provided her with diplomatic immunity via a $1 (yes, one dollar) consultancy contract seemingly intended to halt ongoing criminal investigations into corruption.

One of the concepts transmitted via her encounters with Chucho’s intellectual ouevre and activism – one that clearly has become influential given UNESCO’s support of it –  is cimarron pedagogy. 

Given that Brown-Vincent describes cimarron pedagogy in her doctoral thesis as “a weapon of history, a method of bearing witness to methods of resistance, struggle, freedom and dignity passed down from enslaved ancestors to present communities of African descended peoples struggling for freedom” and that she descibes “auto-ethnography” as an area specialization she clearly identifies strongly with this. But what all does this description entail? In his article Afroepistemology and Cimarron Pedagogy Jesus “Chucho” Garcia exapands on this and describes the idea as follows:

“to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methogy was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.”

While this succint quote may give the appearance that Chucho’s intellectual project, and thus Layla Brown-Vincent’s is just about preserving cultural norms and values, which is not problematic, but it is not. It is the promotion of a categorical negation of all “non-Afro” modes of thought, i.e. civic laws and the institutions which enforce them, and it’s replacement with an unarticulated vision of “racial memory”.

The book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh provides the best summation of the concept I’ve read thus far, this time from Afro-Ecuadorian scholar Juan García Salazar. There we learn that:

“in his conception of cimarronaje, or marronage, as a pedagogy for the new urban generations, García underscores the ways that marronage can be used as a sort of theoretical and memory-based anchor, conceptual analytic, and decolonial code and tool to reread official history and to contribute to it with a new and “other” reading. “This is a cimarrón attitude: to always distrust the word written by the dominant other, . . . to closely go over this word and history and compare it with our own, . . . to recuperate elements of the memory of resistance that is born in the cimarrón being . . . and to reconstruct a new memory,” that is, a history otherwise. Entailed here as well is a learning to unlearn in order to relearn, a central component of decoloniality in/as praxis.”

Putting aside the fact that Chuco and Salazar are engaged in their own form of African Orientalism based on poor historiography – according to Ethnologue Africa is a country of 2,143 languages, making claims that it is “a people” and not a continent worthy of derision, especially in light of the fact that the transatlantic slave trade would not have ever been as large as it was if it not for the fact that various tribes profitted from it – it’s here that it’s practical applications comes to light: Afro-epistemology and cimarron pedagogy are justifcations solely on the basis of social or economic positionality for the belief that every claim made by “the dominant other” is worthy of distrust and resistance. 

For someone that works in an institution invested with authority based on adherence to sundry traditions of intellectual labors – I found it strange that Layla Brown-Vincent would avow such committments. So having depicted Layla Brown-Vincent’s network connections to members of pan-Africanist Revolutionary organizations and Venezuelan political actors that promote this mode of thinking I’ve now defined, I’ll examine two example of her academic productions to see if those that meet the standards of cimarron pedagogy match the standards of “Western” professional academic standard.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part I

The African-American Intellectual History Society has a section for contributors called Black Perspectives and one of Layla Brown-Vincent’s articles, titled (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, is hosted there. Because the format of it’s publication makes it easy to include my comments side by side with the article I’ve posted an Ariel Sheen annotated edition of Layla Brown-Vincent’s article (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, to show all of the instances which confirms my hypothesis that “cimarron pedagogy” is not compatible with the code of ethics outlined in various professional academic organization standards – in this case the American Anthropological Associations Code of Ethics. This is evident in that fact that this academic work in the cimarron pedagogy tradition is characterized by:

1. Extensive use of loaded language.
2. Extensive use of government sources (i.e. Venezuela Analysis).
3. Extensive use of unreliable sources (i.e. GreyZone Project).
4. Multiple claims unsupported by evidence.
5. Multiple claims to have facts important to the context ommitted
6. Multiple claims fail to examine or even consider counterfactuals.
7. Several claims could be construed as racist.

The specific violations of the Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics in this case are Layla Brown-Vincent’s not “mak(ing) good-faith efforts to identify potential ethical claims and conflicts in advance” and not doing “mak(ing) clear the empirical bases upon which their reports stand, be(ing) candid about their qualifications and philosophical or political biases, and recogniz(ing) and mak(ing) clear the limits of anthropological expertise.” [quote altered to make the verbs infinitive]

What would an ethical iteration of her article look like?

First it would include the fact that she is – in her own words – not qualified as an expert on Venezuela. The below exerpt where Layla Brown-Vincent admits this comes from her article Seeing it For Wearing It:

“Even now, after having completed my dissertation, I am still hesitant to claim expertise about Venezuela as a country. My work is the product over just over a year of research in a particular urban area of Venezuela, among a particular subset of Venezuelans who self-identified as “Afro.” To claim, or even the desire to claim any level of expertise over a people whose identities, politics, and ways of being are constantly in flux is a product of the hubris of the colonial institutionality of Euro-American Ivory towers that I vehemently reject”

Secondly it would include the fact that she has recieved goods and services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Lastly, it would include the fact that she has avowed a political committment to pan-African revolutionary activity.

What would this “good faith effort” to inform readers of conflicts thus look like? Layla Brown-Vincent should have opened her post with something to these effects:

“I write this article as someone that is not an expert on the country that I here write about, I have previously recieved goods or services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and my personal political committment to pan-African revolution leads me to believe everything their intelligence services tells me.”

This would be an honest statement of fact, and it would also allow potential readers of Layla Brown-Vincent’s to see that she has – in essence – an uninformed opinion that can be ignored as propaganda that probably ought not have been published in the first place.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part II

Layla Brown-Vincent’s article in The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence entitled This Ain’t Nothing New: Contextualizing Black Responses to Trump’s America is available for free to view via’s Google Books. I’ve posted screenshots of it at the end of this article, but haven’t made an annoted copy as I did with the above due to formatting reasons.

The purportedly historical essay is unusual given the extensive irony which punctuates it that Layla Brown-Vincent, seemingly, is unaware of.

Having read it I’d claim it’s inclusion in this collection of essays titled “anti-racist scholarship” is the most humorous as there’s little in Layla Brown-Vincent’s article that qualifies as scholarship.

She claims that President Donald Trump has passed “a number of draconian, racist, sexist, and classist policies” and not only does she not name a single one of these policies, she justifies the claim by referencing Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Talents as Andrew Jarrett, a presidential candidate in the book, uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan.

She uses phrases such as the “school-to-prison” to demonstrate her familiarity with Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” – despite the fact that this particular historical account was proven false by a Barry Latzer, an emeritus professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by John F. Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham. Even those on the left have pointed out it’s many flaws. In an article on LibCom – short for Libertarian Communist – Greg Thomas, a Professor of Global Black Studies and hip-hop scholar, has written that there is “literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow”.

She claims that Trump is a racist when Andrew J. Stein, the former president of the New York City Council and a former president of Manhattan Borough that has known President Trump since 1973, has provided a character reference that he is not a racist and  data analysis shows that those who voted for him weren’t either. And yet despite these facts and that President Donald Trump’s family arrived in the United States 22 years after the Emancipation Proclimation, Layla Brown-Vinent describes as “the product of insitutionalized racism” that has “waxed and waned” since the arrival of the first slave to the U.S.

She then follows this up with the claim, sans any explanation or citation of an expert opinion proving this is so, that his election was due to a “backlash” against the Blackness of Barack Obama and is evidence of “white supremacist logics”. The phrasing and sentiment is notable as it matches that of Van Jones, an avowed communist who has travelled with Deborah James – who used to be the director for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s public relations organ the Venezuela Information Office. In the context of the criticisms of the academic/activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a former member of the Internationalist Socialist Organization who clams that President Barack Obama categorically failed black people, this is another example of irony. All the more so given that polls show that black people have ever increasing approval rates of President Donald Trump.

Later in the article Layla Brown-Vincent describes her participation in a South Carolina protest wherein Bree Newsome took down a flag, and omits the fact that this obtained national media coverage because of promotional services providedby FitzGibbon Media, a public relations firm that has been contracted by the Venezuelan government and the Ecuadorian government under President Rafael Correa.

In light of all this – the most evocative irony in Layla Brown-Vincent’s essay is her claim that the FBI’s monitoring of Black Identity Extremists “signals a revitalization of anti-Black genocide in the form of state-sanctioned espionage”.

Even if we could rationalize such an absurd claim as a rhetorical flourish, which I don’t think is appropriate as it is a patently false and polarizing proposition, there’s a shocking lack of self-awareness in this statement from someone who openly identifies with foreign state powers and is the member of a revolutionary party that works in coordination with foreign activists claiming that U.S. national security services shouldn’t engage in vigilance practice on those whose advocate for secession and revolution. Given that it is this political class of people that have, historically, been most likely to engage in subversion, espionage and collusion on behalf of foreign powers it is an entirely sensible proposition that such people be monitored and why the law allows for it.

Closing Summary on Cimarron Pedagogy and Professional Academic Standards

Having brought together all these public documents regarding Layla Brown-Vincent’s engagement with foreign revolutionary movements – both in the political and epistemological sense – and reviewed her academic work it becomes clear that  cimarron pedagogy is wholly incompatible with codes of ethics described in professional academic associations.

What is most fascinating about reading Layla Brown-Vincent’s academic work is that this is, seemingly, completely lost on her. I found this particularly strange given that describes her colleagues expressing criticism for her particular line of research. Rather than viewing their words as expression of care and concern about her not being able to meet what academic tradition dictates are the prerequisites for becoming a doctor in a subject area, she stated the belief in Seeing it for Wearing It that these subject area specialists  just wanted her to become “good colonial anthropologist” and claims that “the liberal individualism of the American academy rendered my intellectual preoccupations illegible to many of my so-called colleagues and professors.” As laudable as research is that is “in part a utilitarian search for liberatory alternatives for myself and my people” – based on the above analysis it should be clear that cimarron pedagogy leads to the wrong answers and ought to be excluded from practice in the academy as it is – at base – not an appropriate method for discerning the truth.

This Ain’t Nothing New by Layla Brown-Vincent