In response to the question of how he incorporates his text Race Rebels into his teaching, he humbly responds:
"I may have taught Race Rebels twice in my career. Still, there are some themes that come up in my teaching that relate directly back to Race Rebels, as well as to all of my books during that period. My objective has long been to unearth movements that had been driven underground or erased from popular historical narratives, and to recover their ideas. Race Rebels, more than my other books, is about unearthing what is sedimented below the surface. In the classroom, I’m not necessarily trying to construct a new master narrative but encourage students to figure out what people thought, felt, and how their ideas and visions of what is possible changed over time—irrespective of how big or influential the movement. I resist dividing Black movements into categories like “integrationist/separatist; resistance/accommodation; nationalist/socialist, etc., but instead try to get beyond the public performance of consent and push students to understand that motives for human behavior are not reducible to material conditions or ideology. I hope that students come away from my History classes recognizing that evidence for these kinds of movements is always fugitive, ephemeral, flashes rather than full-blown illumination. It’s like writing history by strobe light."
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