Roberts Discusses Religion, Bo’s Barbershop, and Books

Continued from page 6 to keep me alive — and I mean, alive, in the sense that it keeps me vibrant. It keeps me connected to communities that are breathing together in a small social space, trying to ask questions about what it means to be alive. So I like doing that. I like watching TV, my guilty pleasure is Bridgerton. I’m waiting for the next season to come out. And I love continuing to be rooted in my community in Harlem, which is where I am when I’m not here in Amherst. And each week, I return to Harlem, and I walk those streets, the same streets that Baldwin walked, and Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke — and I see myself, I see myself as being a part of the path that they quite literally laid before me. So all of those things are things that I like to do.

Q: So you grew up in the Church. How has Christianity influenced your life?

A: Christianity, particularly Black Radical Christianity — the Christianity of David Walker and Frederick Douglass, as it were — has had a profound impact on my understanding of the work of liberation, and the connection between the idea that the project of liberation is also a spiritual project. To be clear, we’re not going to legislate racism away in Ameri- ca, right? So it’s not about changing laws. It’s also about a spiritual revolution, right? Martin Luther King spoke about this as “a revolution of values.” So I come out of that tradition, also, rhetorically, the language of the Black church, the rhetorical traditions of the Black church, as well as the biblical mandate of calling out injustice, when and where you see it, informs not only who I am as a scholar, but who I am as a human being. Also, the tradition of the Black church of allowing people to bring all of their gifts to the altar is something that I try to recreate in my classroom, so that my classroom can feel like a space where you can come down to the altar as you are, and be healed, be known, be seen and be loved. And that is something that we see in the best elements of the Black church. And I try to help recreate it in a secular context in my classroom.

Q: A tweet of yours on your practice of giving books to students went viral. What were the consequences of it, and what was that like for you?

A: I now receive dozens of books every week from people who I don’t know, which is really wonderful. And those books are not being sent to me, they’re being sent to students, which is why my shelves always look kind of halfway empty, because they’re actually being replenished. I give out probably on average, 25 to 30 books to students a week. And I come out of a tradition where the role of the teacher is to introduce students to ideas, and one way that you can introduce students to ideas is by the sharing of knowledge in the form of books. So I’ve always had this tradition of when you come into my office, if you see any book that you like, of course you can have it, I have the resources to be able to get another one. So why wouldn’t I share it with the student? I made a Tweet about that. I didn’t know that this was a novel or revolutionary concept. Apparently, the internet disagreed, and therein lies the controversy. But I’m really glad that that Tweet went viral because I think it raised conversations about or crowd create conversations about the role and responsibility of professors to make themselves available to students outside of the classroom space, and how our office hours very often can function as ours, spaces of sanctuary and intellectual curiosity and reawakening for students, particularly students who may have historically not had have had access to institutional spaces like Amherst College.

Q: Why’d you decide to host Bo’s Barbershop and Books every week with senior Bo Oranye ’23?

A: Bo’s Barber Shop and Books goes back to my roots as a community organizer. But really it came out of a very practical dilemma. When I arrived on Amherst’s campus, as someone who doesn’t drive, I quickly realized that there were no places within walking distance where I could get a quick shape up. And so I started asking around, where can a Black man get a shape up in walking distance at Amherst College, and people said, “You gotta go to Bo Oranye.” And so I met this young man, Bo, a senior pre-med student here, and I asked him to cut my hair. And in that experience, I began to think about how it’s a perfect example of how, in PWI [predominantly white institution] spaces, in particular, the relationship between Black faculty and Black students is a much more reciprocal one than it is in other spaces, and that we literally need each other — that Bo was providing a resource for me that I couldn’t actually get somewhere else. And so I began to think about this ethics of mutual care. What does it mean for students to need the professor? Yes, to provide knowledge in the classroom. But professors sometimes literally need a haircut, and it’s the students who are able to provide it. And so then I thought to myself, since I already have this tradition that we’ve talked about, of giving out books, I’ve got a nice spacious office, and we have a young man on campus who is an expert barber. We have a need on this campus to continuously create community, what would it mean to bring together all of these concerns in one context? It was out of that context, that Bo’s Barbershop and Books was born as an attempt to build community, increase faculty-student interactions — and also get people in the habit of the Black barbershop tradition of these informal spaces where we get to talk about the world of ideas, and have and have conversations that bring us together as a community.

Q: Do you have any advice for students here?

A: The advice is to remember that, whether you know it or not — take it from an old man like me — these years are probably some of the best years of your life, right? That these are the good old days, even if you don’t know it yet. And so to treat it like that. To honor your experiences as an undergraduate student. Understand what is so sacred and special about your opportunity to spend four years studying, being in community, learning, and debating. Value that, and continue to reach out to your professors to help you in your vision for creating a new world.

—Zane Khiry ’25