Love, study, struggle

This essay argues that George Lipsitz’s Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads is a model for how Ethnic Studies is a project of what Robin D. G. Kelley sums up as “love, study, struggle.” I organize the essay around these three concepts, to show how Lipsitz models each in his scholarship and practice. In the section on love, drawing on my experiences as Lipsitz’s former colleague, I show how the book’s arguments are inseparable from the scholarly practice he has maintained over decades, refusing to separate theory from practice, research from teaching, or scholarship from working with and learning from the communities it is meant to serve. In the section on study, I examine how Lipsitz makes visible the multiple structures that constrain Ethnic Studies. In the section on struggle, I lay out how Lipsitz shows that studying communities through a relational lens helps us see our interconnectedness thus giving us an important tool of resistance. At a moment when Ethnic Studies is in a new era of danger, Lipsitz’s call to love, study, and struggle together is even more urgent.