Black lives matter, But to whom? Why We Need a Politics of Exile in a Time of Troubling Stuckness (Part I)

May you be recognized by powerful people.

An ancient Chinese curse, allegedly

Strange Openings, Meandering Paths

Four days away from the Christmas of 1848, in the dark and occult hours before morning wakes, Ellen and William Craft beheld each other through tearful eyes for the last time. Minutes later, they collapsed to the floor, both falling into a writhing heap of limbs and agony, convulsing, trembling, and flailing until the strong brew they had ingested hours earlier passed through them. When the sun yawned awake to the sounds of the cock crow, his surveillant gaze travelled across the undulating fields of Georgia, across the cottonfields of one plantation in Macon, and fell through the cracks of the cabin where two lovers had spent their last human moments, and where a few obsidian-black feathers belonging to two fugitive crows now littered the log floor – tell-tale signs of a daring escape, a transformation too offensive for history to embrace.    

But they were not the first to turn, you see. 

Forty-five years before Ellen and William shapeshifted into birds, a small vessel named York suffered a terrible mutiny. It was drifting up north along the length of Georgia’s coastlines from Savannah’s marshlands towards Dunbar Creek in Glynn County. Onboard that vessel, 75 Igbo men, women, and children taken from the east of present-day Nigeria pounced upon their masters, drowning some of them. The others that did not drown escaped ashore to seek reinforcements. Refusing to give their bodies to the coastal plantation that had purchased them, the slaves marched into the waters singing an ancestral song of loss, promise, and queer hope – the kind that needs a healthy dose of hopelessness to be itself. A song to Chukwu, the Great Spirit.  

Nearby was one Mr. Roswell King, a plantation manager for Major Pierce Butler, whose account of the matter is considered the first authority on the subject. “[The slaves] took to the swamp,” Roswell writes through gritted fingers – with the lilt of a man who had only just suffered a great injustice. How dare they? 

His description was as cold and as sterile as the cosmology that enabled his supremacy. However, alongside that stoic account of things, an ecology of wandering lines, rumours, echoes, mispronunciations, [1] nightly whispers, generous embellishments, and strange openings began to fester like an untreated wound. A beautiful, pulsating wound rich with posthumanist themes and irreverent desires. In this subterranean world, another story was more compelling: the seventy-something ‘Eboes’ didn’t just “take to the swamp”. They turned. They sprouted giant black wings and flew back to Africa, borne by winds conjured in the cavernous depths of Chukwu’s nostrils. The same winds that whispered directions to the Crafts as they flew to Boston. 

And why not? 

Why not retell the marronage story of the Crafts and the legend of the Igbo Landing as if they were speculative-fabulist, sci-fi, animist adventures? Why not relieve them of their burden to say only one thing, to be only one thing, to fit into only one sense of history, to affirm ‘just the facts’? Why not turn them this way and that to see what happens? Why think of marronage and fugitivity only along the cold and sterile lines of history? Along the lines of “what really happened”? 

Something about Black exile, about Black refusal, gestures at a generosity stranger than ‘truth’ can accommodate; it gestures at how things spill away from neat lines and steady identities; it gestures at the drunken, creolized promiscuity of ‘reality itself’. Black exile distrusts straight lines and loves zigzagging cartographies, meandering stories that do not care much for some Cartesian notion of a fixed truth. Black exile loves death and ghosts, moonlit dalliances, subterranean experiments, hybrid bodies, bacchanal aesthetics, perverse mixtures and spillages, monsters with phallic horns sprouting from their heads, grandmother concoctions, and stories of a promiscuous ‘world’ that won’t stay still long enough for us to paint its portrait. For Black exile, facts vibrate at the speed of mystery. 

I know how this sounds. 

It might seem a dangerous thing to say that history bleeds, and that it is an effect of political arrangements instead of a pure ideal awaiting discovery and the elucidation of historians. It might seem reckless to say that facts are not as straightforward or as innocent as we often presume (as Saidiya Hartman herself seems to acknowledge when she writes that facts are the State’s preferred fiction…fiction endorsed by State power). This danger is especially pronounced in a time when countercultural fortifications on the political left (at least in the United States) are being engineered to counteract the corrosive effects of “alternative facts”. 

Yes, these are moments when telling the truth, verifying identities, fact-checking statements, speaking one’s truth, and acknowledging the objective superiority of science and the scientific method feel like urgent matters of life and death. 

The irony of attempting to create safe zones, to nullify the offending body, and to postpone fascism indefinitely is that it is often in the effort to guarantee this immunity to the corrupting influences of the folks across the aisle that we become the very thing we resist. Lean on a wall long enough, push against a surface hard enough, and you also start to take the shape of your adversary. 

It’s almost as if there is something performatively sticky about trying to flatten an ‘Other’ that reminds us fascism has more readily thrived where people trusted in their own purity, the inertia of their social analyses, and their unflinching certitude about their moral positions. It has thrived where rationality was divorced from feeling and poetry and politics; where extreme lines of distinction were scratched out in the soil to divide “them” from “us”; where the measures adopted to remedy the excesses of the bad guys and to create a safe world cleansed of harm and its effects incarcerated us; and, where other ways of knowing the world were told off as inferior shadows of a more advanced way of knowing. 

When we begin trusting that we’ve figured it all out, that our descriptions of ‘facts’ are confident reflections of the way the world really is, we become frozen and impervious to the movement of things. The world is not a simple archive of things that happened, but is a creative, orgasmic dancing with itself, experimenting with im/possibilities.  

These reframed stories, decorated with fugitive abandon, are not subjects of the grand old truth. They are dynamic examples of exile, of a “right to opacity” (to borrow Edouard Glissant’s excellent phrasing). Roswell King’s account of things wasn’t the true version; his recollection was no less value-laden, populated, oriented, invested, and speculative than the emergent accounts of transmutated flight. As such, to believe the fugitive stories are ‘true’ is to diminish their power. The point is not whether they fit into a cold notion of history, or whether they have paid their tributes to some Enlightenment notion of fact. Indeed, the point is that they don’t. These stories allow the slaves to become something else. They refuse full disclosure. They permit them the right to opacity. They grant them a fugitive afterlife that falls outside the text of legibility. The stories mispronounce history so that other effects and orientations might be glimpsed. 

These stories live in the places where history is beside itself in its madness; they will not bow to the colonizing morality of Truth with a capital ‘T’. And neither will the text that follows, my humble attempt to reframe the most vibrant countercultural moment in new light…the kind that glistens darkly. 

To compose a brothy, flavoured account of how black lives come to matter, one must risk straying away from the categoricity of history. To take black mattering seriously is to become fugitive, to touch rough surfaces, to eat up the offending thing. One must perform the kind of mutiny that denies history its absolute claims to exclusivity. One must disguise oneself, take on new forms, and travel with mispronunciation and misrecognition if one is to exit the plantation. 

***

This essay is about the limitations of recognition and the risks of representation. 

This essay is about the contested, resource-laden, quicksand of Black life – and the many attempts to pave it over, to save it, to voice it out to the ignoble deafness of dominant power, to weaponize it, to centralize it, to render it liveable, tolerable, intelligible, and useful (like a newly constructed parking lot) to modernity’s compelling march to mastery. 

This essay is about exile, refusal, and wild experimentation as viable political projects we must entertain, especially in moments when the prospects of inclusion and justice, the promise of diversity, and the logistics of equity no longer appear to be in league with our hopes for radical transformation.

I write about “Black lives matter”: not the decentralized, US American (but increasingly international) anti-racist movement that began in 2013 as a social response to police brutality and violence against Black people in the United States. Not the movement that grew exponentially and gained greater attention on the heels of the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020. But the central claim that the movement rests on, right there in its name: “Black lives matter.” 

It seems self-evident, doesn’t it? That Black lives matter? In the middle of writing this essay, tucked into a warm cabin in a snowy forest town called Petawawa in Ontario, along with other readers investigating Nahum Chandler’s paraontology and W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings about Blackness, I told a Black sister about its progress and about my fears the essay would quickly become too unwieldy and too long for modern tastes – given that I imagined I had a lot to say. I told her the title included the popular phrase, Black lives matter. 

“Then your essay need only include one word after the title,” she quipped, as she rinsed the cassava slices that I had just passed on to her. 

“Yeah, what’s that?” 

“Obviously,” she said, with a knowing smile. 

It might appear an incontrovertible thing to say, but its simplicity belies a theoretical density worth investigating. How do Black lives come to matter? What are the ingredients of this mattering? What do the popular ways of voicing this claim exclude? How is the articulation of Black lives intimately connected with the constitutional violence of the nation-state? In naming Black lives the way we do, what is surfaced and what is lost? What is at stake if we win the argument? 

By using “we” here, I include ‘myself’ as an ‘African man’ in the mighty swirl of transatlantic conversations between Africa and diasporan Blackness; between the Bight of Benin and Dunbar Creek; between ‘Wakanda’ and Oakland; between the African independence movements and the civil rights movement; and, between the Blacknesses conjured in the wake of loss and devastation. This essay, difficult to compose, is an attempt to contribute to that historic conversation in fragments that has been christened by many moments: by Martin Luther King’s celebrated 1957 visit to inaugurate the new nation of Ghana along with its first president, Kwame Nkrumah; by the meeting between literary giants Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin at the 1980 conference of the African Language Association in Gainesville, Florida, where both men would think of their respective nation-states (and the global state order in general) as sites of violence, incapable of delivering “freedom to the people within its borders”; [2] and in the adoption of George Floyd as a symbol of anti-police-brutality resistance by #EndSARS Nigerian protesters in 2020. 

The confluences are many. Black worlds have for long beheld each other, dreamed together, conspired together, hoped together, and protested together. Now, more than ever, new conversations are needed. The examples shared of Black convergence above illuminate the long and prodigious body of a worlding project, an inquiry at the edge of the creek – a project best announced with Reverend King’s piercing question: “Where does Blackness go?” Towards the shore with cries of “Black lives matter!” or into the warm transindividual waters of refusal? Towards the accoutrements of the manicured citizen-subject or in the direction of fugitive birds? Towards a politics of recognition or towards a politics of imperceptibility? 

It is not that these orientations are mutually exclusive or binary; they are not. I merely cast these political options in this way to momentarily contrast them, to alchemize the ingredients of Black mattering, to trouble the dominant device of Black excellence as a wayfinding cartography, and – in the spirit of that great conversation between Blacknesses – to sniff out other frames of Black mattering that wander away from the adversarial, protest-led, voice-driven, critique-inspired, politics of representation we’ve grown so used to and are slowly getting weary of.  

To do this, I offer one more instance of that Black-on-Black conversation: an unlikely discussion between an African American music superstar and me at a dinner table somewhere in Norfolk, Virginia.

Hidden Figures: The Trouble with Black Excellence

“I come from Nigeria, blackest nation on earth…”

Pause for effect. And… go. 

“For those of you who are geographically challenged, it’s west of Wakanda.” 

Applause. The joke worked. The crowd loved it. Someone’s lingering laughter floated awkwardly above the darkly lit room, picking up more giggles as it eased by. I doubled down on the moment, introducing myself as a Nigerian Prince who was there to take something away from them. “But not your money. Your sense of composure. Your sense of arrival.” Despite the glaring lights, lavishly decorated stage, and general sense of foreboding, I eased up a little. I needed ease and my comedic sensibilities to navigate sticky habits of mind, invisible frameworks, and exhausted ways of seeing and talking about things. There were dragons in the near distance.  

I was the first speaker, the opening keynote at the Mighty Dream Forum, a multi-disciplinary festival on Black excellence and social change convened by music producer, rapper, and singer Pharrell Williams in November 2022. Upon arriving the venue of the festival in Norfolk, with lingering thoughts about why they had invited me – a known saboteur of the familiar, I was shown around the massive tent where most of the presentations and conversations were to happen. There were uniformed, headset-totting, ID-carrying, polite people moving things about, black-carpeting the entire venue, checking mics, lifting white luxurious sofas and regular seats, or being lifted by cranes unto phallic towers inscribed with the bold fonts of Pharrell’s dream. I remember thinking to myself that the place had the combined energy of a good old African American cookout and a rocket launch site. The message felt clear: Pharrell, “Happy” crooner, had his sights set on the stars. And it looked like we were all invited. 

In the tent and around it, the atmosphere had a certain quality of completeness. Arrival. Not inquiry. Not complexity. Just answers needing a fine-tuning here and there. Like listening to a choir on a Sunday, knowing everyone had rehearsed their lines the night before and knew their bits. I didn’t stay to listen to all the presentations made after my talk, but when the speakers eventually got up to do their thing, the spectacle of it raised the saying, “preaching to the choir”, to the nth degree of irony. 

Feeling more and more exterior to the proceedings, I could now trace out the territorial dominance of a shibboleth, the exalted elephant in the arena. It was like everyone in that space shared the same Netflix password. I am no betting man, but from the looks of things, from how frequently I heard it in passing conversation, and how emphatically the notables stressed it in their presentations, or maybe something I was making up in my head, I was willing to bet my favourite pen that password was “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”. 

The barely concealed theme of the event was of course Black excellence: a celebration of Black visibility; an anchoring of social transformation to the prospects of Black inclusion. This was the story that seemed to weave together the multiple threads of the convening: from matters of business, local entrepreneurship, and food, to technology, networking, and corporate philanthropy. A Black representative from Google would extol her company’s efforts at diversifying its workplace. And in a shared conversation with Pharrell, a Black, retired NASA astronaut would speak on stage about meeting the star on the set of the Hollywood production, “Hidden Figures”, which memorialized the adventures of three African American “computers” (women whose job was to do the real math that made the triumphant space adventurism of the 60s possible). He would speak about playing Pharrell’s music aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the delight of their audience. While encouraging those gathered to dream big, Pharrell and the astronaut would trade quips about the possible existence of aliens. 

The architecture of the place felt very hospitable to the entrepreneurial-minded, to Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ myth, and to the allure of disembarkation. Waiting in the wings to be announced by a God-voice-announcer, I considered what I was about to say to those gathered, to Black celebrities, Black activists, business-card-flashing executives who had their memes down pat, and the entire band of an HBCU no less: that disembarkation didn’t happen. Not quite. Despite the cold stare of history, black bodies (and their slavers) didn’t leave the slave ships for the plantation. They didn’t disembark. The last slave ship didn’t disappear into the backwaters of ignominious times. When it arrived the shore, it became the shore. It turned. It became the organelles of computational capitalism and its hidden algorithms of bodily reproduction. It became our hegemonic monocultures of mind that orbit around the fetish of the citizen-subject, the dissociated self of modern civilization. It became the managerial logistics of the clearing devoted to the worlding project of singling out the “individual over the field”, by which the “human increasingly [became] the focal point…synonymous with life.” [3]

Disembarkation – the story that Blackness was now done with the slave ship and could now turn its sight to the stars – was a trick of the senses. A consequence of looking at things too squarely. A form of incarceration.

Long story short, we were all ‘on’ the slave ship. White bodies. Black bodies. Green bodies. Spotted bodies. Convened by her logic. We were her wooden children, gestating in the flattened worlds it had produced.

I couldn’t help but think that the call for Black excellence, for trillions of dollars in new enterprises, was like seeking the finer settling spots in a fishbowl. Like wanting a front row seat on the Titanic. Or seeking an equal piece of a carcinogenic pie. 

And so, I said it, through dry lips. Feeling like the one person who hadn’t read the script on the greatness of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “There was a lot of representation aboard the slave ship,” I reminded everyone as I named the slow seduction of the centre as the purportedly exclusive source of power and the troubling, contemporary migration from the edges to the city of lights set on the hill. “Black excellence is a form of white capture,” I proposed. “We need a new form of underground, subterranean spirituality. We need a new kind of trickster.”

The next evening, honouring an invitation to eat with Pharrell Williams and other speakers at a special dinner, I was ushered to his table, where we would spend the next almost-hour sharing about the premises of the festival, about Blackness, about justice, Kanye West, and the need to show up. It wasn’t an encounter on par with Kwame Nkrumah and Martin Luther King or Baldwin and Achebe. Nothing as noteworthy as those other prestigious Black-on-Black moments. Moreover, the finer nuances of our conversation were lost in the din of high-fives, clanging plates, shuffling feet, and loud music that enveloped the room. Mr Williams made his points about the necessity of working with the system – a framing I found some resonance with. There are neither pure departures nor pure arrivals. No emancipatory project can – with critique and protest – extricate us from the worlds we are set against. 

We do need to pay the bills.

And yet there is a sense that the quest for recognition, for equal representation, for a seat at the table aboard a Space Shuttle in outer space, is itself an effect of a brutally humanist perspective that renders invisible the other figures that have always texturized, haunted, troubled, and disturbed our modern claims to independence and the politics of visibility that emerges alongside that claim. Representation comes with a risk of falling out of touch with context in order to fit into a regime of seeing. No matter the gains in visibility, there are always hidden figures. 

An animist cosmo-vision revisits those hidden figures, hidden political constituencies – the slave ship; the traumatic whiplash that metamorphosed into an organ; the carbon-14 from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that settled into our flesh; the bacterial carnivals that line our guts; the inordinate “thing power” of the material worlds around us; the ecological ventriloquisms that mock our ownership claims to voice – touches them, and realizes we’ve never been modern. Never been human. Never been one or alone all by ourselves.

Through the noise of our festivities, prefacing my audially challenged response to Pharrell’s spiel by noting that African Blackness had a few insights to offer Diasporan Blackness, I asked a few questions: “What happens when black excellence serves something else? What about the costs of showing up? What is served when Black lives are rendered intelligible to the imperatives of recognition, of excellence so-called?” But try as we might have, many interesting threads in our exploration were left flailing in the wind of environmental imperatives at work: we both were organelles of the creature that was the dinner party. Pusha T was nearby loudly high-fiving some other gentleman with a beard woven by Athena herself; Hannibal Burress was just excusing himself from our table, perhaps exhausted with the back-and-forth between me and Pharrell. And soon, I also felt the need to retire. We said our goodbyes with a brotherly hug and a promise to continue our conversations.  

I left the scene of our fleeting philosophical contemplations and went to bed, my mind now furtively inhabited by a new guest, the fictional figure of Odewale – the tragic oedipal figure who might have had a thing or two to add to our tableside inquiry, and whose story was a stentorian sermon about the prohibitive and ironic costs of gaining power, recognition, and excellence.

Odewale: When Showing Up Becomes a Problem

In a 1968 theatre production of three acts and ten scenes called ‘The Gods are Not to Blame’, written by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, Odewale is fated from birth to kill his father and marry his mother. His parents, the recipients of this cruel cosmic joke-to-come, King Adetusa and Queen Ojuola, upon hearing of these things from the seer Baba Fakunle, fall into despair. Such an unthinkable event – if it were to happen – would not only risk destroying the land of Kutuje and King Adetusa’s careful work protecting the domain, but it would also upset the delicate balance of all things. It would stray too far into realms of taboo, and curse everything living.

There’s no time to lose. Adetusa orders the child to be taken far away from the kingdom and killed at the evil grove, the place of monsters. The matter cannot be helped; the child must die. But the messenger entrusted with this gruesome task takes pity on the child and commits him to the hands of a hunter he encounters along his way.  

Odewale grows up a capable but hot-tempered young man with trust issues. He soon turns weary of his parents – who are of course, unbeknownst to him, his foster parents – and abandons them in search of meaning, adventure, and recognition. On his way, he murders a man on a farm in Ede that had dared cross him, and heads to the old kingdom of Kutuje where he assists that kingdom’s forces to quell an invasion from surrounding kingdoms. Odewale’s exploits in battle become so legendary that he immediately gains the recognition he had always craved. Following the traditions of the land, he is appointed King of Kutuje, and is married to the bereaved Queen of the land – who would give him four children. 

It all comes to a head when despite Odewale’s balanced leadership, a calamity – which the old seers suspect to be a curse from the gods – descends upon Kutuje. Children fall sick; crops grow rotten; farms repel their caregivers; clouds refuse to deliver their heavenly gifts; and the sun frowns her hot fury all day long. Baba Fakunle divines the terrible truth: the gods have cursed the killer of the old King, who eventually is revealed to be the young and impetuous Odewale in his tussle with an anonymous man in Ede, King Adetusa. 

Odewale’s children are also his siblings. His wife is his mother. The whole world caves in under Odewale’s feet; the kingdom grips its chest in its united cry of “Abomination!” Odewale plucks his eyes out of his head – as if to deprive himself of that ruling sense that governed his own desire to be seen – and walks away with his children, performing exile, as if responding to his overwhelming tragedy by refusing his containment within the legibility of the text of the story. By refusing to offer the reader any more details.

When Ola Rotimi’s Greek-inspired tragedy became a celebrated novel in 1971, the African independence movement was already well into its years of maturity: Ghana had chased away the British in 1957 and was already running a Second Republic after a few post-Nkrumah years of military rule. Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, and Madagascar would all shake off their French yoke by 1960. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, would also gain sovereignty on October 1 of the same year. 

Between Martin Luther King’s 1957 visit to sub-Saharan Africa to commemorate Ghana’s triumphant birth as a Black state, and the publication of Rotimi’s play in 1971, up to 40 new African nations had sprung into the international order. Redeploying biblical language, Nkrumah’s near-prophetic assertion that all Africans had to do was “seek first the kingdom of God”, by which he meant state power, “and all these other things shall be added unto you,” by which he marked his anticipation that all the good things Africans had been denied would eventually be theirs in the wake of decolonial victories, was the guiding lodestar of Black aspirations. Despite a few hiccups with getting things started, there was some hope that the nationalist movements that captured the imaginations of the Black world, riding in on the backs of eloquent critiques of European domination, would usher in an era of peace and prosperity, guaranteeing freedoms from violence and oppression. 

However, just as Odewale’s consanguineous tragedy seemed to be tied to his quest for recognition and migration to the centres of power, the victories of the African nationalist movements activated hidden algorithms buried within the machinery of the nation-state, the prize those movements had fought so hard to win. By showing up, by gaining the prestige of becoming nation-states, by striving for excellence, by winning, we lost. 

Firoze Manji writes in his essay on the failure of politics in Africa:

“On coming to power, most of the nationalist governments, often supported by the left, believed that all that was required to satisfy the demands of the masses was to take control of the state. But what they ignored was that the state was itself a colonial state, and set up to serve, protect and advance the interests of imperial power and its entourage of corporations and banks. That state had a monopoly over the use of violence. It had police forces, armies, and secret police and it used force and, where necessary, violence, to protect the interests of the way in which capitalism operated in the peripheries.

Having occupied the state, independence governments essentially sought to make modest reforms consisting primarily of deracialising the state and modernising it so that the economy could be more fully integrated with the new emerging international order that the US, Europe, and Japan set about creating after the Second World War. The structures of state control, the police, army, and special forces–even the structures and powers of native authority established by colonial powers–all these were left fundamentally intact, albeit dressed up in the colours of the national flag. The structures of the capitalist state were left intact, even where regimes proclaimed an adherence to ‘Marxism-Leninism’, as in Mengistu’s Ethiopia.

Few understood the dangers of occupying, rather than creating alternatives to, the capitalist state. Amongst those must be counted Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), and Tomas Sankara (Burkina Faso). They had in common their commitment to building alternatives to the colonial state. Cabral was emphatic: ‘It is our opinion that it is necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people.’ Tellingly, all three were assassinated by their own comrades, in collaboration with empire.” [4] (Emphasis mine)

Today, with collapsing economies outsourced to the highest bidder, incidents of police brutality, cabal-like political parties that are set up to funnel public funds away from the commonwealth, ‘Africans’ are more readily defined by their singular attraction to a haunting question than by their claims to continental commonality: what went wrong? Why didn’t Black Rapture happen? Why didn’t our victories create for us the world our struggles were guaranteed to deliver to us and our children? 

Africa’s political failures are a canary-in-a-coalmine moment for diasporic Blackness. Surely, the same questions have already taken up residence on the lips of Black communities in the West. Why – after the triumphant legacies of the civil rights movement, of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, of an Obama presidency, of the pedagogical popularity of identity politics and its situated critiques of white supremacy – do we now find ourselves with justice kneeling on our necks?       

Ola Rotimi could not have anticipated it at the time, but his brilliant transplantation of the Greek tragedian Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” into the rich Yoruba worlds he was familiar with is a cautionary tale about the invisible woes that come with recognition. Odewale was a creature of prophecy – not merely ‘prediction’ but a particular way of convening of time, for ‘prophecy’, as I see it, speaks less to what comes next than to how bodies and their networks are arranged and patterned, and how those patterns secrete different species of time. Odewale moved within temporalities that had the architectural effect of urging him and others towards the tragic conclusion of his story. 

Perhaps there’s also some significance to the title Ola Rotimi selected for his drama, The Gods are not to Blame. Despite the salient themes of fate and predestination woven throughout the text, Rotimi refuses to reduce culpability to the gods. They are not to blame for Odewale’s and Kutuje’s woes because they are not in charge. They are not transcendent intercessors but energetic traces of activated objects glowing seditiously in the shadows cast by human intentionality. They are the occult powers beneath the asphalt of unmediated choice. They are participants in an unfolding assemblage that involves multiple actors and agencies, hidden figures, crossroads, principalities, and territorial spirits. 

Odewale’s story is not the story of a hero gone bad, or a villain gone worse. In its all too human portrayal of loss, death, jealousy, anger, murder, sex, conniving gods, and the existential why that churns at the molecular level of the ordinary, it reaches for and gestures toward the more-than-human. It suggests that we are swimming in dense materialities populated by exquisite others who have a say in how what comes to be, comes to be. Odewale’s story almost mocks human intentions; without reducing human events to fatalistic, predetermined outcomes of divinely programmed sequences, it grounds voice, intentions, agency, accountability, freedom, and power within an ecstatic web of profusely unspeakable happenings – thus warning us not to get too heady with our plans or get too excited about our triumphs. The ingredients of the goings-on around us are not reducible to the choices and consequences of human actors and human sociality. 

In short, Ola Rotimi’s story reminds us that we move and are moved by things. We act and are acted upon. In this animist reframing of politics, ‘The Gods are Not to Blame’ conjures Black excellence in the figure of Odewale, headstrong but still captive to forces beyond his control. It problematizes the sensorial monoculture of sight; notices that the rush to wrest power from oppressive forces is often a reinforcement of those powers; and, in its non-conclusion, opens conversation about the improbable but abiding promise of exile.

How do Black lives come to matter?    

“Black lives matter!” is the loudest challenge to white modernity, joined umbilically to the largest advocacy group in the world – one which is no longer limited by its original American moorings. This guttural cry for respect, inclusion and racial equality has franchised its thesis to those most affected by state violence around the world, sharing its language and slogan with those outraged by the perceived excesses of the state, by justice delayed or denied, and by the inhuman brutality of the state’s agencies towards members of especially Black communities. 

At 17, when Ayo Tometi (formerly known as Opal Tometi), a Nigerian-American community organizer, visited Nigeria, she met with her cousins. Something stirred. A sense of home and community. A feeling that she belonged. An understanding that she was more than just a placeholder in the vast and disempowering anonymity of modernity. A reckoning with significance. Years later, following the police killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013, devastated by his murder, she would create the #BLM hashtag and website, co-founding the advocacy group along with fellow female Black organizers Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. She hoped that by taking a stand (or, as Colin Kaepernick later did, taking a knee), she might draw attention to these shocking incidences of murder – and push culture in hopefully inclusive directions. 

Today, the slogan – tied to the Black Lives Matter movement – bridges “the collective labor of a wide range of Black liberation organizations, each which [sic] their own distinct histories. These organizations include groups like the Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders, Assata’s Daughters, the St. Louis Action council, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle, to name just a few.” [5] Its human rights advocacy has taken the form of protest, community organizing at grassroots levels, storytelling, policy proposals, performance, merchandise, celebrity endorsements, street events, philanthropy, and a constellation of effects directed towards proliferating the critique of the state and its apparatuses of force. 

From one lens, the vocal cry that “Black lives matter!” is the call for equity, diversity, inclusion, and ascendancy. It is a way of noticing the perverse power of the state and how a section of the population has been generationally stolen from, put down, oppressed, to create the windfall of stability that modernity currently enjoys but is also rapidly losing. It is the hope that one’s race would not be a weighty consideration in determining how a person is named, treated, supported, and seen. 

When we say, “Black lives matter!” it is our way of saying: see me. Acknowledge my body. Acknowledge my suffering and the pain of my being erased from visibility. I want to be seen on your TVs; I would like to see myself represented on your conference panels; I want a seat at the table. I do not want to be killed on the streets by the very same uniformed officials employed to protect me. I do not want to be emblematic of prisons or crime; I want to eat well, drink well, and be treated as a citizen.  

The slogan and the movement it names have met with huge success, entering mainstream culture, and becoming one of the most effective human rights movements of recent memory. Its achievements are plentiful: this includes inspiring efforts at cutting funding to police departments across the United States; [6] pushing for laws that make police operations more responsible and accountable to the communities they serve; inspiring school districts to desegregate their schools; advocating for the removal of racially insensitive relics that monumentalize Black suffering; and changing the ways big businesses conduct themselves. [7]

And yet some lingering questions itch the hard-to-reach middles of our backs: how do Black lives matter? That is, not how are they valuable, but what are the conditions for their becoming dense, material, and real? What is the matter with Black lives? What is mattering with Black lives? By what metrics do we measure Black lives assumedly equal with, say, White lives? Do Black lives matter because we say they do, because we know from the depths of our bones that they do, or because it is self-evident in other undisclosed ways? On what do these claims rest?

One response to these questions might be to posit that the yardstick of value deployed here, the one with which we calculate Black lives to be equal to their racial counterparts, is the nation-state and its promises of justice and citizenship. As a phenomenon of human rights discourse, the slogan and its movements perform their work within a politics of representation, a politics of seeking visibility, recognition, and vocality. Voice is centred. Experience is centred. The individual citizen-subject is affirmed as the fundamental unit of governance. 

In this way, Black Lives Matter is an implicit agreement with, and navigation within, the dynamics of white capture. It is the justified but necessarily limited agitation for the fresh air and roaming space of the upper deck of the slave ship – anything but the lower deck and cramped spaces deep inside the hull of the vessel. The thing about moving through decks is that we – all of us – are still on the damn slave ship. 

In thinking of Black lives as equal-with, it is already allied together with white modernity, with the colonial Anthropos (the world-building project of the Enlightenment) which gestures towards the Human individual as the fulcrum around which agency and mastery spin. [8]   

How do Black Lives Matter? To whom? To power. To the calculations and myth-making stories that centralize the individual above ecologies. To the winding legacies of slave trade and the economies of extraction and displacement they conjured. To the age-reproducing ethos of The Man in his quest for dominance and Icarusian flight. To the global state order launched on the back of World War II and the rapid industry-led consumerism that was birthed on the way to heaven. To the Anthropocene. The power space in which Black lives are said to matter is built on dissociation, on a genocide of relations, [9] its dissenting posture notwithstanding. #BLM is ironically the success of white modernity. Its growing visibility and engendered dissent are a trap, a form of entrapment. 

This animist, process-oriented analysis does not say Black Lives Matter or even white modernity is “bad”; it makes no such judgments, as if one could stand outside of our moral frameworks and make universal pronouncements. What I feel inspired to notice is that every worlding project is strewn with tensions, intensities, multiplicities, and polyphonic/anaphonic reverberations that stray far from the clarity of its intentions – like Odewale in the unanticipated middle of a tragic saga of multidimensional proportions. Nothing is so neat and tidy in an entangled and entangling world. By thinking more in terms of material sciences – how ingredients mix and take on new colours, textures, and shapes; how ethical flows secrete temporary moral structures; how bodies melt into other bodies; how resistance implies intimacy; and, how acting in the world is always an acting-with the world – we might come to touch the corporeal forms of a framework that manufactures Blackness in its colonial hybridity with Whiteness. 

It should also be said that Whiteness is not “Caucasian bodies.” I refuse such reductionist moves (mainly because to reduce “whiteness” to “white people” would be to ironically extend the powers of white modernity). Race is not a property of specific bodies per se, but an event co-produced by relations within an assemblage of myriad connections. It is with particular relations – where the properties of ‘things’ only emerge as an effect of their entanglements – that an assemblage becomes racializing. The focus is not on presumably stable entities but on patterns of relations. What ‘Whiteness’ stands out as is a dissociative performance that hijacks the event and makes it subservient to the privileged body, which is itself tautological: in other words, it reduces agonistic tensions, patterns, and embodied movements to pre-figured entities with already stable identities and properties – demanding names, location, and firm histories. 

White people are also captives of Whiteness – which seeks to build new pliant surfaces upon the messiness of entanglement, by wiping away the many ways “white people” are grounded, involved, entangled, [10] indigenous, moving, spilling, ecstatic, situated, dying, immanent, and becoming-other. Whiteness is the logic of proper welcome: a border issue but also a real estate phenomenon. Through its specific connections to the ‘New World’, to the emergence of the United States as empire, specific senses have frequently been enlisted in who gets to identify as White. But its world-building ritual, working by offering inclusion to scarce privileges, comes with an unanticipated side order of ontological containment. [11]

By Whiteness then, I mean to temporarily name the racializing assemblage of agencies, cartographies, archetypes, desires, stories, orientations, and gestures that have had the colonial effect of re/producing a hyper-rationalized, flattened world available for human mastery, where the value-laden definition of what it means to be human has historically supported a reiterable group of people, while necessarily excluding others. 

Through anthropocentric perspectives, Whiteness was summoned within Euro-American discourse and propagated through white supremacy. However, if we relax some of those humanist constraints, if we de-exceptionalize humans as separate entities, we might come to see that Whiteness is not the exclusive domain of human actors: there are posthumanist processes involved. There are microbial matters, textural issues, situated materialisms, strange forces, and much more involved in how Whiteness comes to matter. For instance, it is becoming increasingly difficult – at least to many influenced by posthumanist thinking – to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade without naming the chemical inducements of sugar and the gut bacteria that fed on them. To essentialize ‘White bodies’ as evil by association, to reduce even the acts of white slavers to choices that can be weighed on a scale that bends towards good or bad, is to reproduce the liberalist, traditional, ableist image of the free human subject, the wet dream of modernity – untethered to the world around him, unbothered by the actions of a teeming world around him. Untouched by context and environment.             

Black Lives Matter is a framework of Whiteness. It is a making of worlds using the same ontological and epistemological tools as Whiteness. It is an agonistic dynamic of Whiteness. Whiteness touching itself. As such it stresses voice and prefigured subjects; it occupies itself with saving the identitarian subject from oppression; it embraces the paradigm of the dissociated self; it champions human rights within the colonial clearing Whiteness made. It desires good seats on the phallic time-travelling machine burrowing through worlds. It wants a spot in the clearing. It algorithmically celebrates Black excellence. 

We do need to pay the bills.

Speaking Truth to Power 

But are other worlds possible? What else could black mattering do other than perform within the nexus of relations that render Black experience intelligible to regimes of visuality and social justice? Are there other ways to think about black mattering beyond the traps of Black excellence?

To recall, “Black Lives Matter” has proven to be an effective organizing heuristic in service of minoritarian survival within the matrix of imperial capture. I need it. My life is dependent upon it. I am grateful for it. Even as a Nigerian who has no life in Black America, I am touched by the movement’s work – not merely through its afterlife in the efforts to end police brutality in my country, but in the ways its thesis dignifies Black bodies around the world. In the ways the movement and its international siblings give us voices. [12]

Voice is such a prestigious thing in the city – perhaps this is because attention is a scarce resource – at least in the ways we often look at it as produced by human actors. Little wonder we give so much power to it, to the person or group who can wield it more effectively. As such “speaking truth to power” is considered meaningful work – perhaps the primary work of an advocacy movement like ‘BLM’ (an acronym I will use simultaneously throughout the text with the movement/organizational entity of ‘Black Lives Matter’). 

Voices are presumably discrete things, located firmly within the agential control of human subjects. Something that cannot be taken from us, synonymous with free will even. But such a view of voice, as an object of a stable human organism, displaces the roles the world around us and strange worlds within play in shaping speakability. Voices are not solely the products of individual or collective vocal folds: without oxygen, without the efforts of microbial communities that inhabit vocal fold mucosa, without a milieu that grants language such power – often investing it with a nobility denied others who cannot speak, without a politics that gives currency to speaking, without the mutuality of a (perceived) listening apparatus, speaking would be invisible. It would be no matter at all. 

I grew up learning a Yoruba folklore story about the tortoise who, in a bid to quench his hunger and attend a feast in the clouds that is said to be strictly for the birds, disguises himself with an assortment of feathers from willing companion birds, and learns to fly. Upon reaching the clouds, Tortoise is so stunned by the quality of the dishes in heavenly places that he reneges on his private promises to be honourable at table. He quickly adopts a new name when registering himself at the pearly gates: "All of You", he says. When the king of the birds gives his welcoming keynote, blesses the meal, and says - as one does in these kinds of stories - that the food is for "all of you to enjoy", Tortoise springs from his chair, and declares to everyone that this is indeed his name. His enthusiasm, his righteous declaration silences the other birds, who are too constitutionally shy and polite to interject. Eventually, Tortoise disguised as this strange assortment of bodies, steals everything, gobbles all the delicious food while the birds look on in suppressed disappointment. The story ends with a fall from grace, a fascinating twist explaining how the tortoise got its rough shell, and the morale of the tale ("Don't be greedy") – which our elders often required us to shout out in unison. 

These days, I suspect hunger or greed is the least sinister theme at play in that story. I am fascinated with the way the tortoise effectively speaks on behalf of the birds, snatching their voices despite their very expressive vocal folds. Maybe ‘on behalf of’ is too generous. Perhaps we can say that the logic of the gathering – the surprisingly violent disruption of the proceedings, lined with the legacies and inheritances of bird politeness – produces a seductive torpor that speaks as tortoise-bird, effectively snatching away other voices. 

Voices can be snatched. Voices can be projected onto another, can sneak in, and can sneak away. Voices can possess, infect, and use us. Voices can crawl into other bodies. Voices exceed experience and have lives beyond human subjects. Voices meander and travel with queer lives, thriving in sociomaterial densities in ways that undercut the anthropocentric move that tethers them to their proper owners. Voices exceed the relations of ownership through which we think of ourselves and the world around us. Voices are not the properties of discrete human subjects, but volatile, rarefied, and subtle effects of certain arrangements and bodily configurations. As my dear sister, contemporary dancer, and Black scholar Angelique Willkie puts it, so eloquently, “the sounds we emit do not belong to us; they belong to the room, and not to the emitter.”  

In a world where voices are not fixed to their so-called owners, in which the room also speaks, in which faces and voices are algorithmic and flowing, [13] it is not outrageous to imagine the sinister effects of an ecological ventriloquism, a kind of possession, by which a system of relations speaks 'through' or as us even when we trust we are exercising our own desires, our own disagreements, our own power, our own demands. We might insist that the inviolability of our experiences occasion a speaking up – a formulation that is central to much of protest politics today – but what this formulation takes as granted is that humans live in a solid world composed of solid objects around us, which we have somehow attained the transcendental and superior ability to describe and convene in chaos-bracketing ways. An animist-ecological perspective revisits this framing as possibly insufficient to the imperatives of thinking alongside a frighteningly more-than-human intelligent world that does things. Within such constraints, we are forced to think that humans do not perceive the world outside of themselves; we do not live in the world, we live with the world. The old reassuring divides by which we name ourselves free individuals and preformed identities with private lives separate from an external world break down under a consideration of the weight of the vibrancy of relations of which human becomings are only a partial convening. The subject/object formula – a particularly anthropocentric equation – gives way to something more processual and relational. As such, even experiences and perceptions, how we think about what happens to us, how we story our lives, and ultimately how we voice these experiences, are nodes of larger effects, powers at large, sociomaterial densities, and animacies, cross-cutting crystallizations of concepts in their efficacious migritude. Our experiences [14] are trans-sensorial matters, not properties belonging to preformed persons. This of course makes ‘speaking up’ less a matter of exerting the brute force of one’s individuality upon the nation-state and more a matter of reinforcing the processes that stabilize the nation-state as the exclusive source of power.   

We would suppose that by speaking up we are showing up, but presence is such a haunted concept when delinked from its humanist anchorage, when allowed to roam free away from the imperatives of commencing all thought from the givenness of a rational modern subject. Nothing is fully 'there'. Whose voice, we might wonder, does the zombie ant – infected with the fungal spore of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, dazed and disoriented in its wandering away from the colony – perform? 

Black Lives Matter thinks centrally with discrete human individuals, who have voices and identities - a convenient starting place for white modernity as well. This is how it initiates its protest: with a rigid reassertion of the givenness of the individual as a substantial presence with its own pregiven identities and properties. But, to paraphrase Karen Barad, if we began our analysis of social relations from the presumptuous primacy of the human subject, we are already too late. 

"Speaking truth to power" names a framework that believes that language and signification – wielded by a rational modern subject – encompass everything. Speaking truth to power can often be a victorious justification for the conditions spoken against. We speak – as subjects within a politics of subjectivity, and therefore as ‘vocal manifolds’ within complex social arrangements – and the state, whether by heeding our demands or failing to heed them, preserves the conditions of speakability, the Atlantic temporality that still beats in our chests.

The framing of Black Lives Matter, the slogan, and its operations, gives language too much power, gives voice too much power, and as such gives the modern subject and its paraphernalia too much power. Everything else matters except how matter comes to matter. Black Lives matter only within a limited prism of anthropocentric relations intelligible to governance, to the promise of justice, to the apparatus of policing, to the metaphysics of the stable self. As such, what is not allowed to matter is black mattering – the wild and potentially agonistic ways bodies mediate and move and modulate and murmur, doing things beyond the bailiwick of intersectionality and identitarian anxieties about who has been left out and who is in the room. I’ll spell it out, not with the bombastic self-assurance of a 17th century powdered-wig-wearing lawyer at court, but with the poking assertiveness of a hungry griot whose talking drum speaks mysteries: Black Lives Matter, the secondary logic of containment, is the constitutional exclusion of black mattering, where black mattering hints at the choreography of transindividual flows and tides and magic that exceeds and precedes individuals, meaning, identities, language, voice. 

I am writing to say that while Black Lives Matter deploys an identitarian approach to make its demands and claims about Black experience legible to the public, it inadvertently contributes to the ongoing manufacturing of the Black subject, an imprint of white logic. Its method of intersectionality, an iteration of which seems popular beyond a studied and careful appreciation of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s more nuanced thesis, contributes to the discretization of bodies as fully articulable subjects of meaning. 

BLM utilizes the same cartographic lines to draw bodies as pre-relational, propertied subjects; to make its critique sensible to the familiar, it embraces the familiar and becomes part of its organs and adopts the colonial metaphysics of dissociation to support its thesis of exclusion. It implicitly endorses modern power by seeking greater representation within its halls of control, pleased to celebrate when a Black person or minority person rises to a position of authority. Why this pleasure? Because if there are more of us that look like us at the top of the machine, then it is likelier that the system would stop suffocating us. If we moved up the decks of the slave ship, we could get more air. But the charcoal-black skins of our police officers in Nigeria and in Africa do not care about representation when they whip and shoot their equally dark-skinned siblings; this is because their bodies are modulated and im/mediated by matters insensible to, and matters that exceed, the logic of identity. Moving up the decks of the slave ship is a triumphant reassertion of the slave ship’s subtler modes of captivity. 

It seems Black Lives only matter as aspects of the state, as visions of contained selfhood, as matters of isolated subjectivity, as subjects of surveillance, as potential recipients of state control and/or benevolence, as capitalist units imprisoned in the gridlock of identitarian intersections, as intelligible projects of modernity. It seems Black Lives only matter as patches on the crack in the hull of a sailing ship to keep out the onrush of deterritorializing ontological waters. Thinking of bodies as discrete things is a displacement of the fluid, embodying, posthumanist processes that are the conditions of our claims to exceptionality. 

The framework, the slogan, and the movement around BLM does not know what to do beyond the subject, beyond the politics of the hallways of city hall. Beyond city walls. All it can do is raise its volume. All it can do is pay homage to the logic of the propertied subject, the vaunted destination of the less-than-privileged Black subject. 

Again, voice locates the intersectionally oppressed subject within endless fractals of linguistic performativity, a gridlock that imprisons/subjectivizes as it names the subject. Black Lives Matter can advocate for 'Subject X', a hypothetical interstitial phenomenon of intersectional politics, an infinite fractal of oppression, perhaps a disabled Black Muslim refugee woman, to move up the decks of the slave ship, but it cannot address the slave ship [15] - in this case the modulating material conditions that pre-exist the focus of advocacy (human subjects, human systems, human laws, human societies) and the emphasis on identity. 

In short, Black Lives Matter is a form of subject formation, one that depends on the managerial halting of occult movement or black mattering, which touches on pre-individual dynamics (more on this shortly). Despite its posture seeking to sanitize/rehabilitate Blackness, it is a civilizing ethic that stresses locateability, pronounceability, and visibility within a metaphysics of capture. The offer is a seat at the table; the restaurant is white modernity. 

When Elizabeth Grosz identifies intersectionality as a gridlock system, which fails to account for the mutual constitution and indeterminacies of embodied configurations of gender, sexuality, and race, she means to say that contemporary politics – one which Black Lives Matter occupies – is stuck. It can critique, but it cannot create. Its place of power is upon the flatlands, within the clearing, among the managerial logics of the Anthropocene. It too wants flatter highways, phallic towers, front row seats, and Coca-Cola refills. Not that these things are bad to want; they are worlding events, and the thing to apprehend here is that Black Lives Matter is worlding along with what it criticizes. Therefore, Grosz writes of a gridlock, a stuckness. 

And yet, it would be a mistake to think this stuckness is not prolific in its own way.  

Kanye West and White Lives Matter

The Samudra Manthana, an ancient Hindu myth about a thousand-year-long battle between the forces of good and evil, the Devas and the Asuras, [16] begins with a curse – as is the case with many epics. The Devas are doomed by an aggrieved rishi or sage, Durvasa, whose gift to Indra – King of Devas – is rejected by Indra’s elephant. Stay with me. 

Losing their prestigious place in the heavens, their glory, their kingdom, their power, the Devas – soundly defeated in a battle with their archenemies, the Asuras – approach Lord Vishnu, who advises them to seek out an elixir of immortality, Amrita, whose powers should be able to restore their lost might. Amrita is however not simply ‘there’, waiting to be scooped out of a golden cauldron. Instead, it ‘exists’ as an intensity, as a field potential, traces of which embroider a vast ocean of milk. The nectar emerges at the end of a laborious process of alchemy, involving the kind of churning that separates butter from milk. The plan is to churn the entire ocean until Amrita floats to the surface. 

Finally finding a path back to their inheritance, the Devas begin to assemble the materials for their experiment: they ask the Mountain Mandara to act as their churning rod; they solicit the aid of the King of the Serpents, Vasuki, whose giant middle would wrap around the churning mountain to facilitate the agitating movements needed to produce the stuff. Crucially, the Asuras – also eager to taste of this nectar of invincibility – offer their hands to help churn the ocean. For a thousand years, with both Asuras and Devas poised at either end of a cosmic snake, whose belly envelopes the peak of a mountain that is itself stirring the mighty tides of a primordial ocean of milk, the process of producing the Amrita proceeds.  

The rest of the story involves a turtle whose length is 800,000 miles, a god’s throat turning blue from drinking a universe-eroding poison named Halahala, a flying horse with seven heads, and a remarkably beautiful woman whose intervention disciplines unruly demons. It’s a lot of details for a story that is primarily concerned with things getting stuck, with the unexpected comorbidities of righteousness, with the flirtatious adventurism of ‘taking a stand’, but it beautifully illustrates how troublingly prolific stuckness can be. How an ocean churned can cough up strange things. In this instance, the Asuras and the Devas become aspects of a moral apparatus that reconvenes their identities and modifies their moral positions in new ways. They become hyphenated within the Amrita-producing assemblage, churning each other as the ocean beneath their grunts and sweat swells and dances in the heat of alchemy. 

Somewhere in this story is a materialist upending of moral independence, an ethic that ontologizes stuckness as a curd-like inertia whose ingredients co-generate each other, producing slushy standpoints. 

***

“…no matter how you feel about West, the music maverick’s work has undoubtedly left an indelible impact on culture as we know it. Unfortunately, more recent years have twisted West’s legacy into one of chaos, controversy, and confusion, leaving even the most passionate card-carrying members of Team Yeezy mulling over a question that’s particularly difficult to answer: what should we do about Kanye?” [17]

A few days after US rapper Ye or Yeezy (formerly known as Kanye West) wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “White Lives Matter” at the Paris Fashion Week this past October (2022), setting into motion a maelstrom of think-pieces and outraged responses, Andrew Lee, in Anti-Racism Daily, penned thoughtful, emblematic lines in a short article about the situation: 

“The ‘White Lives Matter’ phrase on West and Owens’s shirts was popularized by the Aryan Renaissance Society, neo-Nazis fighting ‘racial integration’ and ‘inter-breeding’ to create an ‘Aryan oligarchy based on genetic aristocracy’. White Lives Matter leader Rebecca Barnette, who also has ties to the Aryan Strikeforce and the National Socialist Movement, declared that white people need ‘the blood of our enemies [to] soak our soil to form new mortar to rebuild our landmasses’ before Jewish and Muslim people kill off white people entirely. 

There’s no indication that West or Owens knew of the phrase’s association with outright neo-Nazis. But the ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘White Lives Matter’ slogans are consistently deployed in such a way that pro-white (read: white supremacist) politics end up seeming reasonable. White lives are ‘defended’ in response to Black Lives Matter, a movement against white supremacy. When it’s pointed out that this is an utterly inappropriate response, it’s taken as evidence that white lives are, in fact, under attack. If white lives are threatened, it makes sense that political organizations be formed to defend them. The protection of white interests in a white supremacist society is the politics of the Nazis and the Klan.” [18]

Andrew Lee’s position – that the slogan “White Lives Matter” (from now on, WLM) and its bizarro twists on Black advocacy represent something so indefensibly aberrant, so out of whack as to be collapsible to the familiar epithets of hate and evil – seems to be popular among those who care about social justice. [19] In content and form, along with other similar pieces, Lee’s article marks the moment many believed Kanye West, self-acclaimed genius and controversy-generator, had finally crossed the unapproachable Rubicon. 

By attaching his brand to the misdirected (at best) and hate-filled (at worst) declarations of a section of the population that failed to see that “…white lives’ have never been targeted for oppression” and that when the Black Lives Matter slogan is deployed, it is done to call attention to the ways “Black folks, in contrast, are at the bottom of virtually every economic, social, and political measure because of centuries of individual and institutional racism,” [20] Kanye West (is popularly believed to have) perpetuated harm towards minorities. 

West – once a prince of “the culture” with an unprecedented platform to “speak truth to power” on behalf of people who look like him – had turned to the “Dark Side.” [21]

So how did the favoured son become the reprobate, the pariah? Why did he decide to camp with the moral others? A captivating conversation about mental disorders, the nature of genius, the affordances of celebrity culture, racial identity, and the thresholds of sayability, has erupted in the wake of the rapper’s faux pas. Some popular theories draw attention to Kanye’s bipolar disorder: these arguments insist that the rapper is allowed some leeway denied to others because of his publicly acknowledged disability. Others suggest his disability has little to do with his tirades about slavery, about the hypothetical cultural dominance of Jews, and – for my focus – his troubling alliance with WLM. They suggest that the rapper has always been this way, and that he is ‘at heart’ a racist, Hitler-loving, White-oppressed, House-negro and narcissist who should pick up a book, or – at the very least – be kept away from being read about in public. 

There is one other consideration that is missing from the conversation about Kanye’s support for White Lives Matter and perceived disavowal of Black Lives Matter, edged out in the crowded heat of public censure: and that is, Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter are the same argument. 

Or rather, they are different tensions within the same field of ontological capture. Within the same clearing that is so hauntingly epitomized by that image of a residential school in Canada that was found with the bones of indigenous children. Within the clearing that is the refurbished wharf of Cais do Valongo in Rio de Janeiro – concrete layers and monuments fit for an arriving Princess masking the slave bones of dead Africans pushed down to subterranean biospheres. Within the clearing that is the upper deck of the slave ship. 

It might seem intellectually suspicious and in bad faith to reduce a minority’s struggle for dignity and representation to the dominant group’s effort to contain those countercultural moves. But a sufficiently materialist, non-anthropocentric, counter-colonial, and relations-oriented perspective forces us to think beyond accounts of good versus evil, individuals against other individuals, subjects versus objects, to speculate about the intensities and vortices that tie apparently polar opposites within a creatively dynamic moral economy that exceeds said subjects in its production of subjectivity. As such, thinking in this way is hardly reductionistic. If we refused to launch our thinking about these matters – about Kanye’s ramblings, about the righteous demands of BLM, about the pushback of WLM – from the perspective of already determined human subjects with moral positions that correspond with a post-materialist, transcendent reality…if we allowed for an immanent, curd-like, worlding process in which ethical positions are crystallizations of open-ended, non-stable, subject-manufacturing dynamics (instead of essentialist codes perceived through human consciousness), then it is possible to speculate about the ways a moral standpoint absconds from fortifying its own position and becomes complicit in the production of the other.   

This is what I mean by slushy standpoints. Slushy standpoints are the ecological burdens of moral positions, perceptions, and judgments. That is, they are the invisible effects – pre-dating us and spilling beyond us – of being morally composed in specific ways.

They are the moral positions we adopt, occupy, and act within, only partially touched by articulations of belief. Whether it is the decision to skip breakfast meals or the insistence that the earth is flat, a standpoint is more than just what we believe – more than just the content of what we say we trust in. A standpoint does other things beyond reflecting to us our own images; streaming and zigzagging beyond their alleged aboutness and self-referentiality, it is chimeric, mycelial, promiscuities that aerate the soils of our ongoing becoming, creating stabilities and architectural bodies whose equipoising dynamics convene the others we then ironically attempt to stifle, to get rid of, to remove, to pathologize, and to cancel. 

The idea is simple enough: moral positions, no matter how austere and well-intentioned, are always performatively entangled with the co-production of the "other". That is, to be "good" is to produce the very conditions that make the "villain" possible. This is not as simple as saying "yin and yang" or reducing this to a binary composition. I mean to suggest that morality [22] is never binary and is always caught up in other productions that exceed the immediacy of our convictions. 

If, for instance, you took a good look at the worlds produced in the wake of pronouncements of “holiness” by religious imperialists and crusaders, you might find the ruins of excavation and displacement. You might find the Anthropocene. Within the gyres and gullies of its toxic landscapes, you might find those feeding on the crumbs of colonial departures, their bodies mutilated by their pairings with the plastic experiments of benevolent utopian projects. And if you were a citizen of those cities set upon a hill, you might look out of your window one day, out beyond the city walls, and pity the monsters that protest the nobility of civilization. The point here is that there are no points, just lines. And a moral position, which is already an aesthetic one, which is already an epistemological one, which is already an ontological one, is an effect of larger forces – not an isolated, independent position.  

A slushy standpoint is a field, in fact. Not quite an atomic point. The positions are slushy because they are not tied to stable human subjects; they are absconding in/fidelities. They speak to the ways moral subjects come to be; how ‘we’ and the ‘others’ are individuated; how beliefs are strategic more-than-human explorations in embodiment that exceed their content; and how we are co-summoned in economies of subjectivity-reinforcing enterprises that keep us stuck in increasingly toxic cyclicities that need openings. In need of breaks. In need of monsters. In need of digressing errancies. In need of ethical ruptures, deterritorializing flights, and cracks. 

Slushy standpoints are the ongoing creolization of justification, the hyphenation of moral standpoints that upend the individual as the nexus of morality. That is, they are materialist reconfigurations that name the ways moral positions – which are not merely vertical but horizontal – produce more than just relations of correspondence between a subject and a code of behaving. They spill away from their algorithms and produce the conditions within which the ‘other’ might become intelligible. Slushy standpoints notice how moral economies become textured, producing inertial conditions that contain new ethical flows. It is the story of how the bad guys are secreted from the bodies of the good guys, and vice versa. In this sense, to occupy a position within a moral economy – depending on the forces at play – is to risk reifying the very matter one’s position externalizes. 

In other words, every position embodies hidden intensities and flows, unsayable unsurfaced veins of pulsating nourishment that umbilically connects ‘self’ and ‘other’ in a choreography of paired becomings. To take a stand is to be grounded, and to be grounded is to be repurposed, discombobulated, hyphenated, and redeployed in ways that exceed the humanist articulations of what we insist we believe in or stand for. If it stands, it is grounded – if it is grounded, it is not alone.     

But I digress. 

The resonant inquiry is: how could BLM and WLM be entangled? How can we conceptualize moral entanglements without reducing any position to the other, without resorting to a rampant both-sides-ism that characterizes conciliatory (or worse, fascist) politics, and without privileging human actors and collectives as the fulcrum around which the moral universe spins? 

Allow me to speculate about how Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter hail each other and constitutionally modify each other as co-contingent others within the same moral field – that is, how one might think of BLM (and WLM) as slushy standpoints. 

Both positions exist as intensities within the moral ecologies of the Anthropos – the world-building, civilizing project that takes off from the presumed primacy of the human individual who must compete or interact with other individuals to accrue power and wellbeing to itself. This Cartesian ethic im/mediates western cultural and political forms and informs its politics of independent subjects whose powers are extended by representation. This is Sylvia Wynter’s “Man”, the racializing colonial entity that ‘humanized’ retrospectively Black bodies by importing them into the lower spectrum of humanity, subservient to the avatars of the modern. 

BLM is the afterlife of that troubling arrival, an attempt to make do with the surface, a social experiment that uses the terms and conditions of aest-ethico-onto-epistemological capture to negotiate a more tolerable subjecthood. BLM is a form of white capture, a clearing, a logistical field that reproduces subjects and their others. The quest for citizenship. Slugging for the scarce gaze of the interpersonal; an attempt to bathe in the limited algorithms of state-approved humanity. 

Today, the ‘genocide of relations’ manufactured by the ecology-dampening machines of modernity are, in part, responsible to the groundswell of onto-fugitive pushbacks the geologists rudely call the Anthropocene. The stabilities that sponsored the paradigm of the citizen are evaporating – a situation that could theoretically explain what Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman [23] call “the empire of trauma” and the rise of the new role of the “victim”. The rush for proper citizenship is now pushed aside by the rush for victimhood – which is not a dismissal of harmful relations, or a belittling of the ways bodies become violated. Instead, melting icebergs and their unanticipated effects mean that statehood is stretched beyond its capacities to maintain the territory of the civilian. The “victim” becomes the additional pressure on the state to keep to its promises, to enact compensatory measures, to ensure representation. 

And thus rises the claims to White loss. 

Even White bodies are modulated by tensions other than identitarian considerations. One must keep in mind that Whiteness is only a fitting epitaph to the extent that it describes a worlding process that deploys white identity as the avatar of its terraforming ambitions; it would just as readily jettison White people and adopt Black bodies in its transcendent project if the conditions of its continuity might be guaranteed in so doing. The material movements and geophilosophical undoings of the world at large are offering an atmospheric warning: no one is safe. Not even privilege. 

White Lives Matter is a response to this shrivelling of modernity, a reaction, a desire for troubling continuity; a guttural rejection of the encroachment of the other; the longing for the permanence of the modern subject and its accoutrements articulated as a presumption of scarcity. 

In its fight for the dignity of being seen and in its struggle for the vestigial remnants of the exclusivity of purity, both BLM and WLM, respectively, are the triumphant continuity of the Cartesian series of worlding events dedicated to the primacy of the human individual. They are both in the same moral field. Their moral positions are slushy standpoints that feed each other, cater to, and nurture each other – through hidden algorithms and sociomaterial convergences. It may be difficult to notice but easier when something transversal comes in and crystallizes the seemingly disparate supersaturated solution, hardening it. 

Like the Asuras and the Devas, whose eternal other-defining struggle is the condition for the alchemy of the Amrita, BLM and WLM are constitutionally stuck in the co-production of that troubling nectar of contemporary immortality: the paradigm of the citizen, the regime of the seen. 

Once more, this is not a game of sides and opposites. To think with moral slushiness is to consider how bodies are ethically composed in complex algorithmic arrangements that secrete structure-stabilizing behaviours, which in turn preserve the production of specific subjectivities while giving off the façade of progress, victory, or independence. No matter the number of times Popeye defeats Bluto, nothing changes – the series keep reproducing themselves. [24] Winning is a trap.

None of this explains why Kanye West went off the deep end or flew off the handle, so to speak. But thinking with slushy standpoints changes the parameters of the problem we are considering. It is as the Igbos say: a bird that flies off the earth and lands on an ant hill is still on the ground. Maybe Kanye West never left the ground; maybe he did not cross a thick cosmic line when he declared his support for the ‘others’; maybe he inadvertently occupied a crevasse in the vast moral landscape that is Black Lives Matter. Maybe at a nonconscious level, at an architectural level, at a molecular dimension that evades conscious articulation, somewhere in the absconding, self-decentering, cognitive webworks of the belief that Black bodies deserve dignity and equal representation is the shockingly unexpected endorsement of the idea – performed by WLM – that this dignity is not enough to go around.      

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Footnotes:

[1] For instance, “Igbo”, which to local users is properly pronounced with the explosive ‘b’ and somewhat silent ‘g’, becomes Eboe in the New World.

[2] Askew from the Nation: Thinking About Home and Country with Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/askew-from-the-nation-thinking-about-home-and-country-with-chinua-achebe-and-james-baldwin/

[3] Erin Manning, Out of the Clear (2023).

[4] Firoze Manji, The Failure of Left Movements in Africa. https://roape.net/2016/08/16/account-failure-left-working-class-movements-taking-root-africa/ 

[5] Frank Leon Roberts, How Black Lives Matter Changed the Way Americans Fight for Freedom. https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/how-black-lives-matter-changed-way-americans-fight 

[6] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2022/10/12/black-lives-matter-at-10-years-what-impact-has-it-had-on-policing/ 

[7] https://www.dosomething.org/us/articles/black-lives-matter-protests-whats-been-achieved-so-far 

[8] Together with Marisol de la Cadena, I agree that Black bodies were imported into the Human as a prop for the category. 

[9]  Thank you, Dr. Erin Manning, for this gripping phrase.

[10] Of course, “indigenous” here does not dabble with the complexities of political identity. By “indigenous” I mean white people spill beyond that category (“white people”) and are also part of the animacies and ecological movements of a more-than-human world. They are not ‘pure’. 

[11] Whiteness imagines the world as a pyramid, and then offers to its guests the very top of that pyramid. However, the top of a pyramid is a very lonely place to occupy. There’s never enough room there. 

[12] Or rather, renders us intelligible within a regime of vocality and sense-making. 

[13] I am fascinated by the current defacing, face-morphing, digital technologies like AI-driven deepfakes which simultaneously mark the triumphs of modern capitalism and its outer limits. With deepfakes, our faces – already digital – are not fully ours and have never been. With deepfake voices (audial deepfakes or voice cloning), one’s voice can be reproduced, stored, bought, transferred, archived, stretched, and reprogrammed in ways that exceed the intentional boundaries of the “original” user. Our voices can do things we do not want them to do – and can do things their eventual programmers do not anticipate. These deepfakes are important to think with: they suggest that the human subject, contingent upon and garlanded by more-than-human processes that are usually hidden, is never alone and has never been just by itself. They are ‘ethical’ ruptures, preindividual flows in the moral architecture of the substantialist self – calling for experimentation.     

[14] Experience is not a matter of portrayals that reify representing subjects and their represented objects. Since we do not live in a world of objects, but with this world (in its ongoing worlding of itself), experience is already how an inexpressible “they” touches, corresponds, and intra-acts. A nexus of palimpsestic strands of practice. In this sense, the ‘experiencer’ is always postponed, never fully realized. An example: a person violated by another does not “own” that experience of being violated. It is not theirs. To think in terms of stable experiencers and their propertied experiences would be to presuppose that a subject predates a relational event. Such a view cancels the vitalist, intimate diasporas that are always involved in how bodies come to matter. As such, the subject and object are individuated (never in a final way) within the context and specific intensity of their being named; they are appellated by the ‘field’, immanently and transversally. Always involved in the appellation are concepts of self, a metaphysics of the individual, political ideals of freedom, sociomaterial forces, bacterial imperatives, and more. These are all involved in the co-production of ‘experience’, which – as a result – is already a crossroads, an effect. It is necessary to think this way if we must imagine ways to move beyond the ‘subject’ as a containment device, as fully available to the violence of its constitution – like I try to do here with Blackness. Modernity’s pure phenomenological mode of addressing violence is the commitment of the violated to the algorithms of compensation and therapeutic rehabilitation – and the incarceration of the violator…each identitarian, reductionistic, and anthropocentric in ways that risk maintaining (and even strengthening) the transjective conditions that gave rise to the ‘act’. 

[15] There’s a reading of contemporary politics and its subject-coddling performances that often comes across to me like the ethical equivalent of installing solar panels on a slave ship.

[16] This clean divide between the Devas (the good supernatural beings) and the Asuras (the bad supernatural beings) might be misleading. I’ll leave you – able reader – to find out why.

[17] https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2022/03/10898188/kanye-west-kim-kardashian-harassment-backlash 

[18] https://the-ard.com/2022/10/13/the-meaning-of-white-lives-matter/ 

[19] A lot has been written about “White Lives Matter” and – especially – the incidence surrounding Kanye West’s apparent, problematic adoption of the slogan, which I have not explored here. None of the articles and opinion pieces I have read initiate their arguments from the transversality of individuation; instead, they presume the givenness of their subjects without considering the larger flows that territorialize BLM and WLM together, as cadences of the same argument.   

[20] Dr. Melina Abdullah, Director of Black Lives Matter Grassroots, in a statement responding to the Kanye West incidence. https://www.tmz.com/2022/10/04/black-lives-matter-responds-kanye-west-white-lives-matter-candace-owens/ 

[21] Kanye West Has Turned to The Dark Side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMIhEPT5p0U 

[22] I think of morality as the place-making interface that convenes bodies, racializes bodies, performs subjectivity, and enacts closures often in terms of articulated codes, laws, and punishments. That is, morality cannot be thought apart from ontology and epistemology, questions about what reality is and questions about how we come to know anything at all. In this sense, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are immanently composed within assemblages while remaining open to transversal cracks. These cracks are morality’s indebtedness to ethical impermanence. 

[23] Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009). The empire of trauma: An inquiry into the condition of victimhood 

[24] Walter Wink, The Myth of Redemptive Violence, https://www2.goshen.edu/~joannab/women/wink99.pdf 

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Báyò Akómoláfé is the Global Senior Fellow of the Democracy & Belonging Forum, where he acts as the Forum’s “provocateur in residence”, guiding Forum members in rethinking and reimagining our collective work towards justice in ways that reject binary thinking and easy answers. Learn more about his role here.

‘Part One' and 'Part Two' art modified from original by https://www.vecteezy.com/members/prawny