We went to look at puppies because I was heartbroken. Summer 2020, my sense of time was off because my days were blending together. It felt like time was moving too quickly but also not moving at all. Without teaching and leaving the house for the gym or the supermarket to mark my days, everything felt the same. There was COVID, yes, and the separation anxiety of social distancing. But it, my sadness and brokenheartedness, was much more intimate for me: I was experiencing something like a breakup.
Sleepless nights, prayerful nights, sweaty nights, overwhelming nights. No rest or too much sleep, I was fatigued in body, in mind, in spirit. My emotions felt distant and dissociated but also nearer and more in and on and through me than I’d known before. And lots of tears too.
Queer people, if you ever listen to and are in relation with us, can tell you a lot about how grief feels. How you have too many words and not enough, how harrowing and emptying it all feels. And not just the grief from death. Having to mourn the silence of another, the unkindness of another, is a real separation too, a kind of death of possibility. This isn’t just the grief for the departed and dead. It is a grief for the living—a family member, a severed friendship, a flirtatious relation gone cold, a lover now gone. A grief because they still live and there is hope even when you do not want there to be hope, when you want the door closed and finalized and ended. The quality of this grief is different than that experienced through the death of a loved one. The ones that remain in this realm that we must grieve compel us to need to forget and pretend they are gone when there remains a stifled and ever so quiet hope for change.
But this isn’t a story about a breakup. It’s a story about a dog.
July 26, 2020
I remember it clearly. My pandemic pod—my friends, wife and husband—came to my house for dinner on the 25th. It was July and hot and we likely watched Greenleaf. We laughed and ate and it felt like a moment to breathe. They returned home and I sent my friend a text telling her that I was glad they came over, that I’d been crying the entire week, grieving the loss of possibility. She suggested we go to the Charlottesville ASPCA to look at puppies the next day, told me to fill out the paperwork to foster a dog. I did it without much thought, there was no way I was going to take a dog home.
July 26th we went. I thought we’d be looking at newborns and I could hold them for a couple of minutes, get an endorphin rush, smile, and give the puppies back to the workers. Instead, they brought dogs that were a bit older, and larger, than I was imagining. We walked a couple of dogs around.
I’ll only take one with me if it sits next to me and doesn’t say anything for 45 minutes. An impossible task, I thought. There was no way I was taking a dog home anyway.
The folks brought a white pit bull terrier mix, with brown spots, named Speckle. We walked for a bit and I sat down, tired, ready to go. My friend was walking another dog. 45 minutes passed without my noticing, Speckle next to me sitting quietly. Someone brought me the papers to sign, take her with you, they said. Protest though I did, she was in my car a bit later.
Me and Speckle—who I renamed Speckles because I’m black and we add s’s to everything—have been together, quite literally, ever since.
Dogs have been on my mind a lot since October 8th. And cats too. The atrocities being rained down on Palestinians makes me feel so much grief. I began following an Instagram account—Sulala Animal Rescue (@sulalaanimalrescue), described as “the only organization in the Gaza strip that rescues stray animals,” and it follows Saeed Al-Err, an Afro-Palestinian man that provides food and medical care to animals—particularly but not only dogs and cats. Their work has increased exponentially after the violence that began on the Gaza strip on October 8.
I go to the page and see so many animals with shrapnel, broken limbs, gouged out eyes. And even in their different and varied injuries, all of these animals, these pets, hungry, all of them with frames thinning and frail, animals looking for food because they have not been cared for. Perhaps deceased, their human companions, or at least separated, confused, unable to find them. Before my encountering Speckles I would have thought about these stray animals on the street seeking solace as sad, certainly, but not something to concern one’s thinking and emotions with. Not when there are bigger things to worry about like the people.
I was the person that would proudly say I don’t understand why people cook for their pets and Why do they give them sweaters. And I would question any real display of affection between animals and people. We are the top of the food chain and all that, so I thought. But being in relation with a pet does something to you.
She is annoying, she snores a lot, she eats expensive food because she has a weak stomach. After she came home with me and my heartbreak did not subside and I cried multiple times at the edge of the bed, she just stared at me. Her incurious nature at my tears actually made me laugh then. Still does now. Because I had been taught that dogs are empathetic, and they care and they cuddle with you when you are feeling terrible. Speckles just looked at me from a bit of a distance, stayed a little bit removed from me because I think she was confused.
I imagine what she would do in a moment of protracted crisis like the animals Saeed Al-Err cares for. Like them, I know she would be confused. And like them, I know there is no explanation that for their confusion, though cataclysm is surely being registered and felt in their central nervous systems. Mine is a very nervous and easy to startle dog. It is not an overstatement to say that she becomes afraid at the sight of her own shadow. I often laugh at her because as we are on our morning walk in the park, she will see her tail get startled and try to run in the opposite direction.
**
But she is not innocent. Innocence is a concept some use to assert pets, animals, olive trees, dirt, shouldn’t have to experience or endure the violence of settler colonialism. And on the surface, it makes sense—innocence because it implies a lack of blame, a lack of acting or behaving criminally. Speckles staring at me is funny because she lacks a kind of knowledge to act maliciously. This is true. It would be true for the pets in Palestine experiencing cataclysm and crisis and settler colonial violence too—the lack of knowledge to act maliciously, the lack of blame, the inability to be criminal. They are confused, and after confusion, hungry.
Sulala Animal Rescue, Speckles too, make so very real to me the urgent need to think through different epistemologies regarding how we treat one another, our animal friends, and the earth.
I’ve been thinking more about the limits of the concept of innocence when applied to pets, animals, olive trees, dirt…and people too. Because the very conceptual domain of innocence and guilt is deeply flawed. Innocence is primarily about moral claims that presume punishment and property.
Some would claim that no Gazan, no Palestinian, is innocent, that they are all on their way to becoming terrorist. This is reasoning at least some do not lament the deaths of children, framed as “collateral damage,” precisely because they—according to this logic—lack the very capacity to be innocent. These folks wield innocence as a weapon precisely to withhold it. They are the measure and metric by which the concept can be given and withheld. With their concept of innocence, their affective orientation to the world is privileged and centered, and they then are allowed to justify targeting those they decide are enemies and carry shame and are guilt embodied by virtue of their breath, their existence. And this is the problem.
As an abolitionist, I think about harm a lot. Innocence is not a measure for how harm happens, and it is not a reason to provoke or condone It either. Abolitionists believe no one should have to endure harm. We believe we can build worlds in which everyone’s life and breath can thrive and flourish. An abolitionist commitment compels us to interrogate the epistemology of the normative world, the world that allows settler colonialist violence to occur.
In this peculiar epistemology of innocence and guilt, grief and mourning for the victims of genocide are turned against us, our grief and attempts to mourn transformed into antisemitism. And this, we are told, because Gazans, Palestinians, Muslims, and their earth and dirt and ground and water and trees and fruit and pets are not innocent. We are supposed to pretend the loss of life in Gaza, the targeting of hospitals and schools and zoos and children and women and men and grandmothers and granddaughters and cousins and dogs and cats and horses and poets and journalists and the laughter the emerges from the delight of having an animal companion or imaginary friend is inconsequential.
**
As a young person growing up in the Blackpentecostal religious world, there was so much loss. But there was not the expression of grief, not the sharing of mourning. If we expressed or shared it, we were rendered guilty of sin and shame too.
HIV was being contracted and the AIDS virus was manifesting itself in so many folks that were an integral part of the church communities of my young life. Musicians, singer, choir directors, ushers, drummers, preachers, pastors, laypeople were contracting the virus and dying of complications related to it. There was so much unkindness, especially for the queer folks, or the people presumed to be queer. The vitriol was levied at and reserved mostly for the ones writing the music, directing the choirs, singing and playing instruments. It was heartbreaking to experience so much loss. But I was nine and ten and eleven years old when I began to notice the disappearances and began to really pay attention to the rumors and gossip floating all around and about me, the whispered conversations about these ghosts. I dared not ask questions about them because in such asking my affinity and similarity to them would be revealed.
There was an existential crisis happening, but we lacked the fortitude to confront it. And I began to wonder, and it is the basis for everything I teach and write and my artistic practice too—how does an entire people get rendered disposable? What is necessary to think and feel and sometimes explicitly state in sermons and songs too, that it does not matter that uncles, sons, cousins, brothers, nephews die—oftentimes alone, oftentimes without homegoing ceremonies that honor their lives? What does it mean to lose so many lives and not be able to bury your dead in the traditional ceremonies?
Musicians in black churches—the ways their lives were rendered expendable, the ways they became lives so many of us refused to grieve—prompt my questions. But I make connections with other communities and spiritual practices and stateless peoples too. What do we make of the dead still under rubble in Gaza, unable to be washed and wrapped and given the appropriate traditional ceremony according to the sacred life worlds and traditions? We should be heartbroken.
I watched a TikTok video of an Israeli citizen saying she looks forward to the destruction of Gaza so that the state can build a Sephora, a Disneyland, a Starbucks on the occupied land. There is something so menacing and unkind about such a declaration of desire for things to consume after being made available through vengeance, through violation of international law, through unfettered violence. I do not presume that every Israeli citizen wants a Sephora or Disneyland or a Starbucks. But I do know that after October 7, economists have declared that there has been an intense downturn in traveling leisure spending especially with regards to gathering in public: “Spending on leisure and entertainment crashed by 70%. Tourism, a mainstay of the Israeli economy, has come to an abrupt halt.”
Even so, some have made it to theaters to watch, and celebrate with Israeli flags, the releases of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” and Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” films. These films being shown there are being used in the service of encouraging and strengthening the ideology of displacement of Palestinians. With direct distribution deals with AMC, they both profit from the genocide. Their silence, then, is more than complicity.
Architecture and construction firms are envisioning what Gaza could look like after the violence—beach front property, leisure. And as someone that loves section drawings and digital renderings as an artistic practice, for me this is the transformation of art into a menacing practice of ongoing settler violence.
That hoped for destruction of land and displacement of people for a coffee chain and a visit to the movies simply means that consumerism has taken the place of spiritual fulfillment. They sing in theaters because it gives a moment to refuse to think about the violence being inflicted 40 miles away.
So much destruction of land, of earth of soil, of people, of pets, of laughter, of love, of language. Family lines decimated and all delivered to us on smartphones. Heartache. Harrowing and emptying mourning and grief. Words fail.
And but also, I keep thinking about the dogs, the cats.
The folks like Sulala Animal Rescue, like the kids, demonstrate another form, a different epistemology, for living. And they give me hope. Hope—not a disregard for the loss of life, or an attempt to redeem it because it cannot be redeemed but a social practice of endurance and encouragement. And in enduring, the invitation others to the cause of justice, to remember there is so much worth fighting for—like our breath, like our rest.
**
Speckles snores when she sleeps. A lot. I sometimes wonder if there is a cpap machine for dogs because she snores so loudly she wakes me up. Her snoring reminds me, too, of how comfortable she is with me. She had lots of nightmares when we first met and her sleeping was very anxiety-ridden. Now she just makes loud inhalation and exhalation noises and I say her name loudly to get her to stop. It works most of the time. Her loud snoring reminds me of the beauty and necessity and fragility of breath, and rest. I am undone daily at the lack of care and concern, the refusal to tend to and be incited to rage regarding the breath and rest of Palestinians, their trees and water, their air and soil, their pets and animals, their imaginations and songs, their poets and plays, their hospitals and homes.
I think about the kids, the adults, the human companions, that miss their pets—their snores, their chasing of their tails, the tales they can tell about the delight and joy and love brought to them by feeding them, caring for and tending to them. I think about the heartache of losing someone that cannot articulate their own confusion but still register it. There is sadness. There are tears.
Sulala Animal Rescue
As bombs burst in the air, a Palestinian boy holds a cat gently. As a mosque is raided and a hospital destroyed, a group of Palestinian girls feeds a stray dog. Finding innocence in dogs and olive trees isn’t the solution to the problem of thought. They tell us to remember them, to continue to fight for them. To hope with them. And this hope, my friend Mariame Kaba teaches me over and over again, is a discipline. And I have hope that a world otherwise is being constructed each and every now moment and that we can join in the struggle.
During Ashon’s Fellowship with New City Arts in January 2021, he created various pieces that explore the concepts of sameness, difference, that attempt to think about versions of the nothingness of blackness, of blackqueerness. Working with scripture, with hymns, with concordance, with shouting, the various pieces were created by attempting to figure out a way to relate to a religious and spiritual world of plentitude and possibility, the space and complexity and contradiction of Blackpentecostalism. He is extending the foundations of his two books, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility and The Lonely Letters, into several large-scale paintings using an audiovisual practice that includes dancing, painting, and singing in rhythm with Blackpentecostal hymns.
I’ve posted this statement about being afraid across different social media platforms the last couple of weeks, and really days. It’s ok to be afraid. These past days have felt very fuzzy and gray to me, very difficult to find the correct energies to think about syllabi and course rubrics. I am concerned about my family. I am thinking about my friends, hoping everyone is well. I am going to parks in order to walk (no one is there, so it’s ok). I am concerned about my well-being and those I hold dear. And I care about you all too … how you’re doing, how you’re making out with so many changes in so little time, the demands this makes on our bodies, the stress, the fear.
It’s ok to be afraid. I post it for folks that follow me, yes, but I also post it over and over again because I need the reminder too, because I feel afraid and it’s not something to shun but an emotion to honor, like any other emotion. So we can honor our fear, sit with it, let it be with us. Because it is only through treating it as sacred—sacred because the emotion betrays to us something about our desires and our hopes, it reminds us that we are indeed alive and not numb to it all, that we retain the capacity to feel—to be afraid is another way to say: I am alive. And to be alive is to be sacred.
In the past few weeks of class, I have been conversing with you all about imagination, saying that I watch cartoons and paint and try to make sound art and dance because imagination is a reflex we have to exercise daily, we can’t call upon it only in times of duress and despair and expect it to do its magic. We have to cultivate a practice of imagination, kinda like the Muppet Babies. But as I have also been saying: Imagination ain’t easy. Imagination isn’t something that is frivolous or luxuriant and reserved for the elite or the monied or the normal. Imagination is work, it takes fortitude and commitment and courage, it takes courage, to live imagination as practice, as a way of life.
Black folks have had to practice imagination as an urgent mode of resistance to and against dominance, to and against violence. Black life is an imagined life insofar as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, insofar as racial capitalism as a form of exploitation, would have us all dead and spiraling towards death without attempts to live, without attempts to breathe, without attempts to say no to these conditions, without attempts to create alternatives in the here, in the now. To talk about the souls of black folks and grief, to talk about the art practices of black folks and creativity, to contend for rights domestically and against war and global dominance, is the practice of black imagination. And today I want to remind you that imagination towards the possible isn’t easy but we can, and must, strive for it. Breathe.
Otherwise possibility is the phrase I’ve been using to say that what we have is not all that is possible, that alternatives to the normative can exist, already exist in this world. Maroons—enslaved people that escaped plantations and created lives in woods and swamp interiors—engaged the dangerous practice of imagining other kinds of relations to one another, to the earth, to the world. And after imagining, they put into practice the desires they imagined. Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is not the lack of fear, it does not mean one isn’t afraid. Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is the recognition of—and honoring as sacred—fear and being afraid and moving in the direction of the alternative anyway, anyhow, in spite of.
Black life isn’t lived in absence of fear but is a kind of courageous wisdom fashioned in the face of fear to continue to breathe and become otherwise. This is our time, in other words. It has always been our time to practice alternatives. It’s ok to be afraid of what is to come, because there is so much unknown, so much that is uncertain. But we are here. I am not concerned about grades and quizzes but about your well-being, about your capacity for care, about your ability to imagine alternatives.
[…]
I often write the phrase: ‘make art. find your joy.’ to friends and across social media platforms. I want to encourage you in these coming weeks to engage the practice of imagination as a kind of art-making. Find something beautiful everyday. Whether a passage in a book or poem; a piece of art; a color; a flower; a sensation. If you’d like, you can share it during the open lectures. But it’s primarily an exercise for yourself.
Black religion in the age of Trump, in whatever age really, needs friendship as practice. And black religion in the age of Trump needs blackqueerness. Blackqueerness is fundamental to but also excluded from the institutional practice of black religion because it unsettles identity fully, because it is open and capacious and enduring. This, its being open and capacious and enduring is its gift, not as identity but as relation.
When black religion functions in the service of, rather than against, empire, dominance and violence, it loses its life and breath, it ceases to be the practice of radicalism, it relinquishes friendship.
In Michel Foucault’s interview “Friendship as a way of life” he says: in friendship you must invent from a to z how to be with another, which at its initial moments is formless. In other words, we must be inventional to respond to the urgency of any now moment. Black religion in the age of Trump must rediscover friendship.
The interpersonal is how I come to understand the problem of religiosity, as a person attempting to practice blackqueer life and relation, having been excluded from the religious communities that have formed me because of doctrinal and theological breaks between those communities and my practice. There are questions that would be necessary for reestablishing relation, for rediscovering friendship: how are you; can you help me understand; is there a way for us to practice relation in our difference? But these questions cannot be asked under the regime of identity because it is a thing that assumes a stable core coherence, an unchanging essence. But what black religion is, is a freedom impulse, a liberatory drive and verve, it is not identity but practice. We must learn how to practice relation, we must learn to refuse to relinquish one another for something like doctrinal integrity of traditions of churches, mosques, masculinities.
I have been writing about white supremacy as the renunciation of the flesh, how white supremacy is the practice of renunciation of relation, of the social, of blackness. And I have been teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and have been thinking a lot about the character Harpo. He loved to cook, to clean, to take care of the children. But because he wanted to be a “real man,” because he wanted to participate in patriarchal dominance, he was willing to relinquish his joy, his absolute delight and happiness, he let go friendship, in order to compel his wife Sofia to mind him, and he was willing to do this with brutal violence.
Harpo gave up his joy to attempt the normative. And I think about the black church’s relinquishing of blackqueer folks, their release of joy and delight found in blackqueer praise and practice, in order to attempt normative doctrine and theology of sex, sexuality and sin. It is heartbreaking. The desire for normative function and form—whether the guise of patriarchy as a system of domination, religious chauvinism, normative gender and sexuality as a mode of queer antagonism, settler colonialism, antiblack racism—dispenses with difference, renounces possibility for and of and about relation.
The Color Purple shows that men have the ability to do emotional, intimate and aesthetic labor, it brings Harpo lots of joy to do it, it brings Harpo lots of misery to live a normative life. Walker elaborates the ways the systems of domination called patriarchy, heterosexism and queer antagonism produce occasions for men to practice renunciation of the social field in which this kind of labor is produced.
So when Harpo relinquishes the care work he enjoyed in order to be a “real man,” to enact patriarchal power, he also practiced the refused relation to his own capacity for intimacy and friendship with Sofia that the work made possible, it is the renunciation of labor and of the sociality that is had and gained and practiced through that labor. He gives up, and relinquishes, the capacity for being in relation in a way that is deeply emotional, intimate and physical. He gives up friendship as a way of life, forestalling it. He gives up intimacy as a way of lovingness and livingness, refusing its capacity for radically altering who they could be.
Harpo might be the practice of black religiosity in the age of Trump when it acquiesces to empire, to patriarchy.
We must rethink tradition; how do our particular practices of Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or agnosticism open us up to relation. This question of the possibility for being moved is informed by my reading of Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing: that we must contend for relation with one another, that we must be open to being moved by one another. This openness to being moved is what black religiosity as practice teaches. This capacity for being moved, undone, vulnerable, is relinquished in the concept of identity grounded in a past of resistance that then presumes any current political position is itself radical. But radicalism, like blackqueerness, is practice. Relation with people that practice blackqueerness is blackqueer because it is a mode of relation against patriarchy. Relation with people that practice radicalism is radical because it is a mode of relation against normative function and form, a practice of insurgency against violence and violation.
Finally, there is a film, “Purple Rain” that stars Prince that we all know. There is a film based on “Purple Rain” located in Nigeria spoken in the Tuareg language titled ”Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai,” which is a Tuareg phrase that translates “Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It” … (the language has no word for the color purple).
I think the difference between ”Purple Rain” and ”Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It,” is beautiful. Beautiful because it illustrates the way we have to search language for feeling, for familiarity, for that which can be lost if we think ”there is no word for purple in that language.”
Just because there is no word for it doesn’t mean it’s not real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it’s not effective. We can find delight and joy in the gap between, the space where difference is practiced and felt and known. This delight in difference is what black religion in the age of Trump, which is another way to say black religion in the age of Thomas Jefferson, which is another way to say black religion in the age of racial capitalism, antiblack racism and settler colonialism, needs to rediscover. In such a rediscovery will be the reckoning with the urgency of our times, times that span at least from 1492 to today.
**originally posted as an fb status, i decided to put it here too**
though i haven’t said much of anything publicly, i’ve been thinking about the methodist church and its likely impending schism because of the “question” of human sexuality. and most recently i’ve been thinking about the sermon in tennessee at the blackpentecostal church that used homophobia and transphobia and sexism to welcome pence, to illustrate, see, you belong here, your white supremacist xenophobia has a place here, we agree with you.
i’ve been thinking a lot about — and really wanting a feeling for — a sense towards a different kind of world. in this world otherwise, there isn’t even the possibility for one’s sense for connection to others through intimacy being a “question.” in this other world that we struggle to make together, all we do would be an occasion to ask how we can practice justice with one another so that all might flourish in their practice of gender identity, in their practice of affectional intimacy in non-coercive ways. that’s it.
detail from: “dancing in one spot number 6” x ashon crawley
i’ve been thinking about this because the kinds of messages that say queerness is sinful and shameful and embarrassing and should be relinquished and destroyed are so pernicious and insidious and harmful.
even if you somehow manage — with the help and work and energy and struggle of community — to begin to think otherwise about affection and pleasure and intimacy and, yes too, sex, there is absolutely no guarantee that even if you somehow manage to find relationship (friendship, romantic; these words are imprecisions and cannot capture fully the multiple ways we relate to one another but shorthand here, you feel me) with others that it will somehow be grounded in the same or even similar thoughts, convictions, shared compassions, shared imaginations. you can’t assume that there will be shared intuitions, ideas, intentions about the religious, the spiritual, the political, about “causes” for affectional orientation (is it “biological,” is it “socially constructed”; the very question of its “construction” is itself a problem), for example.
that anyone of us finds semblance of peace and relationship after working against all these terrible messages about our simply trying to live and breathe and be is really a miracle at all.
one of the things i try to gesture towards in The Lonely Letters, because it took me so long to figure out, is that one form of heartbreak that is difficult to discuss emerges from having loved someone deeply but because there is no reconciliation about what that love means, even though it is beautiful and brings joy and absolute delight, it is continually questioned and forestalled and broken by the ones engaging it. they are struggling to share a similar sense of and for what their love means because they disagree deeply about the religious, the spiritual, the political, the “cause” for their affections. and this even after having accepted the interrogation of doctrine and theology that reductively considers their practice of queerness sinful.
sometimes even when attempting to fight it with all one’s might, one loses the struggle, the force of the oceanic surround of messaging that engulfs becomes too much to stand against. it is heartbreaking.
so much potential for relating to one another in deep and loving and non-coercive and reciprocal and joyful ways obstructed because of the refusal to think of the fullness of our lives as beautiful. i keep thinking about how that preacher, and certainly he is not the only one or the first time i’ve heard such a sentiment, said another man better not touch him. what is so very explicit to me are the ways patriarchy as a form of control and violence and also desired protection is about refusing the kind of touch that undoes and unmakes us, touch that would underscore the fact of our vulnerability, the fact of needing tenderness and caress. it is sad. it is heartbreaking.
the courage to seek alternatives in this world is such a gift. and i am thankful for the gifts, the examples that practice relationship with me daily, that remind me we can do differently, we can be otherwise. there is no guarantee that one will find it. there is no guarantee that, if after finding it, it will be sustained. it is such a struggle but this world otherwise is beautiful. and it is worth the pursuit.
Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. I tell my friends that the older I get, the more emotionally raw and vulnerable and available I seem to be. It’s as if feeling were no longer worn on the sleeve but is now the very skin of flesh. Not like cloth that can be removed, emotion – the range of affective possibilities experienced through a weird simultaneity – is sensed much more expansively. It is what allows a certain entry into and perception of worlds. But also, and curiously, it seems to go unnoticed. Emotion is always there, for good or ill, but not the stuff I think about until a prick or pull or push. I am no longer protected, it seems, from a range of emotion, often sensed together in conflation but also, at times, in contradiction. Anyway.When I begin to tear up, my face becomes hot, I have to squint a bit to fight back the waters. And so my face got hot and I began to feel a bit congested, the way the mother-in-law called her, in the story, ugly. On an episode of the television show The Real, a mother-in-law wanted to talk about how she loves her daughter-in-law.
Can I be real? They went to church together. I liked her in church because I was her Sunday School teacher and he was like nah, ‘mom she’s ugly.’ She got older and started filling out, and he says ‘mom, I want to marry Jasmine’ and I said ‘Jasmine? The one you called ugly?’ And he said, ‘she’s not an ugly duckling no more.’ But I’m happy because she is the best thing that ever happened to my son. I love her.
Kim Burrell
Posted to a friend’s page on Facebook, it caught me off guard, that word, ugly. Hearing it, the way with which the mother-in-law shared such a story with such casualness as if she were talking about the weather or the time of day, bothered me. Ugly. She said it with such a coolness and calm. The way she told such a story, intimated for me at least, that it’s not the first time she told it, that she thinks it’s funny, that she thinks it’s loving. But in the story, her son is the one with the power to evaluate, she does not interrogate his relation to concepts of the pleasing, the beautiful, the pretty. It is he who is allowed to make such a determination and the mother doesn’t once consider that perhaps his capacity for evaluation is, itself, violent. He gets to determine what does and does not belong in the domain of the ugly. This is, in other words, violence of patriarchy given through the way she talks about ugliness. It’s the construction of power through allowing him the space to evaluate.
Hers was a soft narrative, not full of vehemence and screams. Sometimes ugly shows up in the smiles and gentle kindness of muted disgust. Laminated contempt. This disgust, this contempt, is always there but the vibration is made a bit more difficult to detect, its surface area dispersed a bit. There are other times when the trumpet mute is put down, when the lamination technology is removed. In such instances, disgust and contempt are not new but are felt, experienced, enunciated with a particular clarity and force.I’ve been thinking about ugliness ever since I saw the clip of The Real’s episode. But the hurt that ugliness is supposed to conjure sharpened when I listened to Kim Burrell and then Shirley Caesar proselytize about queer folks, death and the supposed sin of our existence. I am of course talking about Kim Burrell and her sermonic rant about queer folks and Caesar’s subsequent defense of the same.
What to make of such disgust and contempt preached? With such preaching, blackqueer folks are supposed to be made to endure and carry an ugliness we did not make. I want to think about the ugliness we did not make but are told to carry – that we often refuse to carry – without pathologizing those that find such ugliness impossible to bear but with no place to take it. I saw Burrell’s rant the same day I saw the episode of The Real. On the one hand, a mother-in-law pronounced that her daughter-in-law was no longer an ugly duckling. Rather than challenging her son to think more expansively, she intimates that it was the daughter’s “filling out” as the reason she is acceptable for her son. In her narrative, he maintained the capacity to choose. The video struck me as a sort of quiet heinousness, an unkindness delivered with sweetness and familiarity. But on the other hand was Kim Burrell, pronouncing to the folks gathered in the congregation of her church that homosexuality (to say nothing of transgender, gender-non-conforming, asexual or a range of other peoples) is only ever behavior and that such behavior is only ever perversion.
I came to tell you about sin. That sin nature. That perverted homosexual spirit, and the spirit of delusion and confusion, it has deceived many men and women. You as a man, you open your mouth and take a man’s penis in your face, you are perverted. You are a woman and will shake your face in another woman’s breast, you are perverted.
She also “prophesied” that for those of us that do not “come out” of our queerness, that do not abate our queer behavior, that death would visit us in 2017. To call our way of life perversion, to declare death on us. In another register, in another key, this is to call us ugly. These callings out of ugliness and perversion, to wish us death upon queer possibility, is to make explicit a spiritual and ethical failure rooted in patriarchy, misogynoir, forces aligned against blackqueer flourishing.
**
My first impulse was to have a sorta cavalier response to Kim Burrell. Though what she said, and the subsequent “apology,” are thoroughly theologically wrong, mean spirited, morally reprehensible, displaying for her a lack of integrity and consistency, I did not want to think much about what she’d said. I’m not there anymore, I thought to myself, so my first response was more about agreeing to disagree.But a cavalier response today is made possible today because of a lot of struggling with doubt and fear and shame and sadness. I wanted to live a life that we called holiness and tried and tried and tried and prayed a lot and shed many tears and meditated and supplicated with hopes of being delivered. I felt, in so many and deeply important and existential ways, that I was – that my very existence could only be – ugly. There were moments in my life when the very fact of my existence felt like too much weight to bear, that such a weight was eclipsing my capacity to breathe. And so a cavalier response, an insouciance, is the freedom dream and imaginative impossibility of my life’s past. Some days, I still don’t know how I got here.
As part of a research project I produced in 2007, I conducted several interviews with black church folks that are queer identified. Some were living out the closet, others deeply entwined within. Some reconciled faith and sexuality, others not. One interview I remember particularly. I asked her about how she experiences her sexuality, from the time she first discovered her erotic desires through the time of the interview. She responded,
I figured if I’m not able to shake this thing, I’m going to hell, which would suck because I love the Lord and I want to see his face and I don’t want to go to hell. So…what the difference is now: I am pretty certain that I’m going to hell but I’m really hoping for a pass. I’m hoping that the Lord will look back over my life and see how much I love him and let me in for my love for him alone and so that he will not judge me for the fact that I’ve been sleeping with women. But he will more see that I love him.
I still remember the way this respondent said, “I am pretty certain that I’m going to hell.” It was, for her, an inescapable fact, something she must endure. It meant her existence was one created for the purpose of being destroyed. It was as if she were saying she were tired from a long day’s work or wanted some water to drink. Listening to Burrell’s rant and the well-worn theological and doctrinal defenses that folks have used to assert her rightness, forced me to think about ugliness. Because ugliness is about a forestalled relation, one based on the capacity to evaluate, the capacity to analyze, the capacity to deem valued or valueless. Listening to Burrell caused me again to think about this respondent, how existence was a kind of brutality. Sunshine and rain, both then, are cruel. Happiness with a partner or loved one, then, is always the capacity for terror. Because such happiness will still compel her to think eternal torment is what awaits her.
I want to think about her interview in light of Burrell’s sermon because the doctrine and theology preached is one that fundamentally does harm. Blackqueer folks ask, in varied registers because of these theologies and doctrines: Am I broken? Am I beyond repair? Who will love me? Who will touch me? What is experiential for queer people – through normative theology-philosophy – spills over into the existential, is the ontological. It’s not that some of us do not have relations – many of us do – but it’s that the relations themselves are repulsive for many, that they are that which cause family and friends to recoil in horror. At times, we recoil from our very selves. We are made to feel, because of the fact of our existence, that we are supposed to endure and carry shame others project onto us.
So though we should have conversations about what it means for Burrell – who some might presume to be a single, lonely, straight, black woman struggling with attempting to live a sacred life – to preach such things, we should have conversations about sexuality and wholeness, certainly, we must also contend with the way doctrines and theologies teach that queerness itself is brokenness, is perversion, is nasty, is ugly. So it is not that straight single cisgender black women don’t experience loneliness or despair because of theology but I do want to hold a space that, for blackqueer folks in important and fundamental ways, we are told we must inhabit the world as broken, beyond repair, as untouchable. There is no relation blackqueer folks can have that would be presumed sacred and holy according to these theologies and doctrines. And that because even for those that claim deliverance, they have to continually prove that they are living what is presumed to be holy and sanctified, they have to allow surveillance of their behaviors and they will, for many folks, always remain “suspect.” Queer possibility destabilizes the possibility for ever living into a normative straightness. But this is the prize.
Discussing Burrell’s loneliness seems to me to be a case of what Naomi Murakawa describes as displaced anxiety:
[T]he danger of the displaced anxiety thesis (that racism isn’t really racism but really just only ever a concern about economics) [is that] it purports to analyze post-1960s structural inequality, but it replicates the post-civil rights logic and language of racism as nonstructural – a misplaced emotion, an atavistic irrationality, a mere epiphenomenon of class. The vocabulary is rigged against politics: no whiteness as property, just folksy white subgroups; no interests, just ‘fear’; no black or Latino targets, just ‘scapegoats.’ […]Without attention to white interests, the anxiety induced by ‘race’ does not reach the core of structural power so explicitly valued by displaced anxiety scholarship. Displaced anxiety acknowledges race as cultural membership while eliding white interests, and this, I suspect, is its core appeal in mainstream politics: displaced anxiety attributes support for policies that target and injure people of color to anything but white racist interests.
Focusing on the supposed loneliness of figures like Kim Burrell as a possible reason for her violent rant against queer possibility is, we might call here for this short essay, the displaced loneliness thesis: that homophobia isn’t really homophobia but only a concern about not being fulfilled sexually, only a concern about not being fulfilled intimately. The displaced loneliness thesis would then attend to, by making central, the affective and emotional posture of presumably single, cisgender, black, straight women when discussing queer antagonism and violence. It places, as central to the concern about violent rhetoric and its proliferation, the feelings of those said to not belong to such an aggrieved group.But I’ve been lonely. Sometimes, very much, still today. I came out the closet thinking I’d have all this availability for relationship and dating but that’s not been the case. I’ve failed, utterly, with an erotic life. In all my thirty six years, I’ve been single. I’ve dated here and or there but nothing sustaining at all. No relationship life to speak of, really. So it’s not an erotic life, an intimate relational life, that has sustained my ability to remain, to have joy, to have peace of mind. There has been loneliness and sadness on both sides of the closet, on both sides of attempting to speak more precisely about who I am without fear or shame or loathing. Loneliness, then, cannot be a reason that we accept for folks to espouse rhetoric that is violent and dangerous.
But this is another problem with the displaced loneliness thesis: it reduces sexuality and intimacy to sex acts in ways that Kim Burrell’s sermon demonstrate, it thinks queerness as only action and not longing, not desire, not the possibility of making something new, something otherwise. It cannot contend with choosing queer possibility even if that means choosing loneliness.
The displaced loneliness thesis cannot contend with the loneliness of blackqueer folks, the way loneliness is what we are to endure not as a temporal feature of living but as queer temporality itself. What I mean is that loneliness, through doctrines and theologies like those of Burrell, is what creates a life for queer folks, it is a temporal measure that engulfs time itself. Loneliness would not then be a momentary experience but would be the grounds for queer existence according to these theologies and doctrines. And the disgust and worry, the nastiness and ugliness, of queer possibility is the refusal of such theologies and doctrines and, as Stevphen Shukaitis might say, the courage and wisdom to make worlds.
One of the things I love about Instagram videos of @notkarltonbanks is that he shows, with stunning precision, that the black church is cultural territory for black women, that they are the ones that carry the tradition. But these women are not only straight, are not only cisgender. And I love James Baldwin because he shows that the black church is cultural domain for queer possibility too. But what this then means is that we have to think more about the textures between black and presumably straight ciswomen and the violence of homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia that emerges from these spaces. It is the antagonism to queer possibility of the quotidian, of the mundane, of the ordinary to which we must attend.
The first sermon I recall that lampooned queer folks with a sorta desired precision was Frances Kelly at the Church of God in Christ annual Holy Convocation, talking about “I’m sick of sissies…fanning over somebody’s choir,” about “bulldaggers,” and the so-called separation between holy and unholy. Kim Burrell, in other words, is not novel. We learn that patriarchy is an aspiration and the bodies that materialize such aspiration can be, and are, varied. To pretend that this rhetoric is only about black women and loneliness flattens a far too textured and much more complex set of circumstances.
The displaced loneliness thesis, in other words, cannot contend with the agential possibility and desires for power for people that are marginalized within certain contexts. Such a hypothesis also participates in the settler logic of ongoing displacement from the heart of matters – placing into the conversation, onto the ground, into the central space – the ones that cause harm and violence perpetually. Such a thesis, in other words, is a general displacement, it does not operate against the structures of inequity that produce gendered, racialized and classed violence but, by displacement, only ever revise and refresh such a practice. It cannot contend with the pleasure gained, as Amaryah Armstrong argues, by participating in the sociality of antagonism.
Such a displacement, with the settler logic that is its hydraulics, confuses through conflation specific performances emerging out of specific occasions – the celebration of Moonlight or saying “yaaasss, hunty!,” for example – with a theological-philosophical ideology made evident through a general relation, which is often a general antagonism, to worlds. In the particular instance of this writing, I seek to interrogate the ongoing, quotidian, mundane antagonism against the force of queer possibility and relationality and imaginative worldmaking capacities. Such imaginative worldmaking is not simply about “accepting” queer people through doctrinal and theological argumentation but about destabilizing and disrupting the very possibility of a normative world.
There is a quiet, smiley-faced delivery system – a nice-nasty way of being – that provides lamination for a general antagonism to queer worldmaking. This is made evident by failing to rise to the occasion to think more broadly about the relation between the spectacular and the quotidian performances of queer antagonistic rhetoric and its attendant violence. Confused through conflation is the idea that the occasion, which is another way to say the event, of speaking against such antagonism is conspiring with, is allyship of, the force of queer possibility. But, as Saidiya Hartman so deftly taught and continues to teach, attending to the spectacular performances of the event misses the quotidian and mundane performances of a general antagonism, of which a displacement thesis of loneliness might serve as, for blackqueer people, tear-inducing evidence.There are, in other words, no natural allyships, there are no natural comrades, but each relation is possible through engaged, sustained labor, each is sustained by remaining committed to each other. It is not enough that folks don’t think queer possibility is any longer ugly, what is necessary is contending with the desire to evaluate and analyze and judge if something is or is not ugly – which is to say doctrinally sound, theologically correct – in the first place.
**The following brief notes were delivered at the Anti-blackness and Christian Ethics Roundtable at Boston College, September 14, 2016. I reproduce the remarks here, particularly, to be in solidarity with Bresha Meadows and to urge against her ongoing incarceration. If you would like to learn more about Bresha Meadows, click here and here. May we all pursue justice.**
For years I prayed for a young man I had yet to meet: my daughter’s husband. I asked the Lord to make him godly, kind, a great dad, and a good provider. I was proud of a wish list void of unrealistic expectations. After all, I knew not to ask for a college football quarterback who loved puppies, majored in nuclear rocket science, and wanted to take his expertise to the mission field. I was an open-minded mom.But God called my bluff.This white, 53-year-old mother hadn’t counted on God sending an African American with dreads named Glenn.
She continued:
It wasn’t long ago that interracial marriage—particularly a black man like Glenn marrying a white girl like Anna—was considered the ultimate taboo in American white society…Though I never shared this prejudice, I never expected the issue to enter my life.
Bresha Meadows
The entire piece is cringe worthy. There was lots said on social media, particularly Twitter – a website I frequent – that had lots of commentary, jokes, memes and criticisms of the writing and the theological-philosophical thrust undergirding Clarke’s desires, both before and after Glenn. After a brief description of her daughter’s love for her Glenn, Clarke gives eight suggestions for white parents that do not expect their daughters to engage interracial relationships and marriage.The first suggestion was to “Remember your theology,” and when explained, Clarke included that the theology to remember is about creation, that we are all descendants of Adam and Eve. What this meant, in practical terms for Clarke, is that, “Glenn moved from being a black man to beloved son when I saw his true identity as an image bearer of God, a brother in Christ, and a fellow heir to God’s promises.”
This movement from black man to beloved son is not a little bit problematic. For Clarke to see Glenn’s worth and value, his blackness had to be erased, had to be liquidated, had to be transformed into an acceptable modality through which love could occur. His true identity was not his blackness but his commitment to Christ; this is what bell hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it is an ordering of flesh through racialization. It was not Clarke’s daughter that needs to move from white woman to beloved daughter; it is the person racialized as Other. As if whiteness itself is not also a racialization, the racialization of the modern world. This desire to move from black man to beloved son and for that to be the true identity of the black is supercessionist logic. But supersessionism is a core value of modern problems of racialization, the creation and maintenance of purity through whiteness and vulgarization through blackness. The only zone wherein this move could be effectuated is not the material world but the spiritual, invisible, intangible one of salvific condition. So police brutality, systemic and structural inequity, antiblack racism are then the problem of individuals not living into the cause of Christ rightly, are not allowing their lives to be moved from blackness to beloveds.
Of note to me is the way it is the white parents that should be surprised, that they have to change their thinking in order to be accepting. And not because changing one’s thinking isn’t a good thing but because with Clarke’s framing, what she calls on white parents to do is to allow black people entry into their fold. But this entry is conditioned upon the movement from blackness to beloved, from racialized problem to true identification in Christ. I don’t want to pick on Gaye Clarke. I am sure she had the best of intentions. But as Imani Perry offers, we are in a moment of post-intentional racism, and so Clarke’s intentions, ultimately, are not important. Rather, I want to offer that this short blog is an example of a much longer history of the figuration of blackness as completely non-convergent with Christianity in the west because Christianity in the west is fundamentally about articulating whiteness, or a relation to whiteness. Such that for non-whites to be or become Christian is to trade out blackness.Christians often presume that salvation, life in Christ, takes away racial distinction. We can look to Paul asserting that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female but because of salvation, all are one. My research is primarily in Blackpentecostalism and Gaye Clarke’s explication of what white parents should do in the case of possible interracial marriage is not disconnected from the early twentieth century Pentecostal movement’s figuration of race and racism, and its relation to salvation. So here, I’m thinking about Frank Bartleman, an important figure in early twentieth century Pentecostalism, arguing that the color line had been washed away in the blood of Jesus. The line that was popularized, though not created, by WEB Du Bois, the color line, according to Bartleman, was no longer a problem because of the performance of the flesh at the Azusa Street Revival. But this, of course, was never the case. Members of the Ku Klux Klan began pressuring white congregants of the Azusa Revival, causing what would eventually be splits from several organizations. For example, from the Church of God in Christ – a predominantly Blackpentecostal organization – emerged the Assemblies of God.
There is a misapplication of modern racialization to ancient text in order to enact a post-racial fantasy, a fantasy that leaves intact the hierarchal inequities in the service of Christian witness. In Bartleman’s case, it is important to note that the black people of the early twentieth century Pentecostal movement simply did not see the color line as inconsequential because of speaking in tongues, that they detected the way racialization was occurring on the wooden floors and in between the pews soon after Spirit baptism became a prominent feature of the movement. William Seymour, founder of the Azusa Street Mission, eventually disallowed white leadership after the beginning years of the Revival because he was worried about the ways whiteness remained uninterrogated, how whiteness was, in the name of Spirit baptism, the production and proliferation of antiblack racism.
TWO
Mary. In Blackpentecostalism, it is rare to talk about Mary. In other traditions, she is much more fleshed out, so to speak. But from within Blackpentecostalism, she is often described as a “poor, unknown, uneducated Palestinian woman” and that God’s choice for her to be the theotokos, to carry the logos, the word, to hold the child in womb through gestation, is praiseworthy. Isn’t it great, they say, that God used this poor, unknown, uneducated woman, that God used this Palestinian woman who had no renown, who was not royalty, to bring for Jesus. It is said that through God, Mary transcends the categorization of social victimization, that she transcends the categorization of degradation, that she transcends the categorization of stigmatization because of the sovereignty of the deity.
And this began to bother me deeply. Because what is assumed about Mary is what we assume Mary must have believed about herself in order to glory in the fact of her being chosen. Such declarations have to assume the valuelessness of the persons in question as the grounds from which to make assertions about the choices of deities. That is, we have to believe that Mary believed her station in life was valueless, that she was without virtue or honor, in order for the narratives we tell about her to make sense, in order for the theology and philosophy of Mary as chosen to cohere. We do not think with Mary but our thinking is supersessionist, it supersedes the very possibility for Mary to think herself valued without being chosen, without Mary being harnessed and used as the anchoring point for our theological-philosophical projects. None of the markers ascribed to Mary in this normative narrativity are, in and of themselves, markers of valuelessness. It cannot be assumed, in other words, that Mary internalized the inequity of a political economy as a personal moral failure such that only after such an internalization could she glory in the fact of her being chosen.
And this is the key for me: I think this is so precisely because I keep thinking with the ways blackness is narrativized in various modalities: from the juridical to the medical, from popular culture to the interpersonal. It is what I think about as paternalistic benevolence, a narrativizing occurring from the position of the ones that have been Othered in order to declare the relative value or valuelessness of said Others. This is what Gaye Clarke performed in her writing, implying that Glenn could not be valued or think himself of worth until his transformation from black man to beloved through Christ.Blackness in western theological-philosophical discourse is the antithesis of the holy, the sacred, the set apart, the hallowed. Blackness is narrativized as the bestial, as the burdened, as the problem for purity. Blackness is the wretched, the worm, the worrisome station. But this from the position that assumed – attempted to grasp and hold, to harness and abuse – black flesh, this from the position of whiteness. Black performance, however, illustrates the ways that such narrativity is always in the service of the propping up of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not its undoing.
And we see this with sharp intensity and focus with Black Lives Matter protests; with the demands for the abolition from police, the carceral state, the end of the Prison Industrial Complex; we detect this refusal of narrativity with the solidarity work between Indigenous people fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline or between Palestinians and the Movement for Black Lives; and we detect this refusal of narrativity in the protests of NFL players, Colin Kaepernick as an explicit example. The stories told about us, in other words, we do not have to internalize. And the ways we inhabit the world are often against such narrativity. This refused narrativity, the refusal to accept the narrative of whiteness, of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the refusal to assent to anti-black racism and its contents is what I think of as a non-ethical or an-ethical project.
THREE
Bresha Meadows’s father, Jonathan, was abusive to her mother, Brandi. He was verbally and physically abusive to Brandi, and emotionally and psychologically manipulative. Jonathan was also emotionally and manipulatively abusive to the children, Bresha inclusive. They existed under the rule of thread and terrorism and Bresha sought relief from the constant barrage of violence and violation in the home. She decided to kill her father. Bresha was arrested for murder though there are calls from social justice activists for her release. Brandi Meadows calls Bresha a hero, giving her and her family the space to breathe again with ease and comfort.
Jamall Calloway says the following: “instead of criminal charges, what Bresha Meadows needs now, desperately, as opposed to incarceration, is productive psychological counseling and treatment for severe post-traumatic stress. Bresha (and her family) need psychological attention and help, not a conviction from the courts. In fact, it is the courts, it is our law and authorities who need convicting for such a callous response to this ordeal and every ordeal like it.”
But how can one come to such a conclusion? I think it is because what Bresha’s actions did is obliterate the question of the ethical in ways that are consistent with how blackness exists as a critique of the terrain of the ethical, of ethical being. Frederick Douglass is famous to have delivered the speech, “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” What Douglass was interrogating was the ethical terrain upon which celebration of warfare and liberation emerges since the emergence of such celebration and warfare was produced through the violent exclusion – through brutality – of black people. Another way to ask the question Douglass lodged, the animating force of black performance, is what, to the target of antiblack racism, is ethical responsibility, what – to the target of gendered, racialized, classed, sexed violence and violation – is ethics itself?To appraise Bresha’s behaviors through the normative rules and regulations of the juridical is to assume a normative ethics. But what I detect is that Bresha enacted the critique of ethics, she enacted a non-ethics, an anethical performance. And I consider antiblackness and Christian ethics through a similar thinking, through a similar sorta analytics, that asks first what is the relation of blackness to ethics, and blackness to Christianity, such that we can have something along the line of an ethics, a black Christian ethics that responds to, and anticipates, antiblack racism. And I think to get there is to think more with renouncing the terrain of the ethical because such a terrain is produced through the exclusion of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the others of Europe. Perhaps we are after a mode of thinking equity and justice from the position of the excluded.**
In the filmic version of The Color Purple, Celie said: “I’m poor, black; I may even be ugly. But dear god, I’m here!” And with that, she rode off with friends into the sunset and away from the man that abused her. Celie did not need to be chosen or shown favor because at that instance, she refused to internalize what the world said about her, about her capacity for life. It was the declaration of being “here” – which is to say, existing, breathing – that was of radical importance. Her being here is what distressed Albert, it’s what distressed and disturbed him because he spent so much time and energy wanting to disallow the possibility for such a declaration. To riff on my friend Fred Moten, the consent to being shamed she could not resist she could still, importantly, withhold. Withhold, withheld, as in breath, as in the possibility for existence, as in life.
“In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or ‘otherwise’ modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism–a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles–Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what Crawley identifies as ‘otherwise worlds of possibility,’ they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such expressions are increasingly under siege.”
[this is a really brief note, some ideas, that i’ve been thinking about for some time. i’m not interested in it being right nor wrong as much as i’m after a way to think about things.]
I think organizing against the current and pernicious systems of domination cannot have us saying that race belongs to us in any sorta easy way. [I have not talked about this publicly but] one of the things that fascinated me about Rachel Doležal last year was how quickly and intensely ideas about blackness and whiteness were resolved in the biological in ways that were just really confusing to me. I think a lot was unsettled about seemingly settled concepts of race and racialization. This was seen, for example, in the memes that jokingly “questioned” light skinned black people, saying they were now – because of RD – “suspect,” that their blackness was under interrogation. It was so quick and easy and intense for things to turn into old concepts regarding race, color and authentic black flesh. I learned a great deal about how – or, really, had the idea confirmed and verified that – many consider blackness to be defined by the history of violence that has happened to black people, that the history of middle passage, enslavement, jim crow and mass incarceration themselves are the bounds, the borders of blackness. If you and your ancestry did not experience “it,” then you are are not black. That is simply not what I think creates blackness at all, I do not think that violent encounter is the determining factor. (I’m also tryna think a lot more about what it means to do blackness rather than possess it and I’ve been thinking about this for some time now; I’ve been thinking with James Cone, for example, when he opines in his theological writings that the white church must become black; I’m thinking of blackness as abolition, indigeneity as decolonial and, as such, not an identity but a modality of existence.)
Anyway, the RD affair last year really made me wary because it seems to me to be a problem to use violence – or the capacity to have violence visited upon you – because we all, not all, experience the same violence. Think, for example, of the violence that black transwomen experience as a particular instance. Using violence as a method for thinking our relation to one another in order to contend against white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (WSCP) is a serious delimitation that just as often is broken down by tautology. (Palestinians have the same teargas thrown at them as black people had in Ferguson; what does the “same vilolence” mean in such a world where weapons manufactured for use over there are used domestically? What does it mean that violence – in the form of surveillance, infiltration, incarceration, terrorism, murder – visited upon the Black Panther Party for Self Defense became the architecture for future projects of surveillance, infiltration, incarceration, terrorism, murder both domestically and abroad?) We have to find other methods for thinking our relation to one another.
And because of the need for other methods that do not rely on the well worn tropes of racialism, I was in awe – but totally unsurprised – by the #NotYourMule conversations happening since Sunday night. I was in awe and saddened because, really, lots of the conversation appears to reproduce the logic of racial hierarchy as a given, as a good. How is it given and good? Well, we know that WSCP creates for us a hierarchy along the bias of white-black binary logic and folks that are “not” either of the two (and really, no one is, but…) have to figure a relation to race within the binary. WSCP is a settler colonial logic that necessitates property as private. That’s what it is and does. So to presume that race belongs to us as a form of property, as a good, only harnesses the current ordering of knowledge regarding race, it does not fundamentally disrupt that logic.
How, then, is this a good? It is a good because we constantly have to name our relation to what is presumed to create the binary logic: violence. And so violence becomes the thing that people constantly rely on to assert the coherence of a racial-gendered-sexed-classed group, violence rhetorical and physical, violence symbolic and material. Violence becomes property. It’s all about violence that has been done to a group, or the possibility of violence – that makes a group. (Think, for example, of middle passage; and though middle passage may have been the occasion to create affinity and group resistance, it did not create blackness.) So the logic of racial hierarchy is produced as a good when it can disallow critical engagement. Of course (and this is not a sorta vulgar, discardable, non-serious “of course” either), antiblackness happens and we must be attuned to not reproduce the logic of such violence. But the charge of antiblackness should not itself become a kind of property of which certain people can own and exchange and trade as a means to thwart engagement altogether.
So Chris Rock. He was not protesting and his monologue was fully terrible. The jokes were misplaced aggression full of sexism, ahistoricism and ridiculously unfounded parallelism. But let us also be clear: his work on the stage was not a protest but a paycheck. Chris Rock is not, nor should he be, a mule for others to build platforms for racial justice. But we must acknowledge that he was not doing justice work; it was flagrantly sexist and misogynoiristic and hyper capitalist, all for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Watching #NotYourMule was intriguing because it missed the fact of Rock’s labor for the Academy, labor that summarily dismissed Jada Pinkett-Smith, victims of lynching racial violence and current struggles for justice against police violence. Perhaps not a mule, then, but what will we call such exploitive labor and the celebration of it?
I’ve been pretty weirded out by the search to show Bernie Sanders was a progressive youth, particularly through images. I was hella self-hating, hyper conservative, homophobic and transphobic, pro-capitalist and imperialist right through college, until I started being confronted with the wrongheadedness of those claims. Many of us that claim a leftist politic testify likewise. And many of us now are at least a bit concerned by how folks have used, exploited really, “being there on the ground” contemporarily as a means to self promotion with vests and twitter t-shirts. That is, the search for images does not immediately demonstrate a commitment to justice. Advocating strongly for the privatization of public resources while being fully resistant to critique should make us a bit more leery about attempting to use the image of a young Bernie, a young anyone really, as proof of a politic, progressive, regressive or otherwise.
One of the problems with trying to find images of Bernie resistance as a young person seems to be a problem of thinking progressivism, radicalism, can be stable, coherent identities. And this is particularly acute in a society that assumes certain racial categories, of themselves, confer a progressive politics on the basis of identity itself (such that white people must find something to append in order to make identity radical or progressive or in any way meaningful). But as the old adage goes, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” or its more contemporary version, the proof is in the pudding. It is the search for identity grounded in a misrecognition of blackness. The search for the images that would have him intimate with antiblack police violence wants to, it seems to me, relate him to blackness through the capacity to be victim of violence. That he was there is supposed to charge our imaginations: he was there and, thus, a victim of that violence, a violence that confers to him a certain value and identity. But no thanks. Blackness is not created by violence, though blackness is excluded from the zone of the proper. We need to think differently about who we are as people committed to justice.
And I just don’t understand the deep need to say, “even as a youth, Bernie was right!” because I suspect such a claim having more to do with the fetishizing of youthfulness that Yasmin Nair compellingly writes about than such a claim is about a sense of justice. Like, Clarence Thomas – the conservative, terribly right wing, terribly loathsome Supreme Court justice – was at one time in his life a left leaning Black Panther Parter for Self Defense sympathizer, a supporter of Black Nationalism, Malcolm X and general Black radical politics. This as a young person. So I find these arguments – about the rightness of certain folks as youth – only obtain their force when their politics as youth coalesce with a politics we hold today. We still fetishize the politics of youth. So it’s not very useful to me because we all change. Some of us commit more to justice, some of us less.And what do such images have to do with Vermont? And justice? And rhetoric? And progressiveness? It’s like we’ve thrown away research that shows people hold a more progressive politics in the abstract; when there are less people of color in a city, state, municipality, it is easier to assert progressive stances. We learned this in 2008 Iowa with the hella disproportionate incarceration rates: for a state with 3% blacks, blacks make up 23% of the incarcerated; 5% hispanic, 8% of the incarcerated. Vermont should, perhaps, be thought about through the way progressivism plays out for the folks living there. Vermont is ~95% white. Blacks make up 1% of the population but disproportionately roughly 11% of the incarcerated; hispanics make up 2% of the population but 5% of the incarcerated. It’s easy to advocate progressive policies but things like incarceration rates, because of the huge disparities along the lines of race, should give us pause.
So I’d love to think that the senator, had he settled in Michigan or Alabama, would’ve advocated for the same things he has as a Vermonter but his stance on Israel/Palestine and the seeming inability to attack racialized disparities in any real way in Vermont makes me wary. What is the proof in the pudding of the disparity between saying the names of wrongfully, prematurely dead black folks and hiring a black woman press secretary on the one hand and policy positions that would continue support for the ongoing violent assault of Palestinians, policy positions in his own state that do not ameliorate racial disparities in terms of incarceration? We have verified images, there are old speeches…but what of actions taken in his own state, his own domain of influence? I do wonder.
