In Conversation: Bayo Akomolafe on “Black Lives Matter: But to whom?”
In his latest essay, “Black Lives Matter: But to whom?”, Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe grasps at an entirely new premise: not just if or how Black lives matter, but how does black matter live? In this interview, Forum Director Sara Grossman asks Bayo about his thinking behind this piece.
You can read Part 1 and Part 2 of the essay on our website.
Why did you decide to write this piece? What sparked it?
I like the language of "sparks" and signals more than I like the language of 'decisions' - as if there were a stable 'decider' pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sparks are nexus events, a coming-together of manifold flows, a crystallization of a super-saturated solution. I would suggest then that certain events and hauntings summoned the essay (as well as the essayist) - perhaps the most paramount of which has been a sense of unease with a politics that is premised on saving minorities, rehabilitating them, 'including' them, or 'centering' them.
This gradual migration from the edges of exclusion to the halls of inclusive power has for long seemed to me to be a nuanced form of violence. A capitulation to the familiar. Well, there's nothing wrong with that per se; it's just that we seem to be living in a time when even the promise of justice and inclusion no longer leads to interesting places. It is important to note - in the same breath - that justice is an algorithm of statehood; it is the 'spirit' of the varnished public - a public that depends on hushed lives, buried bones, bent backs, exiled ghosts, pristine directions, glossed-over porosities, medicalized boundaries, and participating subject-citizens. To premise one's politics on gaining visibility in the eyes of justice is to risk effectively operationalizing its apartheid project of making the world in the image of the citizen. And since the citizen is the most expensive burden of modernity - its hidden costs externalized to rivers, subsidized by ocean floors, borne by the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, paid for by toxic plumes of transcendence released from factories, and endorsed by rising mountains of plastic and face masks - it seems wise we need a different logic, a different aesthetic, a different politics.
"I" wrote this essay with an eye of Black geographies, haunted outdoors, the hidden public that subsidizes the obvious. From within that space, there is - in my opinion - a groundswell of impulses and movements gesturing towards the more-than-just. Gesturing towards 'breaks' of some kind. This essay is an attempt to trace those wandering yearnings for another sun.
Among many questions you ask in the piece, one of them stood out to me: "In naming Black lives the way we do, what is surfaced and what is lost?" Would you be willing to try to answer that question from your own perspective? What is surfaced and what are you suggesting is lost in the framing of "Black Lives Matter"?
I accompany these questions in the essay - attempting to peek behind the obvious or, rather, to touch their presumed innocence. I find the declaration that Black Lives Matter to be a theoretically dense world-building onto-epistemological project. A moral project. A sense-making project underscored and bankrolled by the relative stability of the conditions of colonial capture. That is, the declaration is doing a lot more work than we think it is doing. It is not merely insisting on equal rights, not merely calling for equity and diversity, not merely seeking recognition for Black bodies, not merely naming white supremacy, it is deploying the same partitions and subjectivizing practices to situate Black lives as subjects of a regime of being (of course, this is not to suggest that all activities that take place under the banner of BLM can be reduced to these troubling reinforcements of onto-apartheid). The essay focuses on popular assumptions about social justice, touching the skins of the imperatives to "speak one's truth to power", to "voice out" or "sòrò sókè" (as we say in Nigeria), to "exercise one's right to fairness", to "show up", to "get woke", to "do the work." My thesis is that while critique can take us so far, at some point in the alchemy of its chemical intra-actions with the status quo, it begins to look like what it critiques. We become organelles of the city, tentacular protrusions of its curriculum of perpetuity. We become modulated and mediated by and in the moments when we insist on being seen by the state.
To understand what I mean, it might be helpful to dance through the essay, and linger for a few moments over the lines that speak about whiteness as a flattening ontology that yearns to create room for the isolated individual. It would seem that the stentorian announcement that Black Lives Matter seeks to advantageously position Black bodies within the clearing of colonial capture - and, in so doing, it 'forgets' the ways that bodies spill. It forgets the ways matter comes to matter. This might be an elaborate way of saying that one risks fortifying the materials of our incarceration if we deploy the same epistemologies that summoned them.
You also discuss meeting with the renowned artist and producer Pharell, and engaging with him (and deeply disagreeing) on the question of "Black excellence," a frame that the singer champions. You argue that "Black excellence" is in fact " “Whiteness touching itself”? Could you explain what you mean by that?
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, I remember proudly learning about Black Africans and Black Americans that had invented things that rivalled the efforts of their European counterparts. I read about Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther translating the entire English Bible to Yoruba; I read that Nigerian computer scientist Philip Emeagwali is the unacknowledged father of the internet. I grabbed everything Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka - the first Black person to win a Nobel Prize in Literature - ever wrote. I came to learn about George Washington Carver, Thomas Elkin, and the hidden figures at NASA - Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan - whose ingenuity put US astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962.
Those early recitations of Black achievement had a persistent quality to them: some kind of insistence that Black people weren't inferior. That we too had done marvelous things we could be proud of. Today, at least in Africa, that sense of things looks like a monumental attempt to catch up with the West. To build wonderful roads. To thrust our budgets in the faces of our former oppressors and insist we can spend just as much as they can. But - as one of my brothers in India often says - if we beat them at their own game, we've lost. I would expect pushback here: "Bayo, it was never their game! Black people did things alongside and before White people! Inventing things is just as much our game as it is theirs!" And that may be so. But does it matter who owns the game as such? Doesn't it matter that our many contemporary attempts to outdo the other feel like an unanticipated reinforcement of a particular way of seeing the world, a particular way of articulating what success in that world looks like, a particular way of imagining what our bodies can do?
Black excellence - to the degree that it serves as an invitation to minorities to glisten in the throes of existential capture - risks reterritorializing the civilizing ethic of whiteness. Whiteness touching itself. Of course, the stories that occlude the efforts of minorities are instantiations of white supremacy, but so is the insistence on climbing the heights and breaching the sky. I don't want to move to the upper deck of the slave ship. I want to explore the breach in its hull where the insensible flows in and where, if I listen closely, I might discern the voice of a riverine goddess sharing secrets of ancestry with me.
And you are clear to draw a distinction between white people and "Whiteness". What is the difference there? Why does it matter?
'White people' are no less subject to whiteness than 'Black people'. Whiteness is how the world makes safe bubbles and Lego-land dynamics so that everyone has a place. 'White people' have been enlisted by these dynamics as avatars of this worlding project: the raison d'etre of the Anthropos enterprise. To become this, they were cut off from their heritages, indigeneity, embodied connections to land and death, and then transplanted into the fishbowl of the modern. I find Dougald Hine's figure of a 'fishbowl' an apt description of whiteness. White people are the inhabitants of this fishbowl that live in the plastic castles with the saccharine treasure chests. Others agitating this unsetting privileging of certain aquatic bodies over others are also a technology of the fishbowl.
It matters not to reduce Whiteness to 'White people' because those reductions are exactly what whiteness does well. Today, we are seeing a counter-hegemonic politics that vilifies and reifies 'white persons' as inheritors of the evils of modernity. I have watched many clips of Black journalists in the United States gleefully celebrating a punch landed on the face of a 'Karen' (which is, I think, code for a white woman whose sense of entitlement supersedes the conditions of her presumed nobility...and, yes, who always asks to see the manager). I think this classificatory gestures - however comedic - risk contributing to the idea that Whiteness is equal to white people. Ironically, in the effort to decenter whiteness, this subject-saving politics of the forgotten inadvertently recentralizes it - creating an endless cycle of excluded others, fractioning difference and multiplying occasions for being offended by one's perceived exclusion.
I once told a group of 'White-identified' persons in my class that I needed to let them go. "If I trap you in your identity, I am simultaneously trapping Blackness within the violence of its constitution. I am then saying there is nowhere else to go. If I do not let you off the hook, I cannot fly. And I need to fly. Like the Igbo slaves flew to Africa. I need to fly."
In Part 2 of this essay, you argue that the goal of "freedom", as called for by BLM activists and other justice groups, is simply not good enough. (Or as you put it: "Freedom won’t do.") Why not?
I am right now imagining the strenuous efforts of a running fugitive in the Antebellum South who has stolen his freedom from the plantation. His eyes are fixed: he has snuck past the gates, past the psychiatric doctrines of drapetomania - affixed to any slave that attempts escape, past the barking dogs, through waded waters, and towards the promise of freedom. He surfaces - in the city, in the real estate of white construction. In Africa, for a long time in the imaginations of those that fought for independence, freedom looked like self-determination. Like seizing the reins of power, and directing the state towards benevolent ends. This did not happen. It hardly mattered that a highly educated activist like Kwame Nkrumah - garlanded and surrounded by the likes of Martin Luther King - became President of Ghana in 1957. It hardly mattered that the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution led to the decapitation of the ruling class. In both instances, victory was already inseminated with the 'other': in the case of France, the throne that would inspire the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the case of Ghana, the very elaborate machine of the state.
Don't get me wrong. I need freedom. We want it. To be able to navigate the city and do all the things our social contracts promise us we can do. Freedom is the reward of the good citizen. And therein lies the perverse clause: for if freedom is tied to citizenry, then it is already a form of bondage. I wonder what other iterations of 'freedom' are im/possible as we embark on a politics of touch, of sensing, of dying well.
How do you hope this piece will impact the way advocates and others concerned with social justice "do" the work of justice?
I am not entirely sure, you know. Before writing it, I did not consider the instrumental outcomes of the essay, what I hoped it might achieve. Now that I think of it, I hope it does what "Nigerian Princes" - at least the stereotypic, thieving figures of popular legends - know how to do well: steal your composure; disturb you so thoroughly that you lose your way and then find yourself open to new questions. Ultimately, I hope it contributes to those sparks and signals that allow a different politics to emerge - not to the dismissal of social justice and its identitarian commitments, but at the very least as a supplementary politics. A thing to do because we are stuck - and moving forward no longer seems like an option.
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.