In this March 29 event as part of the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe explore Black identity, Black excellence, and the limits of seeking inclusion.
Transcript
Evan Yoshimoto:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome from wherever you are around the world for what is assured to be an illuminating conversation between the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley's Global Senior fellow Bayo Akomolafe, and scholar, author and activist, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. My name is Evan Yoshimoto. I'm the project coordinator of the Democracy and Belonging Forum, and I'm calling in quite happily and quite excited for today's conversation from my home in Berlin, Germany. As the first ever transatlantic initiative of the Othering and Belonging Institute, the forum aims to connect civic leaders in Europe, the US, and around the world who are committed to bridging across lines of difference while centering the needs and concerns of marginalized groups. We're honored to host Bayo as a resident provocateur in chief of the forum, whose central role is to help us reconsider and reimagine our collective work towards justice.This conversation today is part of a larger series we're hosting entitled The Edges in the Middle in which it engages in conversations with a number of leading thinkers and culture makers from around the world on issues of justice, race, identity, climate, belonging and more. And for today, we are very honored to be hosting Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor as Bayo's conversation partner. Keeanga is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University and a 2021 MacArthur Foundation fellow. And she's a thought leader on black politics, social movements and racial inequality in the United States. Early this year, Bayo released an extraordinary new essay on our website entitled Black Lives Matter, But to Whom, which defies any simple description or summary. But at its most basic, seeks to explore the limits of the Black Lives Matter frame and advancing justice and the possibility for reimagining identities altogether.
In today's conversation, Bayo and Keeanga will explore a set of questions stemming from this essay, including what does a politics based on the rehabilitation of black bodies and their subsequent occlusion leave out of focus? In what ways might blackness exceed the conditions of its violent formulation? And what if justice gets in the way of the transformations we are for? Before we begin, I'd like to thank our ASL interpreters, Antonio Burkis and Janice Portee from Interpret, Educate, Serve. And as a reminder, forum members will have the opportunity to reflect on this conversation directly with one another in a private Zoom room. You should have received this email link directly from me, and if you have not, please email me directly. Lastly, if you enjoy this conversation, I encourage you to sign up for our e-news at www.democracyandbelongingforum.org and you can say up to date with our future activities by tuning into our Instagram or Twitter at D&B forum. And with that, I'll pass the mic onto Bayo to get this conversation started.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Oh, good evening. And it is wonderful to be with you. Thank you for tuning in. And I wonder why I use the metaphor of tuning in. But thank you for being here with us. My name is Bayo Akomolafe and I'm speaking with you here from Hamburg in Germany. I'm with my family and I'm grateful that they have given me permission and your blessings to be here with you and to be here with my sister Keeanga in our exploratory conversations around justice and the difficult cartographical project of justice. And there may be questions around what if it gets in the way? Very difficult questions to hold space for. But before we dive into that, and before I invite Keeanga to be part of this, I want to say a few things again as I'm now traditionally known to about what this is. This is an experiment in conversation.This is an experiment in the umbari, which is the Igbo. The Igbo people are from eastern Nigeria. They're a noble people, powerful people, beautiful stories, and wonderful cosmologies. Part of that cosmology is this art form which we have tried to articulate these conversations around. The idea of the umbari isn't to arrive summarily at a notion of truth. We're not looking for truth here. As important as that designation is, we're not looking for a way to arrive at consensus or agreement, as useful as those are strategically as well. The idea here is to listen with each other, to listen defractively, to create art with words and textures and memory and feeling that allows us to see each other, including you listening, as gestures, minor gestures, instead of stabilized points in space time. So we are not atomic entities trying to finalize our positions. We are touching each other, so to speak, and creating art with our conversation that we allow to be composted by the earth.
Nothing that is said here needs to be grasped as some final principle of fundamental reality. We give it back to the earth just as the evils with the umbari process would give their art forms back to the earth to be eaten by the goddess, Ala. So it's with that that I welcome you to this conversation that is premised and derives from an essay that I wrote a couple of months ago, not too long ago, January. I think it was published in February by my people here at the institute. And the premise of this conversation is, what if justice gets in the way? Now, that doesn't sound right. Justice feels like the thing to arrive at. It's what we all want. To say justice gets in the way or to suggest that it might get in the way is to trouble the relationalities, the way we relate with the public, especially how black bodies are situated within modern civilization.
It is to cast our gaze beyond our fight for inclusion and to kind of bring in a historicity, a history, a narrative, a storytelling tradition that stretches beyond the moments of capture and captivity and beyond that, not just into the past, but into the future, into a speculative future, to ask questions about what we are doing and what is being done to us in our quests for justice. Right? So I don't know that there is any other person that I would like to have this conversation with respect except Keeanga, professor Keeanga Taylor. I have followed and admired her voice in the United States for some time. And when the prospects of this came up, I jumped at it, not only because of the soul and the rigor with which she speaks to these matters, matters of justice, but because of, let me call it a weather of wisdom that surrounds her. So it is my great pleasure to bring Keeanga into this virtual space. Welcome sister.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Thank you. Thank you very much. Looking forward to the conversation.Bayo Akomolafe:
And you're joining us from Philadelphia.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Philadelphia, yeah.Bayo Akomolafe:
The seat of democracy.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
The birthplace of American democracy.Bayo Akomolafe:
The birthplace.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Whatever on earth that is worth.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. And what feels very, very urgent and very, very potent right now to say as we dive into this is, how do you feel about that question? How did it land with you? The problematic, troubling idea that justice might get in the way? And then we move wherever we want to go. This is emergent.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Sure. Well, thank you again for the invitation and thank you for the provocation that is your essay. I think, I mean, there are a few immediate things that come to mind for me. One of which is the question of, I mean, some of this is specific to the essay, which is the audience, in terms of who it is that you are writing to. Because in some ways, I think that the participation in Black Lives Matter and its many different iterations is quite varied. And people come to this desire for movement from different positions, with different thoughts, with different politics. So that's one thing. I think about the question of justice, does justice get in the way? Is justice limiting?I think yes and no. Yes, in the sense that, if we only conceive of justice in the existing political paradigm, if we only conceive of it in the ways, the narrow and confined ways that, in an American context, an American ruling class conceives of that, then of course justice is incredibly limited. And we saw that throughout the different kinds of responses of Black Lives Matter. So we could talk about the first wave of protests with Black Lives Matter in 2014 and 2015 where the main kind of sense of reform and forms of justice had to do with police commissions and making sure that the police had body cameras.
The second wave of protests produced this George Floyd Policing Act, which was kind of toothless and different things that basically keep the system of policing intact. So there's that. There's a kind of normative sense of justice and reform that is attractive to some people. I think that there's also, when I say no, there's also, I think, a more capacious sense of justice that comes from people engaged in the movement itself. And it comes from people who are oppressed. And so, I think that in that sense, justice is not just about tools meant to restrain the police or restrain the violent impulses of the state. Justice is about what do we have to do to live more meaningful lives? And so, that I think is important, which is to say that these concepts are not stable and static, delivered to us from on high, or delivered to us in the forms that they emerge from through the enlightenment.
That the struggles of oppressed people have also changed their meaning, or at least put the meaning of seemingly stable categories into conflict and contestation. And so, the one thing that I had questions about in the essay is, are you holding these concepts to be too stable, to see them only as a manifestation of the desires of the west, only as a manifestation? So we think about justice or freedom only as they are conceived of by those who put them into the universe at a particular point in time and had a very specific meaning for them.
In the United States, the colonial leaders understood freedom in a particular way because they all held slaves. And so, they knew what the absence of freedom looked like. And so their conception of freedom was organized in response to slavery. But, of course, enslaved people had a very different sense what freedom was. And so, that is just to say that I think that these concepts which, on the surface, seem to be reflections of the dominant class and what it is that they desire, are contested and fought over and have come to assume different meaning from the oppressed themselves. And I think that we have to integrate that complexity into the discussion about what seems like stable categories to begin with.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yeah, I totally resonate with that. There is a move that is threaded through the essay. And for those who are listening, as my brother a while ago said, this essay is called Black Lives Matter, But to Whom, and it was published in February and it's available on the internet if you take a look at it. It's a long read and I'm grateful that Keeanga went through it. But there's a move that is privileged in that essay and that is to stabilize strategically, if only for a moment, accepting that justice and these concepts are contested and contestable, but to stabilize it just for a moment, a thought to see what other moves are mobilized, and why that is. You asked me just before we came on, what precipitated, what led to this, what gave birth to this? It's that following George Floyd, the event of George Floyd, we had a moment of our own. By we, I mean the biggest country in Africa, biggest black nation on earth, right?We had End Sars, that is, end police brutality. Sars representing this violent force that calls into question our wanting to see more brothers and sisters in places of power. It clears that a little. And in the struggle to end police brutality, many questions were formulated. Many ideas that have been gestating for a while found expression. Just like the pandemic gave birth to new ideas about schooling and the workplace and organizational arrangements, this gave birth to questions around justice and what justice is doing. We started to have questions or have conversations about how justice is kneeling on our necks, literally taking the figure of that police officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck. And this has, of course, what I try to do is to trace those beautiful connections that have always existed between diasporic African communities and members of the African continent, right?
Blackness is meeting, Kwame, Uma, Martin Luther King, beautiful convergences. I feel there's a new conversation that is troubled or invited in. And I think these conversations are especially needed now in a time when it seems, at least from one perspective, that justice is implicated with the continuity of modernity. So there is a sense, of course, like you beautifully noticed, that we can see justice as this enlightenment thing. It's never some transcendent notion. It is emergent from relationship, right? It's how we relate, it's negotiated. But there is also a sense in which it transcends or exceeds those troubling containments.
And we can start to see justice. We can even practice seeing justice as something to reach out for. But for now, through the agency of this essay, I wanted to ask questions about how bodies were imported into the human, into the anthropos. How Sylvia Wynter speaks about the man and what the man is doing, and what we are missing if we negotiate the public order in a particular way. So the question for me is, what are we missing? That is the hidden courtesy of asking those questions about justice. What are we missing when we, to use Fred Morton's voice, speak truth to power? What is left out when we do that? And where does fugitivity come in? How do we think about the figure of the fugitive through this conversation about what justice occludes?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
I mean, I guess for me, the problem that I have, because I think that those are legitimate questions to raise. I think they get raised in a different kind of context here. And so, what I brought up initially about the audience, what I'm speaking to there. And you hint at some of this, I think, well, for certain in the essay, particularly actually when you're talking about the African context. Not so much in the US but certainly in the African context, which is a question of class. And the question of different interests. And so, part of the difficulty I had with the essay, and just in terms of understanding the nature of the debate and who is being argued with, is that in the US, the movement itself is deeply fractured around questions of class. And class influences questions of strategy and tactics. And so, what you were speaking to absolutely applies to and is the concern of a section of this thing that we call a Black Lives Matter movement.And there's also abolitionists within the movement, there are socialists in the movement, and people who reject the kind of normative parameters based on what is pragmatic and what is politically possible in our current context. Those people populate the movement as well. And so, part of the problem has been a kind of lack of engagement, a lack of debate and tension really around these sorts of questions within the movement itself. They have been muted and papered over. And so that the kind of liberal voices, those who are most concerned with kind of what I'm going to describe as a normative sense of justice, normative reforms, those voices have been allowed to dominate and really capture and overwhelm the discussion about what for others is a question of black liberation and questions that involved how we might get free. And freedom based on the lack of coercion in making decisions about one's life.
What does it mean to achieve actual self-determination? And so, these questions of class and class conflict among black people in the United States in particular are quite profound. And they have resulted in a very bifurcated notion of what it is that we are fighting for. Because there are people who are totally fine with leaving the hull of the slave ship and just being on deck and letting the wind blow through their hair, and they're okay with that. And then there are other people who want to not just leave the slave ship but set it on fire.
And so, the problem is this is all still happening within this concept of community, this concept of a kind of shared blackness, shared experience. And so, that is part of what complicates my kind of thinking about the essay and answering some of the questions that you pose, because to me, those are questions that really engulf a kind of liberal mindset that exist absolutely, but are not shared throughout.
So some of the folks, what I might describe as the left of what we are calling the Black Lives Matter movement, I don't think people who see themselves as abolitionists, these are the kinds of ideas and debates that animate those politics. It's really about how do we look beyond the existing paradigms?Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
How do we imagine different ways of being, different ways of living? And these come into extreme conflict with other black people who see problems with the status quo, but really the problems are about how they fit into it, not the status quo itself.Bayo Akomolafe:
Inclusion.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Yes, that is what you're addressing about the limits of inclusion. Of course, I wrote a book about this question as a kind of critique of post-war racial liberalism and the idea that our sole objective in life is to reject exclusion and simply be included without ever taking stock fully of what it is that we are being asked to be included into.Bayo Akomolafe:
You said something about coercion and articulated that with regards to freedom. I'm going to use a word that I'm guessing, or I'm hoping that everyone might be familiar with, ontologies, right? The nature of the reality of. How would you think of freedom then? Freedom being this very, it's a gleaming data point in the intergenerational transcontinental conversation about blackness, right? We talk about freedom all the time. Martin Luther King talked about freedom, activism is about freedom. But a thread, if you think about it as a biological or symbiotic thread that runs through some of my engagements through the essay and beyond the essay is the nature of freedom. Do you want to struggle with that? Let's struggle with that a little, sister.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Yeah. I mean, for one, freedom is deeply contested, what we mean by freedom. So none of these are, as we said earlier, stable situated categories. And their meaning and inference and importance, frankly, change over time.Bayo Akomolafe:
Maybe I can put it this way, sister, that how do you think we are enacting freedom and performing it? And how do you think it's performing us within an architecture, a social materiality of relationships? How are we enacting it even in demanding certain things of the system that externalizes and oppresses us?Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Well, let me just say, when I think of the idea of freedom, because I get asked this a lot, what does freedom mean to you? What would liberation look like? And so, I mentioned earlier this idea of self-determination, and what does it mean to make choices and decisions in one's life that are without coercion? And that you are thinking or motivated simply by one's desire to move from one place to another, from one thing to another, from one thought to another. And so, for me, that gets somewhere in the realm of what freedom is. I think that it's not wholly clear to me what it means or how it is ingested in our contemporary society. Is it the ability to vote? To be free, it's often negative, right? It's like, to be free from harassment, discrimination, these sorts of things, which to me doesn't sound very free at all.And so, I think that of course we have a political agenda that is limited by what people think is possible, by what people's expectations out of life have been ground down to. So I think that it has been reduced to it's most basic negative form, which is to kind of be left alone, which again is not very free. And so the question that I have for you was really, what are you thinking about freedom, as something that we should not strive for? So what does it mean to be free? And what would it mean to not have that as an objective, as the center of a political struggle?
Bayo Akomolafe:
I think that, and I'm deriving or I'm sitting with a response that is grounded in these African stories and the ways that elders in my lands have alkalized the stories of capture and captivity and stayed with the trouble of freedom. So running through what I'm sure you recognize as a Yoruba cosmology, it's talk about orishas. It's the idea of the pre individual, which is, if you're listening, you might recognize this as resonating with what a philosopher called Gilbert Simondon articulated. That is, we are not individuals as such that have the property of freedom. We are indebted to ecologies. We are not isolated. Modernity would have us see ourselves as autonomous separate beings who have designation of free or not free. But there is a sense in which even the lack of coercion could be a bind, that even without the outward signs of being shackled, we are still tethered to systems and ways of being and of seeing. I just had a dear sister, Dr. Erin Manning say to me, or speak to me about the violence of sight, right?That even typicality is neuropathic and could execute some kind of capture. So holding these ideas of the notion of flow that breaks down the distinctions between me and my environment, it calls the whole project of freedom into question. It troubles it. Freedom from what is not as powerful any longer as what is using us, what is instrumentalizing us, even without the outward signs of being coerced. How are we part and parcel of algorithms, systems and ways of thinking that are sticky to get out of. How are we caught up in a death spiral, right? So I don't know what lies beyond freedom.
I'm thinking right now of the way that I started out the essay, the crafts running away from the plantation. What I should have added or what I now think I would want to add if I get to modify the essay is how historically, they still have trouble when they escaped. The question is escaping to what, right? It's always the question of fugitivity, what are we escaping into? Because white modernity, the plantation wasn't as big as what the plantation was serving. The real estate of white modernity was beyond the plantation. So my question is still, what are we running into?
How are we co-creating and co-performing freedom if freedom is still implicated within specific ways of being that are increasingly problematic, especially now that we know how to name the anthropo scene? So again, I don't know what freedom leads to. All I know how to do is gesture towards something else exquisite beyond my language and capacity that I would signal with the idea of shapeshifting, the crafts turning into birds, Octavia Butler speaking of our bodies melting into other bodies. I'm not exactly sure how to think beyond freedom, because I'm part of this project as well. But I feel that we are at a turn, sister, we are at a point in our shared histories, colonized and colonizer, where the ship is in trouble. And now we have to ask new questions.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
I think yes, I think that we do have to ask new questions. I also think that I don't believe that we can create or conceive of a different kind of world from the one that we are currently situated in.Bayo Akomolafe:
I agree, yes.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
But I do believe that through the struggles of regular people, ordinary people, that those people have the capacity to create a different context and a different kind of social relation. And so, I'm an anti-capitalist, I'm a socialist, and I believe that capitalism imposes certain material, social, political, spiritual constraints on individuals, socially, society, the whole thing. And I believe that it also is a system that promotes this kind of self-interest and self individualism. And so someone has asked about self-determination. Is that in conflict with collectivity? I don't think so. I'm not talking about self-determination as individualism. I'm talking about the self as a collective body. What is in the interest of the collective? And it is the collective that determines what is in its interests. And those interests are constantly in flux and changing. But I believe through, and this is where maybe there, I'm a materialist.Bayo Akomolafe:
Me too.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
So there's tension in even how to talk about some of these things. But I believe that people have the capacity to collectively determine in a given moment and circumstance what it is that they need. And I believe that, without the particular constraints and obstacles created by capitalism or by systems that, there's the kind of bureaucratic collectivist states that call themselves socialists, that work socialist. If we think of socialism as sharing of abundance, these are states that still had the kind of dynamic towards extraction where the state was in control and ownership. But who owned the state? There was not democratic control of the means by which people govern themselves. There was not democratic control of the state itself. And so, I think that it's through that process of collective struggle that people's ideas about what freedom is, what it means to them in their particular context changes. I don't know. I think this is kind of where I'm at with this question, because one of the things that occurred to me in the essay was, what is the mechanism?And so, for me, the mechanism for the kind of social transformation that I'm talking about is mass struggle. And that mass struggle can't be in and of itself. It can't be struggle for just the state sake of struggle. I believe that we have to change the ways, the relations between each other. Change the relations between people and how things are produced. I don't believe that we can achieve anything resembling human fulfillment within the structures of capitalism. So what is the mechanism for this kind of social transformation? It is the self activity of collective human beings through collective struggle. And so, one of the questions that I had for you was this question of mechanism.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Okay.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
How do we go from what we are in today to, as you say, walking away from the constraints of these objectives and concepts into something else that is not bound by these old ideas? What is the mechanism that propels that process?Bayo Akomolafe:
Right. It's how people are peopled that is really, really energetically powerful for me right now. So let's read insights into each other, sister. When you said I'm a materialist, I know that.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Yeah.Bayo Akomolafe:
I'm a materialist too. It's like, of course, I would often describe myself as a neo materialist along the lines of a posthumanism, of an animism, that refuses to center human beings as independent actors, so that when we speak about people, I hear processes and I hear fungi and I hear architecture and I hear texture and I hear algorithms that are streaming through the air so that, there's a lot of porosity between the environment and people. So the question is, when you say, for instance, that it's people struggling, collective struggle, that is the mechanism for breakthroughs. I can sit with that and I know that this is true at multiple levels in our history, in our collective histories. We wouldn't have achieved what we achieve in terms of even living to have electricity in Nigeria, for instance, without people hitting the streets.People are on the streets right now struggling against the tide of, I don't even need to mention it, you know what's happening probably, a horrible electoral process. But the question for me still remains how people are peopled, that it's not simply about people struggling. It has never been about people struggling because environments create people. Not in a deterministic, final way, but even the ways that we come to struggle, even the ways we ask questions, the imaginations we have about what it means to be free and all of that is already a mark of a crossroads. There are multiple effects right there. So that it's never about just this monolithic entity struggling for a new dimension. It's how bodies interact with other bodies.
And I wish I could put my finger on beautiful and resonant examples that suggest that even with struggle, even as important as struggle is, one wants to hold the tension of where struggle has only bequeathed us with the inheritance of repetition that our struggle has sometimes led to the proliferation of the familiar, right? I will never forget listening to Bernie Sanders saying that since the '70s, we've been struggling for a response to climate chaos. And he would say, we have to respond to this yesterday, in the ways that he speaks.
We have to respond to this yesterday. That he would ask the question, why do we keep doing the same things over and over again? I think it's a question that haunts the idea that struggle is the soul or exclusive, which I don't think is what you're saying, but I want to hold that thread of thought, that struggle as the soul or exclusive mechanism for breakthroughs doesn't feel adequate in a posthumous world where people are peopled in different ways by their environments. So for me, I think about the mechanism of shifts as lingering in the breaks. And by the break, I mean to speak about places of deep errancy. I can situate errancy in terms of autism. I do this all the time. Having being a father of an autistic child, I feel that we have learned to pathologize spaces where novelty thrives.
And you could see this pathologization in terms of how we treat disabled people, how we treat minorities and all of that, and autistic children. I think that they kind of embody, and I don't want to binderize it like the neurotypicals and the autistics, but there is a dense sight of monstrosity. The monster to me is the cultural symbol of strain away from the normal path. There is the monster and I feel inquiry of politics that sits with tracing and understanding how we are implicated with specific social analytics might allow us to do something different or see something different. Let me put it this way, sister. Now, the problem, one problem for me is that we are part of a sensorial monoculture, that even protests and struggle could coexist side by side within a sensory monoculture that engulfs even those that we think are against us. We could be part implicated with the very same systems.
I remember seeing a brother telling me that he wanted to get people away from Facebook. And so his method of choice was to use Facebook to get people away from Facebook. It was entirely lost to him. The irony of getting people to do permaculture away from Facebook by starting Facebook groups, it's just a comical example of the ways we're implicated within systems. Even our struggles are articulated within them. So speculatively, I think of the sight of the zombie, the zombie being this monster, but which is a decolonial entity of course with history in Haiti and black culture.
I think of those sites as places of deep interest to me. That it's not enough for us to struggle, because struggle can codify or reinforce the very conditions, under certain conditions, that we're fighting against. But that we need a way of decentering the struggler. Question for me again is, who is struggling? What is struggling? Is there a stable identity behind the struggle? And if even the struggler is contested and the struggle is contested, then what kinds of spaces can we co-enact that allows us to see differently? This is what I theorize as the monster. Stop here for now.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Yeah. I agree that this is not struggle for struggle's sake or that the quote or hashtag struggle in and of itself changes everything. For me, the possibility of a certain kind of struggle is a mechanism. And the reason why I see it as a mechanism is because struggle from below is disruptive, it breaks the status quo, and it's within those moments of disruption and breaks within the status quo that the other part of this becomes viable. And so, the other part of this for me is then politics. So there is the symbiosis with objective and subjective factors that create the space for different ways of thinking. And I have a million different examples of that. So it's not just that you struggle. It's also about the ideas that imbue those struggles. And those ideas are constantly being fought over. I mean, this is the history of the black struggle in the 1960s. But it was the movement itself that opened up the possibility of thinking differently about the position of black people in the United States without any kind of social disruption, which the movement represented.It was very difficult on a mass level to bring in these ideas about black freedom, about black liberation, about how black people could live differently. Not to an external audience but to black people themselves. And so, for me, without the disruption of struggle, because it's true. Fascists have mass marches. January 6th in the United States was a protest, was a demonstration. So it's not just the ability to demonstrate, it's not just the ability to amass people in a certain location. I distinguish struggles in the service of maintaining the status quo and struggles that are disruptive to it.
Those who are stewards of the status quo may think that a particular movement can help. It is in service to it. But I believe that the longer that a struggle, protest, demonstration, movement of some sort exists, that raises questions about the stability of that society. Now, whether or not there is a particular kind of politics that enter into those gaps, that enter into those fissures, that raise new ideas and different ideas about what society is, what it could be, what its problems are, how to deal with those problems, how to respond to those problems, that's a political question. And that is a question that has to be debated and argued over. And that is not in and of itself a product of street demonstrations, but is a product of political struggle between individuals, between people who are in some kind of dialogue about how do we change things. So that's what I see those two things working in tandem with each other.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Oh, beautiful. There is a sense, sister, here that I'm in touch with the violence of clock time. This really should, I really wish we had two hours to do this. I do have something to say about, so there it really needs to be said that, at least I want to say that I agree with the need for struggle. There is no dismissing that there's no sidestepping. Like oh, there's a new political movement afoot, let's get rid of, no, there isn't any of that. But reality is never pure or categorical. It's promiscuous and unwieldy. There is also dot, dot, do, the sense in which the ground beneath our feet, especially in Africa, is widening, probably figuratively embodied by the crack that is literally dividing Africa into two, running through Kenya at this moment.That the ground beneath our feet is going and that we're finding more and more this to be the case that our struggle is eaten up. That there isn't is some kind of a presumption of able bodiedness, even in the call, the clarion call to struggle to fight the powers that be, right? So I'm asking, what do we say to my son who will not look you straight in the eye? Because visuality is not the premise of his experience. He looks to the side, right? He does not gentrify bodies visually. He looks to the side. What do we say to my son? What do we say to those people in Africa? Are we going to say the same thing, just keep struggling? Or is there something else that is possible? And this is not just a question for you, it's rhetorical, that is there something else that can be done within those cracks? Are those cracks now political agents in their own rights, inviting new cartographical projects, inviting new directions without dismissing the need to engage the familiar?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
And I would say that we shouldn't reify struggle as a single thing.Bayo Akomolafe:
Right. Absolutely.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
20 year olds on the street shaking their fist and running at cops. It is the ability to say no, either verbally through what we do with our bodies, a refusal to participate, in one way or another. So the last thing I'll say is that I agree that we absolutely run the risk of reflecting the forces that we are fighting against. I think that we see that profoundly in the US where the right wing is canceling books and banning books, and there is an impulse from parts of the left when you step out of line, when you have a political thought or say something that people disagree with, that there is a very intense reaction aimed at disciplining you into not saying it.And so, these are mirrored patterns of each other. And I don't believe there's any way out of that without political struggle, which is not about the street. It's about how we engage with each other in what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò talks about in the room, in the space. And that is a problem that we have in the United States left, an ability to engage one another in the space on the plane of ideas, to think differently and to come together to understand, to create a politics with those outside of the room that can really focus on what it means to be free, however that might manifest itself. So yeah, we have run out of time.
Bayo Akomolafe:
No, don't have to say it that way. We're in African time now and we can do as we please. But yes, this should have been longer.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Let's meet in Berlin.Bayo Akomolafe:
Let's do it again, sister. Let's find a way to do it again. It's been more than a pleasure speaking with you.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Thank you so much.Bayo Akomolafe:
I deeply respect you and may your way be blessed. And your work.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Thank you for the essay.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, thank you sister. Okay, thank you everyone. We usually have this after event, and I see beautiful questions being articulated here. I wish we had more time. A little bit of African generosity that spills beyond the swissness of time, but maybe another date and another moment would be opportune. Thank you so much for being with us.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
Thank you.Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you.
