It is Now All of it is Now (Original Preface to Black Life Matter)
It is Now All of it is Now
George Floyd’s memorial service happened just over a week ago. It happened right here in Houston. I couldn’t watch much of it. I don’t know why. If I had to hazard an answer, it’s probably because I’m tired of national funerals.
I don’t mean to be insensitive. I hope it doesn’t come off this way. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m tired of what these national funerals mean to the larger public; they are memorials, but they are also public attempts at atonement. So, when I watch them, all I see is another black body that has been transmuted into sacrificial matter for national absolution. “We” pay “our” respects. “We” wail. “We” cry. “We” are outraged. And then, having cleansed “our” conscience, “we” move on. After signifying on black death, the country returns to its grammar. Sure, a clause may have shifted. There might be policy reforms. Corporations will make commercials and publicize their donations; presidents will lay claim to reckoning with black death “at last.” But, in the end, black death is the constant. “We” await another national funeral.
The drama — or, perhaps “passion” is a better word — of black death is an endless one. There is no conclusion; there are only more acts. There is no climax; there are only encores. The cast changes, but this is because it has to; the last protagonist died in the last act, and the only redemption was a form of partial catharsis for the larger public. The old protagonist falls away, and for national “renewal” or national “reform,” a new protagonist is needed. “We” need more sacrificial material. So, “We” conjure a new one. Out of black bodies. Passion.
Many prefaces elaborate on the genesis of a book. But, given when and where I write at the moment, it seems that the genesis of this book is still ongoing. This book began as my dissertation. I wrote what would become this book in the academic year 2016–2017, while working with the movement for Black Lives here in Houston. In 2015, Sandra Bland died in the Waller County jail. A blackqueer man named Rhys Caraway sat vigil for “Sandy” upon getting news of her death, and we formed a collective to raise awareness about her death and the systemic violence — from bail reform to police brutality — that occasioned it. We organized a rally right in front of the jail. And after that, we began organizing against racial injustice in Houston. We fought for bail reform. We ousted violent antiblack political officials. We went to meetings, negotiated with public officials, and contributed to different policies. And in between these meetings, negotiations, and direct actions, I wrote what would become this project.
But the origins of my thinking about the relationship between blackness, religion, and the subject actually began in 2013 when George Zimmerman was acquitted. The day after we got the news, I found myself in church, attempting to make sense of what had happened. I struggled to understand how fifty years of black protest, struggle, and meager progress offered little resources in the way of providing justice for a family broken up by violence. The tears flowed, expressing my personal sense that this world was fundamentally broken. Justice would not be served — not for black people, anyway.
Seven years later, that yearning — for justice, for freedom — remains. I know the time is different. In fact, the text you hold in your hands (or on your screen) is different. I’ve learned a bit since the earlier draft (though I feel as if I have so much more to learn — about queerness, about black feminist theory, about matter).[1] I also write very differently from when I wrote the earlier draft. There is less philosophical exposition, and a bit more storytelling. The sentences are shorter. And much of the theory shows itself in the footnotes. But, even though the times — and this book — have changed, a lot of it feels the same. I still mourn. I always mourn. I am in mourning. I am — which is to say, I exist as — mourning.
But I also celebrate. I always celebrate. I am in celebration. I am — which is to say, I exist as — celebration. The two aren’t disconnected. “That we celebrate is what hurts so much,” Fred Moten claims. And he’s right. He’s also right that celebration is a form of theory, that black theory can be — and often is — celebration. So, I write. I write as celebration and mourning; my writing is celebration and mourning. This text is as much an elegy as it is a praise song. I write from a contradictory space. I write from a present that doesn’t seem to ever pass into a future. It is now it is always now.
What I write stands on the shoulders of others. Books have been written; studies have been done. Much of the academic and journalistic treatments have approached the movement in relation to historical, empirical, and data-based analyses. Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor wrote the most visible book-length historical reflection on the Black Lives Matter movement, and others like Barbara Ransby have elaborated on this history. Christopher Lebron wrote an intellectual genealogy of the movement. And newspapers have begun chronicling how many people police kill in the U.S. The statistics, histories, and genealogies associated with the Black Lives Matter movement paint a powerful picture of the institutional and structural contours of antiblackness.
I also write on the shoulders of theorists, many of whom are black feminists. Quite a bit of what you’ll read is situated in a philosophical register. Husserl and Heidegger are present in the first chapter; Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Louis Althusser are present in the second; a certain variant of affect theory finds its expression in the third; and Judith Butler informs quite a bit of the whole project. Philosophy is my homebase; it is the way I think about things. But Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, and the three founders of Black Lives Matter — Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometti, and Alicia Garza — have all expanded what my homebase could be. They remind me that, irrespective of my own philosophical proclivities, the love of wisdom is always and already an ethical work of self-transformation. They remind me of the female within me, and that it is my work to return to her. I doubt that I have done any of this in this text with any sufficiency. But I hope that what I’ve written gestures toward the line of thinking that has deeply shaped me.
Because this work has been done — and is still ongoing — I build from where others have started. I don’t write a new history; I offer no new intellectual genealogies. I’d even be hard-pressed to say that what I offer here is even “new”; I think, at some point in time, I abandoned the desire to write a “cutting-edge” text in favor of trying to sit with the meaning of black life, of black lives. And people have been sitting with black lives for centuries. What I offer here, then, is a meditation.
I use the term “meditation” intentionally. Descartes’s Meditations was a watershed moment in Western thinking. But his meditations were brutal. They were solipsistic. Perhaps this is because Descartes’s meditator was content to meditate on itself. It thought it didn’t need others, and philosophy has often taken a similar tack. Despite the manifold interventions of black, feminist, and queer philosophers, the field of philosophy — and particularly philosophy of religion — has remained helplessly myopic and tragically homogenous in its methods, questions, and conclusions. This isn’t simply a question of representation; it isn’t enough to “diversify” the guild. Institutional calls to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are often little more than window-dressing — which is, in its own way, another reduction of black people to the objectified bodies that normative subjects like to use. It isn’t enough to train and/or (rarely) hire black folx in the field; the field needs to be shifted and restructured in relation to the intellectual and ethical contributions that black thinkers offer. Blackness is specific, but it isn’t parochial. It is particular, but it contains multitudes. It shows up in time, but it is infinite. Blackness is death, but it is also life. Blackness is lives.
I meditate, then, on this grammatical slippage. I meditate in the space between the singular copula “is” and the multiple lives that animate it. Black Life Matter turns to stolen black lives as both philosophical commentary and philosophical critique. In this regard, what I write here pushes philosophy of religion to see what black lives have to say about the ethical, epistemological, political, and religious dimensions and dynamics of life in general. Much of contemporary black critical theory has laid claim that black life is already a commentary on the meaning of the human being in the West. And yet, save a lot of lipservice, many of these fields continue to move as if black lives aren’t materially important to the allegedly all-important task of philosophizing, of thinking. If we can still produce commentaries on Heidegger, Schleiermacher, Marx, and Hegel, then we can certainly understand the salience and power of black life — of black lives — to comment on and develop larger frameworks of ethical, epistemological, political, and ontological importance. So, I turn to stolen lives as a form of philosophical critique. And it should be noted: these lives aren’t mere matter to me — by which I mean, these lives aren’t mere res extensa. They are stories. I am humbled by them. I am brought to my knees by their contours and their complexities. I don’t philosophize from them; they aren’t mere examples for theoretical elaboration. Instead, they touch me; they guide my thinking because they’ve made contact.
Closing themselves off from the world, philosophical approaches have lost contact. They are untouched. They are untouchable. Philosophy is the academy’s Soaphead Church, unable to suffer contact, and equally allergic to any residue of human messiness.[2] Philosophy, in my mind, retains this allergy, this irritability to being touched by something outside, something other. And this has allowed for much of philosophy to continue its work without having to touch the public. In large part, it is precisely philosophy’s disciplinary and academic solipsism that has enabled the violence we see now. Save a few exceptions (and they are relatively few), philosophy has abandoned the effects of its own practice. It is analytically disingenuous and ethically reprehensible. But it continues to happen.
Though philosophy has long gone the way of the ivory tower, reclusively closing itself from the public, the ideas that dominant philosophers have produced have also enabled and encouraged antiblack violence. It isn’t simply that Kant was a virulent and rather ignorant racist, or that Hegel couldn’t see Africans as humans (I hesitate to say human beings, as I’m not sure what that construction means anymore), or that Heidegger was a Nazi. What is also the case is that these thinkers’ conclusions, writings, and formulations of thought have contributed to the violence of this world, a world that cannot help but produce apologies for the antiblack violence it gleefully, joyously, and blatantly carries out. In this regard, I write out of a tradition that goes back at least to Du Bois, and perhaps was best expressed by James Cone; I write out of an anger that the tradition in which I was trained constantly refuses to reckon with the antiblackness that conditions it.
But I don’t simply write from a place of anger. This text is also written from a deep desire to impact the public sphere. I do not pretend that larger audiences will fully understand the words that fill these pages. But I do hope that, at the very least, readers will be able to understand that blackness is the living matter that makes the west possible. Some will read this text and assume it is simply about the specific encounters I chronicle. Some will read this text and assume it is just about police, and just about the specific police I discuss. And to a large extent, it is: these lethal encounters, and the officers who occasioned such death-dealing violence, are central to my work here. I’ve combed newspaper clippings, and listened to internal review interviews; I’ve read transcripts and scoured testimonies. The specific situations, and the specific actors in these situations, are central. They are at the forefront.
But I don’t merely write about these encounters and these actors. These encounters are instructive for philosophy, for theory; the officers in the chapters that follow aren’t “different” from the everyday normative subject. In fact, my claim is that these officers are proxies for a structure of subjectivity that cannot help but deal death to blackness and black lives. Officers simply bring to light what this world has sanctioned, tolerated, and encouraged. It doesn’t matter if you tweet #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, or #alllivesmatter. It doesn’t even matter if you march, protest, or rally with black people. Hell, it doesn’t even matter if you are black. If you protect the norms of this world, you name yourself as one who tolerates, appreciates, and encourages the violence this world occasions. No amount of virtue-signaling and symbolic statements will absolve the normative subject of its predilection toward violence; the very moment that one reaches for reform instead of abolition, they have announced themselves as antiblack. It is what it is.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be otherwise. It is otherwise. It has been otherwise. Ashon Crawley is right: there has been, is, and always will be alternatives right within this moment. And — on this point, and perhaps just this one — Emmanuel Levinas is right, too: these alternatives are ethical ones. They instantiate a future we haven’t realized but have always lived and will continue to live. In this book, I use the term beyond to capture this dynamic; the terms are different, but my motivations are quite similar to Crawley, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and others who continue to remind us that there’s always something exceeding the parameters of this violent world and its structures of thought. I am thankful to those who have done and continue to do this work; I can only gesture at it here, but please know: their work has influenced me. Deeply. Because of these communities, and because of my own beloveds, I have become convinced that the beyond is real. The Clearing is real. And it is happening around us all the time.
It should be noted that this book is not structured as a traditional academic text. In revising this project for publication, I was inspired by the opening to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which begins — in italics — with “quiet as it’s kept.” If you’ve read the book, then you know that the whole plot of the story is right there in the beginning. I read the italics as a whisper: Morrison, through Claudia, whispers the whole plot to you at the beginning. She spoils it at the beginning, perhaps because she knows that the spoiler isn’t really a spoiler; we read on because want to know how and why this story unfolded the way it did.
Black Life Matter follows this model. Like Morrison, I give it all away at the beginning. Like Morrison, the body texts are elaboration. And hopefully, what is in italics prompts the reader to continue and follow along. I have taught myself to believe that it is the writer’s responsibility to keep the reader’s attention, and it is my hope that what is written compels the reader long enough to follow what I’m trying to think about.
I also write for the reader to feel what I’m trying to think about. The most compelling texts I’ve read are the ones that make me cry, laugh, chuckle, scream, or sit in awe at the power of the writer’s capacity. My favorite works are the ones that have such powerful lines that I cannot shake what the writer has offered — lines like “If I weren’t here, I would have to be invented,” or “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom,” or “they enact the Clearing,” or “o my body, always make me a man who questions!” Lines like these are invitations not simply to think with the writer, but also to allow the writer’s words to affect the reader in perhaps surprising, or even unsurprising, ways. I know not what those feelings will be: maybe it’s conviction. Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe it’s joy. I only hope that it isn’t boredom. But even if it is, I imagine that that can be instructive, too. Either way, I write this text for the reader to follow and to feel — not what I feel, but their own feelings. I write because I feel, and I hope that the reader can share in this capacity to feel as well. I write as an invitation.
So, out of this space of theoretical frustration and ethical outrage; out of a profound desire to honor, love, and care for the lives that have been stolen; out of a profound calling to impact the public; out of a genuine desire to perceive and live into the promise that is already here; and out of an erotic desire to share feelings, I present this book to you, dear reader. It ain’t the first time that a member of a marginalized community has had to roll up their sleeves and do the work that normative subjects are unwilling or unable to do. And, sadly, it won’t be the last time. I wrote the beginnings of this project years ago. Others before me wrote the beginnings of this project centuries ago. And yet, I still feel like I’m writing the beginnings of this project. Freedom actually is, I guess, a constant struggle. And this constant struggle makes a mockery out of linear time.
Maybe it really is always now.
And maybe, always living in now allows for us to see beyond it.
[1] For more on this, see Zakiyyah Jackson’s phenomenal text, Becoming Human (New York: NYU Press, 2020). .
[2] Soaphead Church was a character in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, who could not abide human contact. It made him nauseous. As a character, Soaphead Church is brutal, as he essentially becomes the catalyst for the protagonist’s mental breakdown. But this brutality exceeds fiction; in “The Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” Wynter constantly uses the phrase “celibate clergy” as a way of describing the figureheads who instituted violent intellectual structures that eventually led to the “overrepresentation” of a normative subject. My suggestion here is that Soaphead Church is the literary figure of Wynter’s Celibate clergy; refusing human contact, they enact brutal modes of thinking that leave massive destruction in their wake.
