Restorative Community Project Session 6:

To unyoke blackness from the black body has indeed been the defining philosophical project of the third millennium. Moten writes, “blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another; on the other hand blackness must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology’s sanction against the very idea of black subjectivity. This imperative is not something up ahead, to which blackness aspires; it is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisphean, that blackness serially commits. The paraonotlogical distinction between blackness and blacks allows us no longer to be enthralled by the notion that blackness is a property that belongs to blacks (thereby replacing certain formulations regarding non-relationality and non/communicability on a different footing and under a certain pressure) but also because ultimately it allows us to detach blackness from the question of being.” (emphasis added) To do so, locates blackness within the cosmic ether, now a particle and principle of chaos itself, the very creative energy that vitalizes and annihilates our worlds. Da Silva takes this speculative pivot past its safe guards when she then poses, “Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing? To both questions, this paper provides one provisory answer: Yes. From without the World as we know it, where the Category of Blackness exists in/as thought--always already a referent of commodity, an object, and the other, as fact beyond evidence--a Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing. For releasing Blackness from the registers of the object, the commodity, or the other would halt the trial of Trayvon Martin's killer before it is added to the already huge library of racial facts and precedents that authorize racial violence. For the acquittal of George Zimmerman must force us into radicalizing the task and target the very mode of representation, and its philosophical assumptions, that provides those meanings to Blackness--and its signifies, like the hoodie--which justify Trayvon Martin's killing and of so many other Black Persons, before and after.” Reading the quote again, perhaps up to and over the edge of language is not quite right; as all radical thinkers do, she asks us to consider not within a theoretical field that confabulates within a vacuum but rather the socio-ethical space of black existence (be it for objects or otherwise). The caution is needed one, for as Hortense Spillers remarks, “A RETURN TO THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE MUST BE CONSIDERED today in a critical climate that is not hospitable to the topic;” the climate in question is the “ethical” atmosphere of the insipid identitarian politics for which we have the suffragettes to blame (along with so much more that I don't care to expound on at the moment; eugenicists the whole lot of them). But the operative word here is “MUST”. Failure to answer the call of humanisms dual erosion (epistemological and ontological) is to finally risk peering over and listening with “the little edges.”

What's that got to do with us? “What use does science fiction have for blacks?” asks Octavia Butler. The answer:’,, “performance is the resistance of the object” and this is our introduction: 

Emily Greenwood said: “...the context of our being here, this week of intensive black study and the theme for this evening is These tyrannical times, poetry as liberatory poetry as undoing…”

//Collective Climb is…//

Micah: A community where everyone can get out of their comfort zone 

Basir: Share love connect and entertain 

Destiny: A “rooted” family (budging growing) (it takes a village…)

//What are we doing!?//

Emily Greenwood said: “Dionne Brand, Harryette Mullen, in greek merriatus 1000 now we not quote 10000 yet in this event but we are over a 1000 and i know I can go to the end of language in praise of your readings and what your work means to so many of us and there would still be those out there mad that I have sold you short so let me just say that was ineffably piercing and wonderful. Thank you so much” 

Mohammad: A project that is thinking about the link 

between black liberation and indigenous decolonization  

Mckayla: PAR is a method of learning/exploring something that blurs the line between what is being studied and who is the studier (removed the power dynamic) -- allowing our young people to enter the discourse around black liberation and indigenous decolonization 

//Who are you!?//

Brandon: Learners of BL and ID, to become teachers of the future generation   

Micah: We are the believers to spread the word and remind people that they are not alone

Destiny: Valuable Climbers  

Mohammad: A member of a rooted family who are working to learn more about two important groups in history and unifying them as one and spreading the research to our generation 

So answer me this! The wind is here //

and I am thinking of you