New Bones Abolition and the Function of the Captive Maternal with Joy James

Joy James: I'm sorry.

Josh: Hi, welcome to Millions Are Killing Capitalism. This is Josh. In this 2-part episode, I'm joined by special co-hosts Akwaeah and Noah while we interview Dr. Joy James about 2 of her recent books, the first part being New Bones Abolition: Capitalist Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner, and the second part will be Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon, which will be released shortly after this one. Joy James is a professor of the humanities at Williams College, a political philosopher who works with organizers seeking social justice and an end to militarism. James is the editor of the Angela Y. Davis Reader, Imprisoned Intellectuals, and co-editor of the Black Feminist Reader. James's most recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, Newborns' Abolition, and Contextualizing Angela Davis. Her forthcoming volumes Engage: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures and Beyond Cop Cities will be published this summer and fall. If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron. You can do so for as little as $1 a month. We're bringing you these conversations totally independently with no corporate, state, or grant funding. We're going to include a set of links in the show notes to Dr. Joy James's works and things she references throughout our conversation. Please check those out for further information. Now, here's Dr. Joy James discussing her new book, Newborns' Abolition. Okay, so Joy, welcome back to Melanated: Killing Capitalism. Thanks for coming on again. We've had you like 5, 6 times at this point. So jump right in. We're going to start talking about one of your new books, Newborns' Abolition. And I really want to just focus most in this first section on how you kind of unsettle standpoint epistemology, or otherwise personal narratives that have come to at least dominate Black feminist literature. And you state that personal victimization narrative, although important, does not inherently render every story as virtuous or voracious, end quote. And Akwaeah recently sent me a podcast from Citations Needed titled How the Cold War Shaped First-Person Journalism and Literary Conventions, if anyone or everyone listens to that. And I only listened to about 70% of it, but I really found it really convincing in the sense of Howard discusses how state organs like the CIA and the State Department collaborated with creative writing programs like the Iowa Writers Workshop and publications like the Paris Review to cultivate and reinforce writing tenets like these. And the aim was to focus literature and journalism on individual feelings and details rather than on community and political theory or large-scale political concepts. But you almost explicitly seem to draw a very similar conclusion in your discussion of bell hooks, who I'm not accusing of being a CIA agent or agent of the state.

Joy James: Right.

Josh: Or anything like that, not explicitly at least. But you discussed the kind of domination of personal, individual, and anecdotal experiences as the guiding narrative in which much of her works and how she peddled almost anti-Black, white supremacist, yet mainstream narratives surrounding the Central Park Five that, and I'm quoting here you again, echo liberal white feminists and several prominent Black academics or authors to portray the youth as guilty. And you also discussed how her progressive policies did not reflect The militancy and intellectual rigor of Captain Maternal's, who were working outside of academia. But also you make this connection to how Gloria Steinem, who was the most prominent state feminist ally of Black feminism, worked for the CIA during the Cold War, and she was good friends with hooks as well. But you continue to highlight, and I'm quoting here again, this pretty hefty quote, liberal frameworks have to keep feminism and anti-racism so that remedies to misogyny, gender oppression, and transphobia, and white nationalism embedded And liberal frameworks from longer state feminism. And in the conclusion, you write how markets rely on personal stories to emphasize victimization in the narratives of those who claim to be virtuous. Stories become more significant than physical engagement and movement building marinated in war resistance, end quote. So this question kind of has 2 parts, and you can answer however you see fit. Discuss bell hooks in this sort of opposition to a captive maternal form. Including that of Erica Garner, whose life and politics epitomize such, in your opinion. Can you discuss just that articulation? But also, I would love for you to discuss standpoint epistemology as utility, specifically but not exclusively in Black feminist literature, and how you have observed not just its limitations, but also its weaponization against radical social struggles. And what place do you see it having in political struggles in general?

Joy James: Yeah, thank you, Josh. So there's a lot going on there, right? So I'll try my best. So, and unfortunately I won't be able to do it in the order that you laid it out, but hopefully you'll find—

Josh: No, no, of course.

Joy James: Yeah, you'll check me. Okay, so if I recall correctly in Transcending the Talented Tenth, which came out in 1997 with Radledge, right? That was one of my first books, obviously a quarter of a century plus maybe ago, in which I'm looking at Black feminism and I'm elevating it. So back in the day, that is when I would be basically incredibly loyal to Black feminism because I understood that to be the analytic, but also the conveyor belt in terms of going forward in struggle, right?

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Joy James: And then as the years unfold, it becomes much more complicated. So in Transcending the Talented Tenth, I do have a chapter where I critique Cornel West and I have a chapter where I critique bell hooks. It also, if you open the book on— it's online, so you could see it whenever you want and read it if you want. It's free. The first photograph when you open it is a picture of Charlene Mitchell, who, as I said before, and I think this will be connected to some of the other literature, the works I've been exploring when we have that conversation, Charlene Mitchell mentored me to go into the Schomburg and to read every memoir that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote. And then I would see the contradictions. I don't think she thought I would do a book, or maybe she did. I ended up doing Transcending the Talented Tenth. In the photo, it's Charlene Mitchell. In the middle, it's Nelson Mandela. And then to his right, it's Angela Davis. So again, this elevation of the feminists, of the Black feminists, cannot And does not, right, focus strictly on bell hooks, even though I write about her. And yes, Gloria Steinem is somewhere in the back. I'm very influential, and I've said before that she was brilliant. And then on a podcast, people are like, we hope you didn't say that. And I don't think being brilliant means that you're virtuous or radical. It just means you're really smart and you know how to move the pieces around on the chessboard. So, Back to bell hooks, which Gloria Watkins, but trying to put it in context. There is a way in which her feminism, her Black feminism unfolded that it was both an isolate in some ways because there were a lot of Black feminists that marginalized her. I don't remember if you read, I think it was in Vibe magazine, this would've been in the '90s when she was— had a critique of Oprah Winfrey, but the way she stated it, I can't— we're into respectability.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Joy James: And Black feminist constructs, even if we say we're not what the majority are, the leadership is really deeply embedded in being respectable. But she said that Winfrey sucked the, you know, D of white culture. But at the same time, Bill wanted to be on the Oprah Winfrey Show because that's in some ways how Toni Morrison became a global brand in terms of her writing.

Speaker 3: Right.

Joy James: So there's a contradiction. Like, hooks is offering a critique of pandering to white consumers, but at the same time wants the visibility that comes from pandering or selling markets, meaning Black feminist texts to white women. And, you know, giving them, I don't know what Oprah was giving, but there would always be these gift packages, right? So there would be a literary content and there always would also be a gift package.

Speaker 3: Right.

Joy James: You know, washer dryer. I don't know what she was giving away, but she was giving away freebies, right? So in that context, I would ask, what does it mean to be a Black feminist in the late 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century if there is the market for Black feminism? If people want to read the novels so that they can have emotional sensibilities heightened, you know, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, which also becomes a film with Oprah Winfrey starring in it. Of course, these are all Morrison's texts. Or in the way that bell hooks did it, which was more on the ground and without the celebrity shine because she was not in that framework. So again, sorry if I'm being repetitive. When Morrison gets the Nobel Prize, right, and Emily goes to Oslo to receive it, The entourage will include Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, the sister that runs Essence magazine. I don't know why I'm blanking out on her name right now. It'll come back to me later. Angela Davis, and of course, Toni Morrison. So this is like a powerhouse of writers that also shaped concepts of Black feminism. That is a collective that hooks will never be allowed to enter.

Isaiah Blake: Right.

Joy James: So in some ways, I think as an intellectual, but also somebody who had to learn how to promote her books independently because there wasn't a strong Black feminist— I mean, she had Black women following her, but the most prestigious, the ones in academia, I think they kind of came late. And then at some point there was that beef with Beyoncé smashing car windows, unleashed a beehive, which I actually gotta tell you, it's beyond my skillset to understand what all that was going on, 'cause I try not to focus on pop culture 'cause I'm not really in the generation of it and I, it's not of much interest to me. So I respect hooks for attempting and actually being successful in some ways of presenting Black feminism. But I also think that she thought of it in terms of a market. And when I write in New Bones of Abolition that there's a critique of her, and she's not the only person who's prominent in terms of Black feminists. Newborn's abolition address is bell hooks, Assata Shakur, Black sororities, Angela Davis, and other people. And it is a tribute book, but not a biography of Erica Garner, whose father was slain in 2014, the same year that Michael Brown and Tamir Rice's lives were taken by predatory policing at the hands of white men. So what I see hooks as doing in some ways is remaining non-engaged or distant from a certain kind of organizing on the ground. And because I was invested in organizing on the ground, I knew about the Central Park case. I knew Black radicals who belonged to the December 12th meeting. I had to knock on their doors, you know, in Harlem and be vetted before they introduced me to the mother of Yusef Salaam. Who is now a city councilman in New York City after being falsely accused and incarcerated as part of the so-called Central Park Five, or what they would call as the Exonerated Five. Because I was organizing, and I've said before in podcasts, I was in an all-women's dojo. It was led by Annie, a white lesbian activist who was trained by Black Panthers. It's a whole group of us. We identified as non-binary or female. And we were told by Annie after we trained one day, and what we did in our training is we provided security for marches like AIDS marches, LGBTQ marches, women's rights marches, marches for Tawana Brawley, you know, where, you know, it was interesting. Al Sharpton, I believe, was part of a manipulative political desire for, you know, being publicly known. But in terms of Black women, we were not allowed to publicly critique him. But anyway, Annie sends us to the court to get into the trial. They put it in the smallest courtroom in New York City, the smallest room, right? So it's mostly journalists, but we managed to get inside. And so I watch and I see how the judge is dismissive, how the multiracial jury is dismissive. I see that there's no way these young people, Black and Latino, males could have committed the crime, and they did not. It was Matias Reyes, the serial rapist and murderer, who the cops were not looking for because they were trying to implicate the teens. So all of this you see if you organize on the ground. Hope does not, to my knowledge, organize on the ground, or at least her writing does not reflect that. So she wasn't the only one to write an article that stated that the youth were guilty. Barbara Smith also wrote an article that was like a pushback. And so I saw how Black feminists who had— and they were literary stars. I was nobody. I was a grad— I think I was a grad student. Yeah. There was a way in which they could present Black feminism that it was aligned with the sensibilities of white feminism, that you oppose misogyny, misogynoir, that you oppose violence against women and girls.

Josh: But—

Joy James: Right. What they were missing, because again, we're organizing in Brooklyn, and to the best of our ability, we're providing, you could say it's ceremonial protections, but when cops in unmarked cars are trying to ram the protesters, we were supposed to be, and we were, in between the cop cars and the protesters. But what was not coming to fore when these articles showing Black women, and it wasn't just Black women, Michael Eric Dyson wrote one also, Showing that we're appalled that Black and brown youth are, like, acting these ways, you know, bestial, you know, rapists, et cetera, et cetera. We're not going to go as far as Donald Trump is, which is to put out an ad in the New York Times. And by the way, New York Times didn't need the money, so they didn't have to print the ad calling, you know, the return of the death penalty and gesturing towards the youth, right? So what we were seeing is that there were Black and brown women being raped also, but nobody was talking about it. 'Cause they were focused on Trish Meili, who was the Salomon Bank Wall Street. And it's horrible what happened to her, you know, as a white privileged woman in Wall Street. But because she was a white privileged woman working on Wall Street, that is one of the reasons why this case blew up. So what I was saying is Black and brown women were being raped. They were also being thrown off the top of the roofs of tenements after they were raped. And nobody like New York Times wasn't writing about that, right? And so I appreciate hooks for what she put on the table in terms of a clear critique. I critique hooks for following a narrative so that she can be aligned with the predominant white feminism that was also driving part of her readership. I mean, there were black women buying her books, but there are a lot of white women buying. Her books as well. So again, I think the market and a certain kind of desire to conform with US culture and not to understand it to be as predatory as it actually is has influenced Black feminism. So recently I've been talking about state feminism. This is where Gloria Steinem would come up. In the 1950s, when she was recruited by the CIA in 1967 when she had to admit it, when Ramparts, a small upstart publishing group in California, had someone come out of the National Student Association and sort of bring them paperwork to say, hey, this is a CIA front. And Steinem is one of the people who's laundering the money but also shaping the brand. So you mentioned, and then I'm wrapping to the close, you mentioned a number of people who are critical in our understanding of culture, Black culture. But I would say that the CIA was so slick in how, you know, there's Paris Review, but there's other publications. And also, they gave money to artists. So, you know, I believe Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and others, not knowing the funding was coming from the CIA because it was filtered through layers. I think there's a comparative lens that could be brought to the current moment, like how much money that enables our culture, our writing, our art, and our movements is actually funded by a certain kind of white philanthropy, which is actually tied to the state. I think we're complicated and I think we're compromised. But that doesn't mean that it's always about— it's not always about our desire to undermine radical struggle. But sometimes when you get caught in a trick pony trap, that tends to be the outcome.

Speaker 3: Thank you for that. I wanted to kind of connect it with what you just mentioned here at the end about white philanthropy funding these movements. As you're aware, the limitations of care as a political act is a critique that has been documented greatly over the years, but your book also makes a point to emphasize that. And you write as part of your critique of nonprofits that the state funds the services it destroyed the Panthers for providing. This may seem like a twister, but actually has a logic. The state and predatory police forces want communities to depend upon their formations for survival. Hence, the survival programs of communities attempting to liberate themselves from dependency upon a stratified and indifferent state are, as marronage, largely prohibited. Black Lives Matter as a Black liberation movement, not a lobbying effort to the public/state/banks for Black humanity to be recognized by state formations, structured by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism would literally combat fascism to establish and defend a transformative culture. A transformative culture— care, protest movement, marronage, war resistance— would undo the state as we know it. The state as imperial project or predatory policing has consistently mandated that such transformative cultures will be punished or purchased. End quote. So that's a big quote to pull from, but I would really like to focus on the punished or purchased part here because we do think that, you know, quote unquote, care, love, and community are terms that get mobilized by radical liberals in service of aims that align with the state and/or nonprofit institutions. And you discuss how, open quote, any in-depth Discussion of abolition, community, and love needs to outline its relationship to and strategic moves against predatory policing. However, most of them don't. So for one, I guess part of the question is, how can one theorize around care, or more specifically, the captive maternal, considering these structural conditions? But also, how do you suggest one can strategize how to fortify concentric circles of care that materially, not just rhetorically, confront colonialism and imperialism.

Joy James: Yep. Thanks for that. So we're kind of in a Minotaur maze, right? I mean, we need to get out, but you're also being hunted by some bull that's demonic, which I would say is capitalism, imperialism within the state formation of the US as an empire, you know, built on white nationalism and genocide. So we care for ourselves. I mean, this is what I tried to lay out in 2016 in The Womb of Western Theory when I was asked to write something on Foucault. And I had a critique of Foucault, which I got indirectly from Black militant internationalist women in New York. And I've said this repeatedly, they're the ones who told me the Soviet Union would fall.

Josh: Yeah.

Joy James: And I was working with REE, Women for Racial and Economic Equality. And when we have a conversation around contextualizing Angela Davis, we could talk more about that. But this is how I knew Davis is through the Communist Party, right? So the Black women who were coming from the Caribbean, who were coming back and forth to Africa, understood that on the ground, the liberation movements were going to be defunded, and then there were going to be casualties. I mean, think of the longevity of Nelson Mandela, and the brevity of Chris Hani, who's assassinated in 1993 in his front yard. So this is a larger context. There's a global context, and then inside of it nesting is a national context. Then there's these states, you know, Texas looks like it's just going hardcore right-wing with Florida. And so these circles, these concentric circles can be circles of predators.

Isaiah Blake: Right.

Joy James: You know, like contracting our capacity to breathe and to function. And then what we need are counter-concentric circles of defense, which I don't think we fully have developed. And in part, I think that part of the purchase, you know, if we can go back to that, has messaging in it that leadership tells you that they've got this.

Josh: Right.

Joy James: Like, they've got the narrative that could explain repetitive violence and expanding violence. There's more than one genocide going on right now in the world. But even to deal with one, you know, people are being doxxed, they're losing their jobs, students are being arrested. There's a way in which I don't think we've emotionally adjusted to the nature of the violence arrayed against Black people seeking freedom.

Isaiah Blake: Right.

Joy James: Indigenous people seeking freedom, working class, militant people of all ethnicities and races. So the way I'm trying to formulate this around the captive maternal, why I would no longer call myself a Black feminist, and that's not saying that I'm not, it's just I don't use the terminology, is because I think that both the narrative and the concept has been compromised by the state. And again, the state is not just going to like roll down like a tank. Or when the current Speaker of the House says calling the National Guard, and you think of Kent State in 1970, the National Guard killing 4 white young people, and then you think of Jackson State, all-Black HBCU, Black students protesting the National Guard killing white students or white teens, and then white police shooting up the dorms in Jackson State and killing 2 more Black students. So our past is our present, and our future is going to look a lot like the present that's tied to the past unless we can control The predatory violence. Here are some of the ways I think in which we have had our grasp and our concepts diminished or weakened in terms of controlling violence. And some of it is linked to what I said earlier. So the purchase would be if the state funded the Ms. Foundation. Which it looks like they did. And you can do your own research. I mean, I'm just kind of surprised what people are not talking about, because it's not hard to find the data. But if the Mises Foundation gets founded and it's tied to Clay Felker, who was also a CIA handler with Steinem, and so was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had ties to Henry Kissinger— they were both at Harvard at the same time— So everybody knows each other, but everybody understands there can't always be blood on the floor. So this is when this hyper-intellectualism kicks in. You start having these foundations, right? And you start having these publications appear, and they're well-funded, so they have capacity and reach. And certain kind of publications are constantly circulating, and then they—

Speaker 3: Right.

Joy James: Keep citing— the authors cite each other's work. So, and I also find that in academia as well. I mean, I've gone to some prestigious places and heard late doctoral students say that they're not allowed to put my name in their dissertations, right? So certain names can populate and certain names need to disappear. So what happens in this kind of construct is that if people want to be seen by elites, if they want to be understood to be authentic authors, you know, they have multiple degrees, they're going to be profs, then you're going to end up with something like the Ms. Foundation, but with more of a kind of academic stamp on it. So I'm trying to say academia and popular discourse are not that far away, which means that scholarship probably has been Compromised as well if you're looking for hagiography and not really cutting analyses. So when Steinem creates the Ms. Foundation, she's astute enough to have Michelle Wallace write there, to publish Toni Morrison's— some of her early work. And I believe Morrison also co-authored with one of her sons who preceded her when he transitioned. Angela does this brilliant piece on Joan Little, who is, you know, stabbed the white prison guard who is raping her, and she flees. And then she's configured as a political prisoner. And then there's this trial where a young Black woman attorney is like, I am Joan, Joanne Little, or Joan Little. And there's this victory, but there's a way in which Black suffering, Black resistance, Black culture, Black presentation if it's still encircled by state narrative, by corporate narrative, by nonprofits, it's a way in which we're a feeding source to the greater culture or society, but we don't move the needle towards our own freedom. So when you mentioned some of those stages that I talk about in The Captive Maternal, from caretaking to protest to movement or movement-making, Mm-hmm. To marranage. And for me, that's the sweet spot, right? That's the way how you can get away from these productions and these minor tornades that are the liberal face of a predatory state. But what I also say is when you move to marranage and autonomy, that tends to be when people come for you because you're trying to get off the grid. You're trying to create an intellectual security zone, an emotional security zone, a material or physical security zone. And so what follows marranage is war resistance, because like in Attica, if you try to struggle for your rights in a way that is not performative or that does not produce commodities to be edibles by the state and then is with leisure, Then you become a problem. And so I'm not sure, was that Baldwin? No, it was Du Bois, right? How does it feel or mean to be a problem? For me, the issue becomes, how might we flip that? Yeah, we should be a problem. We should be problematic. But I think often we go into these streams that are heavily funded, If not by hard cash, giving people awards for being progressive, if not by hard cash, then kind of intellectual imprint of approval that we got the golden rings. So I'm not sure that completely answers your question. I'm happy to just circle back if I missed some of the key parts. But I guess what I'm trying to say That our movements themselves, if they are not grounded in risk-taking— I call it agape, you could call it whatever you want, fidelity— but if they're not grounded outside of a certain kind of petty bourgeois, bourgeois elite intellectual zone, then that's because they're not meant to function for the mass. And then if they're not meant to function for the mass, then that means that We don't plan to work with them or protect, you know, offer what limited protections we have, which means that we've agreed to the Minotaur's maze. We just want a shiny one.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of that statement, that function for the mask, I think the last or second-to-last time we had you on the show, you spoke about the gendered function of the Captain Eternal, in which you were still developing and fleshing out. a couple years ago. But throughout the book, you kind of contextualize Erica Garner and the Revolutionary Panthers as being representatives of that function. But some of the roles that you attribute to the Catholic internal assume or have been largely ideologically feminized, as you mentioned. But there are also roles that Black African people as non-gendered people have performed in vastly different contexts. And I'm thinking of you discussing the caretaking As, and I'm quoting here, confronting predatory violence as the marrow of femininity in its various forms. Self-defense directed disproportionately at women and children is not violence, it is self-love. Kathleen Turner defends afterlives so that we, that they, we can evolve beyond the triad centers of basic newborn growth. Breaking men, seeking the higher states that liberate us from all forms of violence, particularly state violence, means confrontations that liberate one from Fear the predator and the pompadour. Whatever exists beyond war resistance and the afterlife, the captives turn over retrieve in order to secure freedoms that reclaim our essence from the battlefields, end quote. So for one, I would love for you to discuss the concept of new bones because you begin the book with the poem titled New Bones by the legendary Lucille Clifton, discussing it as stabilizing communities. But you also retrieve—

Isaiah Blake: Mm-hmm.

Josh: Or recuperate care away from its predominant usage in the form of paternalistic work, nonprofit or state-based utility, expressing it in a footnote at the end of the book about our desperate need for more than emotional care, or concentric circles of security and self-defense required, end quote. And Isaiah, you can get in here as well, discussing the case of O'Shea's sibling, a queer professional dancer who was killed in an anti-Black homophobic attack.

Isaiah Blake: Yeah.

Josh: Leading to Memorial Ball, protesting with the local members of the Black queer trans community to share grief, care, and love. But you also note in the book, Joy, how the only thing missing from that act was a formal security apparatus. And it's not sufficient to engage in cultural performance and community in response to violence. And there has to also be steps taken to ensure the violence does not happen again, of course.

Isaiah Blake: Right.

Josh: And I think it is important because on one hand, I appreciate the almost genderless function of the Capitalist Intern as a formulation. But on the other, something I've noticed over the years is how people, specifically in left progressive spaces, speak on women, children, and/or trans people as outside of the medium of world historical progress and as not political actors, but instead as objects of that. And they should be subjects of other people, specifically men, doing the protecting, doing the serving, doing the militancy, if that makes sense, as opposed to, again, we ourselves assuming such a role. So I'll just leave this open for both of you or anyone on here to discuss.

Isaiah Blake: Right.

Joy James: Maybe Isaiah could go first because also not only does Isaiah have like literally being on the ground, I guess this is part of what I was trying to say. It's not enough just to read a text and it's not enough to organize in a nonprofit formation or something like that. You know, you have to engage in the material struggle in different ways, and Isaiah can speak to that. But also the book ends New Bones, Abolition with an excerpt of Isaiah's poem. You know, so we start with Lucille Clifton's poetry, a brilliant poet who's transitioned, right, about new bones and what we know, which is different from what they say about our reality. And then we close with this almost like orobust, circle of life and death and about bloody red beads and yigams, like what's in the ground, but also what appears. But I'll stop and let Isaiah make their observations.

Isaiah Blake: Hi, everybody. First and foremost, thank you guys so much. Thank you, Professor James, for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. And thank you guys at Melanin for Killing Capitalism for this question. Professor James and I actually that week when O'Shea was killed, we were together, we were working together on a project and we were supposed to meet on that Friday. And I said, Professor James, I can't make it to the meeting anymore. There's the protest that's happening. And it was after O'Shea had been killed. This was the week that Beyoncé had taken over New York for her concert, which I did attend. So I'm a little bit more in the politics of Of pop culture than Professor James is. But O'Shea and his friends had gone to that Beyoncé concert and were at a gas station in a part of South Brooklyn. And there's this kind of altercation between O'Shea and this young kid and this other group of folks, and he's stabbed and killed.

Josh: Wow.

Isaiah Blake: And there's this video that comes out and there's this question, but he's died. And in the wake of his death, because he was— the dancing that he was doing and given the influence that kind of vogue culture, house music has had on the album, that was really kind of, and continues to be a really important part of this dominant culture and part of Beyoncé's last album Renaissance. And so they were voguing at the gas station.

Joy James: Right.

Isaiah Blake: And so after he passes away and it's heard that this Black, this gay Black man dies because he was voguing, right? It kind of sends these shockwaves throughout the community, of course, throughout the country, but especially throughout Brooklyn and throughout New York. And, you know, we have our different, you know, community formations, whether you're Black queer or Black and just, you know, you go to church or you have your different communities. And the ballroom community is one of those. And I think it's in some ways, especially in this kind of neoliberal, gentrifying New York, it's one of these last formations. So for me, I was like, whoa, this formation that is often really well gatekept, where it's like there's a culture, there's a language, there's a protocol, and they're getting ready to do this mourning ritual in response. I almost knew that they were going to do it. And then when I saw it happening, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be incredible. So different organizations, different houses in the ballroom community, right, are like, we're going to vogue as resistance, right? Vogue as resistance. And that became a kind of beckoning call for folks around the ballroom community. And so, you know, balls, right, are battles, right? People, you know, there's a Black food thinker, Michael Twitty, who says, this is our candomblé, right? I mean, I'm not— Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The candomblé, the Brazilian dancing. And I remember when he said that one time, it was in a comment actually on Instagram. I was like, wow, so if these folks are going to come together and utilize the performance as resistance to galvanize around the death, right? I was like, wow, this will be a kind of new queer Black mourning ritual, right? We know how New Orleans Black people, you know, you see the videos of them getting together for someone dying. And I'm like, wow, this is a new way of dying that we see people doing. So I was like, whoa, this is, This could be really, really powerful. I have to be there. So I get to this protest and I was a little late. And I was like, I get there and all I see is a bunch of cameras. I see a bunch of people waving their cameras around. There are people dancing. And I'm like, what's going on? There's chants happening. And I was like, wait, I was looking for ritual, right? And then I also was looking for maybe there would be a power building that was happening and there was nothing.

Josh: Right.

Isaiah Blake: Right? There was these people who were standing around, people who were not a part of the ballroom community. So the community part was gone, right? And then you just have these cameras. And immediately I was like, I don't like this. I don't like this. And any of the power, whether it's that communal cultural power that we talk about or any type of resistive power, I think is kind of devoid. And we kind of go through this kind of process that we always say, someone dies and We start protesting and then we go through this cycle and you kind of saw and felt the cycle happening. I felt like it was going to happen a lot quicker, especially because he was Black and gay. And that's exactly what happened. We had these videos being taken out of there protesting. We're not protesting the state. We're not protesting the police. We're protesting a young 17-year-old kid. So the details of this whole thing kind of gets lost on me.

Speaker 3: Right.

Isaiah Blake: And I was like, okay, I have to. And Professor James was like, you gotta write about it. And so this turns into this piece called How to Live After We Die, which was a meditation on post-George Floyd protests and this new modern-day protest. Even actually one can say in the wake of Kent State and Jackson State protests, where we are always asking for permission to protest. And then now even after George Floyd, the most important part of our protests are our spectacle. I mean, spectacle was always a part of protests. Right? To show nonviolence or create this spectacle of our morality versus the lack thereof of the state when we've seen the civil rights movement. But then now in this age, we record ourselves dancing and these massive formations. I would even bring it to the current protests on these college campuses that sometimes seem to be without analyses, but it's just about having bodies and having masks.

Speaker 3: Right.

Isaiah Blake: But the question becomes, what are you actually doing to build? Because you've built the mask, but now what? And that was what I was thinking, right? Like, O'Shea was stabbed. He wasn't shot by the cops. He was stabbed. And unfortunately, you know, that was an unfortunate situation. But like, could there be a way that me as a Black queer man and other Black queer people who were there, right, be trained to protect themselves if they saw themselves or saw another person in their community about to get stabbed again?

Joy James: Right.

Isaiah Blake: Right? Like, why did we come there and do these chants and post videos and post audios and all these things? Why did we do that? Why didn't we try to figure out something? And I just was kind of, I just had some questions about how we allow social media, how we allow these current protest culture, these performance, performativity, this desire to go viral or be famous, kind of really occupy how we understand our resistance. And so that's the culmination of thoughts. I'm sorry that was long-winded, but those were many of the things that I was thinking about when I wrote the piece and when I shared it with Professor James. And I'm grateful that she put it at the footnote around how we process, how we resist, and how we protect.

Joy James: Thanks, Isaiah. I mean, I thought it was important. So it's a long footnote, right? And I'm grateful that Isaiah wrote the piece. It's in Logos, Journal of Modern Culture and Society. I believe that's the title, the subtitle, that's based at Rutgers University. But because for me, as important as the performative is, I mean, our whole culture is one of survival under subjugation and under war, war on one continent, war on the Atlantic, and war on another continent, right?

Speaker 3: Right.

Joy James: But I'm not quite sure how we understand culture within a larger setting in which everything can be turned into a commodity in some ways. So I feel like our movements can sow back to us. I feel like our language in the movements, the radical language, becomes like some form of hipster language.

Speaker 3: I'm sorry?

Joy James: I believe that even when we do important and productive things, we have to be very careful that we're not capturing, you know— I'm saying, you know, but maybe you don't, and I'm trying to be diplomatic based on what I'm about to say— that we don't think of people who've been captured and tortured as political prisoners. To be kind of symbolic in some ways, and so that we can elevate them. But then the question becomes, okay, what are we doing to get them out? And so that's the real question. It's like without virtue signaling, you could say, well, I saw Mumia earlier this month, but it's still the question like, what's the plan to get him out? Right? And I'm not sure we're having those conversations or debates. debates in terms of what our contradictions are, but also how Black death is monetized.

Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you both for— Isaiah and Joy, for your comments. Isaiah, as you were talking, I was thinking about the recently published book from Too Black and Rasool Mawat called Wandering Black Rage. And part of what they discuss in the book— I'm only about halfway through— But what they discuss in the book is around the ways that the visceral nature of Black rage against a violent, oppressive, unjust system gets basically purified of the rage aspect through the leveraging of the interests of Black elites so that the rage is shifted towards policies and actions of movements that in many ways end up Relegitimizing the state. So, you know, there's rage over police violence, and now Washington, D.C. streets are painted with a BLM slogan and things of that nature. And so what you mentioned there, I thought was really profound, especially because part of what you're pointing out is that, you know, the discussion wasn't really around self-defense, how to protect each other, which are all of these kind of specific things that very directly tie into the way that O'Shea was taken from us. Instead, it becomes about these other types of things that end up inviting the state or even liberals and moderates to become spectators to grief. And so thank you for that. That's all I wanted to say.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And to add to that, I think they're similar, and I think it speaks to what Joy was speaking of earlier about Black feminism. And what I've seen as well when it comes to feminists and queer and trans politics, which have been so detached from political struggle itself, and I'm really fascinated by that. And I think that even when I'm thinking about feminists, the dominant iterations of Black feminist intellectualism or politics, a lot of it takes the form of pop culture. A lot of it is focused on the dominant mode of pop culture.

Isaiah Blake: Yeah.

Josh: I think that we see this very same thing. I think I would trace it back, like Roger Berkowitz has this really good book called The One-Dimensional Queer, where he speaks about this, the kind of one-dimensional political stance that has happened within queer politics in general, which is that it has detached people, what used to be political struggle, away from political struggle and towards a more cultural form that is heavily focused on marriage equality and markets even. And so, yeah, I do think both joined, as Flora's saying, is absolutely correct.

Joy James: I would just add a little bit more to what you both said, right? So yes, Too Black has their new book out, and I think about a month or so ago was at Brown with Ashanti Alston. So Too Black and others have been working on the Pendleton 2 case. I suggest people look that up. And this goes directly to about care and security. So they're incarcerated, 2 Black men in Indiana, I believe, in the '80s. There's a white nationalist Klan formation within the guards, and they've decided to basically beat one Black prisoner who's talked back to them or fought with them, right, to death. And so the incarcerated Black people fight, they save lives, they protect the guards they took as hostages by putting them in a cell, locking it, And putting other Black prisoners in front of those white guards so that prisoners who are like, well, let's just equal the score in terms of dead bodies. Right? But the short-long version of it is when the courts agree that the Klan had organized an attempted murder, those people, white males, are only going to do a couple years. The 2 people who are currently incarcerated, I'm sorry, I don't have all the details in front of me, so please Google Pendleton 2, the number 2. They collectively get about 200 years. So they're still incarcerated. One of them was supposed to be out in 3 months. Another was going to be out in about a year or 2, but they risked their lives. I mean, as Isaiah was saying, what does it mean? How do we live after we die? I mean, being in prison is a form of living death.

Josh: Yeah.

Joy James: They sacrifice their freedom in the world outside of prison to protect the life of a Black man. And they do save his life, and he eventually gets out years later. But they've been doing 44-something years plus. And again, how we could redirect our attention to the severity of the violence arrayed against our people both inside and outside and understand that it's not just dancing in terms of the ball dancing. There was also a couple years earlier, people were doing the Electric Slide and twerking, you know, in D.C. as expressions of culture, which I'm not opposed to. Yay, dancing. I'm good for it, right? But what I'm trying to say is that there's been this muddled smoothie that is not even drinkable.

Josh: Right.

Joy James: That's been served to us, that our very appearance to the state and society has to, in some ways, pacify them, that we are not in rebellion. And so if we're going to dance and if we're going to cry and we're going to go to funerals, and those are all rituals. What immediately came to mind was President Obama singing Amazing Grace and crying. At the Emanuel Church, AME Church, after Dylann Roof murdered people in a prayer circle, that obviously we have a lot to present, but I think what we are presenting are manifestations of ourselves and our desires that might register pity in other people. Because we don't want them to fear us. And I actually think that's our training from pre-K to PhD. And so this gap about what is our capacity for self-care equaling self-preservation, which means some kind of security apparatus, I don't think we're heavily invested in that kind of an equation.

Speaker 3: Right.

Joy James: And I would end on this. I was at a— I was asked to give a keynote at a conference, doctoral conference, COPLET, in the University of Michigan. And then I was going to Atlanta anyway, and they asked me to check in with some of the forest protectors. And I met with 2 of them. They were both Black. One presented as male clergy. I don't know people's pronouns. The other one as a 20-something-year-old Black woman who had come back from Europe after meeting with the anarchists. And the anarchists had asked, after Tortuguita was shot 57 times as a forest protector who was unarmed, shot by Georgia state troopers, they were asked, what is your security mechanism? And she— again, I don't know her pronouns, so I'm just telling you as I saw the persona. She said, We don't have one. And I had asked her 5, 10 minutes earlier, what's your security perimeter or how do you protect? And it's like, we don't have one. So I think that that's very odd that we believe even when we see death, and they knew Tortuguita and they were mourning and they were traumatized, that even when we're traumatized and we see death, We cannot articulate what the state does not want us to speak.

Isaiah Blake: Yeah, thank you for coming in. I just wanted to add too around what Akwaeke was talking about earlier about the way that identity and culture relate to this kind of overall conversation. And then you brought up Josh, I think Roger Ferguson. And so there are different ways, right, to think through Blackness and queerness and our culture, right? So there, you know, there's this, I think this is a way that the piece that I wrote and the reflection that I wrote was in conversation with New Bones, right? I mean, the critiques being placed there, right? Our culture exists in a spectrum, right? So, you know, we have, you know, minstrel songs and minstrel, you know, that we were forced to perform and forced to do. When we were in the house playing that banjo, right, the banjo was a really important element of Black culture, right? At the same time, when you have Black people, right, you know, in the field singing these field songs and they're like, you know, telling you these messages in the field songs, that is also our culture.

Joy James: Right.

Isaiah Blake: One of these cultures is being manipulated, right, to entertain. The other part of this culture is being used to liberate, right? Nevertheless, they both come from the same continent. They both have this kind of, you know, they have these musicological roots and connections to Africa. They both represent our culture. Same thing about like the health benefits of amaranth versus like macaroni and cheese.

Joy James: Right.

Isaiah Blake: They both represent our culture, but the function in our bodies are quite different, right? I share that to say that sometimes in the past, the way that identity politics and these things have been taken up, particularly around queerness and gender, we believe that if we compound our identities, that becomes our radical or revolutionary lens. And then, so then when I go to a Black queer protest for someone who died that was Black and queer. It is enough that we compound the identity. When I say, man, this person was stabbed, how does he not get stabbed again? And how does I, as a Black person, you know, walking around in Brooklyn, not get stabbed again? And not to deny his death, but to prevent more of them from happening, because we know they're happening, right? So when I title it like, how do we live after we die?

Joy James: Yeah.

Isaiah Blake: You know, it was because I was like driving down in Brooklyn and I saw like a dope Someone with a similar name. And I was like, that's it. But really what I was talking about is that if we often are kind of thinking about Blackness as connected to this ontological death, and we like, it's our identity that connects us to death, so then what? Then what do we do after that? And I just sometimes think that we compound identity. Oh, like being a Black trans woman, right, statistically means that there's these higher, you know, precarities that exist. But that doesn't also then equate to that fact that just being Black and trans equates to like you have a radical politic, right? Like, we still have to kind of think about our work. And that to me points to people like Kwasi Balogun. Now I'm thinking about, you know, this is different, but I'm thinking about Essex Hemphill or Marlon Riggs, right? They're meditating, right, on queerness. They're meditating, right, on their being. They're experiencing, right, you know, life.

Josh: You know, I'm not so— I don't know how many of them are like theorizing it.

Speaker 3: Right.

Isaiah Blake: You know, they have different ways, but I'm just thinking about Black queer people who might not always fit into, like, you know, the current politics of Blackness and queerness. And, you know, I'm hopefully going to grad school soon. I am going to grad school soon. Geography at UC Berkeley. And we'll hopefully take a little bit more time to do this research, to read these people's work and try to read into the ways that they're thinking about, you know, how they be, which is what I consider, you know, queerness, right? Like how we be in the world and how that gets taken up by the world and through anti-Blackness. And then how they think about how we live and how we respond to death and dying. And they, I think, have some questions about how to live as well. When I think about Kwasi Bulagud and his politic around Black anarchy, I don't know, but I just think it's not enough to just say, I'm gay, I'm trans, and thus I'm free, or this makes me free. Right? Or, and also vice versa. I dance, I sing, and what I do when I dance and sing, when Obama sings Amazing Grace, does that mean that our culture will— people are liberated by that act? No. What's the function of the song in that moment, in that space, right? Obama gets to cry, he gets to sing our songs, right? He gets to be Black too. Does that mean he gets to free us, right? Well, obviously when I take down his function, right, there's something else that happens. So there we go back to—

Josh: Right.

Isaiah Blake: New Bones abolition and to the theorizing of the captive maternal not as identity but as function. And I just wanted to kind of highlight that when we think or try to think through queerness, culture, and the captive maternal.

Joy James: Thanks, Sizan. And I would say, you know, there's the captive maternal in the registers we talked about. There's also in the early chapters, it talks about compradors, like people who actually don't want to engage in that kind of care or protection Or solidity in terms of creating a formation or foundation where our organizing could be more effective. So Obama was the first Black imperial president, which, you know, I don't know why we— I guess we were emotional in 2008. But like, an imperial president is an imperial president. Like, whatever the color of the skin, it's not going to change the trajectory of the politics.

Josh: Right.

Joy James: And the politics continue to be predatory. Yes, and I appreciate Akiyo, you know, saying that it was John Balagoon Cole and Christopher Naeem Trotter. Those are the names that I was trying to remember in terms of Pendleton too. I would also add that Ashanti Alston, who is a political prisoner veteran, BLA, I believe that, and also now an anarchist, That they were at the gathering, at the conference. And when they presented, I think the title of their segment was Somebody Throw a Cell Phone. And so then we're back to George Floyd. And I've had these weird things like, well, what if— you know, people are crying and they're yelling, but Chauvin's knee is still on Floyd's neck, right? And so I'm like, well, what if we did—

Josh: Yeah.

Joy James: Something unexpected, like— and forgive me, this is just how my brain works— like, start dancing and kicking out. It was just a weird ballroom without the ballroom, right? Just something to startle them, to stop the suffocation. But our paralysis means that we scream, we cry, we weep, but we stay on the curb like they told us, even while they commit murder. And so that can radiate from a single one To killer robots being sent over to Israel, to phosphorus bombs. It's collective death, mass death, individual death, small groups and pods of people dying prematurely and violently. And I always think of Mamie Till-Mobley, what she did after Emmett Till was murdered and his body was thrown in the river. She flipped every script about decorum. She demanded an open-casket funeral. She allowed the teen that was disfigured, her only child, to appear in a coffin. People walked by the coffin, brought their kids, told them to look inside. It sounds like all about abuse, right? It's not. It is a stage in war resistance. But the question is, do we want to resist war or merely survive with as many benefits that we can gather under the grid of these types of structures?