Becoming Unsettled: Why White Virtue Will Not Save Us

Good morning. Greetings. Uh, my name is Alex Forester. I serve on the board here at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and I am tremendously excited to welcome everyone today for a conversation that promises to be as provocative as it is timely. Thank you, as always, to the incredible team at Schumacher for making these important gatherings possible. Thank you, Bio, and Aaron, for proposing this encounter, and most of all, thank you to the more than 1,000 people around the world who are joining us today. We are so glad you’re here today.

We have the privilege of hearing from two remarkable thinkers and fellow sojourners, Bio Komaf and Aaron Manning. Their vibrant philosophical voices are lifting up a poetics of thought and action for our time, gesturing towards new ways of being, new possibilities for the 21st century. The invitation they’re inviting us into is not an easy one. It is about race and coloniality, identity and belonging, histories of oppression, and how we navigate our way towards something new in this tender and turbulent moment. They want to critically reexamine how we’ve been engaging with topics like diversity, equity, inclusion; how these issues are playing out in our institutions and our public discourse. They are unsettled by what they see, and they want us to become unsettled as well.

These are difficult and contentious themes, but now is not a time for easy conversations. Bio and Aaron suspect that the very friction surrounding these topics signals something deeper at work. Their invitation today is to join them in the discomfort and stay long enough to see it from a new angle. Now, let’s be clear: there is no need to join the bandwagon of superficial and reactionary critiques against DEI, nor to burn in effigy a suddenly out-of-favor phraseology while ringing our hands about how to recalculate the politics of the moment. And yet, as our title declares, it is true: white virtue will not save us. Not simply because white villain is so plainly on display these days, nor because race itself is a false lens for analyzing the problem. There’s something deeper at stake, a challenge that calls into question our very notion of identity—of who we are and what we claim to be. The act of claiming an identity itself. It’s about our culturally ingrained ways of inhabiting the world as settlers, seeking a place to claim and to call our own. The challenge to become unsettled and to stay unsettled goes further than we might imagine. But let’s not be mistaken: this is not a call to retreat from a deep commitment to justice, to equity, to diversity in our world. Quite the opposite. As Bio so often reminds us, when times are urgent, we must slow down in our haste. In the rush of righteous anger, we risk missing something important, or worse, becoming the very thing we oppose. And this is a helpful word of caution. In our instinctual response to being attacked, we may fall for a deeper deception of defending the character of our position rather than the position itself. If anything is clear right now, it’s that the shape of resistance must take a different form in the years ahead. So before we rise up in courageous opposition or shrink back in fear, let us be precise about the true nature of the maladies we face, and let us turn toward the practices that genuinely move us in a different direction.

So let’s dive in. Aaron and Bio will each share their thoughts on our theme, on becoming unsettled, before we move into what I’m sure will be a lively discussion. We’ve set aside ample time for Q&A, and we invite you to submit questions as they arise via the Zoom controls at the bottom of your screen. Rather than reading them verbatim, we’ll be using them as we go to shape the conversation, to surface patterns and common concerns that draw together in this moment. Every question will be read and shared with the speakers after the event. And so, with that, let us begin. Aaron, Bio, thank you. Bio, let’s start with you.

In a time of such upheaval, the rise of nativism and white nationalism in America and beyond, I pick now as a moment to engage this idea of white virtue. What is unsettling you about this?

Well, thank you, brother, and my dear sister here. Um, I’m feeling a bit tender, and and and when I’m tender, I’m less eloquent, right? But I I I want to—coming from the side, you see—and see if I can play with that. Um, oh, that that question, that question reminds me of this this quote by Toni Cade Bambara: “Are you are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? Um, it’s it’s almost like a challenge to our um addictions to wholeness, to being good, and what that repeats, what that logic of being good uh perpetuates. But maybe I’ll come in in this way by telling a story, because um, well, I come from a storytelling tradition, um, and um, but because I’m tender, I I don’t—this this story that I want to tell has not been told before because I only thought about it two hours ago, right? So I haven’t told it before, but as I was preparing for this—preparing, you know—um, I was wondering to myself how best to convey what’s at stake, right? How best to to to tell the story of what’s um the kinds of movements that re-incarcerated us, even with the buoyancy of our liberation narratives, you know, finding greater and greater articulation. How best to suggest, how best to convey that we might be moving around in circles, and that the thing to do here is to break away from that cycle of repetition. How best to speak about this? So I borrowed from the the beautiful seminal work of um, of what’s his name? He wrote *The Famished Road*, Ben Okri, the Nigerian author who wrote *The Famished Road*. He tells the story of this uh this tradition called *Ogan* in Nigeria. Um, I’m not going to go into the details of that because that’s another—but the *Ogan* uh uh spiritual tradition is about the crossings of spirits from the ethereal world to the human world, and it—you might say that it was a way for the peoples of Nigeria to explain and to explore uh infant child mortality—that is, why their children died so early. One of the stories they told was that the spirits that uh came and became their children were so enamored of the world that they came from that they went back immediately, right? And so the thing to do was to try to tie them down in this world, and this is the exploration of that beautiful novel called *The Famished Road*. So I thought of a a sequel to that, or a prequel to that story, and in my story, which I’m tender about because I’ve never articulated it to anyone before except myself in the bathroom, um, is about a wild God, and this wild God crosses into the human world to play with human communities, right? Every time this wild God shows up, it introduces itself to humans, right? And each introduction is uh powerful moment of spectacular signs and wonders, right? And it elicits worship, and then the wild God goes back. But every crossing is—maybe to this wild God—just a fleeting moment, a few hours in the ethereal sense, but to those human communities, it’s generations, eons have passed by. But this wild God keeps on crossing, coming back and then doing something, and everyone just falls—goes down in worship and trepidation—until one time when this wild God shows up and comes to the humans, but no one shows up, no one is there to receive it, and it notices—I say it because it’s too wild for gender—and so it notices that the humans are gathered in some kind of beautiful stadium-like hall. It goes there and it notices that there’s a show on. It doesn’t understand these things that are happening and that people are demonstrating things to each other which elicits applause. And so this wild God thinks it’s just a moment to introduce itself like other times, and so it shows up again and then it does its signs and wonders, expecting the same kind of response before, trepidation, but people applaud, you see? People applaud. And it’s worried. That’s not what I want; that’s not what I’m looking for. Something is wrong here. And so it tries again. It pulls a rabbit out of a hat; it it it produces flowers out of thin air, but people applaud while still in their seats. It’s polite now. And so the wild God quickly learns that something is desperately wrong; that where it once elicited worship, it now elicits applause. Something has gone wrong. Doesn’t know what to do, but quickly it becomes sublimated, or becomes acclimated rather, to this new infrastructure, and it tries to climb up the ranks of seeking more applause, right? It tries to it tries to do more acts, right? It it notices that there’s an economy where the more the higher you climb in this economy, the more applause you get, and this applause can be exchanged for living standards that are probably better than others. And so it it kind of forgets itself and tries to climb the ranks. By and by, a companion of this wild God steals into the human world, you know, enacts a crossing and looks far and wide for its friend, notices its friend in this show, in this place, and tries to convince it. Says, “You’ve forgotten, we are supposed to be elsewhere. What are you doing here?” And the friend does everything it can to convince it. Says, “I have to do this. There’s a show in five minutes, and I have to be right there on the stage.” Um, and then this friend says something to the wild God and says, um, “If you don’t come back now, you will lose all the pleasures and the joys and all the things that we’ve done for generations and millions of years together. You will lose these versions.” And the wild God responds, “But if I don’t continue here, I would be letting my competitors off the hook. I would be letting them off the hook.” And that’s the punchline that I’m going for. That’s the punchline, because that’s exactly what a brother said to me in 2018 while I was teaching in Middlebury College in Vermont. I had spoken about processuality, posthumanism, the power of ontology, and I was speaking about why I cannot tie myself down to whiteness—where whiteness is not white people; whiteness is an arrangement; it’s a particular rule of the game; it’s the structure of experience; it’s the shape of action and agency, right? It’s virtue in the ways that virtue colonizes and stabilizes and justifies—and I said, “I have to—I cannot anchor myself to these uh parameters of being,” and this person stood up and said, “So basically what you’re saying is that we should let white people off the hook,” right? And it’s so beguiling a way of thinking, you see? It’s so tempting to think that way. We—it’s it’s very hard to think in terms of systems, in terms of fields of relations. What we hear most of the time when we speak about whiteness is white-skinned people. What we hear when we speak about Blackness is Black-skinned people. But what Aaron and I are speaking about today is not Blackness as an identity. Blackness—I mean, you could speak about Blackness as an identity. I mean, there are justified ways to speak about Blackness as an identity, just as is it also justified for the wild God to say, “I’ll be letting those guys off the hook. I have to compete.” It’s true, right? But it is also true that there is a wild crossing, and that is a radical hospitality of of of terms, a a prior generosity that precedes those arrangements. Blackness is not identity; it is not mastery; it is not a property of a certain collective of people. Blackness is a way of being that breaks the rules of being, right? It sidles being; it travels obliquely, and yet being—what philosophers might call ontology—is indebted to this sidling, to this fugitivity, to this slippery um fugitivity of things that we summarily call Blackness. In the same vein, whiteness is not identity. I mean, you could speak about whiteness as identity; that’s also um articulable, but whiteness is a structure; it’s the rules of the house; it it it, you know, the way that Aaron speaks about whiteness and reads it together with neurotypicality is seminal and rare, you know, to do, right? It’s it’s and it’s not a way of—it’s not a way of saying—as people might hear it—“You’re letting white people off the hook,” or you’re saying white people aren’t racists, or you’re saying you’re saying um Black people shouldn’t struggle for justice. It’s it’s that those anxieties and concerns are best articulated within the house that whiteness built. But do I want to stay there? I don’t want to stay there. So when we’re speaking about being unsettled, brother, we’re speaking about—we’re speaking about a different generosity, a syncopated, a syncopated patient, or a syncopating line of light that is not available for property ownership; it is not a furniture piece within the house that modernity built; it is a different vocation at work in the world right now. This is what we might speak about as parontology, right? It is a way of being that breaks the rules of being. And when I say a way of being, I’m not saying it is my way of being; that there are certain indigenous cultures—you know, this is already speaking to the romanticization of cultures, right?—that there are certain cultures that have a way of being. No, I’m not saying that either. I’m not saying it’s my way of being. I’m saying, if you can have it, and even if you can’t, try to imagine a world of art that does not have artists behind it, right? Try to imagine art moving by itself. Try to imagine um aesthetics without subjects or objects. Try to imagine beauty without the one who paints beauty. Try to imagine a world that is alive and doing things and proliferating itself and upsetting paradigms. That’s what we’re talking about; that there’s a lot more afoot, a lot more at stake than the the anxieties that we traffic in within the paradigms that we’ve learned to settle ourselves in. Unsettlement is not doom and gloom; unsettlement is space for exile; it’s Blackness as escape, and it’s not escape to Freedom, where freedom is an arrival point; it is freeing itself, because even Freedom can become a source of coercion. We’re trying to say here that there’s something that is upsetting the ways that we think about the world that is inviting us to other modalities of practice, other hows of being, and maybe that is the sense of the conversation we want to have here. Maybe my final uh comments—final in the beginning—would be to say this: as you have eloquently said, brother, it’s a very tender thing to hold, and I want to invite my siblings here who are watching and listening and writing and thinking and jingling and wiggling with us. I want to invite you not to come at this conversation with the frontality that we’re used to. Come at it from the side. Ask yourself, where is this coming from? Don’t be quick to say this is wrong, because that might serve you well. It might serve you well to say this idea is wrong because it doesn’t jibe with mine, right? That may be all well and good, but we’re not here to convince you or evangelize; we’re here to dance, to provoke, to invite a different kind of movement. Come at this from the side. The Yoruba people, where I come from, people say that wisdom does not come from the frontality of the lips or from speaking; it comes from from the side, from the cheeks. There’s something that is oblique about wisdom that wants to be heard now and not captured as a new ideology, or what Aaron is saying, or what Bio is saying, or what Alex is saying. And with that, I would say I’m here with my beguiling t-shirt to be in conversation.

Bio, thank you. Um, Aaron, so much there to respond to, to build off of. Same question to you: What is making you unsettled um about these themes, and and what would you lift up in in in dancing a conversation with Bio?

Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Bio. Thank you, everyone who showed up that I can’t see. Um, I want to—a second—I’m going to take myself off the view. Nothing worse than watching self speak. Um, I want to come back to your definition, Bio, just now of unsettled. You said, “A different generosity, a syncopation, or syncopating line of flight not available for propertied ownership; a different vocation at work in the world; parontological; a way of being that breaks the rules of being; a tender thing to hold.” Um, as of my way into the conversation, I wanted to share with you something I wrote a few days ago. Um, I write to work out how I think. For me, writing has always played that role. So I’ll just read a few lines and then let’s move into the dialogue, trialogue. I’m nervous about this conversation with Bio. I wrote this the day before the tariffs. I am nervous about this conversation with Bio. How to think in these times? How to think with a logic that still remains attuned to the depleted ecologies of all we are asked to settle for? How not to be enlisted by the false problems of this particular era—the nationalism, the belief in those systems that, while currently being violently erased, like DEI or EDI in Canada, were not the promises they pretended to guarantee? How to resist a logic of settlement? I have a book coming out later this year called *Unsettled*. It’s both a love story of an intense friendship and an account of being unsettled by the gilded promise of ancestry as the pretendian repair. It has never been. Ancestry is a safe haven for white virtue, it seems. Find an ancestor that can get you out of the shame of your settler centrality and re-enter yourself around that. More than 20,000 Québécois have claimed Indigenous ancestry these past two decades, in the very same period that colonial systems have registered their claim of decolonization here in Canada. Pretendian—what we call those folks who pretend to be Indigenous. Pretendians are not individual problems; that is to say, they are not a problem that can be reduced to a single person, but they are individual problems insofar as they are the apex of where individualism takes us and where whiteness most fervently shines. *Unsettled*, the book—*Unsettled*. Editors: We are living in a time when scripts are pretty much laid out. Being white-skinned means being a very particular kind of ally, according to these scripts. I follow Stephen O’Harney here: There is no such thing as an ally to Blackness. The very belief that there could be some kind of neutral accompaniment to Blackness, some kind of benevolent upholding, describes the abyss of white poverty of thought and of being. As Fred Moten says, “There is no good white person, because there is no good person.” That there is no good person should remind us of what Saidiya Hartman calls the burdened individuality of freedom, and what you talked about earlier, Bio. This Saidiya says is where emancipation leads into that burdened neoliberalism. If you thought colonial accounts of race could be emancipated, you are caught in the imp—imagination of whiteness, norops what thought cannot encompass. And I’m thinking here with Derrida: It is because the movement of thought that Blackness proposes cannot be sequestered by existing ontologies—something you just said, Bio. This is why Blackness is always and only parontological. There is unease when white-skinned people speak about these things. I thought I might as well say it straight. The fear is complex, and I feel it too, both as a speaker and as a listener. It’s a fear that whitewashing will get rid of all the edges, that thought will be retransported into the ontologies that frame being within the limits it finds comfortable; that the enthusiasm to be good will overpower the complexities of process; that white folks will get off the hook; that we will be set free of the racism that binds us to our whiteness. But all of this is in the logic of individualism, working toward the impersonal, means being more than equal to the movement of thought that exceeds any one personing. That’s what Fred means when he says there is no good person. It means practicing difference without separability, thinking with Glissant and Denise Ferreira da Silva; it means sidling, an aesthetics of Black sociality, thinking with Hortense Spillers—that is absolutely irreducible to the one. This is hard to do when you have assumed your self-centering as the very definition of existence. And this is, I think, why white people are suffering, particularly in the face of the of the fascism that we’re living in this moment. So it’s hard to do when you have assumed your self-centering as the very definition of existence. It is hard to do if not white-skinned, when the whiteness of the surround is constantly repersonalizing you around its abysmal definition of race. White supremacy is emboldened as it never has been in my life. This is a moment that will seem extraordinary for those white-skinned people who have been given to assume, like me in their liberalism, that things have been leaning otherwise—lots of DEI around—for those who have lived the constant reduction of their sociality into persons, the continual individualization in the name of racism. This is not new; it is just louder and more direct. It seems to me that this is what we white-skinned people are now learning that Blackness, in its parontological force, has known all along—what the shape of that foretold emancipation will take if the logic is not skewed into another register. The Black radical tradition has known the limits of DEI. It has known that the seemingly opening paths to the art market, to the literary market, were still tethered to the whiteness that gave the momentary priority for its own gains, because the market will always want to grow, and nothing grows it like the spice of Blackness. What worries me most about having this conversation, Bio and Alex, is that we won’t say these things—although I guess I shouldn’t be too worried, cuz Bio, you always do—but I do worry that I will be cowed into acting as though what is being so quickly dismantled by fascism was really worth keeping. That’s my biggest fear—that I won’t be able to think into a parontological logic of the both/and that recognizes that while it is of course vital that life is livable, the most dangerous thing we can do is give into the prism of livability that the logic of colonization bestows; that in the name of fascism, I will settle. Wow.

Um, thank you, Aaron, Bio, for such a provocative invitation into a topic that’s so charged. The the questions and the comments are already coming in, and I’m so grateful for the way that you have brought us into this subject that’s so tender, both at a personal level and so active in our world. Um, today, listening to you both, I imagine that many people might be surprised or confused by the way that the words “whiteness” and “Blackness” are being used, and I think both of you have have brought a really helpful way of understanding that you’re talking about something more than skin color, more than ancestry, more than race. Um, you’re you’re gesturing toward a different understanding, and uh some of the questions that have come in are also resonant in in my heart. You you’re pointing to a connection here between whiteness and modernity, uh normativity, um legibility—Bio is something that you have written and spoken about uh before—and uh and and this in some ways is the connection to this movement of settling. Um, and so I I guess what I want to ask about is um, insofar as we lift up Blackness as a contrast to this way of moving and inhabiting the world, um there’s a risk of essentializing Blackness as resistance, as even fugitivity or escape, reinscribes the the power relation between them. And so I wanted to pull out and ask uh maybe Aaron, um if you could talk a little bit about the connection with neuro-normativity and neurotypicality, and Bio, I’ve heard you speak about this in the context of modernity, um and this prior generosity, this the lines of flight that make sure that we don’t position Blackness merely as the resistance that can’t be captured, but as a different kind of Freedom entirely. Um, these are the the things that I’m seeing coming in. Aaron, would you be willing to to make this connection with normativity and neurotypical?

Yeah, sure. Do we have all [Laughter] day? Um, well, I moved slowly and thought. Um, so this is a thinking that has taken me probably about 15 years to grow over several books, so um I don’t want it to come across as something too even or too pat. What what I can say is that in my work in neurodiversity, which was happening a long time before it was a sort of common word—in the beginning, when I was thinking about neurodiversity, most folks didn’t know what it what it was doing—and so there was a lot of effort in in trying to compose ways of thinking with neurodiversity that people could recognize um had value. It it, you know, at that moment of 2007, 2008, um when I started thinking about it, people just didn’t believe me that there was anything interesting or good about neurodiversity, and and I think we we’ve come quite a long way in that regard, but it’s important to to recognize that the folks that I collaborate with and I’ve thought with the most—the autistic community, we would call the classical autistic community, or classical autism, many of whom um don’t speak with their voices still—are not in any way um integrated into education. There is no school in Canada that can uh, you know, even at the, you know, kindergarten level, that can manage um uh inclusion. So so in in working with these folks, um as I was beginning to try to articulate the complexity of life and thought and perception in these communities, they began to explain to me that it was very odd to them that people kept wanting to make a hard difference between a body and a world, and they found many, many, many ways of telling me this: “Aaron, I don’t understand why people seem so sure that they know where their body ends and the world begins.” This happened over and over and over again, and as I began to understand um the the complexity of that thinking, I began to recognize that this presupposition of separation was very convenient to policing um people. It’s very convenient when you’re teaching someone if you can enforce a separation between a body and a world, and we do it all the time by saying, “Pay attention, sit up straight, look me in the eye,” etc., etc. Anyway, years went by as I developed thinking about neurodiversity, and and I realized after a while that a problem that was often coming up was that people wanted to make neurotypicality a [Music] person, and in in doing that, what they wanted to do was to give far too much credence to the pathology of neurodiversity, which isn’t what had—what had been growing in the movement for neurodiversity. It wasn’t about pathology; it was about other logics, other ways of engaging the question of what it means to be in the world. So I started to think more, more and more systemically about neurotypical and to think about the ways in which we are enlisted to be neurotypical through education, um through familial cultures, and by that I mean very, very early um ways that we are organized as bodies to appear smart; the ways in which we are um taught to recognize intelligence; the ways, for example, in which we immediately feel, most of us in our bodies, that a person who can’t hold their head up or who can’t speak must not be intelligent; the way these hierarchies are laid out. And as that grew, I began to realize that there was an incredible relationship between whiteness and neurotypicality; that whiteness was grown into shape in that way. And I’m never, ever saying that white-skinned people don’t have the capacity to sidle whiteness in a very singular way, because we do, but I am saying, perhaps most importantly, that if we don’t address neurotypicality, we can’t address whiteness, because they come absolutely hand in hand. And and one of the ways in which I came to think this—one sentence that was extremely helpful for me to think this—was a sentence shared out with me by Fred Moten um around 2015 when he said to me, “Aaron, I think all Black life is neurodiverse life.” And what Fred was saying to me when when he said all Black life was is neurodiverse life is very much what Bio was saying in the beginning, which is to say Black life, which is to say Blackness, which is to say what doesn’t fit within the ontological rendering of being, what exceeds the capacity for being to think—it’s Blackness—cannot be neurotypical; it will fall out of neurotypical; it can’t—it can try, but the policing of neurotypicality is such that it will always, in the end, exclude. So that’s how I’m thinking about neurotypicality and whiteness.

Thank you, Aaron. Bio?

Well, I I I grew up in uh Christian traditions that taught me to think in terms of original sin. Brothers—brother, we’ve had conversations around these theologies, and we will continue to have conversations around these theologies. Original sin, the promise of salvation, working out your salvation with fear and trembling, right? The Lutheran scripts, the indulgences, right? Virtue. I remember as a teenager wondering if I was going to be raptured, if I was going to—when the trumpet sounds—if I was going to be taken away, if I was going to be spirited away by whatever was spiriting bodies away. Um, but one of my favorite stories to return to was the original story, the account of when sin entered the world, right? And when we were chased away—humans, Adam and Eve—chased away from the Garden of Eden, and that we’re living outside of the Garden of Eden, which I don’t think is particularly compelling to me now, because I still think we are in Eden. And the way that I would say that is, or explain that, is we’re still living in the onto-theological structures that shape a particular account of being and what it means to be alive. It’s the scripts that are so invisible, right? It’s—they—we really don’t—I think it would be—it would scandalize us if we realized how encased and entrained and embodied we are within these grid-like structures, right? It’s the idea, for instance, that we are individuated, autonomous um beings, and we have will—we have will—we make decisions, right? And we have souls. I’m not sure if there’s some theological jury that is still out at determining whether it’s Souls that have us or we have souls. I’m not sure about how we talk about these things now, but it’s a very, very um beguiling entrainment of value and worlds that teaches us to uh isolate ourselves from the world. This—what Aaron was speaking about—this is neurotypicality as an ecology of relations, not as a property of an isolated brain, not a type of brain, right? Not a neurological function; it’s the poetics of relations; it’s how we move in the world, right? Aaron, what was that phrase that we came—while we were speaking—I was in Hamburg—is maybe two years ago? I think about crabs, right? Something—why am I doing this, you know? You came up with that—that was yours.

Yeah, yeah. It was just spontaneous in conversation, something around something—how we—it was like cross—it was crustation epistemologies or something like that, right? That sideways crust—

Ah, Bio—something like that. We’ll go back to our notes, but the idea of walking sideways was very particular to us in that conversation that we had, and all our conversations are conspiratorial, you see. Um, so so the the—it’s it’s to really stress the point that we are—we are within these onto-theological structures, and that creation isn’t dead. We are still being manufactured. Subjectivity isn’t done and forgotten; we are manufactured in the daily, right? Molecularly, in how we relate with each other, in how we relate with furniture. Creation didn’t happen in the past; creation is an ongoing, futural concept; it’s still happening. Our bodies are still being shaped this way. And I stress this, you know, thinking with the generosity of my dear sister’s offerings here, um, that as a father of an autistic boy, I am learning these things slowly as well, right? I’m learning, for instance—I think there—Aaron—that first told me that—was that I was masking. I was doing a lot of masking. Masking, for those of us who aren’t aware of the term, is is trying as much as possible um as an autistically energetic um becoming to fit within the structures of neurotypicality; is trying to present as normal, right? It’s all the ways that we tell ourselves that we are good. It’s the it’s how to be a good, functional body, right? It’s not so dissimilar from what plantations in the antebellum South proliferated or tried to proliferate—good bodies, bodies that are good for an economy of relations, right? Or a bad body was a body that tried to upset that paradigm, to try to escape the plantation, and there would be diagnostic, you know, tools meant to preserve, you know, the the coherence of that operation, such as “mania.” I speak about this all the time, which is a way of saying you are sick if you’re longing for Freedom, right? And so so it it’s here that we notice that we are dealing with not the other, not the essentialized other on the other side of the aisle, right? Not the individualized thesis of um the person or personhood, you know? Our fight—and I’m going to borrow this theological language—our fight, our struggle is—it’s not against persons, brother—you know how to quote this better than I do—it’s—we’re fighting and struggling with principalities and powers in high places. I would amend that a little bit and say in low places, that this principality is a horizontality that we’re dealing with, a grid-like framework that is cuddling, shaping, manufacturing, and um uh, you know, adorning experience, where experience is not my experience or your experience; it’s the shape of a field that permits or disallows certain kinds of movements in the world, right? This is theology; this is fugitivity; this is parontology; this is Blackness, not as identity, not as a property, but as a way of moving. So I spoke about my son briefly. I just want to say this: that my my son teaches me—he’s my prophet; he’s my—he’s my teacher—and the story of him around the circles is probably spoken ad nauseam now, but it’s a beautiful exploration of how, you know, when he says to me—speaking around, walking around in circles—when I asked him a question, that “Why do you keep walking around in circles?”—seven years old—he says to me that, “Dada, there are things I have to do that you know nothing about.” There are things I have to do that you know nothing about. And I don’t know that I’ve ever received words like that without, you know, as profound as that, coming from the lips of a seven-year-old; that it’s not you and I doing stuff, that the world is doing stuff with us as well; that it—if if you think about agency and accountability and intentionality as reducible to an isolated person or subject, you’re missing and obscuring the world of spiriting and transversalities that are happening. We are encased in these ecologies; it’s not about us versus them; this—something afoot—that you’re missing out of or on. So, brother, that is why I think about Blackness as paratheology or paroral; that is, there’s something erotic afoot. Uh, Blackness—I don’t want to contrast Blackness with whiteness as if Blackness is the opposite of whiteness, like opposition is a department within whiteness. Blackness has no opposites, right? Blackness is is too fleeting for those kinds of architectural uh imperatives. Whatever whiteness decides is is its Opposite, you know, is is due to it, but Blackness has no opposites; it it it is too promiscuous to to fit within that framework. And this is why we say there’s a way of thinking about Blackness as oppositional, as “We will get some—as I need a space at that

Start by saying you know I'm going to sound like a philosopher for a second. Um, that there are no good words and bad words; uh, really, there are operative concepts and there are false problems. Um, a false problem—I'm getting the concept from Aron; he talks about false problems as problems that already carry their own solutions. Our world is replete with false problems; they're the—they're what keep us distracted and busy most of the time. Mhm.

And one of the main ways in which we engage—and I'm, you know, I'm being general, but let me just be general for a second—in false problems is by policing language. So you know, you can listen to us right now and think that's not what I mean by Blackness, or this is not what I think whiteness is, or I don't think racism, but the problem with that is that there will always be a debate. I think that's what you were saying in the beginning, bio. The interesting thing, I think, to us, bio and I, is not at all the debate. You can call it spaghetti or or or Cheerios; it doesn't really matter. Yeah, what we are interested in is exactly what you're asking, Alex, the question of the par ontological.

Now, it's a really hard concept, and I don't think you—if it's new to you—it's going to make sense in an hour. I've spent years trying to understand what it is, but I can tell you how I got into it, and maybe that'll take you on that journey. So just a few lines. So there's a—there's an—um—there's an amazing book by Namnam Chandler called *X*, where he engages, like he does in so much of his work, in extremely close readings of the work of—of Du Bois. And what he does in one place is he goes over four paragraphs of Du Bois, um, carefully, carefully, carefully, and he—he reads Du Bois trying to work himself through a thought of Blackness. And what Du Bois is doing is he's—he's looking at the modalities of his period, which is an earlier period to ours, in trying himself—Du Bois—to understand how Blackness is defined. You know, so he goes through phenomenology; we know these arguments, right? He goes through all of the ways in which we should be able to settle here and now the question of the domination of white-skinned people over black-skinned people, and he finds that he comes up short; that none of these theories are adequate to the problem. I mean, white people agree that none of these theories are adequate to the problem; they can't figure it out, right? Like they can't figure out biologically that they're better than black people, and so on. And he writes about this, and then he says, Blackness is—is a problem for thought. When Du Bois says Blackness is a problem for thought, the Earth must have shaken, because if it can't be thought under the conditions through which thought has come to define itself, another modality of thought has to be born. And that's what Namnam Chandler names the par ontological. Now, on you [Laughter], bio.

Um, that—that is a beautiful rendition, sister, as always. Um, Chandler, Hartman, Fred Moten, you, Brian Massumi, you know, and way back even we can go to Gisson, Duus, Delini to speak about these movements, these sidling gestures, and how they resist captivity, uh, without also sterilizing or thinking of captivity as a bad thing, right, which is also a tempting uh move to make. Um, but I will—let me use story to—to play with yours, um, so that maybe we can think about the par ontological as—as something that escapes where we think of thought as not something that proceeds from individual independent minds, but as a field of tensions, a field of accommodations, where accommodation is—you might think of accommodations as the viscosity of relations that precedes bodies but makes the conditions for embodiment, right? It's—it's—it's how relationality precedes the things that relate, and accommodations explain why we have highways or why we have the internet or why certain kinds of relations uh lend itself to measurements of intelligence, for instance, like how fast you can type, right? It's—it's—it's not that intelligence is some universalizing thing that is available for everyone at every time; it's that within those accommodations intelligence shows up in this way, and we measure it in this way, right? IQ and all of that.

So um, when I think about par ontological, I think about that which cannot be accommodated, that which is so outside—and I'm thinking about—I forget this philosopher, brother; I told you about this philosopher when I visited your home; you said you didn't like him; he speaks about the outside—but his name escapes me at the moment. You remember who this is? No, no, he's French, but I can't remember. Um, he spoke about the outside in a way that—that—that appeals to my sense of processuality, but I digress. Um, here—here is where grace comes in. I—I think of grace as the excessiveness that cannot be accommodated. It's—it's something—it's not a deficit. When I speak about cracks, for instance, I—I'm—I'm speaking about something so full that it—it spills; it leaks; it's beyond the transactionality, the ways that we uh know how to um practice, you know, worth and value. Uh, you might even refer to the story of—of salvation, right? And I'm going to use it in this very limited sense, because every time I see Alex, I just want to have par ontological, right? Because that's what me and my brother like to do, right? Um, the idea of the—of the messiah, the—the Messiah, you know, is—comes into this space where original sin has taken over; everyone is a sinner; we deserve hell, basically, in—in particular readings of soteriology, right? We deserve to go to hell, and—and then the Messiah comes, and the Messiah is amazing grace, right? It's amazing because we don't deserve to see the face of God; we don't deserve to be in heaven, but something interrupts the logic of the accommodations that we're used to; something comes in—a bleeding Lamb of God—and takes away that logic or dismantles it enough for something else to spill through, right?

Even if you don't trust that story—and I'm not here to evangelize that story; I don't think of myself within the orbit of that story—I am attuned to this idea of a grace that upsets the rationalities that we're—that we're framed in, and this is the par ontological power here, holding the weight of something that's—is to the side of and is not to be reduced to the—to the central thing. It's how EUR people, for instance, and villages were often framed—at least metonymically—the king is in the center of the village; the shaman is at the edge. The place of power really isn't the center, just like I, as an immigrant, as a constant visitor to the United States, knows that the place that is more powerful, that marks my skin more than any other place, it's not the White House; it's the border, right? That's where I perform neurotypicality; that is where I perform being a good Black person, right? That's where I show up and I—and I smile, and even when I'm not prompted, I—I submit evidence that I have a PhD or two, right? Like it's where I perform that I'm a good subject. You see, let me in. And so it's—it's the border, right, that is powerful, and it's where grace lives; it sidles and interrupts and disrupts the field of relations, and that is how I think about the par ontological. But the Messiah here, brother, is not a figure at the end of history; it's not a time; it's not a collective; it's not an ideology. The Messiah is a crack; the Messiah is a crack, and it doesn't offer salvation; it offers indeterminacy, where—in the term—not even freedom, right? You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. I—I really don't know why I'm going theological here, but you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, right? Um, is that John 8:32, right? This isn't about freedom. Blackness is not to be tied to freedom, because freedom, as I said earlier on, could be just as much a vocation of the house, just as much a room in that carceral dynamic.

Amazing. Uh, one of the—the topics that's coming up um is the—the parapolitical, and the ways in which uh the—these concepts that we have discussed as a—as a conceptual foundation um feed into the—the practical ways in which we are seeing um this play out in the world and what we want to see. So you know, I—I want to ask—you know, when I—Aron, thank you for your opening remarks. You said you were nervous; I was nervous too. Uh, when I read the event invite for today, I was—I was unsure what angle to understand the title's emphasis that white virtue won't save us. It's not that I disagree, but I wouldn't frankly have—have thought to characterize DEI efforts in this way. Um, but clearly you are seeing something and pointing to something important here. And so I want to ask, as we move into the parapolitical, why is this the statement to make now? Because we're in the context of a world that has really quite quickly and quite voluntarily complied, stripping away language about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it feels like the last thing we need right now is more backpedaling and hand-wringing, as if we made a political miscalculation in our emphasis on the importance of these topics. So I know that that's not the angle you're approaching this from, but as—as there are attempts to move into the political, move into the—into the sociality that you are describing, what's—what are you wanting to lift up in this moment about DEI, or in the Canadian context, EDI, and white virtue? Aron, Aron, I want to direct this at you. Bio, I—I've got a follow-up on this that I want to direct to you. So Aron, I'm wondering if you would comment on that.

Yeah, was—I was wanting bio to suffer through this question, but I—uh—I'll take—I'll take the risk. Um, I'll try to approach it. So if you're listening to this, I think it's—it's one moment where it's important to understand that Canada is not the US, and we do have different [Music] um histories and cultures. And around Ed—what I'm going to say is very specific to Canada. I don't want to speak um in a way that is—can, you know, can seem like a blanket statement, but I'll say a few things. Um, so first of all, I think we need to understand that what is being weaponized as DEI right now in the US isn't DEI; it's just blatant racism, sexism, and—and—and heteropatriarchy; it's just closure of all difference. I mean, I don't think that the people who are, you know, in the White House talking about DEI know what it is. I don't think they know the history of it, where it came from, where it's operative, what it's doing, how long it's lived, what it was called before that, what its history is in relation to um admissions policies and—and so on and so forth. I don't think they have a clue. Um, but that's really not that important in this moment where we're seeing people um lose their ability to um do the work that—that they were um perhaps for a short while able to do. So I guess what I'm—what I'm trying to say is when you're trying to think these questions, you cannot think in binary logics; you just can't, right? I mean, I have worked for years about, you know, with the problem of the institution, while I have recognized that the—that—that—that the work that Lula did in Brazil in the last 20 years that opened up the doors to Black folks to study has changed the—the landscape of education in Brazil. You can think two thoughts at once. And so right now what I want to do is to think two thoughts at once in the Canadian context. Um, it's probably fair to say that the vocabulary of EDI came into use more so around the—the question of indigeneity than Blackness, and uh around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If you're Canadian, you know about this moment, which has all of its problems, and I could speak more about it, but is a moment where there's an apology that is given to the First Nations. I don't want anybody to think that this apology did that much. Um, indigenous folks in Canada have been fighting back for 400 years, and they know how to mobilize, and they continue to mobilize. There continue to be, if I'm not mistaken, 60 communities in Canada um that don't have um potable drinking water. So we're not talking about good conditions; we're talking about um institutions, particularly universities, being told that they have to become equitable, and that in order to become equitable they need to put in policies where they build up their um faculty, and—and in the first instance that means building up an indigenous faculty, which isn't so easy when you have more than 50% of indigenous um young people not finishing high school. And um, I was thinking today—I was trying to think back in terms of timelines, but I can tell you that before the pandemic and the years before the pandemic, so let's say 16, 17, 18, 19, a group of people that I was part of were trying very, very hard to get Black studies at the University where I teach, and we were told more than once by deans that it was not something that—that was interested—that the University was interested in doing. We were told this directly. We were told things like, "Hey, Aron, you teach these things, so we don't need to hire Black people to do this." I was told these things directly, right? When George Floyd died, suddenly Concordia got, you know, awake to the problem and got a Black group of people together and organized this, but any—no Black person thought that the world was being changed, just like no indigenous person thought that a few universities hiring a few indigenous people was the change that Canada—like, no, the only people who think that this produces change are white people—people. And—and that's my concern with EDI, because when the rhetoric becomes such that you can figure out how to be a virtuous white person—and I know that white people know what I mean by this, because—because it's a very tempting thing to want to be—speaking from experience—when we—when we figure out what the rhetoric is like, what the right way of doing this is, um, then um we can continue to do our work with, you know, less concern about whether there is systemic shifts—there are sh—, you know. So the last thing I would say, you know, and this is—this is what I've been writing about, but—but if we were to say we really want a neurodiverse environment of learning, if we were to say we really are going to work toward decolonial systems, well, the first thing we would have to do is get rid of all tuition; the second thing we would have to do in the university is to get rid of all grades; the third thing we would have to do is to get rid of all presupposing hierarchical relationships; the fourth thing we would have to do is to start again at the question of what knowledge is and how we learn together. So obviously it would destroy the university, right? So—so those are the—those are the more complicated conversations, but I want people to hear that I'm, of course, not saying we shouldn't have diversity; I'm saying the opposite, really. And—and in saying the opposite, you know, one way I think that we might want to go forward, if—if you want to think your way into the par ontological from the ways in which we more normatively talk about race, is stop—stop saying "racialized" to mean non-white people. Thank you, Aron.

Bio, I want to invite you to come in on the same theme, but—but I also, you know, it occurred to me last night as I was thinking about our time today, um, is—is DEI a thing in—in India, in—in Brazil, in—in Nigeria? Is this an American and Canadian thing? Because there is certainly a history of peoples doing harm to each other in—in systemic and systematic ways over long periods of time. Are there even variations on this theme happening in other parts of the world? And also, if not, what does that say? What does that reveal? What—what is this? Um, so I'm—I'm curious about the international perspective on this, and also for you, bio, what it is that—when—when you look at these efforts um in America or—or beyond, what it is that you're seeing.

Well, we have DEI in Nigeria; it's called—cui—I shouldn't do this, should I do this? I'm going to do it. We—it's called catch-up imperative, right? It's—it's—that's our DEI, 'cause I grew up in a racially more—more or less monolithic society. Um, our tensions were felt—or are felt—it's an ongoing thing, you see. Our tensions are felt in terms of how we view our lives, how we view a good life, what a good life looks like, what it means to live well, what it means to thrive, what it means to be successful, you see. The African independence movements, the—the 50s, the 40s, that gave birth to Ghana, which brought Martin Luther and—and civil rights activists and leaders, right? All those movements that gave birth to many African nations learned a lesson that we don't really speak about today; we don't really stay with those troubles and those problems today. They give birth to civil rights heroes like Kwame Nkrumah, right? Um, uh, you know, you know, they gave birth to really powerful persons, but the gist of what they were saying—and sometimes this is drowned out in the—in the celebratory aesthetics around their heroism—is that by winning we have lost something, right? We are now playing a game in which winning makes sense, right? So it's—it's just like the Wild God; you're now caught in a framework where it's either win or lose, right? There isn't something else to do. So Kwame Nkrumah famously tried to create an African Union, which was, of course, stopped by, you know, the city set upon a hill, the free and mighty American allies and stuff. But let's not go there, right? It's that every attempt to subvert the global nation-state, Westphalian order of things, um, you know, is subverted; you're either killed or buried in a drum, like Muammar Gaddafi, for instance; you're—you're—you're killed or dismissed somehow. So the way that the tensions have shown up, for instance, on the African continent, is now in terms of trying to catch up with New York, trying to look as much as possible—it's us telling ourselves we deserve that kind of life too; we can live like Toronto; we can have cities and streets like London, right? And so our—the conversation isn't about diversity as such; it's about how do we get more of this beautiful Kool-Aid stuff called development? How do we—how do we flatten our worlds even more, right? You can hear it neurotypically, normally, pathologically in the hissing that erupts on a plane when you're landing in Lagos, right? When you're landing in Lagos and people—coming—Nigerians who have lived in the United States or who just went to the United States for three weeks, right, start hissing, and you could hear people having conversations, right? Like, "Oh, we're back in this country that doesn't have electricity and potholes and stuff." You can literally hear people lamenting returning home, right? The catch-up imperative is the coddling of subjectivity that entrains minds and anticipatory modalities to think about the other—a broism is what I would call it—as the thing to go for, right? And so it may not be the same conversation that's had across the pond with uh—with our siblings talking about DEI, but it's also whiteness, right? To those who are saying that whiteness isn't white, this is how whiteness is operationalized as well on the African continent, right? Where we're all Black, but we're still very, very white. We're white because of the ways we've been shaped to think about ourselves, our children, what it means to be educated. We're white because we're rectilinear; we've been shaped and cuddled and morphed into this rectilinearity that—this is how you show up in the world. If you're not coming into a business room with back straight, then there's something wrong with you. This is what even our most radical educational enterprises are proliferating—the idea of a total mass and the idea of the person who is successful, the Jesus with the business suit, right? This is what spirituality—this is what it looks like, brother. But see, from the global South, we're not entirely bereft of fugitive discourses that teach us—after years, like my dear sister here—after years of developing and cultivating these errant thoughts, right? These thoughts that don't fit in—that white virtue will not assuage white centrality; that white guilt will not upset—you know, feeling guilty will—will not upset the morality, the structure of the house that entrains such neurotypical experiences. And there—many good white people across the planet, and white virtue is a product—I just want to say that it's a capitalist product; you can get it off the shelves these days; you can buy it in a workshop; you can do the work and get white virtue, right? And take your white virtue pills every day, and I don't want to dismiss this, but I want to bring it home and land it in terms that are visceral and also true, especially for me that knows that good white people are still part of the systems that make oppression possible, because white virtue teaches virtue is the currency of settlement, and virtue can only produce more settlement, right? Right, justification—does that? Justification is the rooting of bodies within settlement. Virtue never yearns for—yearns for apostasy. Blackness is apostasy; you see, it—it cannot be virtuous; it cannot be good, right? And this is what the parapolitical is—where politics produces virtue, legibility, uh visibility, categoricity, right? The—the—the thing that is the parapolitical is not an object of actors working hard to be good; it's the knowing that being good is now becoming exhausting. Is listening to people from the African continent, for instance, saying, "Please stop being good white people and throwing your trash away, right?" We can't—maybe we cannot say that, because there's probably nothing else to do except throw your trash in carefully colored boxes where it's taken away to some city—in—in some mythological city—where it returns to you as a good, virtuous product that saves the planet. We know it doesn't do that; we know that it comes back to us. So we're trying to say—when you see through the—when you've blasted away from the lenses of the par ontological, when you see through systemicity, when you see through fields of relations, when you understand the world through processuality instead of atomized individuals who coagulate to themselves or convene to themselves virtue brownie points, when you see the world that way, then it's possible to say that you can be good; you can be morally opposed to oppression in Gaza or apartheid in South Africa and still be entrained within the logics that make it possible. That's why we—we cannot afford just doing good any longer. Blackness is sensuality; is sensuous solidarity. I'm making words up as we go along, but that's what Blackness does, I guess.

Well, let—let's keep going with that, because you know, when we hear a phrase, "white virtue," and for good, you know, our attention turns to, "Oh, white," you know, and—and we've talked about that, but the "virtue" part of this phrase uh—that is being lifted up and—and—and questioned, I think, is really—there's a—there's a deeper philosophical position, maybe even a theological one, um—that the idea that virtue itself will not save us—why or otherwise. And you know, this is itself a provocative and disorienting statement for some. So how could we be against virtue in a world, right, with so much predation and violence? So I—I want to—I want to—what—what is it about virtue that you're suspicious of? And if not virtue, then what? Because there—there are understandably, in—in the audience, people are saying, "Okay, you know, what are the practices? What—what—what—what—what do we do? And if being good is problematic, please explain that." But then also, you know, what—what does—what—what should we be looking to—to navigate the ethical complexity of our lives and the world around us? You get to start this time, bio.

Yeah, bio, if you—you—you were on that train, if you want to keep going, we can start.

Okay. Okay, Aron, I see what you're doing; I see—I see you.

Okay. So—so um, I know, but I'm not telling. No, of course, I'm—I—I don't know. I—it—it is really—again—difficult. These are the things we have—more than not—just the hundreds of people here, but the people that will listen to this who are wanting to hear something, right? And I'm feeling the pressure to speak in that way, right? To—to say something, to articulate something, whereas my preferred mod—it is to stay with the chaos of it, right? Is to—is to—just as Resmaa Menakem, my brother, would say—is to wiggle; is to just sway from side to side, because that's cognition. Cognition is not just finding the words; cognition is actually often not finding the words, right? So—um—but—but I—but I feel the—the pleasure and the invitation to say something around this, and maybe one way that I want to enter into this is—is to say my difficulty lies in the fact that I—I was seemingly brought up in a culture that bracketed virtue, right? You know, there's a sense in which virtue is often invisibilized; it becomes backgrounded so hard that—is the template by which we see every other thing, right? It's that if you're good, this will happen; if you're bad, this will happen. But then a culture that knows how to hold the space of the trickster is probably capable of noticing that virtue is not everything; that virtue could be a form of care, yes, but even care can become carceral, right? Even care can become closure, right? And so we're able then to tell the story of a trickster who, in the face of the approach of white slavers, right, from the Americas, from Europe, at the shores—a trickster who looks and notices that if I fight back, if I resist, my resistance could be part of what sustains this—this—our captivity. So what would be—and I'm not—I'm only storying it in a way that—I'm not saying that in the stories we tell—issue said, "What should I decide now?" It's much more nuanced than a decision we make that we say, "Okay, how not to be virtuous?" It's not a to-do list; is what—is what I'm trying to say. There is a sense in which Blackness is the idea that we are already par-virtuous; it's not the thing we have to get to down the road. That this is what—in conversation with Aron—I speak about white syncopation—that even though whiteness pretends to be total—totalizing and closed and complete and there's nothing else to do—that it is leaking; it is constantly leaking. We are also leaking; none of us are—none of us presents as complete; we only present in the world partially, right? And so the—the—the sense of hope I get here is that where politics fails, there is an art form that does not require organizing in the way that we speak about organizing—like, "Let's start an organization that will make this happen; let's—let's meditate so that we can go beyond virtue," right? In the way that some people often say to me, "I get what you're saying about entanglement, but how can I practice being entangled?" It's like, "No, it's not a thing you now have to do; it's not teed to individual action." They're like, "Hm, okay, I like this stuff about, you know, I'll be entangled on Tuesdays; I can afford to be entangled that—but Wednesdays I cannot give up my—my individual Wednesdays." So it's not—it's a thing that is already afoot. Whiteness depends on Black movement; it co-opts it; it pathologizes it, but we are already leaking, and art projects are already afoot; a planetary unsettling is already afoot, right? It may not look cohesive or coherent or institutional, but that's the point. The idea of the parapolitical is that there are processes afoot—syncopating lines—that mean we are not always fully available within coloniality; we are being spirited away as we speak. So I'm not sure where to go with this, brother; where else to go. I'm just going to toss the hot potato to my—to my dear friend and sister; you have it.

Um, that was beautiful. I—the—the challenge, and you said it so beautifully in the beginning, Alex, is how to be equal to the moment while also resisting being equal to it. I mean, this is the—the challenge that I think bio and I are trying to think about, right? I like that way put in. So there's—there's—the danger, as I tried to say in the beginning, is that in the—the um terror of what's happening on the ground right now in the world, we will say, "Well, this—these thoughts are—are too—too big, too complex; they're not vital; we can't fight what's happening with these thoughts." And I think what—what you were trying to say, bio, and what we're trying to say is it's both and, you know? I'm seeing in the comments lots of people saying, "Well, what are you doing on the ground?" We're doing lots of stuff on the ground, but right now we're trying to think about, you know, what—what is it like to take two hours and—and think through a few concepts and wonder what they can do and what they are doing, right? And so I went and looked at the etymology of—of virtue, and it doesn't surprise me that it says that it's a—it's a Latin word—word, *virtus*, um, derived from *vir*, the word for man, to refer to all the excellent qualities of man, including physical strength, valorous conduct, and moral [Laughter] rectitude, you know? So—so I—I think that what we're trying to say is you can use the very same weapons to try to get yourself out of jail, but actually you're just going to be building the jail again and again and again, right? So—so the most—there's an extraordinary kind of policing that is white-on-white policing; it's—it's takes up an enormous amount of time, and it's what I was trying to address in the beginning, and it—it—and that kind of policing operates along this—this definition of humanism that is called virtue. And—and the thing is that while we're policing each other, we're actually not going to have much time for our practices which we are engaged in, you know, and which we can talk about. It's just that two hours is short, you know. Um, so—so yeah, I think—I think the problem is that white and virtue are the same word, and—and so it's sort of like saying white—white cannot save us, or virtue—virtue cannot save [Laughter] us. That's—you've gone and broken it now, Aron. That's so helpful. I mean, I just—what—what I'm hearing is um virtue as a recipe uh betrays what we're—what we're trying to talk about—a set of steps, a set of—even—even saying, "Hey, go do this," um—and that by turning it into a recipe it becomes a land to be settled and colonized by whiteness all over again, and it just gets reinscribed in—and—and—and so that is—that—that is an unsettling of the good trouble kind, but there is—I am haunted in—in—in this conversation by—so you know, we know instinctively that love can't be prescribed; there is not a recipe for a marriage or a friendship, not a set of steps or a formula, and we understand this even if it's difficult. Relationality is difficult; agonistic, yeah. But what about rupture and betrayal? What do we do when real harm has been done? So much of this struggle at a societal level revolves around history—about what it means to seek forgiveness and reconciliation at scale. And you know, some argue for—for true apology and restitution. And Aron, your—your—your point before about the apology—I—I want to kind of lean in—be like, "What? Really? The apology doesn't matter?" It's certainly not enough, but you know, we are also living in a time in which people are saying, "The past is the past," and—and rejecting any responsibility for its echoes in the present. As a culture, we—we seem to lack language and—and rituals to reckon with the sins of our ancestors and the responsibilities that they place on us now. And so you—you can accuse DEI efforts as being a form of cheap grace, but as flawed and frail as gestures like land acknowledgements or DEI committees might be, they're—they are at least trying to step into this void. So it's not this—then what? Um, in the context of—of harm—and—and guilty history, how should we pursue forgiveness and reconciliation, not just personally, but at the level of nations and peoples? Is it even possible? I want Aron to respond to this.

I will respond to this, but I just want to quickly insert this in—in there, right? That is—is it possible to notice—is it possible—these are what-if questions—is it possible to notice that that which harms also secretes its own solution, right? That which harms—and that which resolves harm could maintain a certain way of being in the world, right? That harm could be an aspect—a department—within a moral framework, right? That there is no way to think about harm except through virtue, except through—through this entrainment, this accommodation; there is no way to think harm isn't an idealized Socratic—or I should use Platonic—or universal thing. Harm is psychopolitical; it is social, material; it is grounded in relationality, which is itself a matter of accommodations, a matter of ecologies, a matter of moralities, a—a matter of rectitude, right? And so—is—is it possible to—to start to investigate—to ask about um what the medicine for harm propagates? Is—is—is there—is there room—and is there also room—this is probably more vital for me at this moment—is there also room for suggesting, in response to your question, brother—like, "What then do we do if we're not doing these things?" Is there

Autonomous thought, and and so many other thoughts, is that if we don't attend to the question of property, we're not attending to these questions at all. You know, so we could have begun the conversation there. You know, what is it to be property? Because because we've been talking about what it is to be propertied by identity, and and so one of the things that that that Brian Mumby, my partner, and I do with other people is we we work quite hard to take land out of the property market. Which is to say that we we purchase uh land; we have a project called the Three Ecologies Project, which is an an open invitation for people to come and and practice in the transversality of the three ecologies: the the social, the conceptual, and the environmental. And we work to try to think about our allegiances to property, um, which are very very complex. For example, they have very deep links to questions of inheritance, and they have very deep links to questions of insurance, insurability, right? So we we buy property to ensure a future, and we inherit or or propose property into inheritance to to um cement that future. Those are two ways in which property functions.

I don't have much patience for land acknowledgements, except if an indigenous person asks me to engage with one; of course I would. Though that's not generally the case in my experience. I don't have much patience with it because they're always coming from mortgaged enclosures. If you're not actively thinking about other ways of engaging the question of property, I actually don't care what you think about who owns the land that you're sitting on, and and actually owning. Do you see what I'm saying? So but I don't think that any of those things that we do, which are very very earthy things, believe me—I mean most of my time I'm not on Zoom—I don't think any of those can be thinkable without other Logics. So so when people in the question and answer are are impatient with, yeah, yeah, these are a lot of words I want to say to you, but they're not, they're practicing other ways of thinking; that's what that's all we're trying to do, right? Because down the road I can tell you that when you're trying to give property back to itself, when you're trying to give land back to itself legally, the system isn't going to meet you where you want to be met, because the legal structures don't exist to think that way. And so you're going to always have to be an an approximation of of a certain kind of um commitment to other ways of living, and the only approximation that is going to kind of teach you how to do that is the one that's going to be born in those practices, I think.

Let let me also piggyback. Can I can I just say say this? Thank you, beautifully. And and just to—I said I wanted to respond to this more substantially after asking those questions—and yeah, Aaron's beautiful comments are really helpful here. It it's it's the—I'm I'm I'm often baffled when this the question of harm comes up, because there it betrays from the questioner or from the question that is posed the—a kind of surprise that harm exists, right? Like harm, right? It it's it it it almost suggests an expectation that that harm is is is an outlier, whereas morality works by justification, by justifying harm, right? It it organizes harm into categories. You might say that there is justified harm and unjustified harm. Justified harm is the nation state we are living in harm, right? It's it's punishment; it's uh, it's think of it—crime would be unjustified harm. So it it organizes the world into this is good harm, this is harm that we can do. If if I beat you as a police officer, that's harm that is tolerated, is legal harm, but if someone snatches your purse, that is unjustified harm, right? It organizes harm in this way, and that's how whiteness works, by organizing harm. But whiteness also works by organizing the palliative, right? By teaching you that the thing to do is to rebalance the moral order. But I understand that Blackness doesn't want to or reorganize the moral order; it knows that every moral structure will necessitate harm. So harm in whiteness is not an accident; it's a necessity, right? And even the the ways that we respond, even our liberation narratives, our discourses, the way that we respond to harm is also harm, gaining intelligence. And so Blackness does not seek—Blackness works in harm, through harm, right? It's not seeking to reduce harm; it's it works through harm, in harm, to get to apostasy. It it it's not seeking to rebalance a moral order; it's just like saying, brother, if you had a time machine, you wouldn't be bothered about punctuality, would you? Unless you forget how to operate such a time machine. It's that the generosity of such a machine means that you—there's no like, oh, when do I get there, right? It's the future, the future, the present, the past becomes this different kind of ecological relation. And I'm saying Blackness does that, to sidle and upset the ways that we think about harm, which is a largic conversation to have, but here there you go. I I'm I'm so glad that you both have have brought the conversation here. We're we're at kind of the a final question, and your comments have have teed it up, I think very beautifully, because I think I I want to bring us back to the question of identity and becoming, and your comments about propertied identity is is very helpful, and and and the theme of the praxiology of relation are real, even when they're not a desire for a recipe or steps. How do you know what becoming becomes? Um, something very important to understand. And Aaron, in the book that you have coming out, you write very beautifully about becoming. You both write powerfully about this theme, about what it means to inhabit the world as a tangled multiplicity, never complete, never fully bounded or stable, and it feels central to everything we've been discussing and connecting directly to understanding both what it means to become and what you mean about becoming unsettled and staying there. So can you bring us back to to that theme of of of becoming and becoming unsettled and staying unsettled, and how it is that you are wanting to lift up this kind of identity, or maybe we're not talking about identity, but becoming past property—identity for sure—being and remaining unsettled? Uh, Aaron, would you uh go first? No, Bio, you go. Really now? Okay. I was going to fish out some—I've been sharing some of my footnotes with people—uh, I was I was going to fish out some of my footnotes to share. This is the final question, right? Um, Alex, yes. Okay.

Um, so the question again is about uh becoming, right? Becoming unsettled and staying there, becoming unsettled and staying there. Um, I think it it would it would feel a bit heavy to open the—I know we have threaded this conversation, maybe not centralizing it in terms of explaining what we mean by minor gestures, but it has threaded through this entire conversation um as a field of tremors that disrupts the architecture of of systems, right? Um, and that systems are indebted to minor gestures. Change doesn't happen in the in the mola, in the big spectacular ways we've been entrained to think about change; that it happens—I don't want to say small, because that's still a designation of scale—it's it's like small versus big; it's that it's it's uh it's transversal; it's it's fugitive. This quality of Blackness we're speaking about, around which change and transmutation and shape shift happens. So when I hear becoming um and staying there, I cannot but recall this moment of walking through a shopping mall—my favorite story to tell with my wife and children, with EJ and Alex—you know the story, but it feels like it wants to be told again briefly—of my son having a moment, and it feels only appropriate to end with a wild God. I began with a wild God, and I will end with a wild God—that it seems like I was wanting to pathologize that moment when my son started to spin, and when he started to to wrestle with—I don't know whether the lights or the very idea of a shopping mall, right?—and he falls to the ground, and I'm trying to gentrify him; I'm trying to bring him back to the safety of neurotypicality; I'm being a good father, you see. So I'm trying to bring him back, and my wife, EJ, whose League's more wiser than I am, notices my struggle from a par ontological space, you might say, and notices that the harm and the good and the medicine that is being offered is maintaining the logic, you know, of our stability. And so she moves with unsettlement; she moves with something generous, and she comes to me and says, step aside; it's almost like I can feel your exhaustion; there's a parapolitics here; step aside for a moment and let me attempt something different. And she, instead of trying to get him to act or behave well, instead of wanting him to be a good body, right? Instead of wanting him to mask again, she gets down on the ground and lies next to him. This is a minor gesture that birs a weird Fidelity, right? And I speak about weird fidelities as commitments to tensions that do not recircumscribed, right? As the virtual side of a binary; it's like there tensions here; I will go with them. It's—is—saying, oh, there's a slave ship; I'm not going to shut down this activity, yes, but I'm going to work through this harm to cize the world. And so we travel through the slave ship, and EJ lies down on the ground, and there's a weird Fidelity that is produced in that moment. I don't know what has rippled out as into the expansiveness of SpaceTime as a result of that seemingly isolated moment, but staying with it long enough is Art, right? And we will—it's not like, oh, let's get into a purity of the minor gesture, or there's another Purity to enact; no, it's that we are against Purity. I think I could say that for you, Erin and Alex, that it's not about finding Purity at this point, like you said beautifully, Erin; we will do many things, and we are contradictory, and it's fine or not, right? But being here, being in that place of—we Fidelity—let me put it this way: if you if you feel like you're no longer called, appal, named by the politics of today, then you are being syncopated; you are already participating in parapolitics. If you feel exhausted with productivity, you are already participating in parapolitics; it's not something else to do; it's how we are being done with, or how we're being done, how we're being cooked in this moment. And so lying down next to my son feels like an emblematic way of speaking to becoming, right? And we don't know what we're becoming, brother, but that's not the point; the point is the line; the point is not the arrival; the point is the snaking line and what it produces along its path. That's my mic drop. [Music] Beautiful. I think um often about that moment that I wasn't there for, Bio, in that shopping mall. Yeah, I had moments like that, been there for moments like that, and what I've often felt in those moments as that what we were seeing was what we should be feeling. So there's something so impoverished in our ability to stand up straight and uh continue to take on the um reduced qualities of life that we um enlisted into. So when K goes on the ground, he's revealing the pain, um and and perhaps that's what I would say about your question, Alex, that I don't actually think we become unsettled; I think we're unsettled, and we work really really really hard to pretend, yes, that we're settled. And the the problem is that um when uh we feel threatened—I think this is true of all animals—when we feel threatened, we protect our territory, and when our bodies are anxious, we're feeling threatened. And so we are in a time of pronounced identity in large part because it's a really vital protection mechanism when things feel very unsettled. But I I think that if you meet unsettled with unsettled, something else becomes possible, and I'm not saying you can do that in every instance; it isn't this isn't like a general how-to; yeah, just you know, it's it's really—and it's not a pep talk; it's really just a question that I ask myself every day: how to how to do this today, you know? How to make it possible to live today. And like you, Bio, I have learned to mask, and I know the cost of it, and that we can do this kind of Zoom talk suggests that our masking is, you know, working quite well. Yeah, it is, it is. But you know, I guess the the main thing I would say is that when we think of becoming as a lot of people do as an ongoing sort of um catapulting forward, we're not doing Justice to the concept. Becoming is full of capture and redirection and uneasiness and falling into the ruts and wishing your kid wasn't having a meltdown and wondering how weird it is that you're taking land out of the market and therefore have more contact with banks than you've ever had in your life, and and and working in a university even though you don't think that that's where knowledge is best explored, and and you know, on hard days telling your kid that you should be the dictator of the world and it doesn't matter what they think. We do all of these things, um but like you said, Bio, we are done by the world, and maybe that's what we're just trying to say is that if we allowed the doing by the world a little bit more, if we allowed the the that that separation between body and world to to not be um uh weaponized in the way that it's weaponized, maybe another way of thinking could be possible. And in this, you know, problem for thought that is Blackness is what most propels Bio and I to be in conversation. And so we have come to a beginning, a comma, the beginning, an ellipses, a dash. Um, I am I'm so grateful uh for this time, for the time time that everyone uh with us in this conversation has contributed. Um, Aaron, you uh wrote in your upcoming book, uh, before identity and between it there is always relation; identity is a certain stopping point of a relational weave, a sometimes useful shorthand for creating category, but it is always being unsettled by the relational web it calls forth; identity is placeholder, nothing nothing more. And I I was really I was moved by these words; I'm moved by the provocation to focus on the Ecology of relation that we that we are being done by. And so if if nothing else comes from this conversation, the ability to stop and pause in our instinctual reaction to threat, not to defend the territory, um not to defend the caricature of Dei, but to go out into the world and practice ecologies of relation, I am grateful for taking that out of this moment. Thank you to both of you; thank you to Schacher; thank you to everyone who has joined us and for your beautiful comments and questions. Uh, we look forward to being together again. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Alan. Thank you everyone; your questions, I did read all of them.