LOVE
A Blues Epistemology from the Undercommons
Mia Charlene White
Greetings from my beloved New York City and a slightly jetlagged mind. I should begin by telling you all a little bit about myself: I am a relatively new assistant professor at the New School. I’m excited to be a faculty member there because of its history of being populated by rebellious academics who needed sanctuary after the war, folks who had a transformative vision for a different kind of knowledge-making space. Today, the New School continues to try to live up to those early aspirations. The New School is a great place for somebody who is trying to engage in epistemic disobedience, like me, and for somebody who has studied in several disciplines and is trying to figure out how to bring them together – even if it means that it’s going to be very hard to make a tenure case. So what that looks like is that I have brought autoethnographic method, from my anthropological mindset, to teach a newly developed course called Black Geographies – itself a radical intervention in the discipline of geography, which was a space I turned to as I searched for a different kind of epistemological framing from the one I was inculcated with during my doctoral studies in urban planning. I have to tell you that I rarely do things perfectly, not even close, but what feels really thrilling and really excellent is that my Black Geographies course is one of very few majority-Black and Brown student spaces at my predominantly white university. It’s really like a prayer. It’s not something I knew I was building toward while a doctoral student at MIT for sure, but I think it must be the result of being blessed with many Black and Brown educators who saw something in me.
I’m also a native New Yorker, born and raised. I spent some time in the projects growing up, in one of the biggest projects in the United States, called Queensbridge. It’s a beautiful, contradictory place – not really the hellhole that people like to describe it as. I’m standing here, so I’m evidence that it must not be, right? I’m the daughter of an American GI, a Black veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and a Korean immigrant, a farmworker from South Korea. And you know what? I’m also the daughter of my grandma Belle Walker, the southern Black woman who raised me in my early years before parental divorce took me and mom to Queensbridge… Her hands, her beautiful brown hands gave me the first touch I remember, her skin the first smell I remember, her serious countenance … the first face I remember.
As you can see, I am trying to model my autoethnographic teaching, so you can understand how I situate myself spatially and geographically, as the first sort of design intervention. So to continue, my mom and I, we were street vendors when I was growing up. We sold socks and underwear – 3 for 5 dollars, 6 for 5 dollars, 2 for 10 dollars. We sold in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and also in Queens, New York, where we lived. We eventually graduated to an indoor flea-market aptly named “The Colosseum.” As a little girl, with my mom, near Tompkins Square Park – if anybody knows Manhattan, you can try to picture me, my short self with my little afro – I met people that I didn’t know were famous or would become famous. One of them was Jean-Michel Basquiat, who very generously allowed me to call him “June Basket,” perhaps because I could not pronounce his name – I guess I don’t really remember anymore. Every Saturday, religiously (at least in my memory’s eye), Basquiat would come to buy that clear plastic bag of 6-for-5-dollars white tube socks. My mother was confused by this and would always mutter later that he must not ever launder his socks. For me – whatever the reason, I didn’t care, perhaps because if I squinted he looked like my handsome daddy and he seemed different. Oh – and he didn’t like my mom, my grouchy chain-smoking mom who sat apart in a folding lawn chair worrying about our future. June Basket preferred to buy the tube socks from me and he would wait even if I was helping someone else. He used to tell me things like “Mia, you are beautiful” and “Mia, don’t forget you are Black. You are mixed, like me, but you are Black.” Now, I have to tell you that I was many things, but I was not beautiful. I was kind of malnourished, and I was sort of a little wild-looking because my immigrant-Korean mom didn’t know what to do with my hair, and I was basically a bit strange – but I would say, “Thank you, June Basket.”
It wasn’t till several years later that I realized his name was not in fact June Basket. At the Colosseum, where we migrated to, I saw a picture of him in a Black newspaper wearing what in my mind of course were our white tube socks. (Basquiat was often depicted wearing white socks.) It’s hilarious to me now because of course it’s doubtful he was wearing our socks at that time. But seeing his image reconnected my body to his, my moment in Queens to our shared moment in Tomkins Square Park, my Blackness to his – my feelings of yearning and grief and searching to this fleeting and meaningful encounter. By my autoethnographic sharing of this, I want to give you a sense of how I understand space as an embodied experience. I adapt and I dream with these imaginations. I don’t really know June Basket whatsoever except for these snippets, but I insist on this kind of radical dreaming where I invent a friendship between myself and June Basket, because I think that’s what we need very much. That’s the foundation of how I think about love and a blues epistemology.
Yes, I totally did just say the word love, as per the title of this talk. In this conceptualization I’m working through, love is not a romantic concept between two people, straight or otherwise. It’s really about radical, revolutionary friendship invested in space, granted in space. I think the best we can do for ourselves and each other is to figure out how to enable this kind of transformative, radical, spatial love – the kind you feel in your body and in your dreams and in your motivations – like with me right now. I hope somewhere June Basket can feel my love. I think it is what we are called to do really … because we are thirsty and also anemic in our love practices – and especially in the context of design. We have to question whether design can model vulnerability and whether it can actually help us grow in our love practices.
This is the basis of how I am thinking right now: Can design be vulnerable? Can design help us in the development of love practices that move us away from the individuation of a nuclear or binary relationship, where we only think about ourselves or our families? I have two children, how is it that I can think beyond myself and my career and what I need individually and what my two children need? But also, what about all the dreamers who might imagine a relationship with me, who might find some connection to me? How can I invest myself in that, even when I may never meet these people? Is it possible?
These are the kinds of questions that I wrestle with. Because just like Angela Davis said to us many years ago, even though prison abolition is impossible, it is still possible.1 We still have to dream it. We still have to wrestle with the idea and figure out steps toward that dream. So, again, my idea of love is really vested in abolition. The idea that we have to dream the place that we are trying to get to, and in the process of getting to it we are making these love practices that in fact define a blues epistemology.
My first job out of MIT (I studied housing and environment in the Urban Studies and Planning Department) was as assistant professor at the Black Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Against the advice of very smart people, I left MIT as “ABD,” which means “all but dissertation,” to take this great job while I finished up my writing, which of course took way longer than I thought. But it was worth it because the Santa Barbara position commemorated the life of Clyde Woods, a Black radical geographer who had recently died, and who was, like me, trained in urban planning. I’d be teaching his courses and sitting in his office and working in his tradition – and that blew my mind. Clyde Woods coined and developed the conceptual framework of “blues epistemology” in his work called Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta 2. His thinking about epistemology is the way I now teach it. And what does it mean? Epistemology is simply how you make sense of the world. This is how I answer my students who say to me “I don’t really care about theory. Why do you always talk about theory?” And I say, “Well, you are theorizing all the time. You just theorized to me why theory sucks, right?
All it is, is you are making meaning out of the world around you.” That’s what theorizing is. And epistemology is how you go about that process – and the architecture of your knowledge, that has everything to do with how you theorize. Are you going about that process as a lucid thinker, as I say to my students, or are you going about that process in a sort of cyborg, automatic way, based on the famous people that you have been taught to respect in your various classes? This matters so much because your epistemological architecture will become actualized in the physical world, in all your design labors that then sort of orient how we experience life together.
Again, I’m speaking from the perspective of an autoethnographic human, but also as an educator. In my classes, I talk about two kinds of researchers, I try to model these two tensions. I say to my students: “There are two ways to be a researcher. Just like there are two ways to dream, right?” On the one hand, there is the lucid dream. You are having a nightmare, you are frightened, but you are aware that you are dreaming. Even though you are very scared, you know that it is a dream and that you can wake yourself up. You are lucid. The other kind of dream is the one where you are falling into a deep hole, maybe like the sunken place, for those of you who have seen the movie Get Out. But you don’t know that you are in the sunken place. It’s the totality of your experience. You cannot see or feel or imagine otherwise. You don’t know that you are dreaming, so you feel completely and unalterably stuck. There is no future in this framework and, thus, abolition is an impossibility.
I want us to be lucid thinkers and lucid researchers, and I want my students to be lucid in their understanding of themselves and the world. The question “Can design be vulnerable?” requires us to be lucid. It actually requires you to be autoethnographic and ask “Who am I? Why am I asking this question this space or intervention?” It is not an academic question – it is a soul question. Why do we need design to be vulnerable? Where is the purpose of that level of vulnerability? This is a geographic question. Geography is really near and dear to my heart, and therefore to my mind. Geographers ask why things happen where they happen. Geographers are not content to simply catalog that something happened, and they don’t want to simply adore the fact that we can make things happen. We proceed in our understanding of why something happened by thinking about where – about the space of that happening, and how that matters. We think space matters and we theorize space in order to make sense of things.
I have been very, very deeply engaged in Black study all my life. I proceed from the working theory that the story of Black people in America is an excellent launchpad for any larger investigation into the limits of ideas like democracy, freedom, environment, and especially love. My life’s training and intellectual mentors have helped me reframe what I have understood to be my pessimism. I’ve now come to understand that my afro-pessimism can generate a new world. A new world that is here already, as many feminists have talked about. I’m not waiting for the revolution to come; I’m challenging myself to see that the revolution has already arrived. In fact, the gathering of us together creates a space that manifests a kind of revolution: the idea of the daily revolution. This is so important because we make freedom out of what we have. This is neither hippy-dippy talk nor new age love stuff, this is all very, very real. It comes from spatial theory and fancy-talk philosophers, but it also comes from a sort of autoethnographic awareness, the lucid self.
I am American, so I try to start with my lucid experience of being American. Miles Davis talked of the blues as being about playing what’s not there.3 The space between the noise, which is most fraught. And James Baldwin, of course, beloved to so many of us, said, “If I am a part of the American house, and I am, it is because my ancestors paid – striving to make it my home – so unimaginable a price: and I have seen some of the effects of that passion everywhere I have been, all over this world. The music is everywhere, resounds, no sounds: and tells me that now is the moment, for me, to return to the eye of the hurricane.”4 He was referring to when he left France to return to the United States and to pick back up his allegiance and collaboration with US civil rights leaders, despite his own feelings of animosity and marginalization during that time. Obviously, as a queer Black American man, his was a complicated experience. Miles Davis and James Baldwin left us some real clues about lucid dreaming, and we are grateful.
And so these questions we ask: What are we doing here, why do we engage in this work, and what does the blues have to do with it? Well, the United States is blues country, and my beloved city, NYC, is a blues city. Both are something of an imaginary and also something of a nightmare. We’ve created this myth of progress and we’ve built big buildings and railroads and big cities in the name of this idea of progress, without really lucidly examining what this idea means. Not just us as historians or armchair historians, but how does it matter, the way that we think about the problem?
To me, this image of American progress from 1873 perfectly illustrates part of our conceptualization of the problem. It is very obvious to us that there are some strong implications around white supremacy and Native genocide and the stealing of Native land. What’s not visible in this picture is slavery and forced and exploited labor, including patriarchy. But what I like about this image – and I use it in my Black Geographies course – is that it is very spatial, and it is very much vested in this idea of dreams. Maybe it is the wrong hope and the wrong dream, but we can recognize that we are constantly evoking these ideas, as human beings.
Dreams have always been our design inspirations.
What I’m laying out here is how I understand the blues as a design framework, as our most lucid dreaming. The blues of course is a Black American music tradition that is based on making space. How does the blues make space? By playing these bent notes. A bent note is a musical note that is varied in pitch. The bent note is very important for us as lucid researchers and lucid educators and lucid designers. We use the bent note, the reality to create space, the blues. And in the process of using the bent note toward the blues, we can create deeper love practices – maybe. The bent note is all around us, but sometimes we don’t recognize it, or we disavow it. We bury it or we marginalize it, because we don’t know what to do with it. We think that it’s just too heavy and too much and it produces too much guilt. So, what do we do with it? We recognize it, we feel bad, but we don’t really incorporate it into our lucid everyday living, because we simply don’t know what to do. Even as super-overeducated people we don’t know what to do. But artists have really helped us understand that you don’t necessarily need to know exactly what to do in order to wrestle with the problem, with the bent note.
This is a piece by Jacob Lawrence, from his 1967 Migration Series, called Through Forests, Through Rivers, Up Mountains. What I love about this piece from a Black geographic perspective is that it helps us build a different kind of design imaginary. Jacob Lawrence is implicating the human with the so-called nature-space. In the image, it’s difficult to disaggregate the human from the trees and the rivers and the streams. It’s also kind of a scary image, there are a lot of bent notes in there. You see Harriet Tubman, or what I imagine to be Harriet Tubman, and her hand looks like a claw. It is as if she is saying “This is not a fairytale. There is some very scary stuff to wrestle with here.” Her other hand is pointing to the North Star, an imagined sanctuary or safe space. Everything is struggling in that direction, positioned toward the star, toward the sanctuary, even the squirrel in the bottom left. We’re all kind of embedded together. You can’t disaggregate one from the other. Jacob Lawrence is showing us collectivity not just with his use of color but with the entire orientation of the image. I have looked at this image over and over since I was a kid, because, first of all, it frightens me, but also because there is something so real about it. How do we deal with the fear and also the hope of yearning toward sanctuary?
In her incredible book, In the Wake, Christina Sharpe talks about the slave ship and the mid-Atlantic crossings as “leaving a wake.”5 The ship leaves a kind of a trail in the water, that’s the wake. Sharpe conceptualizes our present time, and all the labor of artists like Jacob Lawrence, and all of your work, and all of my efforts, as existing in the wake. We are in the wake right now. We are in the wake of anti-Blackness, genocide, colonization, imperialism, oppression, and marginalization. However, we are also engaged in wake work.
A wake celebrates the passing of something, and it acknowledges pain and trauma such as we see in Jacob Lawrence’s piece. But a wake is also something different because it is a collective experience – like music, like the bent note I mentioned earlier. You don’t experience a wake by yourself, as an individual. A wake is something that happens in community with people. You bring things to a wake, you bring yourselves, sometimes you bring food, you bring your trauma and you bring your hopes for healing. You bring funny stories and your body. But you don’t know what’s going to happen precisely, you just know that grief will be shared. However, the neoliberal mind wants us to control every moment of our time. Every moment must be accounted for and if it is not we have somehow failed. Time is almost like the big bureaucratic arm that administers fear. “Oh my God, we are losing time. I have wasted time!”
That’s why some of the most critical Black theorists talk about time as anti-Black. Christina Sharpe says that we are both in the wake and we are engaged in wake work. So, what does it mean to be engaged in wake work as educators and as designers? Can design be vulnerable to this wake work? Can design be responsible for this idea of wake work?
Let’s move to a more expansive idea of being in the wake. I teach two courses this semester, one is the Black Geographies course I’ve described, which is populated by Black students from all across the beautiful diaspora. We do things like dance together, we pray together, we hold hands together at the end of classes. We also talk about white supremacy. The other class I teach is called Environmental History, Race, and Natural Resource Management, and in that class too we talk about white supremacy. In both classes, I stress that white supremacy is not equal to white skin. (I think it is very important to say that. Hopefully everybody already knows that.) The indigenous scholar Andrea Smith has conceptualized “the three pillars of white supremacy” as grounded in 1) forced Black labor or slavery, a kind of anti-Black expropriation through which capitalism is born; 2) indigenous genocide, as a requirement for the land theft upon which settler colonialism depends; and 3) what Edward Said and others have called “Orientalism,” which creates and recreates a kind of war capitalism and a war ethic, a perpetual horde of others always on the poetic front gates about to stampede in and wreak havoc.6 These three pillars have historically defined the pillars of white supremacy. This is often very difficult for students of all kinds to wrestle with. We are in the wake, but what are we supposed to do with this? If we are lucid, it seems like an overwhelming quantity of pain and history and facts and geographies and realities to grasp as one person, let alone as a designer or anybody who is trying to change the world. How on earth can we possibly deal with this from a subconscious or spiritual or soul level?
The neoliberal impulse is to solve this or abandon our confrontation as pointless. Christina Sharpe and others tell us that actually some things cannot be “solved” – because can grief be “solved”? Would you ever have the nerve to say to a grieving person that they should “solve” their grief? So, to circle back to an abolitionist love ethic or ethos – what we can do is resist in our daily practices, we can fight against the conditions which have enabled our pain and humiliation. That’s the reality. Our afro-pessimism can generate a new world. We have to figure out how to hold the general tension that this cannot be solved, neither with a plaque that commemorates it, nor a class called Black Geographies. But that does not mean that we are absolved of our requirement to engage in socially creative thinking daily. We do not “solve,” we bear witness, we play the bent notes, we think with the blues in mind.
What is the blues? It’s this improvisational set of acts toward creating space. It’s using the bent notes – as Christina Sharpe has laid out for us, and Jared Sexton, and Angela Davis, and Clyde Woods, and so many others – to create a way of making sense of the world, an epistemology that’s based in openness and not needing to know the answer. If you want to remember one thing from all that I’m saying it’s this: if you don’t engage in experimental thinking in which you allow yourself to say that you don’t know the answer, then you are not engaging in a critical or radical position. That’s what abolition requires. It requires that you do not see yourself as an individual apart from the suffering of others, despite what everyone has told you. I’m simply a manifestation of all of my ancestors and I’m embodied in this particular framework. And yes, I am speaking, and yes, my name is Mia Charlene White, but I am here representing so many, many other people and spaces and geographies, as are you. Which is part of the soul work that we talked about, what you brought into this space when we made this space.
Clyde Woods’s blues epistemology asks us to attend to the affect, or affective resistance, or love; the affect of how we respond to things like Andrea Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy. How are you going to recognize how you feel about it? I use this concept of affective resistance to build on my own theorization of spatial practices, and I translate that as “love.” Some people prefer “affective resistance” a lot better than love, because, you know, love is so gendered and we are so patriarchal, we don’t know what to do with it.
One of my favorite writers is Fred Moten. He knows it, I’m a big-time fangirl of his. Fred Moten is the basis of what I will go into now, which is the undercommons, the last part of the title of this session.7 Fred’s work encompasses many, many things, it’s hard to put him into a disciplinary box. But he is really interested in affect and performance and poetics. So I have tried to weave this all together. He and Stefano Harney, who model the kind of radical friendship I am so interested in – they theorize love as mutual study. We can sort of, I have sort of engaged their definition of love, mutual study, to better understand spatial resistance in order to reject the neoliberal evaluative logics that render these community efforts as inefficient, ineffectual, or unsuccessful. Love as a blues epistemology helps us see differently and therefore react differently.
As an example: I theorize on community land trusts and other kinds of collective and community-based emancipatory processes. So let’s think about the poetics of private property. I can’t solve the problem of private property as Mia Charlene White. And neither can the community land trusts that I empirically study, alone, “solve” the historical, sedimented reality of private property. But that should not stop my ability to theorize the meaning of these efforts. Love as a blues epistemology asks us to try to understand what it is that community land trust folks are doing and how they are attending to the affect or the poetics of private property, knowing that they are going up as David against Goliath. In other words, we can understand that with a design intervention or design strategy like the community land trust, our neoliberal training asks us whether they “solved the thing,” i.e., the challenge of private property … but with a blues epistemological orientation, we are looking at why they are trying to solve the thing, and how it matters where that thing developed, grew up, and lives.
I’m trying to adopt, as J. K. Gibson-Graham says, an experimental orientation toward everything: toward critique or analysis, toward theorizing empirical projects, and even in the context of giving a presentation.8 Let’s take a really ugly, heavy-handed modernist design, the State University of New York at Stonybrook, where I went for my undergraduate degree, with its giant cement blocks, a depressing state of affairs that students have to engage with every day. Rather than simply critiquing it as a failure of imagination, we might understand it as a reflection of how people were feeling. And what does that mean? What does it mean that these structures are reflections of how people were feeling? Does it matter that people were feeling whatever you feel when you look at these big, heavy cement blocks?
One of the things that Fred Moten, whom I mentioned before, talks about, is the idea of “embracing the feels” analytically and productively.9 Not turning away from drama but revealing its truth as having a very long history. In Black feminist memoirs, in poetry, in personal essays, this is how we have been able to uncover feels. And why is it so important? It is almost pedestrian to talk about feelings, but it’s the thing that people don’t talk about. It’s like the universal thing that people have very little capacity and fluency in talking about. Of course, words are limited. It’s zeros and dashes or symbols or whatever. They are very limited, but we still need them. Every word is an incantation. It’s a spell and the silences also cast a spell.
The idea that we have to face the feels with words, with art, is a way of saying “let’s cast some spells together.” Let’s conjure things with an abolitionist eye. We don’t know what will happen when we conjure them together, but the process of conjuring together is important as human beings. Sometimes we conjure together and what comes out is a building or a syllabus, or a baby. But we have to recognize that we actually have been doing something together, not as individuals. We are far too individuated. Engaging trauma and mourning is one of the ways educators and designers in particular can model, pedagogically and analytically, how to participate in world-breaking and belonging anew. This is so important, because it services the subconscious need to assist in a development in an uncovering of a deeper vernacular understanding, of love practice as affective dissent.
By vernacular I mean that you don’t need to have a Ph.D. from MIT to know that the way that you feel is actually wildly relevant. The epistemological dissent and awakening occurs when we willfully realize how universal trauma is in every space: in the classroom, the bedroom, the boardroom, the park, the shelter, the street. I’m going to read a poem now, in the context of my epistemological dissent about Eric Garner, who you may know was murdered by the US police state. The poem begins with its title, A Small Needful Fact, and continues:
Is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parcs and Rec. Horticultural Department, which means, perhaps, that with his very large hands, perhaps, in all likelihood, he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house and feed small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe. 10
This poem was written by Ross Gay. For me, it perfectly exemplifies what Christina Sharpe says, being both in the wake and engaging in wake work. And my reading it to you here is my way of engaging in wake work. What do we do about the Eric Garners of the world? We cannot solve his murder. But blues epistemology suggests we ask what the wake work is that we will be engaged in as people doing varying jobs, including design, to recognize and acknowledge the feelings that are produced by his murder? Something has to be done. The affect must be attended to.
I teach space as existing on three levels. (I know this is limited, it’s just where I am right now.) The first space is embodied space: our physical space, how we look into the world, but also how our physical existence is oriented, what we look like and how we appear to others, and how this affects how we can move in space. The second space is institutions: the Federal Housing Authority, marriage, the phrase “I do,” all these are institutions by design. Design as an institution, that’s the second space. The third space is politics, which is conceptualized as the politics of possibility. The poetics of property that I mentioned earlier would go into this third space. But we can’t really get there if we do not lucidly recognize the first and second spaces. If we don’t realize that design is an institution and that you are a lucid human being, making space, then we can’t really get to the third space, we can’t get to the politics of possibilities or the poetics of property, anything like that. Because these spaces are not sequential, they are very much a co-mingling, you can’t really pull them apart.
What this spatial theorizing does is to support how I understand love practice. Love practice is basically embodied, or understood, or imagined in this third space, the poetics of property as a love practice. It is vested in abolition. We can think of private property, we can think of the mortgage as vested in the second space. The mortgage, which allows the private ownership of a home, for instance. But we can’t get to the third space without really understanding how this happened. And it’s not so much about answering or solving it, it’s about an act of resistance.
Nayyirah Waheed is a wonderful poet, who has said, “where you write from is important” and to me that’s another way of thinking about the lucid. She says: “Where you write from is important. The feet. The hands, the hem of the heart, the soft patch behind the ear.” 11 Where you design from is important. And if you don’t think that design can manifest our human vulnerability, then you are designing from a particular point of view, from what I call a cyborg point of view. I don’t think we are cyborgs, I think we are humans, and I think the thing that connects us most is trauma and vulnerability. In my perspective, designers who think about a so-called intervention at the level of the street, at the level of the bus stop, where instead of seats you have swings, you know, those are the people, that’s the kind of so-called intervention that I think responds to our various vulnerabilities.
We need to play in order to feel some sense of freedom. In order to feel some sense of freedom, we have to engage in our various affects, our fear affects: we are tired, we are old, nobody cares, the bus is never going to come, what are we going to do? What can a designer do? A designer can put swings at the bus stop. We can swing, even if just for a few minutes. I saw an image once: six older people with silver and white hair, swinging, waiting for a bus. To me, this was a revolutionary feeling. They were elder and they were swinging while they were waiting for the bus. Sit with this for a moment: they were swinging, while they were waiting for a bus. This means that someone imagined freedom as human beings swinging while waiting for something to happen. You feel it and you see it but you need actually to encounter it in space to share it with other people, to get the feeling, to have power. To me, that is abolition, that is a love practice right there.
![[Pasted image 20251222120459.png|Daily Tous Le Jours, 21 Swings, 2011, interactive installation in Montreal.]]
The swinging to me is like a perfect image, a mental picture of what Angela Davis has said repeatedly, that freedom is a constant struggle. Maybe you can think of it as freedom requires constant play. You know, freedom requires a constant reminiscing of your childhood and your unfettered hopes and dreams. The idea that we, as regular people, just regular people – and also maybe fancy-pants designers – can help other people feel some measure of freedom, that these moments might add up to something is wildly important to me. There is something aesthetic, there is something poetic, there is something so powerful about swinging while you are waiting for something.
Let me get to another kind of example: community land trusts (CLTs), a topic I have studied since my dissertation. I really love that I can’t fully explain everything they are, and I want to focus on how they are vested in the idea of a trust doctrine. I’m not talking about the actual mortgage writer and pieces of paper, but about investing in the idea of trust itself. Trust as in “I want to trust you that you know I need a place to live and I want to trust that you care.” It’s an experiment. It’s a love act. And it fails in many ways.
There are many community land trusts: there’s one in West London, and there are several in the Deep South – i.e., the southern states that historically were most dependent on plantations and slavery. These are the ones I study, the Black and Brown community land trusts. The first one was started in the 1960s by Slater King, Martin Luther King’s cousin. It began under very fraught circumstances. Slater King decided to take a contingent of white and Black people to Jerusalem. He was going to interview folks from the Jewish National Fund, because he wanted to understand how the JNF was funding kibbutzim. Slater King was really interested in ideas of territory, settlement, and freedom, so he went to Jerusalem to get a better sense of how it could work to get more freedom for Black Americans in the United States.
Turning to Zionism was quite fraught given the violence required to engage in space-making when there is an existing indigenous population. When I go to CLT meetings – I’ve been to maybe seventy, eighty of these meetings – no one ever mentions that the model came from Jerusalem and from kibbutzim and that the initial plans were based on interviews with the Jewish National Fund – obviously these are bent notes, right? I’m here trying to flesh out those first-, second-, and third-space notions I mentioned before. In the case of the CLT, we skipped to the second space: here is an institution that we can believe in. That happens a lot with how we theorize experimental projects: we skip right to the second space without really uncovering how it matters where it happened, the way that we understood this thing, and how people all around the world have understood it.
From Slater King’s perspective, he was trying to figure out how Black people could be safe in the United States. This is still a question: how can Black people be safe in the United States, where the state continues to kill them? If you can’t be swallowed and you can’t be purged, what are you going to do? Slater King looked at what had happened in Jerusalem, where they were trying to create these safe spaces. He thought “Let’s bring this model back to the United States.” Now, I have nothing but respect for Slater King and all the work that community land trust people do – but I think we can’t really get to that third space, that poetics, the politics of possibility, without wrestling with this sort of intimacy, with global oppression that is somewhat tuned down when we don’t really reconcile with how it is that the JNF has been able to populate these very settlements via kibbutzim. I love the idea of kibbutzim, but there is also a kind of uncomfortable contradiction about their existence. And the same thing with the community land trust.
I’m trying to model my version of love as an ethic of abolition. Love is not, as I said, a romantic sensibility between two people, or even between a researcher and a social object like the community land trust. It’s really about covering that first space and that second space and getting toward that third space and then trying to understand those sort of generative contradictions and the cognitive dissonances. That’s not an abolition-based love ethic. I’m trying to understand the problem the community land trust is trying to solve. The problem they are trying to solve is Black murder and the need for Black sanctuary.
Fast-forward to 2018 and community land trusts have now become conceptualized as affordable housing models. And the most successful ones are known to be in what we call white spaces, like Vermont. And they have been able to create wonderful housing as a public good for folks in Vermont. But why is it that the CLT continues to be kind of unsuccessful in Black and Brown spaces? And I would say, because we haven’t really dealt with those first and second spaces – the problem that Slater King was trying to solve. The problem the CLT was trying to solve is the problem of Black murder by the state and the poetics of private property predicated on Black expropriation. We still need to wrestle together as a community, as a group of people who all have different proximities to history and knowledge, over how to situate this appropriately.
I see the community land trust as a kind of rebellious, fugitive love practice, something like marronage, in the sense of those maroon communities who fled to the swamps and the wetlands and the forests. The CLT is trying to flee the poetics of private property, trying to conjure up something different, a trust doctrine, where the land is owned by the community and individuals live in various parcels on the land. And then people come and do really interesting things, like they are building with cob and they are building with hemp and other natural products not requiring heavy machinery or lots of money or tons of expensive schooling. They are making installations out of hemp which is a carbon-neutral material. Imagine if we had 10 percent of the homes in the United States made from hemp, sucking carbon out of the air just by existing!
But we can’t get to that if we don’t wrestle with the second space. What’s the second space with regard to hemp? The United States housing practice is basically a cartel. We are allowed to build with industrial hemp, but we cannot grow it in the United States. It is illegal to grow industrial hemp in the United States, you have to go to Canada to buy industrial hemp. Hemp is drought-tolerant, hardly needs any pesticides. It would take two months and two weeks to grow enough hemp to make a 2,000 square-foot structure that can house several families. It costs a fraction of the amount that it does to build with sticks, with wood and steel.
I’m trying to evoke what Jacob Lawrence depicted in Through Forests, Through Rivers, Up Mountains – the fugitivity of the people fleeing through the forest trying to get to that North Star. The community land trust folks are trying to get to that North Star, too. My focus, though, as an educator, as a critical theorist, is not to go so heavy into all the ways that they have done it wrong, but to try to hold that unease, that contradiction of using particular institutions toward getting to that North Star. If you don’t deal with the reality of that history that keeps coming up, then you are left wondering why it is that a Vermont community land trust can be so successful while all these Black and Brown ones are not seen as such? I think the answer to that is because we neglect to hear the bent notes, or we mistake them because time is a coil, it’s not linear, our mistakes keep repeating. The history is the bent note that I was talking about before – the bent note is the music Slater King was trying to play for us. The bent note illustrates the blues epistemology we must bear witness to. See with and through a blues epistemology and you will hear and see the bent notes.
And you know there are joys as we try to get to that North Star. For instance, there are Black electric cooperatives – I’m thinking of one in particular in North Carolina called the Roanoke Electric Cooperative – that are trying to generate electricity on a democratic and shared basis. The money they make is put back into the cooperative and used to train young people to become experts with sustainable solutions in insulation, for example – the hemp I talked about. There is this drain of young people leaving the Deep South. You have older people from New York and the different cities coming back to the South and then you have younger people leaving the South. And they are doing that because they need to find a place to live and work. They need a job. And this Black electric cooperative said, we can solve this problem that grandmothers and grandfathers are raising in a vernacular way. We don’t need expert designers or engineers. We need to train young people on how to create hemp insulation that could help create a healthy indoor atmosphere, you know, because indoor air pollution is worse than outdoor air pollution.
They are creating a sustainable loop that’s invested in the idea of Black freedom: how can I, as a Black grandparent on a fixed income and on the board of this Black electric cooperative, recognize and acknowledge the reality of these grandchildren, mine or fictive, who have no job opportunities? And also, at the same time, I’m supposed to rely on experts that come from New York, or wherever they come from, to tell me about how to make a sustainably based insulation, when in fact we can train each other to do this. We can see each other as having boundless potential, without credentials. And that’s what they are doing. They are creating insulation out of hemp in these Black communities. To me, that’s abolition on so many levels. And what we need to do is see it in the right way, the blue note that has been made and the space that we make when we talk about what they are doing.
At the moment, I am studying community land trusts, electric cooperatives, popular education tools, credit unions, and Triodos-style banking. What I’m trying to do with my own work is to move forward with a land ethic. A land ethic requires that we think about space differently. In my conceptualization we have to think in those first, second, and third spaces if we want to proceed with that land ethic. The reason I proceed with the land ethic is because land has been stolen, it has been lied over, it’s been mistreated, and it’s basically a metaphor for us, for each of us. It’s traumatized, it’s wounded, but it’s revelatory. And so, if we think about land as an avatar for each other and we move with a land ethic that’s a basic collective emancipation, I think really amazing things happen. What would it mean for designers, for example, to design with a land ethic, with a landed blues epistemology?
I’ll close by reiterating what so many Black artists and organizers and intellectuals before me have said, which is that I come from that other America, that other America that is so invested in the bent notes. As Christina Sharpe says, we are in the wake. And we continue to create from those bent notes blue notes that create space – that’s our wake work. Sometimes the space that’s made is misunderstood. And it’s misunderstood because the gaze of the viewer trying to understand the blue notes is not lucid. The gaze of each of us is not always lucid. We think we are neutral or individual or objective and we are looking at these various projects as individual projects and not as a continuum – like time is a coil – as a reflection or a mirror of all our different traumas and vulnerabilities. So, if we were to think with a blues epistemology about, for instance, what the architectures of a spatial justice would be, that would require that we engaged with trauma and vulnerability, not with credentials – and I’m saying this with an understanding that my life has been vested in seeking credentials. But if an architecture of spatial justice requires that we build on each other’s vernacular everyday revolutionary capacity – for instance, train each other how to make something as crazy sounding as hemp insulation that would keep our elders lovingly cool in the summer and warm in the winter, our Earth safer, without fancy degrees – we would be engaging in what I call love from the undercommons, based in the undercommons, the people whose history is all about the bent notes and also about so much more. Thank you.
Footnotes
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Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003). ↩
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Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998). ↩
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Robert G. O’Meally, “‘Pressing on Life Until It Gave Back Something in Kinship’: An Introductory Essay,” in The Romare Bearden Reader, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 7: “Miles Davis said, ‘It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play… Play what’s not there.’” ↩
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James Baldwin, “Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 647. ↩
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Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩
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Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 4th ed., ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 273–81. ↩
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Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013). ↩
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See J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Socially Creative Thinking, or How Experimental Thinking Creates Other Worlds,” paper presented at the Katarsis conference, 2008, www.communityeconomies.org/publications/conferencepapers/socially-creativethinking-or-how-experimentalthinking-creates. ↩
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On “embracing the feels,” see Elizabeth Willis, “Work This Thing,” Boston Review, July 15, 2015, bostonreview.net/poetry/elizabeth-willis-fredmoten-little-edges-feel-trio. ↩
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Ross Gay, “A Small Needful Fact,” published on Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, 2015, www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/a-small-needful-fact. ↩
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Nayyirah Waheed, Salt (CreateSpace, 2013). ↩