00:00:01.000I don't believe that we can achieve anything resembling human fulfillment within the structures of capitalism.
00:00:10.540For the Wild is honored to present The Edges in the Middle, a series of conversations between Bio Komalafe and thought companions like John A. Powell, Vee, Naomi Klein, and more.
00:00:22.160These limited episodes have been adapted from Bio's work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute.
00:00:31.440In this role, Bio has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum,
00:00:40.500which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the U.S.
00:00:45.140who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy
00:00:48.740and advance belonging in both regions and around the world.
00:00:53.020BIO's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging
00:00:57.460by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms.
00:01:02.580To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum,
00:07:59.280I think when, you know, about the question of justice, does justice get in the way? Is justice limiting? You know, I think yes and no.
00:08:14.100Yes, in the sense that, you know, if we only conceive of justice in the existing political paradigm, if we only conceive of it in the ways, the narrow and confined ways that an American context, an American ruling class conceives of that, then, of course, justice is incredibly limited.
00:08:40.600And we saw that throughout the different kinds of responses of Black Lives Matter.
00:08:47.600So we could talk about the first wave of protest with Black Lives Matter in 2014 and 2015, where, you know, the main kind of sense of reform and forms of justice had to do with police commissions and, you know, making sure that the police had body cameras.
00:09:12.240You know, the second wave of protests, you know, produced this George Floyd Policing Act, which was, you know, kind of toothless and, you know, different things that basically keep the system of policing intact.
00:09:33.000So there's that. There's a kind of normative sense of justice and reform that is attractive to some people.
00:09:43.780I think that there's also, when I say no, there's also, I think, a more capacious sense of justice that comes from people engaged in the movement itself, and it comes from people who are oppressed.
00:10:03.980And so I think that in that sense, justice is not just about tools meant to restrain the police or restrain the violent impulses of the state.
00:10:21.720Justice is about what do we have to do to live more meaningful lives.
00:10:26.780And so that I think is important, which is to say that these concepts are not stable and static, delivered to us from on high or delivered to us in the forms that, you know, that they emerge from through the enlightenment.
00:10:46.080You know, that the struggles of oppressed people have also changed their meaning or at least put the meaning of seemingly stable categories into conflict and contestation.
00:11:01.200And so the one thing that I had questions about in the essay is, are you holding these concepts to be too stable, to see only as a manifestation of the desires of the West, only as a manifestation?
00:11:19.400So we think about justice or freedom only as they are conceived of by those who put them into the universe at a particular point in time and had a very specific meaning for them.
00:11:36.180In the United States, the colonial leaders understood freedom in a particular way because they all held slaves.
00:11:46.420They knew what the absence of freedom looked like.
00:11:50.760And so their conception of freedom was organized in response to slavery.
00:11:57.760But, of course, enslaved people had a very different sense of what freedom was.
00:12:04.580And so that is just to say that I think that these concepts, which on the surface seem to be reflections of the dominant class and what it is that they desire, are contested and fought over and have come to assume different meaning from the oppressed themselves.
00:12:31.080And I think that we have to integrate that complexity into the discussion about what seems like stable categories to begin with.
00:13:42.580There is a move that is threaded through the essay.
00:13:49.800And for those who are listening, as my brother a while ago said,
00:13:54.620this essay is called Black Lives Matter, But To Whom?
00:13:57.120It was published in February, and it's available on the internet if you take a look at it.
00:14:04.560It's a long read, and I'm grateful that Kianga went through it.
00:14:10.060But there's a move that is privileged in that essay, and that is to stabilize strategically, if only for a moment, accepting that justice and these concepts are contested and contestable.
00:14:27.120right but to stabilize it just for a moment of thought to see what other moves are mobilized
00:14:35.200and why that is you know you asked me just before we came on what precipitated what
00:14:39.760led to this what gave birth to this it's that following George Floyd the event of George Floyd
00:14:48.960we had a moment of our own by we I mean the biggest country in Africa biggest black nation
00:14:56.320on earth, right? We had end SARS, that is end police brutality. SARS representing this
00:15:05.360violent force that calls into question our wanting to see more brothers and sisters0.89
00:15:16.480in pieces of power, right? It coerced that a little. And in the struggle to end police brutality,
00:15:24.820many questions were formulated. Many ideas that have been gestating for a while
00:15:31.140found expression. Just like the pandemic gave birth to new ideas about schooling and the workplace
00:15:38.200and organizational arrangements, this gave birth to questions around justice and what justice is
00:15:45.600doing. We started to have questions or have conversations about how justice is kneeling
00:15:51.760on our necks literally you know taking the figure of that police officer kneeling on George Floyd's
00:16:00.080neck and this has you know of course what I try to do is to trace those beautiful connections
00:16:08.500that have always existed between diasporic African communities and members of the African
00:16:16.780continent, right? Blackness is meeting, Kwame Esbuma, Martin Luther King, beautiful convergences.
00:16:24.220I feel there's a new conversation that is troubled or invited in. And I think these conversations
00:16:32.340are especially needed now in a time when it seems, at least from one perspective,
00:16:40.380that justice is imbricated with the continuity of modernity. So there is a sense, of course,
00:16:46.460like you like you beautifully notice that we can see justice as this enlightenment thing right it's
00:16:53.820never some transcendent notion it is emergent from relationship right it's how we relate it's
00:17:00.840negotiated but there's also a sense in which it transcends or exceeds those troubling containments
00:17:08.740and we can start to see justice we can even practice seeing justice as something to reach
00:17:13.980out for. But for now, through the agency of this essay, I wanted to ask questions about how bodies
00:17:23.540were imported into the human, into the anthropos, right? How Sylvia Winters speaks about the man
00:17:32.580and what the man is doing and what we're missing if we negotiate the public order in a particular
00:17:40.520Chloe. So the question for me is, what are we missing? That is a hidden codicil of asking
00:17:46.540those questions about justice. What are we missing when we, you know, to use Fred Moten's
00:17:51.800voice, speak truth to power? What is left out when we do that? And where does fugitivity
00:17:58.580come in? How do we think about the figure of the fugitive through this conversation about
00:18:06.640I mean, I guess for me, the problem that I have,
00:18:14.040because I think that those are legitimate questions to raise.
00:18:21.300I think they get raised in a different kind of context here.
00:18:26.880And so this is what I brought up initially about the audience.
00:18:33.520What I'm speaking to there, and you hinted some of this, I think, well, for certain in the essay, particularly actually when you're talking about the African context, not so much in the U.S., but certainly in the African context, which is a question of class, the question of different interests.
00:18:56.360And so part of the difficulty I had with the essay, and just in terms of understanding the nature of the debate and who is being argued with, is that in the U.S., the movement itself is deeply fractured around questions of class, right?
00:19:23.080And class influences them, questions of strategy and tactics. And so what you were speaking to absolutely applies to and is the concern of a section of this thing that we call a Black Lives Matter movement.
00:19:46.880And there's also abolitionists within the movement. There are socialists in the movement and people who reject the kind of normative parameters based on what is pragmatic and what is politically possible in our current context.
00:20:12.600You know, those people populate the movement as well. And so part of the problem has been a kind of lack of engagement, a lack of debate and tension, really, around these sorts of questions within the movement itself.
00:20:33.500They have been muted and papered over. And so that the kind of liberal voices, those who are most concerned with a kind of what I'm going to describe as a normative sense of justice, normative reforms,
00:20:52.380Those voices have been allowed to dominate and really capture and overwhelm the discussion about what for others is a question of Black liberation and questions that involved, you know, quote unquote, how we might get free.
00:21:11.060And freedom based on the lack of coercion in making decisions about one's life. Like, what does it mean to achieve actual self-determination?
00:21:26.400And so, you know, these questions of class and class conflict among black people in the United States in particular are quite profound and they have resulted in a very bifurcated notion of what it is that we are fighting for.
00:21:48.920Because there are people who are totally fine with leaving the hull of the slave ship and just being on deck, you know, and letting the wind blow through their hair.0.53
00:22:00.540And they're OK with that. And then there are other people who want to not just leave the slave ship, but set it on fire.
00:22:09.820So the problem is, is this is all still happening within these, this concept of community, this concept of a kind of shared Blackness, you know, shared experience.
00:22:28.080And so that's part of what complicates my kind of thinking about the essay and answering some of the questions that you pose.
00:22:44.340Because to me, those are questions that really engulf a kind of liberal mindset that exists, absolutely, but are not shared throughout.
00:22:59.980You know, so some of the folks, you know, what I might describe as the left of what we are calling the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:23:11.420Right. You know, I don't think, you know, people who see themselves as abolitionists, these are these are the kinds of ideas and debates that animate those politics.
00:23:25.040It's really about how do we look beyond the existing paradigms? How do we imagine different ways of being, different ways of living?
00:23:38.640And these come into extreme conflict with other Black people, you know, who are, who see problems with the status quo.
00:23:51.800But really the problems are about how they fit into it, not the status quo itself.
00:23:59.840That is what you're addressing about the limits of inclusion.
00:24:05.680Of course, I wrote a book about this question as a kind of critique of post-war racial liberalism and the idea that our sole objective in life is to reject exclusion and simply be included without ever taking stock fully of what it is that we are being asked to be included into.
00:24:32.320you said something about coercion and and articulated that with regards to freedom
00:24:43.740right um how how would you i'm going to use a word that i'm i'm guessing i'm hoping that everyone
00:24:53.000might be familiar with ontologies right um the nature of you know the reality of how would you
00:25:02.580how would you think of freedom then freedom being this this um this very
00:25:10.280it's a it's a gleaming data point in the intergenerational transcontinental conversation
00:25:20.100about blackness right we talk about freedom all the time when Martin Luther King talked about
00:25:26.020freedom activism is about freedom but but a um a thread if you think about it as a biological
00:25:35.940or symbiotic thread that runs through um some of my engagements through the essay and beyond the
00:26:15.360And their meaning and inference and importance, frankly, change over time, right?
00:26:22.500Maybe I should give you this way, sister, that how do you think we are enacting freedom and performing it?
00:26:30.040And how do you think it's performing us within an architecture of social materiality and relationships?
00:26:37.100How are we enacting it, even in demanding certain things of the system that externalizes and oppresses us?
00:26:45.360Well, let me just say what I, when I think of the, the idea of freedom, because I get asked this a lot, like, what does freedom, you know, mean to you? What would liberation look like?
00:27:00.320And so I mentioned earlier this idea of self-determination and what does it mean to make choices and decisions in one's life that are without coercion?
00:27:17.080And that you are thinking or motivated simply by one's desire to move from one place to another, from one thing to another, from one thought to another.
00:27:33.020And so for me, that gets somewhere in the realm of what freedom is.
00:27:40.460You know, I think that it's not it's not wholly clear to me what it means or how it is ingested in our contemporary society.
00:27:56.540Is it the ability to vote? Is it to be free? It's often negative, right?
00:28:06.140It's like to be free from harassment, discrimination, these sorts of things, which to me doesn't sound very free at all.
00:28:16.560And so, you know, I think that, of course, we have a political agenda that is limited by what people think is possible, by what people's expectations out of life have been ground down to.
00:28:41.540So that, you know, I think that it has been reduced to its most basic negative form, which is to kind of be left alone, which, again, is not very free.
00:29:00.700And so the question that I have for you was really, what are you thinking about freedom as something that we should not strive for, right?
00:29:20.240So what to you, what does it mean to be free? And what would it mean to not have that as an objective, as the center of a political struggle?
00:29:37.060I think that, and I'm deriving or I'm sitting with a response that is grounded in these African stories and the ways that elders in my lands have, you know, alchemized the stories of capture and captivity and stayed with the trouble.
00:34:43.380But I do believe that through the struggles of regular people,
00:34:51.900ordinary people, that those people have the capacity
00:34:57.320to create a different context and a different kind of social relation.
00:35:06.680And so, you know, I'm an anti-capitalist.
00:35:09.380I'm a socialist and I believe that capitalism imposes certain material, social, political, spiritual constraints on individuals, socially, society, you know, the whole thing.
00:35:29.540And I believe that, you know, it also is a system that promotes this kind of self-interest and self-individualism.
00:35:44.920And so someone has asked about self-determination.
00:35:48.980Is that in conflict with collectivity?
00:35:52.880You know, I don't think so. I'm not talking about self-determination as individual, you know, individualism. I'm talking about the self as a collective body, like what is in the interest of the collective.
00:36:10.580And it's the collective that determines what is in its interest. And those interests are constantly in flux and changing. But I believe through, and this is where maybe, you know, I'm like, I'm a materialist, you know, so there's tension in like, even how to talk about some of these things.
00:36:37.580But, you know, I believe that people have the capacity to collectively determine in a given moment and circumstance what it is that they need.
00:36:51.220And I believe that without the particular constraints and obstacles created by capitalism or by, you know, systems that, you know, there's the kind of bureaucratic collectivist states that call themselves socialists.
00:37:14.320socialist if we think of socialism as sharing of abundance you know these are states that uh you
00:37:23.800know still had the kind of um uh dynamic towards extraction where the state was in control and
00:37:36.520ownership, but who owned the state. There was not democratic control of the means by which
00:37:45.340people govern themselves. There was not democratic control of the state itself.
00:37:52.560And so, you know, I think that it's through that process of collective struggle that people's
00:38:01.740ideas about what freedom is what it means to them in their particular context changes i don't know
00:38:10.500i think this is you know this is kind of uh where i'm at with with this question because one of the
00:38:19.100things that uh occurred to me in the essay was what is the mechanism and so for me the mechanism
00:38:57.400and how things are produced. I don't believe that we can achieve anything resembling human
00:39:05.120fulfillment within the structures of capitalism. And so what is the mechanism for this kind of
00:39:13.300social transformation? It is the self-activity of human beings through collective struggle.
00:39:21.800And so one of the questions that I had for you was this question of mechanism.
00:39:28.840How do we go from what we are in today to, as you say, walking away from the constraints of these objectives and concepts into something else, you know, that is not bound by these old ideas?
00:39:54.200What is the mechanism that propels that process?
00:42:20.580So that it's never about just this monolithic entity struggling for a new dimension.
00:42:25.780It's how bodies interact with other bodies.
00:42:29.780So, and I wish I could put my finger on beautiful and resonant examples that suggest that even with struggle, even as important as struggle is, one wants to hold the tension of where struggle has only bequeathed us with the inheritance of repetition.
00:42:55.800that our struggle has sometimes led to the proliferation of the familiar, right?
00:43:04.280I will never forget, you know, listening to Bernie Sanders saying that since the 70s,
00:43:11.360we've been struggling for a response to climate, climate chaos.
00:43:17.440And he would say, we have to respond to this yesterday, you know, the way that he speaks.
00:43:25.800he would ask the question why do we keep doing the same things over and over again I think it's
00:43:30.480a question that haunts the idea that struggle is the sole or exclusive which I don't think is what
00:43:38.220you're saying but I hold that thread of thought that struggle as the sole or exclusive
00:43:44.080mechanism for breakthroughs doesn't feel adequate in a post-humanist world where people are peopled
00:43:51.660in different ways by their environments so for me i think about the mechanism of shifts as
00:43:59.740lingering in the breaks right and by the break i mean to speak about um places where um places of
00:44:10.300deep errancy right i can situate errancy in terms of autism i do this all the time having
00:44:19.180being a father of an autistic child, I feel that we have learned to pathologize
00:44:29.660spaces where novelty thrives, right? And you could see this pathologization in terms of how we treat
00:44:40.140disabled people, how we treat minorities and all of that and autistic children.1.00
00:44:47.260I think that they kind of embody, and I don't want to binarize it like the neurotypicals and1.00
00:44:53.660the autistics, but there is a dense site of monstrosity. The monster to me is the cultural1.00
00:45:04.540symbol of strain away from the normal path. There is the monster, and I feel inquiry, a politics that
00:45:15.260sits with tracing and understanding how we are imbricated with specific social analytics
00:45:24.780might allow us to do something different or see something different let me put it this way sister
00:45:30.940now the problem one problem for me is that we're part of a sensorial monoculture that even protest
00:45:38.940and struggle could coexist side by side within a sensory monoculture that engulfs even those that
00:45:45.900we think are against us, right? We could be part imbricated with the very same systems.
00:45:53.180I remember seeing a brother telling me that he wanted to get people away from Facebook and so
00:46:00.060So his method of choice was to use Facebook to get people away from Facebook.
00:46:07.900It was entirely lost to him, the irony of getting people to do permaculture
00:46:14.220and away from Facebook by starting Facebook groups, right?
00:46:18.860It's just a comical example of the ways we're imbricated within systems.
00:46:22.620Even our struggles are articulated within them.0.93
00:46:25.260So speculatively, I think of the site of the zombie, the zombie being this monster, but which is a decolonial entity, of course, with history in Haiti and Black culture.0.51
00:46:44.580I think of those sites as places of deep interest to me, that it's not enough for us to struggle, because struggle can curdify or reinforce the very conditions, under certain conditions, that we're fighting against, but that we need a way of de-centering the struggler.
00:47:12.160question for me again is who is struggling what is struggling is there a stable identity behind
00:47:18.320the struggle and if there isn't if even the struggler is contested and the struggle is
00:47:24.320contested then what kinds of spaces can we co-enact that allows us to see differently
00:47:31.520This is what I theorize as the monster.
00:48:31.500Yeah, I agree that this is not struggle for struggle's sake, or that the quote unquote, or hashtag struggle in and of itself changes everything.
00:48:50.300For me, the possibility of a certain kind of struggle is a mechanism. And the reason why I see it as a mechanism is because struggle from below is disruptive. It breaks the status quo.
00:49:14.000And it's within those moments of disruption and breaks within the status quo that the other part of this becomes viable.
00:49:23.840And so the other part of this for me is then politics. So there is the symbiosis with objective and subjective factors that create the space for different ways of thinking.
00:49:46.460And, you know, I have a million different examples of that. So it's not just that you struggle. It's also the ideas that imbue those struggles. And those ideas are constantly being fought over.
00:50:04.400I mean, this is the history of the Black struggle in the 1960s, but it was the movement itself that opened up the possibility of thinking differently about the position of Black people in the United States.
00:50:21.260Without any kind of social disruption, which the movement represented, it was very difficult on a mass level to bring in these ideas about Black freedom, about liberation, about how Black people could live differently, not to an external audience, but to Black people themselves.
00:50:49.360And so for me, without the disruption of struggle, because it's true, fascists have mass marches, you know, January 6th in the United States was a protest, was a demonstration.
00:51:07.840So it's not just the ability to demonstrate. It's not just the ability to amass people in a certain location. I distinguish that struggles in the service of maintaining the status quo and struggles that are disruptive to it.
00:51:28.660Those who are stewards of the status quo may think that a particular movement can help it, is in service to it.
00:51:41.400But I believe that the longer that a struggle, protest, demonstration movement of some sort exists, that raises questions about the stability of that society.
00:51:58.580Now, whether or not there is a particular kind of politics that enter into those gaps, that enter into those fissures, that raise new ideas and different ideas about what society is, what it could be, what its problems are, how to deal with those problems, how to respond to those problems.
00:52:23.160That's a political question. And that is a question that has to be debated and argued over and that is not in and of itself a product of street demonstrations,
00:52:39.120But it's a product of political struggle between individuals, between people who are in some kind of dialogue about how do we change things.
00:52:54.160That's what I see those two things working in tandem with each other.
00:53:02.820There is a sense, sister, here that I'm in touch with the violence of clock time.
00:53:10.720This really shouldn't, I really wish we had two hours to do this.
00:53:15.580I do have something to say about what you, so it really needs to be said that, at least
00:53:28.280I want to say that I agree with the need for struggle.
00:53:31.800There is no dismissing that. There's no sidestepping like, oh, there's a new political movement afoot. Let's get rid of it. No, there isn't any of that. But there is, you know, reality is never pure or categorical. It's promiscuous and unwieldy.
00:53:47.660There is also, there is also dot, dot, dot, the sense in which the ground beneath our feet, especially in Africa, is widening, you know, probably, you know, figuratively embodied by the crack that is literally dividing Africa into two, running through Kenya at this moment, right?0.84
00:54:13.820that the ground beneath our feet is going
00:54:41.420So I'm asking, what do we say to my son who will not look you straight in the eye because visuality is not the premise of his experience, right?