I Like My Coffee Black: Fugitive Blackness (With Gratitude to Fred Moten)

“I realize I’m saying some things that you think can get me in trouble, but…I was born in trouble.”
— Malcolm X, “At the Audubon” (1964)

“[T]rouble becomes the name for a scene in which a certain effort to contest the status quo is punished or maligned for its ostensible destructiveness.”
— Judith Butler, “Interview With Judith Butler” (2016)

I may, here, begin to say some things that may propel me into a troublesome discursive milieu. But, as Malcolm X says in the epigraph above, I — to be clear, and nowhere near twisted, because of my Blackness — was born and bred in trouble. Indeed, one might say that this is, at least in part, what Blackness is, what Blackness means and signifies, does and portends.

I met with a prospective English Ph.D. student the day before he and others in his potential cohort were to be shuttled through meetings, meet-and-greets, lectures, and the academic like in an attempt to get them to matriculate into our institution. He was a dope scholar of theories of miscegenation (he was a biracial dude studying Af. Am. Literature, hip-hop, poetry, short stories, that sort of stuff) and we ended up spending, like, five hours chilling, rapping, vibing in Starbucks. And didn’t buy an ounce of coffee (not all that into their “conscious capitalism,” I suppose).

As this student and I spoke, we wandered, inevitably as rigorous thinkers of Blackness, Black Studies, and general iconoclastic intellectual shit are wont to do, onto the subject of the effects of Blackness. This is too ironic in retrospect.

“Blackness, if we think about what people like Ta-Nehisi Coates or Claudia Rankine are getting at, is…I wanna say, something that is not simply about this right here,” he said as he vigorously rubbed his caramel skin.

Uh huh honey.

“Yes!” I jolted, banging the table. And my response, perhaps, is a controversial point, but I mean it: “Blackness is deployable, which is to say, it is a fugitive, disruptive, iconoclastic pathogenic force perturbing normativity, normative whiteness.” There is, in Dalton Jones’ words, an “intrinsic capacity of blackness to challenge any and all normative assertions of power and privilege wherever [it] may emerge.” In between criminality and propriety, lies Blackness, that quotidian practice of refusal, the middle finger to reconciliation, decorousness, and the demand to structure its raspy vocal timbre into something, anything, that sounds like verified music.

Enter whiteness.

As we engaged in Black sociality in this public space — a no-no, if there ever was one; a veritable intellectually verbal insurgence beckoning, purportedly, to be policed — this old white dude inserted himself into our conversation. No warning. No request. Just enter, because, apparently, this space was his.

“I think you two gentlemen would find this very interesting.” He placed on the table a newspaper clipping, pointing at its title: “Cornell Republicans to Host Fox News Correspondent Kimberly Guilfoyle.”

“That’s not the word I would use to describe this,” I said to him as I read the title. He didn’t hear me, though I was nothing short of clear and assertive.

“I think it would be fun for you guys to think about,” he said, again, hearing nothing.

“That’s certainly not the word I would use. Please go away now.” Nothing. He kept talking, waxing oh-so-objectively about the goodness, fairness, and balance this speaker would bring to the community. “Yo, go away now, please. We are done with you.” I am telling you, reader, this dude quite literally was unable to hear me. And I was irate.

I can only imagine, as my Black radical feminism always compels me to do, if we were Black women or trans folks having that conversation. The whiteness and cis male supremacy — which is also, like white supremacy, absolutely pervasive — that would have ensued would have been utterly catastrophic, I’d imagine. Black women and Black genderqueer/transgender/gender fucking folks, because of their particularly gender-inflected fugitive embodiment, are, I would argue, even more disruptive in public space coded in and through whiteness and cisgender maleness. The erasure, elision, and violent invalidation of the knowledges, voices, and language from Black women and trans folks, yo, is so real.

And no wonder, because, as Gloria Anzaldúa said of Chicana women, women of Color — Black cis women and trans folks — intensely “speak with tongues of fire”; they “are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration.”

So if we are using my experience in Starbucks as a case study that signifies a pervasive and quotidian phenomenon, we must ask ourselves what happens when Blackness occupies space codified through and by whiteness, so much so that corporeal incarnations of this whiteness — a whiteness, mind you, that was consolidated into its current inimical instantiation through “the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs…and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own [Black] bodies,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says — are summoned to shut it down? What happens when, in public, normative space, Blackness comes NY bopping in (you know the leg limpin’), refuses the coffee of Starbucks, and rather prefers to be sippin’ on sin and juice?

Blackness is the disposition, the posture, the moving force of fugitivity. What? Fugitivity, I say. What??

My eternal indebtedness is to Fred Moten for his recalibration of Blackness. We might say that this “thing” we call Blackness is that irreparable disturbance of how the Human has been constructed. An ensemble and revolutionary signifier of fissure, Blackness refuses to even acknowledge the purported tenets of power. It refuses, gets bored with (yaaawn) authority that attempts to circumscribe this disruptiveness. It is a problem, a question, a sinister grin undermining interdiction because it possesses — and re-possesses — knowledge of the indecorous, the improprietous, the inappropriate.

Moten helps us more. He writes, pontificating-in-Black, that Blackness indexes

that desire to be free, manifest as flight, as escape, as a fugitivity that may well prove to veer away even from freedom as its telos, is indexed to anoriginal lawlessness. The predisposition to break the law is immediately disrupted by an incapacity for law, an inability both to intend the law and intend its transgression and the one who is defined by this double inability is, in a double sense, an outlaw.

Mmm, mm, mm. Read that again; it’s better the second time, trust me.

And then read it a third time.

Blackness, then, is lawless, a predisposition to break the Law (note the capital) precisely because the Law is a violent force seeking to preserve order. BUT, to those of you who say “we need laws and orderliness,” it must be noted that the Law is distinct from justice. The Law, historically, has sanctioned — and still does, my god! — the obliteration of Blackness. Trans-Atlantic slave trade: Lawful. Black bodies as accumulated and fungible mere extensions of another, real full-fifths human being: Lawful. Black codes: Lawful. Redemption: Lawful. Jim Crow and murderous lynchings: Lawful. The post-13th Amendment enslavement of convicts (who are disproportionately Black and Brown): Lawful. Mass incarceration in prisons, or what Theodora Danylevich aptly calls the “hidden slave empire”: Lawful. Extra-legal and vigilante extermination of Black insurgency, validated via exoneration of the murderous culprits: Lawful.

Again, “Law” is distinct from justice.

Let us, please, think of Blackness as a radical movement of escape, as stolen life, as knowledge from the underbelly of the Zong and Amistad where bodies melded languages, cultures, potentialities, and those dreams that are colder — and certainly more volatile — than death. Perhaps that which is Black is “The air of the thing that escapes enframing,” that elusive force that says no to being hedged by power.

Perhaps it is, maybe, as Toni Morrison has said, a language that is “unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking language” and a deployment of the “Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable.”

Alternative iterations:

Put “paratheologically,” as that ill theologian of race J. Kameron Carter says in an admittedly “academic” lexicon: “blackness is a movement of the between…an interstitial drama on the outskirts of the order of purity….a fugitive announcement in and against the grain of the modern world’s…investment in pure being, or pristine origins, and of the modern world’s orchestrations of value, rule, and governance (i.e., sovereignty)…”

Put in profane vernacular: I’m not simply interested in fucking shit up; what I am genuinely interested in, on a different, but related, register, is the precise moment when particular actions or postures fuck shit up, and which things are fucked up, how are they fucked up, who fucks them up. Or more to the point, what is it about this thing deemed Black — what is its texture, its context, its history, its motivation for refusal — that foments the fucking up of that which is shit?

Put, if you’ll indulge me, in T-Swift’s sing-songey language: I knew you were trouble when you walked in…TROUBLE, TROUBLE, TROUBLE!

The Blackness I delineate here, to be frank and a bit controversial (though, that’s simply to say “troublesome,” which we already covered at the beginning of this), is not concerned with authenticity or realness or “blood” or a possessed identity — though, sure, I guess it’s kinda those things. Blackness, as it is delineated here, is not concerned with itemizing a list of requirements that one must meet in order to, alas!, “be” Black, Jack. Nah, this Blackness ain’t about that life.

Blackness, we might tentatively say, signifies a proximity to social death (but there is still social life all up in that social death). Too, it is that fugitive movement, absconding with life it is not supposed to have, refusing fixity; it speaks to that insurgent sociality that perennially unfixes. Blackness dances in the underground, a dance that is itself a potent knowledge; it Crip Walks, Nae Naes (watch me whip, whip!), Lindy hops, Dougies, leans and rocks with it (what’s hannenin’!), and snaps its fingers in positional abjection but lived ebullience for the un-grammatizing of whiteness that Blackness augurs.

But all the while, it is destructive. It is what happens when Gizmo is satiated after midnight.

This is all to say that when Blackness is on unapologetic display in, say, a Starbucks, it may necessitate — to the extent that the space, like most spaces, is mired in the grammar of whiteness and anti-Blackness — that white dudes come and put their whiteness smack dab on display right in front of you, assuring you that it, whiteness, is “interesting” and “fun.”

Yes, they will try to come for you.

But, as Blackness does, we will sidestep it, keep it movin’, dance, sing, elude, escape, disrupt, and set fire to rain long before, and after, Adele. In short, Blackness will cause trouble, trouble, trouble.

And that’s when you will know that something is happening, something is working. You know it’s hot enough when people start to squirm.