Race Reflections

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[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

When I was a kid, some distant relatives came to visit from Russia, they were mixed Congolese/Russian.

I was in my very early teens. I seem to remember they came by bus, and the trip was weeks long. As my mother was the host, the White Russian woman brought her a gift. The gift: carrots.

The carrots were hardly edible. Somewhere between rot and dehydration, it was just a bunch of them. I remember watching the exchange and remember we were ‘poor, poor’... but even to me, it was shocking to be handed such a gift.

I was stuck between feeling insulted, confused, and amused... so I took cues from my mother. Even knowing she would never feed us these carrots, she thanked her guest warmly, accepted the carrots, and got on with helping them settle.

That is when the compassion hit me. I thought, how poor are you??? How desperate that you would think these carrots would make an acceptable gift?

I realised then this was likely a massive deal for them and that they were even poorer than us. And again, we were ‘poor, poor’, but not that poor not so as to eat these carrots or hand this kind of gift to anyone.

This memory sprung to mind today as I walked through street markets in Normandy. The stuff people sell, the stuff people buy. Emptying their homes trying to get a little cash.

For a minute, too, I thought, what is going on? How are these people thinking anyone would buy this stuff? I mean second-hand undies. Broken goods. Stinky or stained clothes. Hardly wearable... that kind of stuff.

But people really were rummaging through what can only be described as loosely resembling a "third-world" market, in one of the richest countries on earth, allegedly.

It hits me once more how much people are struggling in plain daylight, here in parts of France, how desperately poor some groups of people have become, and how invisible they are to the grand narratives about the Republic.

This story invites to reflect of human dignity, and what we can do to preserve it, when apparently stripped by circumstances. The act of graciously accepting the carrots, not only humanised a group of cash strapped foreigners, it helped them to feel they were acceptable in their condition.

Finally, a note that receiving the most apparently worthless gift may in fact be the biggest blessing someone may give you, if you read their intention correctly.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

There is something else, here happening as we are faced with a clear moment where a subjugated way of knowing triumphs over modern Western rationalism, and highlights clear epistemic gaps…

But look at how this is managed, instead of conceding the gap in the capacity to see and understand the world, the goalpost shifts suddenly, and all discursive distance is erased.

That naturalist/integrated/spiritual way of knowing is no longer recognised as distinct or at least distinct from the ideal pathway to truth and reality.

Instead, it is absorbed, naturalised, and cannibalised. Thus, indirectly reclaimed and assimilated into the self, as if it were always part of its own domain, as though it had never been subjugated, as though it was dominant.

That is also important, that speaks to what I have termed the epistemic shiftiness of whiteness…

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

My good people, some of you may have followed the tragic story of Lyhanna, the 11-year-old French girl who went missing and whose corpse was just found, thanks to an African man called Malik.

More than 170 gendarmes were searching for her for almost a week. Malik led the investigators to the body of young Lyhanna.

He noticed a flock of birds hovering above an agricultural silo and thought it looked unusual. In an interview, he said the sight made him suspect there might be a death-related explanation for what he was seeing, so he alerted the gendarmes.

Shortly after the investigators found the corpse under the flock of birds.

There are several ways to understand what Malik saw and the conclusions he drew, but I propose we remain at a symbolic level. He noticed a cosmological shift, observed the strange behaviour of the birds, and intuited that death might be nearby.

He says he initially thought it might perhaps be an animal, but it troubled him enough to call the police. And indeed, he would not have called the police if he had been certain it was only a dead animal.

We could also form thoughts about why he may have felt the need to add the more “logical” or “rational” justification of the possible dead animal as an African man; still, it collapses the minute he decides to alert the police, still let us not speculate too much.

Given where my thinking is at the moment, I want to offer a short commentary. I have a forming thought that part of the anger towards the police is that it is an African man who helped locate the murdered (white) little girl, Lyhanna.

There’s a symbolic transgression here, not only racialised in the most obvious way: someone deemed lower in terms of intellect solved a mystery that almost 200 men, white in the collective imaginary, could not, day after day after day.

There is another reading which is more interesting: to think about the response in terms of conflicting epistemologies, and the subjugated/African epistemology symbolically coming out on top.

That is a richer reading. It says that a sophisticated team, armed with rational logics, reason, and high-tech tools (modernism personified), could not solve something that the alleged primitive way of knowing and connecting to the world and nature could.

I think this is what I intuited and communicated, though not fully consciously, when I posted that I was surprised the cops listened to the African man. Indeed, although it was not recognised as such, there was something in this that was too counter-cultural and noteworthy.

The accusation against the police implies an expectation the police is trained to observe the behaviour of wildlife/birds, understand cosmological shifts, or feel when such shifts may indicate something sinister. They are being held responsible for the way modernism, in fact, disconnects man from the cosmos & nature.

The public is therefore, as we’d expect, making shortcuts and accusing the police of incompetence for missing the sign or sight. But this reading is itself somewhat lazy; it also functions as a form of scapegoating, displacing collective anguish, anger, and distress activated by the murder onto the police hear me out rather than engaging with the complexity of what occurred and what was projected onto it.

That is what the Lumières, broadly speaking, sold culturally to France. Of course, there is the greater context of police actions, culture, and competence outside of this particular incident which may be colouring things.

But I wanted us to stop and think about this tragic story and what it reveals about knowing, seeing, and witnessing, given the ideas I have shared of late. We could think about Malik’s role in terms of seeing and form hypotheses too in light of African cosmology, but this feels inappropriate to intrude on, so I won’t.

In the same way, the African men who I believe could see through me respected my autonomy and sovereignty by not digging too deeply into what they thought they saw in me.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

My good people, some of you may have followed the tragic story of Lyhanna, the 11-year-old French girl who went missing and whose corpse was just found, thanks to an African man called Malik.

More than 170 gendarmes were searching for her for almost a week. Malik led the investigators to the body of young Lyhanna.

He noticed a flock of birds hovering above an agricultural silo and thought it looked unusual. In an interview, he said the sight made him suspect there might be a death-related explanation for what he was seeing, so he alerted the gendarmes.

Shortly after the investigators found the corpse under the flock of birds.

There are several ways to understand what Malik saw and the conclusions he drew, but I propose we remain at a symbolic level. He noticed a cosmological shift, observed the strange behaviour of the birds, and intuited that death might be nearby.

He says he initially thought it might perhaps be an animal, but it troubled him enough to call the police. And indeed, he would not have called the police if he had been certain it was only a dead animal.

We could also form thoughts about why he may have felt the need to add the more “logical” or “rational” justification of the possible dead animal as an African man; still, it collapses the minute he decides to alert the police, still let us not speculate too much.

Given where my thinking is at the moment, I want to offer a short commentary. I have a forming thought that part of the anger towards the police is that it is an African man who helped locate the murdered (white) little girl, Lyhanna.

There’s a symbolic transgression here, not only racialised in the most obvious way: someone deemed lower in terms of intellect solved a mystery that almost 200 men, white in the collective imaginary, could not, day after day after day.

There is another reading which is more interesting: to think about the response in terms of conflicting epistemologies, and the subjugated/African epistemology symbolically coming out on top.

That is a richer reading. It says that a sophisticated team, armed with rational logics, reason, and high-tech tools (modernism personified), could not solve something that the alleged primitive way of knowing and connecting to the world and nature could.

I think this is what I intuited and communicated, though not fully consciously, when I posted that I was surprised the cops listened to the African man. Indeed, although it was not recognised as such, there was something in this that was too counter-cultural and noteworthy.

The accusation against the police implies an expectation the police is trained to observe the behaviour of wildlife/birds, understand cosmological shifts, or feel when such shifts may indicate something sinister. They are being held responsible for the way modernism, in fact, disconnects man from the cosmos & nature.

The public is therefore, as we’d expect, making shortcuts and accusing the police of incompetence for missing the sign or sight. But this reading is itself somewhat lazy; it also functions as a form of scapegoating, displacing collective anguish, anger, and distress activated by the murder onto the police hear me out rather than engaging with the complexity of what occurred and what was projected onto it.

That is what the Lumières, broadly speaking, sold culturally to France. Of course, there is the greater context of police actions, culture, and competence outside of this particular incident which may be colouring things.

But I wanted us to stop and think about this tragic story and what it reveals about knowing, seeing, and witnessing, given the ideas I have shared of late. We could think about Malik’s role in terms of seeing and form hypotheses too in light of African cosmology, but this feels inappropriate to intrude on, so I won’t.

In the same way, the African men who I believe could see through me respected my autonomy and sovereignty by not digging too deeply into what they thought they saw in me.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

I’ll add this;

Decolonial work involves a double movement.

In the same paradoxical way I argue (Kinouani, 2024), colonialism involves a movement of extraction of what is most valuable in the colonial subject (starting from life) and at the same time, colonial projection (which is an act of discharge both psychic and moral).

Projections do not only transform the violated subject into a silenced and mutated object; it also produces the psychic, epistemic, and structural conditions to legitimise, conceal, and sanitise that very extraction. One process cannot happen without the other.

Hence, since colonialism (re) produces extraction or theft, then decolonial inquiry seeks reclamation.

But as colonial projection organises the conditions of erasure and ‘forgetting’, then decolonial inquiry necessarily also involves seeing. Here too, one process cannot happen without the other. And seeing involves confronting loss…

The more we reclaim, the more we are forced to see, the more we see, the more we are bound to connect to loss.

This paradoxical condition of both being deprived and being enriched…is the liberatory symmetry of being taken from and…being loaded on, in lay language.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

I want to think about the feeling of dispossession/loss I named yesterday. It is a feeling that can accompany decolonial work, and has important implications for how we understand racial trauma in academia.

There is an almost taken-for-granted wisdom that the ability to withstand the emotional and intellectual labour of engaging histories of atrocity is ultimately a matter of personal resilience or psychological fortitude.

A matter of developing sufficient distance between oneself and the material under investigation. A way, therefore, of demonstrating how assimilated one may be into the structures of academia.

But I think this way of thinking emerges from whiteness and modernity. It is often articulated unthinkingly by those who stand in continuity with the benefits that histories of empire, colonialism, and mass violence brought them, while those attempting to piece together the archives are doing so years, decades, sometimes centuries later, raw from their ongoing violence.

It is violent to expect that, as human beings, we can be confronted with the unspeakable brutality visited upon our ancestors and forebears without flinching, and that our capacity to do so is somehow evidence of a mature psychic constitution.

In fact, this expectation is itself an expression of whiteness's dissociation, which in turn serves the reproduction of whiteness.

It assumes that these histories are past and buried in the way it wishes them to be past and buried. It seeks distance and detachment because it does not have the capacity to see, or to hold what has been.

The generations of scholars emerging from formerly colonised societies and formerly enslaved peoples were never meant to occupy the condition of knowers.

We were never meant to become subjects capable of thinking about and interrogating the former coloniser, their institutions, the archives, or to occupy any critical gaze.
In fact, everything was done; epistemically, politically, and materially to ensure that these realities disappeared from our view.

We were never meant to see. We were never meant to encounter the realities of what has been.

And yet here we are.

The emotional force of decolonial work hinges on this. To uncover truths that have been hidden, denied, or systematically erased is not simply an intellectual exercise. It is an encounter with terror, as many have already theorised. It is a reorganisation of our internality. It is encounter with loss and grief.

The expectation of dissociation, detachment, or distance is not only a repetition of racialised dehumanisation. It is a demand for our complicity in what was done to our forbears. It echoes the ways those who were brutalised and killed were asked to muffle inconvenient cries because they troubled white (Christian) innocence.

It reflects an academic culture that continues to refuse the consequences of its own implication in the covering over and disappearance of this suffering.

So how do we honour what it means to stand in the world necessarily transformed by the research we do.

The decolonial grief, anger, sadness, disorientation, and sense of dispossession that can emerge in this process which are part of the work itself.

What we often call resilience in this context is a defence against confronting this reality. A demand to absorb the unbearable that institutions themselves cannot absorb. Another way to disappear those disappeared. It is a veiled request to quieten protest.

But there is nothing immature about grief in the face of historical brutality, or sadness in the face of loss and theft.

And, there is power in making these emotions visible, known, and heard. Our ancestors were not allowed to; they were often murdered for feeling.

Instead of aiming to comply affectively, how about giving ourselves permission to cry loudly, to grieve unashamedly, and to reclaim the human capacity to feel as we think and to come together to say, we can see what you did not want us to see.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

I want to think about the feeling of dispossession/loss I named yesterday. It is a feeling that can accompany decolonial work, and has important implications for how we understand racial trauma in academia.

There is an almost taken-for-granted wisdom that the ability to withstand the emotional and intellectual labour of engaging histories of atrocity is ultimately a matter of personal resilience or psychological fortitude.

A matter of developing sufficient distance between oneself and the material under investigation. A way, therefore, of demonstrating how assimilated one may be into the structures of academia.

But I think this way of thinking emerges from whiteness and modernity. It is often articulated unthinkingly by those who stand in continuity with the benefits that histories of empire, colonialism, and mass violence brought them, while those attempting to piece together the archives are doing so years, decades, sometimes centuries later, raw from their ongoing violence.

It is violent to expect that, as human beings, we can be confronted with the unspeakable brutality visited upon our ancestors and forebears without flinching, and that our capacity to do so is somehow evidence of a mature psychic constitution.

In fact, this expectation is itself an expression of whiteness's dissociation, which in turn serves the reproduction of whiteness.

It assumes that these histories are past and buried in the way it wishes them to be past and buried. It seeks distance and detachment because it does not have the capacity to see, or to hold what has been.

The generations of scholars emerging from formerly colonised societies and formerly enslaved peoples were never meant to occupy the condition of knowers.

We were never meant to become subjects capable of thinking about and interrogating the former coloniser, their institutions, the archives, or to occupy any critical gaze.
In fact, everything was done; epistemically, politically, and materially to ensure that these realities disappeared from our view.

We were never meant to see. We were never meant to encounter the realities of what has been.

And yet here we are.

The emotional force of decolonial work hinges on this. To uncover truths that have been hidden, denied, or systematically erased is not simply an intellectual exercise. It is an encounter with terror, as many have already theorised. It is a reorganisation of our internality. It is encounter with loss and grief.

The expectation of dissociation, detachment, or distance is not only a repetition of racialised dehumanisation. It is a demand for our complicity in what was done to our forbears. It echoes the ways those who were brutalised and killed were asked to muffle inconvenient cries because they troubled white (Christian) innocence.

It reflects an academic culture that continues to refuse the consequences of its own implication in the covering over and disappearance of this suffering.

So how do we honour what it means to stand in the world necessarily transformed by the research we do.

The decolonial grief, anger, sadness, disorientation, and sense of dispossession that can emerge in this process which are part of the work itself.

What we often call resilience in this context is a defence against confronting this reality. A demand to absorb the unbearable that institutions themselves cannot absorb. Another way to disappear those disappeared. It is a veiled request to quieten protest.

But there is nothing immature about grief in the face of historical brutality, or sadness in the face of loss and theft.

And, there is power in making these emotions visible, known, and heard. Our ancestors were not allowed to; they were often murdered for feeling.

Instead of aiming to comply affectively, how about giving ourselves permission to cry loudly, to grieve unashamedly, and to reclaim the human capacity to feel as we think and to come together to say, we can see what you did not want us to see.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

Good morning.

I have been feeling quite reflective and quite sad about this Jungian discovery of differentiated perceptions or at least what Jung called differentiated perceptions which as I demonstrated is just a poorer — let’s keep it be real — rendition of complex African sensory metaphysics.

I think it is quite significant.

And I think the reason for that drop in mood is not only connecting to the feeling of dispossession, when confronted with colonial erasure and appropriation particularly from those who built their theorisations on the infériorisation of Africans (back to that projection-extraction dynamic)…

I lost my long term (though former training) analyst a few months ago; Dr Earl Hopper.

Not having access to him — as this thinking would have been something I’d run to/past him, and I would have been excited to exchange on, reconnected me to loss.

And I think he would have agreed with me and we did not always agree.

And this morning something he said to me years ago keeps playing on my mind, how tragic, he felt, it was that I would never have access for myself, to an analysist that thinks in the way I do…and this was the curse of my knowledge production.

So… all the efforts I put in theorising and conceptualising would eventually benefit others, but not to me.

I don’t agree entirely but…the work and thinking I did this weekend brought his words to life, with that, the enormity of his death too, and echoes of his thoughts on my developing thinking.

Today this loss feel particularly acute. I have not spoken publicly about it, particularly because there has been complicating factors which have made open engagement trickier, more in due course.

But I do want to say that I am grateful we crossed paths and ‘worked’ together for so many years, though often we really did not work well together at all…but it was all part of the work.

As all the same his thinking and analytic practice have profoundly shaped me, even if at times pushed me to think and work in alternative ways, you can see traces of his ideas in my work.

I am thankful. And may he rest in peace.

And to all the black scholars who theorise out of experience of violence, I send my solidarity.

https://t.co/JUz3ARKtsf

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

I don’t go much into Jungian analytics in my thesis because group Analysis is primarily Freudian but in places I interrogate issues of colonial appropriation in his work and thinking too. But that is a new useful element, which supports my position that foundational analytic thinking/ideas can find their equivalence if not genesis, in African metaphysics.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

Oh look! Almost as though Jung’s concept of differentiated perception which I am looking into for the first time today, maps precisely onto much more ancient African beliefs, and I mean centuries old foundational African beliefs.

The Kongolese’ Kolo comes to mind (the particularly perceptive/sensitive individual/node in the network of communication/community who is in touch with various realms of functioning, the unseen, the immaterial).

I wrote the piece on African sensory conceptualisations and recognition, I will precise, without awareness of this particular Jungian framework, sold as a ‘Jungian discovery’…

Like Jung I theorised, they were at risk (outside of the infrastructure of recognition), like Jung, I wrote it was a double edged gift, unlike Jung I credit Africa, unlike Jung I wrote the gift is communal (rather than a temperamental or cognitive disposition) and spiritually inherited.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

Added an addendum on the broader African relevance of the sensory conception I use so I could capture/retain the thread.

https://t.co/pCPdKrJ9qJ

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

In Ghana Ote in the Twi language, can mean to hear a sound, to taste food, to feel an emotion, and to understand a concept. Like Wa and Mona, it collapses the artificial/Western boundaries between different sensory modalities.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

´In Western thought, we speak about “seeing” someone as a psychological, social, or physiological act carried through ocular pathways. At least literally, though symbolically, we can mean to understand or to understand someone’s needs or experiences sharply.

But in African metaphysics, seing and recognising is ontological, communal, and spiritual. What is seen is not only accessed through the eyes.

What is seen may not even be accessed through the senses or the body, in fact in Kikongo, the verb to see (Mona), is multi sensorial, you can see with your body, you can see with your heart, you can see with your head, you can even see with your ears…the same goes with the other sensory modalities like hearing (Wa)’

I want to linger on this a little bit more…

https://t.co/uss783Aj3J

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

Ogbón Inú (Inner Wisdom/Hearing) *taps* neatly into the expansive sensorial and the immaterial component of ‘Wa’. It is "hearing" and accessing or sensing cosmic/spiritual vibrations, hidden truths, and/or disavowed emotional currents or conflicts.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

A few examples:

Ojú Inú ( often translated as the Inner Eye or insight) within Yoruba cosmology is the direct equivalent to seeing with the heart or head in Mona.