Footwork, Rootwork, Wake Work
For the closing symposium of How to See in the Dark, an exhibition curated by the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines at Co-Prosperity in Bridgeport, Chicago, I organized a panel of Black scholars under the theme Footwork, Rootwork, Wake Work. I convened the panel because I was circling a question I could not yet articulate—a question I sensed might answer itself through movement, through presence, through resonance. I had encountered thinkers whose movements suggested a path—and was fortunate they agreed to gather.
Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE, a research group exploring emerging technologies in live performance. He is also a historian of Black aesthetics, dance, and performance theory. Thomas had already offered essential insights during the Futurhythmachines: House project, presented last year through the BADS_lab (Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences), and I sensed there were still open threads from that moment worth following.
Anna Martine Whitehead is an artist whose work troubles the entanglements between marginalized bodies, systemic violence, and institutional knowledge—through movement, image, and text. I first encountered her opening a work-in-progress by A.J. McClenon at Watershed Art in Chicago. Something in the grammar of her movement hinted at an answer I had long been waiting to hear.
Angel Bat Dawid is a composer, improviser, clarinetist, pianist, vocalist, educator, and DJ. Her work memorializes, extends, and re-dreams radical Black musical traditions through celestial soundscapes. She is an artist in residence at Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium. We met at the ABSTRACT BLACK symposium at Northwestern. We found ourselves in conversation about the figure Black Herman—and about Sun Ra’s impossible koan: “If you are not a myth, whose reality are you? If you are not a reality, whose myth are you?”
Together, during the panel, they answered the question I had posed in the only way it could be answered. What they revealed was this: Black life has never depended on the promise of light. Since the barracoon, since the passage through the Door of No Return, since the hold of the ship, we have navigated the dark—not as deficit, but as depth. The double pressure of fungibility and fugitivity demands it. The flashlight, the spotlight, the searchlight, the limelight—all surveillance masquerading as recognition—are not safe. And so we move in the dark: through sound, through rhythm, through ritual, through remembrance. This panel gathered to explore how Black survival has never been merely endurance, but a (re-)creative choreography of flight.
What follows is my articulation of the answer I found in their presentations:
Martine on the Möbius strip—not as abstract topology, but as Black mosh pit, twisted into a prefigurative dance form. She recuperated aggression and force as in-/re-surgent directionality, overturning the figure of the circular path again and again.
Thomas on rhythm—not as ornament, but as source code for time itself. His wordplay opened it, the interventions in the form of Prince tracks exploded it, and the entire contribution danced.
Angel with a sermon, yes—but more: a sonic conjuration. She shook the symposium out of its stupor and made it quake, holler, testify to a Blackness beyond projection—Blackness as its own project, practice, and possession. Even I, trembling in fear, found myself reaching for my Deleuze and Guattari like a cracked white mask slipping loose from sweat-slick Black skin.
What I’ve done here is pull fragments from a number of my own writings—not to repeat them, but to let them be rerouted, recharged, through the epiphanies that opened while listening to Martine, Thomas, and Angel.
It’s time for new education—the former rules don’t apply.
—Prince, “Dance On” (quoted in Thomas F. DeFrantz’s presentation)
Empire is not a monolithic institution but an evolving assemblage of machines—abstract and concrete—engineered to sustain global racial hierarchy and ecological dominion. It does not merely preserve dominance; it mutates, recomposing itself modularly through a planetary apparatus of capture—the technosphere—co-opting pre-colonial rituals, weaponizing colonial infrastructures, and neutralizing anti-colonial resistance.
Its continuity depends on the reinscription and deepening of two foundational fractures—wounds engineered into the world itself:
The division of humanity into races, defined by demographic determinability, geographic separability, and historiographic sequentiality. Global Apartheid.
The severance of humans from their earthly kin—from soil, stone, wind, and water. Planetary Ecocide.
Empire operates scalarly. It doesn’t simply act; it synchronizes its operations across multiple registers:
Sub-molecular: At the level of affect and impulse, Empire renders racialized flesh hyper-visible and behavior predictable. Tremors and twitches are scanned, catalogued. Desire becomes data. Sensation becomes surveillance.
Molecular: At the level of relation, Empire recodes intimacy into hierarchy. It exploits kinship and care, extracting legibility from elective affinities and enmities. Loyalty, preference, alignment—all harvested into statistical profiles.
Molar: At the level of population, Empire diagrams masses through typological abstraction and spatial administration. It anticipates movement before it manifests, rendering rebellion preemptively governable.
These scales are not isolated—they are orchestrated through a shifting ensemble of motion capture, user profiling, and crowd control technologies. The first laboratories for these techniques were the baracoon, the ship’s hold, the plantation grid, the slave ship’s manifest, and the slave trader’s ledger. Today, these same logics persist in predictive policing, biometric tagging, refugee sorting, and border infrastructure.
The manifests and ledgers that once quantified the value of enslaved labor have not vanished; they have mutated into contemporary data-driven apparatuses—tracking incarceration, reproducing racial typologies, and embedding structural inequalities into healthcare systems, employment metrics, educational access, and the algorithms that govern visibility, validation, and disposability across digital platforms.
As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney remind us:
“Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade—the first massive, diabolic [Imperial] logistics.”
Today, Black and Afro-diasporic peoples remain the substrates upon which Empire conducts its ongoing experiments. Africa is rendered a laboratory; Africans, a surplus population subjected to ever-refined trials in the standardization, normalization, and optimization of dismemberment, dispossession, and denigration. Beyond the continent, this logic reverberates—in favelas, ghettos, slums, refugee camps, and prisons—zones where Black life is sequestered, exposed, and subjected to the same relentless calibrations.
This is why Frank Wilderson writes:
“Civil society does not want Black land as it wants Indian land, that it might distinguish the Nation from Turtle Island; it does not want Black consent, as it wants working-class consent, that it might distinguish a capitalist economic system from a socialist one, that it might extract surplus value and turn that value into profit. What civil society needs from Black people is far more essential, far more fundamental than land and profits. What civil society needs from Black people is confirmation of Human existence.”
And further:
“Blacks are not going to be genocided like Native Americans [or Palestinians, for that matter]. We are being genocided, but genocided and regenerated, because the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world—we can’t be wiped out completely, because our deaths must be repeated, visually. The bodily mutilation of Blackness is necessary, so it must be repeated.”
What Wilderson makes plain is this: Black people are not simply excluded—they are instrumentalized. They are the flesh upon which the outer limits of the Human are tested. The dismemberment, dispossession, and denigration inflicted upon the Black—the one who is Black without distinction—serve not only to devalue Black life, but to calibrate the scale by which all Human life is measured. The mutilation is not incidental; it is exemplary. It shows how much can be stripped away, so others might gauge how much they still possess.
The singularity of Blackness lies in the fact that Black people are reproduced to be captured, tortured, and murdered—by commission and omission—without reason and without distinction, a condition that affirms the sense and distinctiveness of the humanity of those who are not Black. Others die for a reason, be it good or bad; Black people die so that others might recognize the distinction between dying for a reason and dying for no reason at all. Others fear being brutalized, imprisoned, or murdered for one reason or another, justifiable or unjustifiable; Black people fear being brutalized, imprisoned, or murdered for no reason at all. Others fear that care and support may be denied to them for some reason; Black people fear that there is no reason, justifiable or unjustifiable, for others to care or support them at all.
The popular myth that African people were enslaved purely or primarily for free labor collapses under the weight of the gratuitous violence inflicted on the enslaved. As Karl Marx described, Africa was converted into “a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins,” but the tortures inflicted upon these black-skins reveal that this was not merely a matter of labor exploitation—it was a spectacle of senseless, inhumane brutality, a performance of anti-Black terror that stood in stark contrast to the non-Black, non-slave’s sense of human distinction.
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman obliterates this myth by recounting only a few of the tortures endured by enslaved Africans across the globe—acts perpetrated at the very same time that the humanism born of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was consolidating itself:
“In the Gold Coast, his ears were cut off and then he was put to death. In São Tomé, he was drowned in the sea. In Dahomey, he was decapitated. In Kongo, he was asphyxiated in a barracoon. In Santo Domingo, boiling sugarcane was poured on his head and withered the flesh on his body. In Barbados, he was flogged with a seven-headed whip. In Cuba, he was filled with gunpowder and blown up with a match. In St. John, he was burned at the stake, sawed in half, and impaled. In Maryland, he was hanged and decapitated. In Georgia, he was covered with sugar and buried in an anthill. In Curaçao, his face was scorched and his head cut off and placed on a pole for the amusement of vultures. In Surinam, they cut off his hands and crushed his head with a sledgehammer. In Trinidad, he was dismembered and his body parts were thrown into the Atlantic. In Brazil, his ears were chopped off and a dagger buried in his back, his putrefied head displayed in the central square. In Panama, a sword disemboweled him. In Lima, he was paraded through the streets, beaten with the lash, and his wounds were washed with urine and rum. In Jamaica, he was force-fed excrement and burned on a pyre. In Grenada, he was shoved into a kiln and roasted. In Paramaribo, they cut his Achilles tendon and amputated his right leg. In Virginia, he was skinned. In Texas, his feet were bound and he was dragged through the streets by a horse. In New York, he was beaten with cudgels and hanged from a lamppost. In North Carolina, they burned him with torches and threw his body into quicklime. In Mississippi, he was cut to pieces on a wheel of blades. In Washington, D.C., he was mounted like a beast of burden and driven to death. In Alabama, he was tied to a cross, scourged by flaming torches, and beaten with chains. In Louisiana, his belly was sliced open and his entrails spilled out.”
As Angel Bat Dawid testified in her sermon, Dark Sound, War Cry, the reality of the Black condition is so horrific it overwhelms the psyche, compelling even Black people to disavow it and seek refuge in “White Mythology.” In an effort to escape the fate of being “just another mass of Black flesh,” some construct spurious explanations for the inexplicable—fabricating and then dismantling justifications for what was never meant to be justified. Those most persuasive in this endeavor—those who convince the world that their lives and deaths carry “meaning”—become Black persons of distinction, “special cases,” granted the dubious privilege of having a reason either to live to term or to die prematurely.
These “talented tenths,” these polished emblems of “Black excellence,” emerge as exceptions within a broader regime of gratuitous violence. Too often, they mistake their exception for elevation, imagining themselves avatars of Black uplift. But as Zakkiyah Iman Jackson reminds us, their so-called excellence is merely the answer to a racist question. It is not a response to Sun Ra’s anti-racist question—a Black koan: If you are not a myth, whose reality are you? If you are not a reality, whose myth are you?
The suffering of other groups under racial capitalism may resemble that of Black people in manner, but not in meaning. The fact that their suffering typically holds meaning—serves a function, a rationale, a context within the system—sets a clear limit to the analogy. Only in rare instances is the brutalization, imprisonment, or murder of non-Black people rendered wholly gratuitous, without pretext or explanation. Black suffering, by contrast, is structurally gratuitous, foundationally without reason—except in the case of the “special.” It is only through the figure of the “special case” or those with “special needs” that analogies between Black and non-Black suffering find their strongest, though still limited, traction. Only the exemplary figures of Black excellence are permitted to suffer like others. And only the exceptionally abject among others—the disabled, the stateless—suffer like those who are Black without distinction.
This condition is not confined to a small or isolated group. Africa alone accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s population, and the global African diaspora—stretching across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond—adds hundreds of millions more. Taken together, those who are Black by descent, history, or subjection likely constitute a quarter of the planet. But even this is a conservative measure. For Blackness, as both structure and grammar of suffering, exceeds census and phenotype. If the Human is continually secured by staging Blackness as its underside—if Black death is required to affirm life, if Black disposability is the baseline for social value—then more than a quarter of the world does not merely witness Blackness; it is formed through it, haunted by it, governed in relation to it.
This structural entanglement helps explain the prodigious global circulation of Black cultural forms—musics, dances, fashions, vernaculars—not simply as aesthetic products, but as resonant expressions of a structural position. They travel not because Blackness is marginal, but because the world is organized in relation to its negation. The global order is calibrated through proximity to Black suffering, Black style, Black refusal. Under Empire, to be human is, in part, to not be Black—or to survive Blackness through exceptionalism, analogy, or disavowal.
If there is a minor population that receives disproportionate attention, it is not the Black masses rendered undistinguished and ungrievable—it is the ethnoclass of whites with distinction. Not all who are white, but the credentialed, platformed, publicized, published, and titled—the global elite, less than one percent of the world’s population, who define the prevailing standards of beauty, reason, citizenship, and exception across mass media and global discourse. If Blackness without distinction is the figure that reveals how much can be stripped from the Human while still leaving a body behind, then whiteness with distinction is the figure that accumulates every property the Human is said to possess, and more. One is reproduced to be captured, tortured, and killed without reason or recourse; the other is reproduced to be believed, protected, and pampered—no matter the cost in lies, in limbs, in lives. Between them, Empire draws its measure. Between them, the world is sorted, scaled, and secured.
There are two primary ways this sorting is performed. The white supremacist paradigm figures whiteness with distinction as the furthest possible point from Blackness without distinction, positioning all other identities along a continuum stretched between them. This continuum has a midpoint—a threshold often called the “color line” or “human horizon”—below which one descends into subhumanity, and above which one ascends into full humanity. In this schema, Blackness without distinction marks the nadir of the subhuman; whiteness with distinction, the apex of the Human. No one can equal the heights of whiteness with distinction, but one may approach it—asymptotically, aspirationally. Likewise, no one can equal the depths of Blackness without distinction. Whiteness with distinction is imagined as positive infinity; Blackness without distinction, as negative infinity.
The anti-Black paradigm rearranges the field. Here, whiteness with distinction is not the furthest point, but the shortest route—the most direct line—from the abyss of Blackness without distinction to the horizon of the Human. It becomes the escape vector from the subhuman condition. Under anti-Blackness, one can, in theory, reach whiteness with distinction—but only by taking longer, more circuitous, more scenic routes than those born already near the top. And yet, again, no one can match the depth of Blackness without distinction. That position remains singular, absolute, and necessary. Blackness without distinction remains negative infinity—but in this configuration, whiteness with distinction loses its illusion of boundlessness. It is no longer infinite. It is merely a finite limit, like the upper bound of an exponential decay curve with a negative y intercept and an increasing slope: always approached, never attained.
Against both paradigms, radical Blackness adds what mathematics calls the point at infinity. Adding this point closes the system: parallel lines meet, tangent curves become whole, divergence is reconciled. It introduces continuity where there was fracture. It allows a break to become a loop.
This offers a lens through which to approach Blackness—not as a stable identity, but as a force operating at the limits of relation, recognition, and power. Blackness resists containment not through distance, but through its disruptive presence at the system’s extremes, at the place where binaries fail.
Radical Blackness marks both the nadir of subhuman abjection and the apex of human freedom as fugitivity. It is the site of negation and the site of flight. It is the degenerate and the generative, the disposable and the world-making. As the point where extremes converge—positive and negative infinity at once or, better yet, infinity as the point at which negative becomes positive and positive negative—Blackness undoes the logic of opposition itself.
As Anna Martine Whitehead showed us in her presentation on the Black Mosh Pit, the figure we are dealing with here is more than just a circle—it is the Möbius strip.
The Möbius strip is topologically kin to the circle, but fleshed out and kinked so as to turn space against itself. It makes boundary into passage. The Möbius kink is turning point where inside becomes outside, where tops bottom and bottoms top, where the lost is found and the found is lost. This is not metaphor. It is the structure of Blackness as point-at-infinity.
Blackness, at this point, does not transcend the system. It flips it. It inverts the coordinate plane. It exposes the arithmetic of identity as fiction, the geometry of power as illusion. It does not exit. It destabilizes. It is not the vanishing point as a perspectival trick, but as the point where perspective is both lost and found.
And so, Blackness moves—not in straight lines but in kinks and curls, in turns that return and overturn, again and again. It does not offer a way out. It reveals that there is no clean inside or outside—only traversals, twists, and recursions.
What does this mean, practically? It means we must reject the metrics of Black progress and uplift—the fantasies of getting ahead, of movin’ on up. Our flight must not trace a straight line from Empire’s inside to its supposed outside. We must abandon escape plots that keep us on the straight and narrow, seduced by the illusion that there is a shortest route out.
Instead, let us hatch kinky plots—baroque, wayward schemes that queer the orientation of top and bottom, in and out, captive and free. Our escape routes must be Möbius strips. We must work our way out only to wind our way back to where we began—again and again—each return an overturning of what we thought we knew. Every loop, a reversal. Every apex becomes a nadir; every nadir, an apex. To ascend to the heights of the Human is to brush the depths of the subhuman; to touch the depths of the subhuman is to experience the heights of the Human. Every myth kinked into reality; every reality kinked into myth. Every escape a reentry.
Jacques Derrida gives us language for this operation of inversion in an interview from the volume Positions:
“In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn [renverser] the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning [phase de renversement] is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of the opposition. Therefore one might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that, in practice, would leave the previous field untouched… The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis…”
Interminable like a Möbius strip. A structure that cannot be transcended, only traversed. No clean breaks, but knotty loops. Not a path out, but a kink that re-/dis-orients the field.
Black peoples have been charting kinked escape routes across multiple scales from the jump. We have many names for how we do. Let me offer you three: rootwork, footwork, wake work.
▩ I. Rootwork = Bass Materialisms = Vibe Shifts ▩
Empire at the sub-molecular scale wants your twitch before it’s even yours. It stalks the blush, the shudder, the near-thought. It doesn’t wait for you to move—it predicts your impulse and logs your vibe.
Rootwork kinks the sensor/censor. It vibrates at the threshold, making the apparatus shudder—like bass so deep it plays the soundsystem as rattle, not speaker.
▩ II. Footwork = Maroon Choreographies = Pack Formations ▩
Empire at the molecular scale parses relation. Your love is a dataset. Your intimacy, an input. Every nod, grin, blink—tagged, scored, commodified. It wants your touch to talk back in metrics.
Footwork kinks the profile. It builds crews through coordination, not categorization—with polyrhythms so funky you need multiple meters, multiple incommensurate metrics, just to attempt to notate or locate them. The beat never hits where they expect.
▩ III. Wake Work = Sonic Ecologies = Mass Movements ▩
Empire at the molar scale diagrams the crowd. It maps mood like terrain, calculates movement like weather. Heat signatures. Risk maps. Preemptive repression.
Wake Work kinks the diagram. It subordinates the topology of the network to the acoustics of the medium—not links and nodes, but resonant frequencies, interference patterns, vibrant fields. It subordinates code-switching to circuit-bending—no longer adapting to the algorithm’s preferences, but rerouting the signal itself. Signal-versus-noise gives way to call-and-response. The link becomes the loop. The node becomes a kink. Our networks are not clean chains of command; each node is a mirage of distinction, each link is a curl with a Möbius kink, a point at infinity. What seem like discrete nodes at opposite ends of a link are, upon recursion, revealed as twin approaches to that same point at infinity.
This, as Thomas DeFrantz showed us in his panel, is us “dancing in plain sight, when dancing is ‘not allowed’”—this is what Sun Ra might call the not-myth and not-reality, or the realist-myth and mythic-reality, of the flying African, “tapping feet, gliding, running with the angels, sliding, moving without moving.”
Or, to close another way, let me quote Fred Moten and Stefano Harney:
“If [Empire’s] logistics both assumes and dictates that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, what if [Black] logisticality, before and against both assumption and dictation, improvises a shorter distance in curve – or not even in curve, but in kink? Kink is neither curve nor circle, much less line. Indeed, a kink is often said to be a block. And what is a collection of kinks, or a collective of kinks, if not a dread, or jam? Watch me? No, watch meh, motherfucker.”
I against I.
Dreaded Blackness jams
the motion capture,
the user profiles,
the crowd controls—
takes flight, moshes down Babylon;
but too many answer that flight
with stomp, with cut, with drown, with burn—
as if Black were nothing.
But ask yourself:
where would you be
without Black?
You’ll find
you would not.
(a journey
through
the secret life)
