Scene One: October 26, 2023— I woke up today because the alarm on my iPhone was going off. I immediately opened New York Times to update myself on the current bombardments in Gaza. I went to my living room, turned on my Amazon Fire TV, and did yoga on a mat of whose origins I am unsure. What I know now though, is that my TV and phone may contain materials from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there are currently reports of forced labor, displacement, and deaths due to conflict minerals. After I finished yoga, I made myself some tea—it was not fair trade and therefore I am not sure what labor practices were used throughout the production process. I proceeded to make my breakfast and lunch— all of which were made with products that are not fair trade. I then left the basement apartment that I rent to go to Emory University, a school funded by Coca Cola and whose president currently supports the building of a 90-acre police training facility that would further police militarization in Atlanta and beyond.
I am starting this post with above scene because it illustrates how we are always making ethical choices under constraint. For example, most of what I name from that morning can be traced, in some way, back to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the triple evils— poverty, racism, and militarism. Or, to zoom out and recognize those three evils as symptoms of root causes: capitalism, white supremacy, and an ethic of domination and death.
I do not consider myself a supporter of any of these evils, and yet to get by, I participate in them daily.
This is moral agency under constraint: the ability to act within a limited number of choices and alternatives.
This definition, along with a definition of apocalypse as an unveiling— one that acknowledges that society is approaching an end time rather than the end time— allows us to unveil the constraints of the American Empire and the ways people can and do exercise their moral agency within those constraints.
If you are reading this skeptically, not fully convinced that the United States can be considered an empire, it may be helpful to understand that empire is a broad concept that brings with it multiple conceptualizations across people, places, and times. The American School of Empire by Edward Larkin provides a helpful analysis of empire, which includes the way that the United States conceived of empire: “as a system or structure that enabled the state and the culture to manage a heterogeneous and complex series of peoples through a central organizing principle” (10).
In other words, the United States was intentionally crafted, by white men, to structurally and systematically centralize power over diverse groups of people—both within the ever-expanding borders of the United States as well as around the world. MLK’s triple evils—poverty, war, and racism— provide us with a helpful framework for understanding the way the American Empire has and continues to function.
Ironically, as Rebecca Gordon details in an article for The Nation, the very means of maintaining such centralized power have resulted in conditions indicative of an empire in decline. Gordon highlights four different signs that America may be following in the footsteps of previous empires that have risen and fallen throughout history: grotesque economic inequality, overspending on the military, corruption so extreme it undermines the political system, and deepening conflict and division.
There are numerous ways that individuals and collectives negotiate their moral agency within such an empire in decline. For example, the way an 81-year-old white man in the senate negotiates his moral agency within a dying empire will likely be different compared to a young, Black/biracial woman who is trying to find her place in such an apocalyptic era (yes, I am talking about myself).
Indeed, a quick Google search related to the end of the American Empire brings up numerous articles with varying responses to the notion that we are at a worlds’ end. For example, an article in The New York Times argues that the best way for American society to navigate its decline is through an increase in workers:
Given that Western societies, with declining birthrates and aging populations, aren’t producing enough workers, they will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains. Migration may have eroded the Roman Empire’s wealth. Now it’s what stands between the West and absolute economic decline.
John Rapley, “America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall,” Opinion, New York Times, September 4, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/america-rome-empire.html.
Such preservation-oriented arguments are, indeed, representative of moral agency under constraint, but I am more interested in the moral agency negotiated by those who are not interested in preserving this empire.
Here, I would like to lift up “We Need More Fugitives” by Ra Malika Imhotep. In this article, Imhotep states:
I’m not sure how to hold my wellness alongside an accumulation of rage and insurmountable grief. Everyday, I work against the lure of psychological exhaustion and apathy to reach towards a mode of being and doing in this world that is neither reactionary nor nihilistic. The urgency of now, the resurgence of the contemporary Black liberation movement—now commonly referred to as The Movement for Black Lives—is contagious. With my people unceasingly under fire and vulnerable to every kind of illness this world-society can host, I want to raise a machete and be a part of taking it all down.
“We Need More Fugitives” by Ra Malika Imhotep
My body is convinced of this theory more than the one shared in The New York Times. My body— which has been flowing through body aches, heart palpitations, and a mind so thick with fog it feels like I need to wade through it—feels the psychological exhaustion she names.
Imhotep goes on to argue for different ways of showing up in our present context, pulling from a wellspring of scholars, including Dr. Jasmine Syedullah, who wrote the following quote:
What we need now is not more freedoms, but more fugitives. We need more fugitives to find the loopholes in our language of liberation. We need fugitives now to keep abolishing legacies of slavery, colonialism and genocide that persist in the present day. What the world needs now is a pursuit of freedom rooted not in the fear of someone taking what’s ours but in a radical kind of love that refuses to settle for meanings of ‘justice,’ ‘safety’ and ‘independence’ that recreate the shackles, borders, colorlines, and other punitive forms of policing and surveillance we just escaped to claim our freedom.
Dr. Jasmine Syedullah as quoted in “We Need More Fugitives” by Ra Malika Imhotep
Moral choices made within this framework, then, are made in order to move us closer to the end of the American Empire, rather than away from it. Imhotep argues that such fugitivity can be embraced through, and crafted from, art and play.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of fugitivity as it is being used here, Fugitive Feminisms by Akwugo Emejulu is a short and helpful resource. In it, Emejulu defines a fugitive within this context as “one who escapes the material violence of the slave economy and the symbolic violence of our status as the non-human Other, from which whiteness and humanity draw their meaning and purpose” (34). She goes on to explain that fugitivity “is a process of becoming something other than what has been circumscribed by captivity.” Through this lens, art and play are not trivial acts but means of resistance.
How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce has been an essential resource for me as I have leaned into notions of fugitive art. In it, Bruce analyzes black expressive culture from the 20th century through a lens of critical madness that critiques Western normative conceptualizations of reason. Through this analysis, he argues that “mad methodology primes us to extend radical compassion to the madpersons, queer personae, ghosts, freaks, weirdos, imaginary friends, disembodied voices, unvoiced bodies, and unReasonable others, who trespass like stoways or fugitives, in Reasonable modernity” (10). The radical compassion birthed from such mad methodology, Bruce argues,
is an exhortation to ethically walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own. Radical compassion works to impart care, exchange feeling, transmit understanding, embolden vulnerability, and fortify solidarity across circumstantial, sociocultural, phenomenological, and ontological chasms in the interest of mutual liberation.
How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce (10)
What Bruce shows throughout the book is that artistic expression can help those facing the constraints of a dying empire go mad without losing their mind. As the American Empire crumbles around us, art allows us to embrace the creativity and imagination necessary to make a home in the ashes in ways that move us toward our mutual liberation.
This is moral agency under constraint: the ability to create, imagine, and act within a limited amount of choices and alternatives.
Scene Two: November 7, 2023—I had to ask for an extension on the paper that inspired this blog post. I was too overwhelmed by this American Empire that is lashing out with each dying breath. Within that extension time, I went on a pre-planned trip where I got to spend a weekend playing with my 2-year-old nephew. Though his vocabulary is extremely limited, his creativity knows no bounds. Car rides with him meant looking out the window and finding “wild daddies.” These were not random men driving their own cars or walking down the street, but rather figments of our joined imagination. “Did you see that one!?” I would ask, to which he would look out the window and shout “Yeah!” in return. Within a day, these wild daddies evolved and, in his beautiful imagination, learned how to fly. Now, the possibilities of finding wild daddies could not even be constrained by the realities of gravity. I started my trip with heart palpitations, something that happens to me when the stressors of the world begin to weigh too heavily on my body. I left with my heart racing from spending the day running around stores and my mother’s house with my nephew. I left feeling like I could write a paper about play with integrity.
The above scene confirmed what I had already been sensing in my body: play allows us to renew our energy and imagination. Such renewal is important as we continue to envision better ways of being amidst the death of an empire. Flying daddies, then, are no trivial thing.
When I was younger, my mom had two at-home jobs so she could have an income while also being home to care for my siblings and me—another example of moral agency under constraint. The first job was providing childcare for families in the neighborhood, and the second was printing custom candy bar wrappers for parties and weddings. This meant my basement was filled with toys, kids my age, and Hershey wrappers that my mom pulled off to replace with her own.
One summer, the other kids and I decided to turn my basement into a mall. We each set up our own shops with what we had in the basement— clothing, jewelry, fake food— and used the different color candy wrappers as currency. We would take turns closing down our shops so we could go make purchases at other shops. We did this for hours and days.
Also in that basement, I would sift through my mom’s daycare materials so I could play school with my little sister. Like the mall, this playtime was thoroughly thought out. I would spend time “lesson planning” for what I would teach that day. After lessons and worksheets, I would send my sister off to “recess” while I “graded” the worksheets and crafted new lessons. Other days spent in that basement would involve gathering our play tea set, along with either fake or real food, and sitting around having a tea party.
Recently, as my friends and I tried not to drown in the sorrow of the world, I gathered them together for lunch at a nearby park. As I pulled out the food and jars with homemade lemonade, I was reminded of all my tea parties growing up. I was reminded, with grace and gratitude, that what I consider everyday life now is a life I once constructed from Hershey wrappers and plastic food. I am, indeed, playing. This gives the systems I am a part of— like capitalism and the academy— less power to choke the breath out of me. I take away the power of constraint to drag me into nothingness when I decide this is just play.
While in the park with my friends, October leaves fell around us and occasionally on us.
“It means good luck when they hit you,” said my dear friend and colleague Courtney Ariel Bowden.
Now, when I get hit by leaves, I cannot help but feel like my ancestors are whispering to me— sending me a blessing through a veil that feels so thin these days. I breathe in and thank them; I breathe out and remind myself we are still at the beginning of the end. For as luck rains down on me from the sky, death rains down from the sky in Gaza. We are constrained. These constraints can feel so tight they choke the breath out of us. I am grateful for those who choose art and play, regardless.