Alt is an instance of psychic resistance that builds moments of black social life against the afterlife of slavery.

For Black men’s access to these tools is in the first instance contingently granted only if it serves anti-Black interests, and in the second instance never bolsters any mode of Blackness into power. Rather, these tools are wielded to mete out punishment to Blackness that can never, and must never, be incorporated into hegemonic conceptions of what it means to be human or free, and what serves the interests of white patriarchal heteronormativity. Blackness yields no power within the state or within the intramural. Black social life “lived underground,” however, includes modes of psychic resistance we have yet to fully understand. This very resistance is inextricably linked to Black women’s (and other groups of Black people with less access to the instruments of “borrowed institutionality”) suffering made (il)legible within revolutionary movements. In fact, I argue that without devising proper analyses, discourse, and political strategies that understand the unique ways Black women’s, particularly poor Black women’s, suffering remains illegible within the intramural yet legible and malleable in the interests of anti-Blackness, we will fail in our attempts to unveil how the psychic afterlife of slavery persists within our most radical and revolutionary attempts to foment revolution and cultivate Black love: Black love for all positioned within the varied spectrum of subjectivities within Blackness.