Flash-in-the-pan transgression is good.

‘This revolt’ is also an invitation to the other to observe not just the unethical world of antiblackness, but the more elusive ethical im-possibility that escapes that world and its worldliness; the invitation to be other than human escapes in fugitive moments like these and it can only be acknowledged in and through passing because of its impropriety. Sukie is not freed in this act, in fact, the condition of her unfreedom is brought into full relief, but there is something else besides her political unfreedom, that is, a fugitive escape. This is to say, the fugitive nature of blackness that cannot be contained, that which is a thinginess that transcends objectivity, is also traceable through the revulsion of the other that cannot bear to witness and yet must; and also in the transmission of a story of blackness doing the impossible, that is, of revolting from a position of non-being, if only for a moment, as escape; not freedom. The political conditions are never fully transcended but are instead highlighted in a flash; and that flash is a beckoning, an ethical invitation, for all to embrace black hospitality..

The ethics of Sukie’s transgression is where the political ontology of whiteness, the first yes, is transgressed, for a moment, by a second yes of black social fugitivity. Sukie is the transgressive host and the criminal stranger, as she is forced to welcome the other at the threshold, but she also brings to light the im-possibility of an unconditional black hospitality through a gesture at the social level that unveils the intangible and fugitive breech of decorum that is blackness. She is constitutively indecent and improper, and the impossible flashing of her black body vivifies this sordid ontology—which is just one of many names for paraontology. The act’s fugitive brevity is not a temporal iteration, but a logical anomaly, an escaping moment, where the object bears resistance to an idea of the human that cannot be reconciled with itself or its ‘other’. In this sense she welcomes her guests to the auction block—the black home —to the realities of black life, the impossibility of domesticity, with a curtsey and a threat. That ethical moment does not come to us, now, firsthand, directly, but escapes through the archive, through black social life, through Fannie, through Hartman, through the others within … the black home .

Again, transgressive acts of black hospitality do not take place at the political ontological level or merely in the symbolic register; instead, they expose the political in sometimes exorbitantly violent, but often mundane and everyday, acts of ‘welcoming’. These acts of black hospitality take place in common courtesy or violent contestation of the ‘Other’s’ violation, with different fugitive scenes of rejection in and by the black home . Most importantly we need to emphasize that these acts of transgression are not just irresponsible acts that serve to highlight the historical hostility aimed towards black bodies. Criminal blackness is the only way we can recognize the structural role of transgression in relation to the unconditional law of hospitality. Criminal blackness both gestures to an idea of criminalization that is affiliated with black people throughout history in an attempt to systematically oppress and undermine them, while also ultimately escaping this political reduction. Or as Moten explains, “the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness” (Moten 2018, 150). Black hospitality, and the transgression it begets, articulates the black, fugitive, criminal ethical life outside of, but related to this history of pathologizing black people.

Now, listen to George Yancy as he espouses transgression’s profundity:

There is no attempt here to propound an idealist, ahistorical conception of agency/resistance or one grounded in a mere fleeting private moment of joyous transgression while the social and material conditions of oppression go unchallenged. My point is that there is something powerful to be said about the initial moment the black self proposes, reflectively generates other ways of being in the world especially within the context of those white iconographic frameworks that perpetuate distorted and dehumanizing depictions of the black self . (Yancy 2008, 113)

These transgressions are not for the vanity of individual satisfaction or as one-off acts of deviance. They are done with the effects of exposing the contradictions of the political order that has condemned the black body, the black soul, and the black home . They are not what initially generates ‘other ways of being’ per se, they are instead facilitated by the other ways of being that follow in the wake of an escaping paraontological sociality of blackness. They are not ‘fleeting private moments’ in time but fleeting social moments that are always out of time, that is, out of the linear time of the human. Sukie’s defiance is expressed through all black people of past, present, and to come at the same time; that is, her ethical transgression resonates through and through out the sociality of the black home as an act that challenged the narratives of complacency and practices of violence that attempt to delimit the space of blackness to the politics of the auction block and undermined her social sense of self through physical restraint, psychological torture, and public humiliation.