They fundamentally misunderstand what fugitivity is, it isn’t a reliance it’s a refussal, it isn’t a flight from antiblackness it’s a sprint towards blackness

School of Social Sciences at the University of irvine, they earned their Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology.] (Damien M., “Another Life is Possible: Black Fugitivity and Enclosed Places” University of California, Irvine, Nov 29 2017, https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3343&context=lawreview)// [King K]

Black Fugitivity: Politics of Disengagement and Refusal

The politics of gender cast a long shadow in the lived experiences of my interlocutors. The actions of these young men ran in direct opposition to the countless efforts by policymakers, private foundations, and state officials to make respectable, law-abiding “men” out of these “boys.”7 Their indifference and provocation illustrate the contradictory nature and uselessness of such a gendered stance toward respectability under late capitalism. P. J.’s and Marley’s testimony and Devon’s strategic disengagement make clear the logic of refusal. The young men’s actions thus force us to reckon with an unnerving question: who among us would be content living in a social milieu where we were forced to learn within an educational structure that had severely outdated resources and pedagogical practices, was heavily policed, and due to the drastically uneven distribution of resources, could not even dangle the menial carrot of a living wage upon graduation? Yet this is the expectation and moral imperative that we place on Black students such as P. J., Marley, and Devon. On a very basic level, the liberal rhetorical strategies that conflate education with future economic and social success have fallen flat for Black youth throughout Southern California.8

Effectively countering the liberal logic of enclosed places, Devon’s tactical response of refusal to participate in class is an abdication of a liberal framework that masks the insidious processes of racial violence, as well as a profound means to maintain his humanity. Through his brazen plan, he managed to dissociate from the pejorative invocations of his inability. However, it must be stated that Devon had very few options. The school was in full support of his teacher, and he sought support from the only source of assistance he had available to him. While his stance proved heroic, we should recognize that Devon had to endure levels of state-sanctioned emotional and psychological violence that no youth should ever have to endure.

Marley’s alternative strategy of complete disengagement demonstrated a key function of the radical nature of the Black fugitive logic: the proposition of an alternative social vision for the utilization of social resources. His intervention of developing pedagogical techniques that incorporated the realities of the community performed two key tasks central to Black fugitive logic. The first was to utilize the formal setting of education as grounds to teach about the duplicitous nature of state power. In Marley’s case, the issue of cutting down the trees served as a literal and metaphorical device to understand the manner in which state power was commonly experienced in manipulative ways. While the parading of the space shuttle Endeavor through the streets of Los Angeles was marketed as a public good, there was very little discussion of what that entailed for residents, for whom such a spectacle meant the destruction of their communities. Marley’s insistence that a communal narrative be inserted into the formal educational setting constitutes a direct threat by exposing the oppressive mechanisms of state power while simultaneously assisting Black youth in understanding the complexities of crucial processes in the natural and physical sciences.

Marley’s call for the incorporation of the lived conditions of his community into education, as well as Devon’s and P. J.’s strategies of countering the politics of a violent space, are tightly meshed to the second function of Black fugitive logic—exposure through refusal. Their disengagement from the formal educational process has to be understood not as a blanket rebuke of education but as an action in opposition to state-mandated education that attempts to disempower Black youth. In many ways, the three young men’s actions are manifestations of Tina Campt’s (2014) invocation of fugitivity as a tactical practice to counter the imperatives of the state. Marley’s withdrawal, which is representative of more than 30 percent of Black students in California (Tucker 2010), illustrates in many ways a collective yet unorganized recognition of the oppressive tendencies found within the formal education system. As perceived by Marley, the emphasis on banal forms of testing and draconian educational mandates represent state power doubling down through increased control over both the curriculum (what is taught) and pedagogy (how teachers can teach). Perhaps more damning is Marley’s implication that the intention of the formal education system is to obfuscate paths of resistance and dissent for the masses of Black youth. In this manner, the chasm between what is taught by the school and the lived reality of Black students is not a lack of knowledge and/or recognition on the part of the state, but rather an attempt to prevent meaningful discussion and forms of learning that would directly lead to questioning and rebellion against processes that uphold state power.

The response by the state to the fugitive actions of Black youth sheds light on the fear of exposure of the forms of violence committed within enclosed places. As outlined in my brief history of Black education in Los Angeles, the county and city have been swift to criminalize acts of fugitivity. The Abolish Chronic Truancy (ACT) program has provided the impetus for the state to enlist all of the facets of the criminal-justice and judicial systems to track down Black youth and place them back in the clutches of enclosed places. Yet such a response is typical with respect to the attempted state suppression of Black fugitivity. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, 57) argue that this consistent response is based on the criminalization of the fugitive for fear and knowledge of what Black mobilization would bring to bear:

Governance and criminality—the condition of being without interests—come to make each other possible. What would it mean to struggle against governance, against that which can produce struggle by germinating interests? When governance is understood as the criminalization of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is that excess left from criminalization, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether.

Building on Harney and Moten’s insights, we can connect Black fugitive logic with Campt’s framing of fugitivity and Trouillot’s analysis of the state. The criminalization of Black fugitivity is a reaction to the Black fugitive’s insistence on refusal and on not being placed in the metaphorical and literal clutches of state power. Such was the case with Marley, who was very explicit about the role of state mandates (e.g., compulsory education) within Black communities. In this regard, Black fugitive logic functions as the catalyst that pieces together the multifaceted state apparatus that enacts state power. The diffusion of power throughout its many institutions and structures is thereby made known through the Black fugitive’s ability to decipher and name the many tentacles of the liberal state project (Gordon 2011).9