ON SAVING YOURSELF

In a conversation transcribed in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten models a useful way of thinking about such recognition. “The ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain’t my primary concern,” he says. “I don’t worry about them first. But I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk.” Then he paraphrases the thinking of Fred Hampton, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers:

Look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognize that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid mother-fucker, you know?

Jenny Odell (Quoting Fred Moten), Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock