We Will Not Innovate Our Way Out Of White Supremacy

A letter to my 19 year old self

Written and read for the occasion of the first Cultivate Fellowship, presented by Ginkgo Bioworks, aimed at increasing Black STEM representation. The Cultivate Fellows were a group of 19-21 year olds pursuing majors in STEM. I wrote and performed a live reading of this essay in response to the question “Imagine you were one of the students here. What lessons would you give to your younger self now?”

---

Dish of the Receiver, Lonnie Holley, 1983 (destroyed in 1997). Photograph of a box television suspended upside down inside of a circular structure surrounded by green foliage.

It is 2012 and you are busy at work creating the next startup that will change the world. You don’t yet know you’ve already changed the world by being born, you don’t yet know you don’t have to live for your parents, you don’t yet know that validation from teachers, peers, and jobs can never be proxies for the love you don’t yet think you’re worthy of, the love you think must be earned. No, not yet. It’s 2012 and you’re being indoctrinated during the height of “design thinking” when white supremacy discovered empathy was lucrative. You’ve decided to create your own interdisciplinary major, “Innovation, Design, and Society”, something with broad enough buzzwords that will allow you to keep taking your energizing blend of architecture, dance, philosophy, Black women studies, computer science, drawing, graphic design, creative writing, economics, environmental studies, and entrepreneurship classes.  Out of all the schools you cycled  in and out of, you found the religiosity of neo-liberal startup culture bubbling in the business school the most intoxicating at the time. 

It’s 2012 and Ruha Benjamin’s, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code¹, book and quote that will transform your thinking about innovation doesn’t exist yet. In 2019 Ruha Benjamin reminds us: 

“Whether or not design-speak sets out to colonize human activity, it is enacting a monopoly over creative thought and praxis. Maybe what we must demand is not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation. Too retro, perhaps? And that is part of the issue — by adding “design” to our vision of social change we rebrand it, upgrading social change from “mere” liberation to something out of the box, “disrupting” the status quo. But why? As Vinsel queries, “would Design Thinking have helped Rosa Parks ‘design’ the Montgomery Bus Boycott?” It is not simply that design thinking wrongly claims newness, but in doing so it erases the insights and agency of those who are discounted because they are not designers, capitalizing on the demand for novelty across numerous fields of action and coaxing everyone who dons the cloak of design into being seen and heard through the dominant aesthetic of innovation.”

It’s 2012 and you don’t yet know you will keep this quote in your pocket, right under your tongue, ready to whip out like a map to find your way home while in an artist residency organized by a biotechnology company named Ginkgo and a design agency named Faber Futures. No, it’s 2012 and you’re with a group of Black STEM majors talking about generational wealth, often conflating it with “breaking generational curses” without any informed critique of capitalism. You’re unconsciously seeking safety under the shade of white proximity, taking misguided pride in being one of the few Black folks in these STEM spaces. You giddy up and do a little twirl when you’re called a unicorn. It’s 2012 and you’re fantasizing about building the next billion dollar start-up not realizing in this fantasy no generational curses will be broken there will just be more money added to the well — the reliable well capitalism drinks from, a generation of people who believe they can be the lucky one that wins in a game designed for everyone to lose.

It’s 2022 and your fantasies look different, the conversations you find yourself inside of are different. Emerging out of the neoliberal spell you shifted misplaced pride in being the “unicorn” to “consenting not to be a single being” which Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten invite us into. Eventually, you will remember we will not innovate our way of white supremacy. There is no app for that, no algorithm, no robotics. The tools we need for social transformation and repair are ancient and relational. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study² Moten asks, “Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social?”, he goes on to say “when I think about the way we use the term ‘study’, I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

Still in conversation with the 19 year old version of myself, they might be asking, “Okay…so you realize capitalism is a losing game, you’re living through climate collapse, and you now know innovation is an untrustworthy nickname for domination. Now what?”. It’s 2022 and the 29 year old version of myself remembers “now what?” is the everlasting inquiry framing the beautiful door, the opening we can enter together. What’s on the other side of that door? A Wild Beyond³. An unknowable future and thank god, because if we could spell it out, articulate it, put it in a business plan —  if we could invent it with two people in a garage in San Francisco then someone would have bought it already. No, no this is a future that can not be seized. The biotechnology of ownership doesn’t work here. And the keys are in the shape of what AbdouMaliq Simone calls a “care that comes from having endured nearly everything”.

I used to always say, “everyone wants to teach black kids how to code, but no one wants to teach them how to dream.” It’s because they have the keys.

It’s 2022 and this is my question to you, reader, listener, dreamer: What futures do we want to build if we remember math is in the fractals of our fingertips, the southern river deltas, and our cornrows. If we remember the mutual aid our aunties, uncles, and cousins perform at the cookout to the sounds of Frankie Beverly and Maze’s, “Before I Let Go” is technology. If we remembered the flower garden your great grandmother tended to and the house your great grandfather built is a sort of structural and social engineering whose material and immaterial reverb transcends space and time. If we remembered the biotech belonging invoked at the community garden where we rehearse a world without prisons alongside collard greens is a sort of science. 

What futures do we build if we remembered STEM is a very recent acronym for the very ancient generativity of Black brea(d)th?

During an Antipode lecture Katherine McKittrick gave in 2021 titled Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea⁴ she reminds us we’ve already been engaged in the speculative practice of the wild beyond, the choreography of being we might need in a world that cares for Black life. McKittrick states,

“My methodological premise, or assumption, is that black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles dismal and insular racial logics. By employing interdisciplinary methodologies, and living interdisciplinary worlds, black people bring together various sources and texts and narratives to challenge racism. Put differently, one of the many ways race and racism are manifested is through colonial and imperial knowledge systems that express and normalise discipline-based and place-based classifications that hierarchically organise (according to race, place) our epistemologies. Within black studies and anti-colonial studies, one can observe an ongoing method of gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers, songs, grooves; these narratives push up against and subvert prevailing colonial and imperial knowledge systems by centering and legitimising other (black) ways of knowing. What is meaningful, then, are the ways in which black people are interdisciplinary actors, continually entangling and disentangling varying narratives and tempos and hues that, together, invent and reinvent knowledge.”

It’s 2022, a decade later, and I’m only 29 with way more questions than answers but if I could give three pieces of advice to my 19 year old self it would be: 

1. Discipline is a devastation to imagination. In a culture that doesn’t center transdisciplinarity, you will often find your curiosity on a leash. Commit to overcoming this. Find or create work that makes room for you to be multiple things at once. 

2. Never mistake silence for safety. Audre Lorde warns, “If I were to have maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. At the end of silence is still death”⁵. Trust in the transformation of silence into language and action and remember real safety only exists inside collective care.

3. Whenever someone says innovation, listen closely to see if they mean domination and watch their actions, never their words.

1. Benjamin, Ruja. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.

2. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.

3. Halberstam, J. (2013), The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons. https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1460896/a899a5ebf2ec18e9468f6c29cbef1911.pdf?1511808313

4. McKittrick, K. (2022), Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea. Antipode, 54: 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12773

5. Lorde, A. (1978), The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf