30/06/2025
❤️🙏❤️
How do we unlearn white supremacy?
We can't.
The pedagogical imperative that reduces learning to the isolated learner-that-learns, the self, conceives of white supremacy as what selves are doing, instead of how selves are being done.
But white supremacy cannot be unlearned by individuals alone. Because it is not just a belief system; it is a weather system. It is an onto-epistemic regime of experience with its own skin, breath, and metabolism. It learns. Indeed, it is a form of learning. And so, it must unlearn itself, at its edges, where its logics convulse, where its clarity dims, where the voice cracks into splinters of fugitive dissonance.
You could learn all the right words, adopt a million techniques, attend more workshops than there are clouds in the sky, change your attitudes, and take personal responsibility for racial oppression - you could do "the work" - and still the weather does not change. Because white supremacy is not just in your mind. It's not a "mindset".
It is in the timing of your breath; in the grammar of your city; in the slowness of justice; in the architecture of your institutions; in the materials of your childhood; in the light that falls unevenly through windows; in the question that is never asked; in the colours we don't know how to name; in the cavernous spaces between a sigh that we don't know how to inhabit; in the beat that is never felt; in the floorboards that creak in your favour; in the primal cry that streams through the embroidery of noise. It is the geometry of experience.
To unlearn white supremacy is not a solitary pilgrimage. It is not a tidy rewiring of cognition. It is not even a moral achievement. This is what I call 'paragogy', a learning at the edges of self. Or rather how learning unlearns itself. How learning re-members. How a system remembers its violences by glitching into unfamiliar music.
It is how the world forgets how to be colonial for a moment, and a sprout grows in the asphalt crack. Or perhaps amaranth.
You cannot unlearn white supremacy. White supremacy does not unlearn itself through 'you'. You are not the site of transformation. It unlearns itself in the cracks, in the dissonances, where 'you' are also being unmade. Where "you" is no longer a stable observer or subject-agent, but a shifting constellation of relations, histories, and incisions. A porous seam. A trembling node. A leak in the code.
What then do we do? The question hinges itself on the persistent logic that human selves are the solitary sites of transformation, that what we do is singularly consequential in the formation of planetary arrangements. And that we are the authors of 'our' doings.
It is not that our doings don't matter; rather, it is that doings are radically incomplete and are always framed within boundaries of relevance, within context, within a palimpsest of other doings. We are not the sole authors of our actions. What we call "doing" is already enmeshed within a choreography of forces - ancestral, microbial, historical, ecological, technological, gastronomical - that exceed intentions.
So, in the spirit of parapoetics, instead of asking "what do we do?", I ask in the minor key: how might we become more available to what is happening? What kinds of gestures let the crack speak? What does it mean to be apprenticed to disfigurement (which is the vocation of the crack)?
To tremble before these questions is not to fix the world. We cannot fix the world. But we can be moved by it. And in that movement, something undoes us. Or rather, the undoing becomes 'us'. And that undoing is everything.
Bayo Akomolafe
