Bayo Akomolefe:
“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.”
Challenging the idea that we can unlearn anything, e.g.: white supremacy:
“You could learn all the right words, attend a thousand workshops, 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 spaces between a sigh that we can’t inhabit; in the beat that is never felt; in the floorboards that creak in your favour; in the primal cry that streams through 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’…”