In the wake of the court proceedings and jury decision in re: the killing of Mr. George Floyd, a friend of many years just yesterday asked me what thoughts I had. He had in mind more specifically whether I thought that any real changes might now be set in motion. I responded that I did not know. Quite honestly, I was and am still—doubtless, like so many of you-- somewhat paralyzed and traumatized. It is for me both difficult to impossible and necessary and therapeutic for me to focus and express thoughts in writing of some kind. For whatever they may matter to you, here go my attempts to channel, focus, and express raw feelings and thoughts:
First, a note of serious challenge--if the discourse on which you were weaned as thinking and acting adult person in the world—whether academic field or subfield a, b, c; or this or that other type of professional formation, jargon—if it does not provide space for, or actually enable you to think about, no, think through, what happened to Mr. Floyd, then you must seek to reform or dismantle that discourse; or “Get Out!” If your conversation circles or partners are not wrestling with what is happening, you need, as the late Congressman John Lewis often challenged us, to take it upon yourself to “Make some noise! Get in good trouble!” If your discursive circle cannot address or reckon with what happened to Mr. Floyd that circle has lost its legitimacy in the world we share. Henceforth, there can no longer be business or discourse/discursive practices as usual. All critical discourses should be structured so as to orient you to make the phenomena and dynamics we now associate with Mr. Floyd—the centuries leading up to his cries and agonies in the last moments of life—the stuff of critical focus. And the latter must be directed so as to make itself an ally of articulations of demands for appropriately radical changes.
Second, those of us associated with The Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) and through it committed still to modeling ex-centric discursive practices worthy of anyone’s investment of time and energy in our fraught and dangerous world—we might consider what it would mean to think with more focus and intentionality about what the “readings” of Mr. Floyd (and too many others, but also other related problems issues) represent, what they tell us about how we “see,” how we “read” things, situations we have naturalized, viz., made scriptural; and what it takes (nine plus minutes! of brutal and heavily symbolized violence mediatized throughout the world) to shake some of us out of our natural habit of “reading” in terms too flat and tight and fixed. (The situation/text can be signified as normal at a distance.) Mr. Floyd and others like him—too numerous and painful to name here--who wear (and are reduced to) black flesh historically overdetermined, signified, scripturalized—all these must for the sake of modeling and advancing discourse that matters be our focus.
I invite your sharing of thoughts—in response to these words or on other tracks--for the sake of common enlightenment and as part of the process of healing. The latter so as to wage the necessary battles again and on many other fronts.
Vincent L. Wimbush
22 April 2021