I’ve said before that I treat Black culture as a sacred text wherein I draw both my spirit and intellectual inquiry to form knowledge! I’ve put it in my books now lemme explain it to you through song.
Told y’all before I’ve been trappin’ out the intellectual Bando of social media as a public intellectual. That wasn’t done kitschy marketing sleight of hand. I really does this.
Here’s the 13-song Bando curriculum:
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I. Khia — “Respect Me”
This is the fucking thesis statement for my life as the public intellectual. 😂 I’m reminded of one of my most beloved professors and mentors Dr. Jonathan Gayles who loved me tremendously as a writer and stayed on me about my gratuitous public profanity online. I know he was trying to protect me from becoming illegible to places that would deem my intellect illegible through the profanity. I forged ahead and decided that I’m gon demand recognition without assimilation anyway. Khia doesn’t negotiate herself into respectability so that respect can become available to her. She announces identity, labor, history, standing—and makes respect the listener’s obligation. So I do not present an intellectual persona, I give you what I’ve got and tell you to evaluate what is actually here. And no matter where you find me you gotta respect the thing I actually made and the person who actually made it.
II. Then there’s The Last Mr. Bigg — “Trial Time”
I know who I am now watch what happens when who I am enters somebody else’s court of legitimacy. When I tap the line “ I can’t put my glock up, my glock is my hoe
And my hoe go everywhere I go
Which one of you fake ass niggas wanna harm me?
I said you better bring the Navy cause I’m fine bring than Army
Get you 12 white folks and take that shit to trial bitch” word for word it’s because I know that my mind is my Glock and my artillery don’t form with fear no matter who attempts to harm my thinking by credentialism, racism, or misogyny. Because when I say get you twelve white folks I definitely mean grab your peer reviewed citations cause I’m definitely bringing all my intellectual lineage with me to the gun fight.
III. Goodie Mob — “Cell Therapy”
My thinking often circles what it means to live under surveillance, social control, political suspicion, institutional power, paranoia that may not be paranoia because the environment actually contains structures worth fearing. The fascinating question in this song isn’t simply is the speaker correct about every perceived threat? It’s what kind of subject gets produced when people experience themselves as living under systems whose power exceeds their visibility? That is straight into your concern with the lasting imprint a show of force leaves upon the site.
IV. Outkast — “Elevators (Me & You)”
Cause Atlanta been teaching and preparing me. The Marriott marquis Atlanta’s infamous glass elevators passing one another from the grand atrium below🤣 Then there’s the literal iconic glass elevators at the Westin peachtree literally overlooking the city itself like Gods who reign on high and look down low.
I’m so ATL that I can clock myself in Outkast’s metaphor of ascent and changing social position.
And Atlanta has always been a spacious classroom for my questions because the contradictions are everywhere: Black political power—we ain’t had a white mayor in my lifetime—and racial hierarchy; civil-rights memory and capitalist spectacle; Black professional aspiration and poverty; megachurches and strip clubs; HBCUs and corporate headquarters; hip-hop and Ebenezer; Peachtree everything; I-20 & other freeways cutting freedom of movement through Black neighborhoods; the mythology of the Black Mecca alongside the material limits of that mythology.
V. Dead Prez — “I’m an African”
Because Ancestor Audre Lorde told us if I do not define myself for myself, I’ll be eaten alive by other people’s ideas of me. Do self-definition against imposed classification is central to my work. Who gets to name the subject? What historical consciousness permits someone to refuse the category supplied by the dominant order and locate themselves inside another genealogy?
This methodology is how I come to recognize that the code switch of Blackness ain’t always been authored by us.
Sojourner Truth says aren’t I a woman in her 1851 Akron speech and 12 years later some white lady (Frances Dana Gage) rewrites her as ain’t I a woman to give her nice slave reformation persona to appeal to white patronage.
And Adele Givens a century later would declare that “I’m such a fuckin lady”
Truth said I’m a woman & I’ll define the terms of my own womanhood then Frances decides lemme season this with antebellum negro got my audience.
The profanity does not negate the lady and neither does the rewriting of her by white gaze. The speaker’s self-definition outranks the respectability rule.
Gage definitely sprinkled antebellum nigga on Sojourner who was otherwise intellectually illegible to white sensibilities without it 🙃
🤣🤣 we know historically a suffragette wasn’t always concerned with Black women or our freedoms. It’s giving Yoko Ono & John Lennon woman is the nigger of the world.
From where I stand as a BW, white feminist movements have known how to articulate their struggles through Black oppression even absent acknowledging their role within its perpetuation.
Black feminist epistemology is not born simply by painting feminism in coal. Just as Africana Womanism isn’t either theory dressed in kente cloth.
VI. Dead Prez — “We Want Freedom”
And tight here’s the normative horizon. Not merely representation. Not merely access. Not “please distribute the existing arrangement a little more equitably.” Freedom. This is important for Dominionty because your inquiry can’t define liberation merely as the formerly excluded person acquiring greater power. You’ve already run directly into the problem that one can recover capacity in one relation while reproducing domination in another. So: what would freedom actually require of the organization of power itself?
VII. Pete Rock & CL Smooth — “Act Like You Know”
Act like you know I ain’t new to it only true to it. What is the relationship between knowledge and functioning? Knowing domination exists does not necessarily disorganize us from it. White feminists can know racial oppression well enough to borrow its grammar while remaining implicated in it. A Christian can know liberation scripture while reproducing hierarchy. What happens between knowing and organizing oneself according to what one knows?
VIII. Pete Rock & CL Smooth — “Ghettos of the Mind”
Material domination and mental organization aren’t separable. My question is explicitly not only what supremacy does to people, but how power organizes our functioning after the encounter with domination. “Ghetto” becoming a condition of mind. So now what does an environment teach its inhabitants about possibility, danger, authority, survival, refusal, belonging? The show of force leaves residue at the site.
IX. Tyler, the Creator — “Take Your Mask Off”
Instead of stopping at calling folks sambo ass coon ass minstrel show ass niggas I continue to interrogate adaptation as identity instead. Now we’re asking what performances become necessary, rewarding, protective, desirable—or eventually indistinguishable from the self—inside particular arrangements of power. And this is where my work avoids the cheap “false consciousness” explanation. A mask can conceal, but it can also protect. It can provide access. It can become habitual. It can be imposed. It can be chosen under constrained conditions. Removing it may itself carry costs. Dominionty’s better question is not why won’t you just be authentic? but what organization of power made this performance adaptive?
X. The Roots — “Proceed”
After all that interrogation the goal is movement not navel gazing. 😂 Not certainty. Not “I have solved supremacy.” Proceed. I’ve developed enough conceptual architecture to warrant continuing the inquiry but not developed it enough to pretend the inquiry is complete. Proceed under interrogation. Proceed corrigibly. Proceed because the question has earned further investigation.
XI. Fabolous & Jadakiss — “F vs. J Intro”
Is my meditative devotional when folks who show up to my intellectual gunfight with an opinionated knife. As Dr. John Henrik Clarke called it: I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this subject. I only debate my equals all others I teach.
XII. Kendrick Lamar — “man at the garden”
This one is an honest reflection of my wrestling with deservingness, authority, inheritance, recognition, and the declaration of what one believes oneself entitled to after labor and struggle.
XIII. CyHi — “No Dope on Sundays”
THE PEDAGOGICAL BANDO FOR THE SABBATH. 😭😭😭😭 because when CyHi said “I came not to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance. Luke 5:32. They say gangsters don’t pray… I beg to differ
We pray every night. We pray every night to make it out of these struggles
We pray all the time to make it out of this hell that we stuck in.” I respond with offering no dope on Sundays. I won’t offer you sermons that numb your thoughts or tickle your emotions because numbness won’t free us!
Go back and read my villain origin stories here:
Trappin’ Out the Pedagogical Bando, Repatriation 1 A Decade of Public Intellectual Practice,2016-2025, Repatriation 2 A Decade of Public Intellectual Practice,2016-2025.
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