The Dempsey Backstory

Nordhaven Part:

The Dempsey Backstory

The snowflakes gently glided down from the sky, compiling into an array of soft white clumps spread across the sparsely coated ground. It was serene, just what the Dempsey household needed. Harvey Dempsey turned away from the snowfall and continued scraping the sticky egg from the bottom of the pan. The sizzling was just as comforting as the slow dance of snowflakes outside, he thought to himself, a steady pace that he tried and often failed to emulate in this home. But his effort mattered, he knew it did. And this was now his home, even if he wasn’t sure he would ever feel confident saying that out loud. He wasn’t sure of many things any more, but he was practicing being present just like his ma once taught him.

Harvey stood in the newly renovated empty yet cozy cream colored kitchen. The shelves had gnomes and a few travel trinkets on them. Bright yellow flowers were strategically scattered about. Harvey thought it made the home warmer when he bought them at the market. He was still learning how to do this right. Before it became a home, this lot was an empty plot of ground covered in thick grass. It was purchased by ma and pop Dempsey who intended for it to be an investment for the kids — Harvey and the twins Tess and Tristan. They were to make it their own one day. The Dempsey kids have always been a close knit bunch. They were raised to share love and advice when needed and traveled together with their parents multiple times a year. But lately Harvey thought they felt more like his own children, which has been well… an adjustment  to say the least. There has been more outbursts and more bickering. Losing their parents changed all of their lives, forever. 

After enjoying his portion of what he could admit was a half-decent egg and ham scramble, he turned his headphones on and began cleaning up before he had to leave for work. The rhythm from the blues music had him falling back into the depths of his own mind. He started to reflect on the last year and a half. It had been so different than what he envisioned for himself as an idealistic seventeen year old. Upon graduating he was meant to travel to Sulani and Mt. Komorebi with his best friend and former football teammate Jetson. They planned to sail and scale all summer and fall. He dreamed of seeing the world and Fiona, his ma, knew it. She helped him buy his plane tickets in advance, sharing with him her own pictures backpacking through Selvadorada and enjoying Tartosa with Lars his pop. But instead of flights and adventures, five days before graduation on a scorching hot summers day, his parents vanished. And so did the most of the parents of all the other students at Crest Hill Academy. He remembered it like it was yesterday. Of his friend group, only one parent remained — J. Luna Yung, mistress, crone, and mother to Jetson and Juniper.

For more about each character visit: https://youtu.be/N6tn5L-6Emo?si=U6pG7bO9CexkXncK

Right now I am trying to meaningfully write about the proposed changes to the ACF - Administration for Children & Families written in Pr*ject 2025. I have found it difficult to articulate how often misogynoir is at the root of policy changes that specifically target the broader trans community. The hatred of Black people and specifically Black women specifically has been a driver for government policy, the paradigms in Pr*ject 2025 are a recapitulation of what we already know. I do not believe you can or should fight for trans rights without fighting against anti-Blackness. They have always intersected.

As Spillers states,

“Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses…”.

C Riley Snortons conversation with Spillers work, and their focus on “uncensored flesh” is what I am currently diving into so that I can better appreciate and articulate this discourse around gender fluidity, racialization, and the mechanisms of upkeeping a captive flesh via policing.

Digression aside, I  say that Project 2025s aims are a recapitulation, due to the lineages of suffering that stemmed from the transatlantic slave trade, much of which we already experience - including that which has flourished from the seemingly mundane (to non Black folks) policy changes of the 60s, 80’s, & 90’s.

Right now I am honing in on the 60’s — a time when in response to desegregation jurisdictions, particularly in the south, were attempting to creatively destabilize the Black family by instituting several new criminalization measures/tactics, ie: diminishing ADC access by deploying suitable housing & parenting requirements which were enforced by welfare workers via raids. Too many Black women on AFDC meant having to find new ways to kick them off it. The focus on waste and fraud became more prevalent and necessary to uphold the white supremacist order. Segregationist, in retaliation to the freedom rides, pushed Black women out of their cities by claiming they were lazy, aid-dependent, & draining the community. Moynihan's cementing of this discourse in “tangle of pathology” paved the way for Reagan’s obsession with Linda Taylor & the welfare-queen-dramatics-turned-full-fledge-policy-agenda. The goal was and continues to be domination of the white cis-nuclear family, & anti-Black racism drives this.

As evident in Pr*ject 2025, there is still an effort to solidify this image of what is a “healthy”, normative,  “productive” family. As this posts describes, this has been the case decades prior to Trumps second election. It has surfaced in significant ways locally. In my dissertation work I found that Los Angeles, as of 2020, has had a “red flag” warning for mothers who have a boyfriend living in their home . This red flag was suggested by the LA Civil Grand Jury. Single Black and Latine mothers in LA talk about experiencing this in real time through additional surveillance from caseworkers and even having to sit through interrogations abut their sex life — as teenagers. I have no doubt that this has been occurring throughout the country. 

But why is this all important to remember now? Because solidarity and cross movement organizing is what is going to keep us alive. Back when legislation passed in Florida to criminalize gender affirming care, making it a reportable crime by child maltreatment agency workers, caseworkers stepped up to outright refuse to comply. But once legislation started to change for the better, those caseworkers went back to business as usual, dismissing all of the presently-normative ways that they still harm of the youth in the system. It is this way because these youth are disproportionally Black. Even if they are trans, they are seen as Black first, making their suffering less critical and urgent. In 2025 we have to care about Black liberation, even when it’s not convenient.

My first pitch since 2021 was just published by the Forge! This piece was inspired by my friends with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis who have expressed feeling left out of post-election organizing spaces due to inaccessibility. I love you all and am so grateful to have the support from such a loving community. This piece is about grief, severe disability, and community.

If you're seeing this, I am on a medical break due to a procedure planned on Monday 2/24. Keep me in your prayers as I navigate a crucial month (including possible biopsies in March) for medical care. 

luv,

v

It has only been two days since the Super Bowl performance and I am still reeling from the radiance of SZA and Serena, the eloquent dragging of Aubrey, and the simple genius of Kendrick’s 13 minute set. This reflection is a first impression stream of consciousness and not neat and tidy, so bare with me. Regardless, writing this has been a pleasure. Kendricks performances have always been memorable. The first time I saw him perform live was in 2015 from the press pit. My hands couldn’t stop shaking as I tried holding my camera steady to get at least one good picture. Mid set he dropped a bunch of red and blue balls on the crowd as the lyrics “if Pirus and Crips all got along…” blared through the festival grounds. I'm grateful that we are still able to experience his music, art, and mind ten years later.

I’m going to get into my thoughts of the performance, but first let me get this off my chest. As someone very critical of, well everything, engaging with the Super Bowl and the NFL was and is riddled with tensions for me. With the pandemics, the state of democracy right now, genocides, and state sanctioned abandonment across Louisiana, I can’t help but feel disdain for so many parts of the event. Simultaneously, I cannot ignore how much joy I experienced getting to watch and engage with the audacity of Kendrick Lamar, my favorite rapper since I was 17 and first heard “Faith” in 2009. Most times I don’t know how to discuss these intricacies and contradictions, and I have been recognizing that I regularly feel these tensions in my day-to-day whether it’s working jobs that profit the elite or during my futile attempts to try and chip away at my grief and anxiety with inadequate resources.  Somehow, I (we) still find ways to experience and create joy through it all. And I think that’s remarkable. This is not an excusal. In this part one of my stream of consciousness, I’m validating how difficult it is to feel this tension, and how feeling it has influenced how I viewed the performance as well. In this piece, I’m acknowledging the inspiration and joy Kendrick’s creativity has brought me over the years while also grappling with the landscape in which we create and enjoy Black art.
 

The Super Bowl halftime show was packed with meaning. I can’t speak on everything because there’s too much to cover. I won't even get into the significance of having Samuel L Jackson as Uncle Sam, SZAs performance, Serena getting her lick back via glorious crip walk, or the Gloria jacket. The performance was a 10/10 no notes. As for the rap beef, Drake is down bad. Period. But as I sat with the performance over the past two days I recognized a few themes, one of which is control. Of course this is likely obvious upon first watch or listen.

As many have recounted over the past few days, Kendrick loops us into a story about the “Great American Game” straightaway through Black Uncle Sam’s opening dialogue. My first thought was that the performance and the slogan were alluding to the government and music industries oppressive attempts to control Black people, attempting to mold them into a palatable extractable entity — a thing created for consumption, labor, and entertainment. Of course this is rooted in the echoes of the transatlantic slave trade, much of what many of us already know and much of which K Dot has explored in his previous projects. This perspective was made more evident by the continuous cut scenes of Uncle Sam instructing us to tighten up, stay calm and peaceful, and refrain from being too “ghetto” (aka refrain from the tropes associated with Blackness in America). Peaceful protest anyone?

The stage consisted of a simple but thoughtful set up that utilized the entire stadium. The main performance stage was laid out as a controller, accompanied by a street running through what would be the middle of the buttons. The street was wide and surrounded by streetlights and surveillance cameras lining either side. Part of the stage expanded to the crowd with lighting being manipulated throughout the set to show different signs in accordance with the game stage, words including “start here”, “warning wrong way”, and “game over” flashed at different parts of the show. My visibility, however, was entirely based on the Apple Music version of the performance which was shot by a few cameramen on the stage itself and a camera from birds eye view.

After watching the recordings from people at the stadium, I recognized that there were multiple different ways to engage with the performance based on vantage point, some of which were inaccessible to people only watching through the cameras lens. Kendrick masterfully controlled the reception of his storytelling by utilizing various camera angles and lighting sequences, while also playing with movement and set architecture. These manipulations impacted the audiences vantage points in real time and could completely alter the meaning and interpretation of the performance based on how you viewed it. This realization made me feel like I was in a simulation, a game indeed, and I have been grinning from ear to ear ever since.
 

But let’s back up, first impressions right? Kendrick opened the show by rapping an unreleased track on top of a GNX. I hate to toot my own horn but in our pre show estimations I definitely hoped this would happen. I’m not about to get too into the GNX discourse because I’m not a car girlie but I will say that my very cursory look into K Dots beloved car shows that it was thee car at the time of its conception. I am sure K Dot and a bunch of Black kids during the 80’s dreamed of racing this so called “Darth Vader” joint — (“Ain’t no other rap king, they siblings. Nothing but my children, one shot they disappearin’, I-am-your-father type vibe). Performance wise, the GNX was comparable to the Ferrari F40 at the time and only 547 were made. I love the notorious reputation of the GNX which is exemplified in this very 80’s commercial, enticing the consumer to join the dark side as Bad to the Bone plays in the background.

Real g shit, what an opener. But what almost made me cry was when all of the dancers started popping out that mug.

My first impression was awe. It was a reminder that Kendrick constantly puts LA and other Black creatives on. When he eats, others eat too. I thought about how exciting it must have felt for the performers. It also made me proud. Sometimes you really do gotta pop out and show ninjas. Talk your shit Kenny! But upon more consideration, I started thinking about the pressure that’s placed on Black men as mentors, fathers, brothers, husbands, artists, and educators everywhere. Their lives are consistently under a microscope, or surveillance camera. Kendrick Lamar has alluded to this over the years.

The introspection and creativity Kendrick has shown us over time through his music started to become more evident to me very early on in the performance. People hopping out the GNX was love, but was it also part of the game? I started falling down a mental spiral of questions. Can you stay genuine to your roots while amassing capital? How do you put people on without selling them and yourself out? What do you do with immense influence and responsibility as a Black man, especially one tangled up in the industry?

Not only that but what happens when we come together and things pop off? How do we handle our beef under the constant gaze of the oppressor/controller? Do we run to the courts (uh say Drake), do we kill each other, do we lock each other up? I think back to conversations I had while organizing with my Skid Row comrades, talking about how the prevalence of police and the criminal legal system reduces our communal imagination and our ability to handle conflict without relying on forms of policing. As one might say, it’s deeper than rap.
 
There was a simultaneity of narratives happening with this performance. I remember one time my professor lectured our grad seminar on legibility because we were frustrated reading through some dense text. Someone said “it’s just not legible”. Our professor took the time to teach us about legibility and how it didn’t always mean what we thought it did. Sometimes when you read or engage with Black text or art a specific meaning will only be decipherable if you can connect with it based on a common experience. Some text and art is more easily deciphered and given meaning when engaged with as a group, as black study. It’s rigorous, and sometimes it’s difficult and painful, but it turns illegibility on its head. And legibility is not always synonymous with accessibility. I love that Kendrick talks about this in Not Like Us and his teaser track. When Kendrick’s raps  “You would not get the picture if I had to sit you for hours in front of the Louvre” in the opener, he meant that shit. I appreciate him for the level of entertainment he planned for the Super Bowl, but also for the discussion he laid out for us underneath, around, and within the performance.
 

Kendrick can be serious, goofy, a straight shooter, a g, but hands down he is always a creative genius. Over the years people have been saying Kendrick can’t put out a hit song. (Which has always been cap, but I digress). To play on these critiques he released bops like Not Like Us and tv off, “give them what they asked for”. In doing so, he showed us the role WE, as the enjoyers and engagers of the art, play in controlling what is and isn’t taken up by artists and the industry heads who run the labels (eyes on you Lucy). In many ways we playing right into the game. We do it through our hot takes, our opinion pieces, our need and desire for drama, and our general consumption of art without true engagement and respect for Black artists as human. I am particularly thinking about dehumanizing situations like Meg the Stallions experience.

We are not just mindless consuming machines here to be entertained, we play in active role in all of this, for better or worse. He’s calling Drake a whole ass pedophile, but how many of us will still include him in our playlists? And what if all of us just chose not to? It truly begs the question of who is really in control and how we can and do use our power. I can’t help but feel like Dot is asking us to sit with these questions.
 

This is where I started to really get into my head with the performance. When I first heard Dot say the revolution WILL be televised it made me pause, it was not what I expected. While everyone is hyping this part up as an “I’m that ninja” moment, I have been thinking about it in terms of gaze and the overall theme of control.

I am jumping around but stay with me.

I want to specifically talk about my first impressions of “peekaboo” and “Not Like Us”/“tv off” as it relates to this. First, when Kendrick performed “peekaboo” I was shook. It’s also when I realized that so much of his performance was to or for the camera, and not necessarily the stadium audience. He was making sure he was almost always in frame directly addressing the camera audience. That’s part of the game right? That’s what we wanted right? During "peekaboo" Kendrick was within the X, the only stage with walls in which those in the stadium attendees could not clearly see unless seated with a birds eye view, or directly looking at the screens showing the camera footage. He further controlled the camera shots by moving his body around, comically popping up on the first peekaboo (he’s a diabolical troll fam). And it was up. I was hyped.

This segment of the performance had me thinking about a concept I’ve discussed in previous posts (and my dissertation) called dark sousveillance created by Simone Browne in Dark Matters) which she describes as “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one's self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight”. She goes on to say, "Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being. Dark sousveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with anti black surveillance”, and that it “…charts possibilities and coordinates modes of responding to, challenging, and confronting a surveillance that was almost all-encompassing…”.
 

Kendrick crafted the stage architecture in a way that allowed for pockets of invisibility/hypervisibility based on different audience vantage points. Kendrick's set was a contestation of the attempted censorship that stemmed from the lawsuit, a dismissal of the legal and industry eyes that were on him, and a declaration of subversive artistry and joy. I love how this ties into Simone Brownes concept of dark sousveillance, but also her work in general in that she calls us to question who is being watched, who is watching, and in what capacity—particularly as it pertains to Black people. I had this in mind as I scanned the stage.

There were performers seated on the street lights as an ode to the city life, but were they ops? Were they guardians? Homies? Scorekeepers? Spectators? This play on gaze seeped throughout the entire set. Although stadium-goers were able to see the dancers in black who were in the periphery or margins of the stage, particularly those gathered around the street section of the stage who were holding the pg lang flags (site of the protest), they could not clearly see Kendrick and the performers while inside of the X during peekaboo unless they watched the tv screen.

 In contrast those watching through the camera/tv only could only see what he and the camera man wanted us to see and when. We missed the peripheral details, the elusive performers in black weren't apparent until the end performance of “Not Like Us” (the final level before game over) when he chose to have the house lights on during A Minoooooor. *Revelation*. Exposed.

Sometimes our joy is not for their gaze. Sometimes we scheme in the shadows. Although tv viewers at home got to consume (in detail) Dots entire performance without much “distraction”, we missed other critical details like the directions and warnings portrayed from within the crowd. At times, we were lost because the camera was not focused on those other details. Funny how that works. I loved this play on gaze. We see what we want to see. We see what he wanted us to see. It was all crafted knowing it would be consumed in this way. We are part of the game.
 

There’s one part of the performance that made me gasp, and it was the pause after the John Stockton bar in “Not Like Us”.  The performers were laid out in an eerie resemblance to the forensic investigation crime scene chalk symbols used on the streets when there’s a murder.

It was so quick you could easily miss it. This was the best visual of the night to me. I’m still deciphering what the circle of standing performers means, but having everyone laid out like this initially made me think of Kendrick’s "Rigamorotus" video. “Don’t ask for your favorite rapper, he dead”!

However, when I started to sit with it more I thought about the spectacle, performance, and reality of mass Black death. It’s not lost on me that New Orleans has seen devastation, not only through the slave trade but also notably during and after Katrina when masses of Black people were forced to exist in horrendous conditions, particularly within the Superdome. These suffering bodies were “dead” to some of you, some of them. Waste, thing, to be used or otherwise forgotten.

It made me think about the bloods and crips in the streets of LA (reminding me of having to remove our blue shoe laces when we visited my aunties house on menlo as a kid) and how the death and destruction of Black communities is recycled, taken and used to propel the prison industrial complex, the music industry, and everything in between. We are the creators, the consumers, and the consumed. Whose holding the controller? They need us laid out in the streets as much as they need us to live so that they can keep taking — an almost guaranteed cycle of destruction. They find new ways to profit off of our suffering and I have been thinking about the ways the Super Bowl performance aides in or resisted that.

The performers laid out on the street was a statement for us, but also for those wealthy folks in the stadium watching an NFL game (NFL with majority white owners) in a city and country still devastated by ongoing disaster. A stage-street filled with a momentary fleeting spectacle of Black death, what and who was it for? K Dot gave us what we asked for, are we satisfied?  I am still stuck on this and am reminded of Christina Sharpe’s words from In the Wake:

Respectability. Representation. Revolution via Apple Music? Although “Not Like Us”/“tv off” felt like a victory lap (we reached the final level of the game!), especially when the performers started leaking onto the green outside of the bounds of the stage-street, I had to think, did we really win? Of course on the first watch I was purely hyped. The questioning came the next day like a lingering bitter aftertaste. Is it victory having Black people in high places if they’re abiding by, allowing for, and exacerbating the conditions that lead to our premature death and destruction (when we're the ones holding the controller)? Do we win by having a Black Uncle Sam? Does anyone win this game? Do we even have a choice in whether or not we play? Why did it bring me so much joy though?

I throughly enjoyed this performance. But after thinking about it I was like dang, am I even supposed to enjoy it? (Yes and no). It is deep. I feel like Kendrick called me out/in, particularly when it comes to how I consume art, violence, tragedy, beef, and music. I have so many emotions. I feel immense joy and appreciation from the art. I have been so depressed lately and I genuinely needed this inspiration. I laughed hard at how hard Drake was dragged. I feel awe over the audacity to bring this conversation to a global audience as a Black man during this political climate. I feel tension in watching for entertainment. I feel enraged that I’m a pawn, an npc, and at the same time partially controlling the game. One thing I know for sure is that Kendrick always reminds me how important it is to not wait for our oppressor’s to call the shots. We are not just spectators. We never were. We have to find a way to free ourselves, and to enjoy ourselves in the midst of the struggle. It will be mucky, full of failures and experiments, riddled with tension, but we are worth it. 

A little about me.

(This section is not pertinent to the review above so feel free to skip!)

My dads dream was always to have a radio station. He frequently made me record voice overs for him and listen to his mixes back on tape. He would play them in his red bmw with the bass so loud that it rattled my entire body. All of my dads spare time was mostly spent listening to music or creating music mixes. This love for music has been passed down to me and my brothers, and we have shared this passion with our closest friends growing up. Growing up in North Las Vegas was... an experience. We were consistently ranked as the second worst school district in the country. There were multiple shootings at school and the police regularly pepper sprayed us and did searches of our bags during class time. There was little for us to do in Vegas, it was a city tailored to adult tourism. No one poured into the youth, into us. Disinvestment from the city and county was felt by our corner of the valley specifically.

Growing up in the North we had to observe and experience a lot of state violence and I believe this impacted our perceptions of ourselves. Compounding all of this, the recession (and my dads retirement from the army) made things very conflict-ridden at home. For years I really didn’t know anything else. It was the norm for us. Through the long dry and scorching summers, crusty textbooks and defunded after school programs, we all found sanctuary in the music. 

It was game over when my brother bought FL Studio for the first time. Friends would frequently come over to record in our makeshift recording studios (aka a mic and pop filter in my tiny little bedroom). All of us spent long afternoons and endless nights surrounding ourselves with music whether it was making beats, testing them out in the van, recording raps, shooting videos, or going to local shows. It really did deter us from messing around in the streets. I’m not sure if my mom realizes we had some gang bangin ass people in the house, but my best friend in high school protected me (and I him) from some major foolery, and music brought us together. In high school I helped host beat battles at the local venues, created a website to promote local hip hop, and started recording “producer series” across the west coast. 

Section.80 was the soundtrack of my senior year and I know that it inspired so many of us. Some of the people I grew up with in Vegas and became close friends with, went on to become producers (presently!) for some of the biggest artists in the world. Music was our fuel, it was everything.

 
In my twenties I took my passion for art to the streets to protest against state violence and the prison industrial complex, my playlist was dominated by GKMC and later TPAB. At the first protest I brought my younger brother to we circled around the strip with a banner of all of the names of people who were gunned down by the police while blasting “alright”.  I say all of this to say, I love music deeply — and Kendrick has deeply shaped part of that for me. Music, for Black folks, is so much more than entertainment; its essence, joy, release, love, ancestry. Music has introduced me to people I’d never thought I’d meet, it’s helped me through depression and illness, it brings people together, it ruins lives (RIP drake), and it exposes vulnerabilities -- this performance was not an exception to that and I'm grateful for that. We need the music.

Thank you for reading. Part II incoming soon, health permitting! If you enjoyed this please subscribe to a membership or contribute a one-time donation to help me pay for my medical expenses, thank you!

"I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.”  - Toni Morrison

***

Imagine.

Me, an eager and tenacious 25 year old from North Las Vegas, a Cheyenne HS alumni (at the time one of the worst rated high schools in CCSD, which is also consistently rated the second worst educational system in the United States) sitting in professor SA Smythe’s Blackness and Borderscapes class in the second year of my doctoral studies at UCLA.

They said this was my ancestors wildest dreams. But how could they really know?

***

Professor Smythe required us to read all of Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination before our first class. This book changed the trajectory of my entire PhD. (I am truly indebted to Prof. Smythe for really shaping my PhD experience). I bring this up today because I have been reading Ruha Benjamin’s “Imagination“, for a book club, and it’s surfaced a few core memories. So though this is not necessarily a review of the first chapters of “Imagination” per se, it is about where the text is taking me. As I learned in Smythe’s class it’s important to read across texts, disciplines, and genres and sometimes concurrently. Notably, in the same quarter that we read Morrison we also studied Alexis Pauline Gumbs “Spill”, which is not only a phenomenal example of how to read across texts but also an excellent guide on how to imagine and engage in new citation practices. It’s with these foundational practices that I am thinking through this reflection.

Reading the first two chapters of “Imagination” reminded me of reading “Playing in the Dark” for the first time. It may sound so silly, but coming from a STEM undergraduate degree, I never realized that the current state of the world was influenced by the white imagination. Of course I have been fully aware of racism and misogynoir, but never did I actually recognize this as the conglomeration of ideas, the figment of someone’s imagination. That these things were dreamed up, which also makes them exceedingly fallible. Knowing this did not make systems and people feel less dangerous, but it made them feel more possible to change, destroy, or render unusable. I started recognizing this in everything I studied, in everything I existed in. I’m very serious when I say that I mention imagination in almost every talk I do. This video embedded is a talk with the transgender law center about mandatory reporting (relevant clip starts around 55:15). 

What was really important about Morrisons text for me was how she completely shifted my perspective on gaze. It’s as if she added new sets of binoculars to my collection. Or unlocked new realities within my interplanetary map. It was Morrison who helped me recognize the importance of understanding the ways blackness is portrayed through the white gaze and through language, and how that language alters the very real existence of structures and systems. In many ways practicing this type of analysis necessitates a look into what is as much as what isn’t, and consequently how both what is and “isn’t” there leads to a map — a map not as in just a location finder, but as in a guide to know how, and why, and when, and where. Because of Morrison I pay attention to the loud silences, the representation(s) of the portrayer and not just the portrayed, and how these representations relate to one another. This way of seeing allows the distortions to become more visible, more tangible in a way that is hard to ignore (as Morrison so eloquently describes in the quote above).

In “Playing in the Dark” Morrison says,

“Earlier I said that cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation's literature, and that what seemed to be on the "mind" of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man”.

She adds,

“I want to suggest that these concerns— autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power-not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.”

Here we see that without the portrayal of a “barbaric” or monstrous “other”,  the development of the American identity and some may add the “American dream” or even “manifest destiny” would have crumbled. It is upon this self-consciousness, fear, and simultaneous longing of said other that the New World was imagined, and how its capitalistic structure was formed. Yet although relentless it is not indestructible. And although Benjamin cites Berrys ideas on “Old stories” in her first two chapters, Octavia Butler (whom I jokingly refer to as prophet) described something that bends these dichotomous renderings of time — that is old versus new. The reverberations created from the past are patterned, like an echo, and elucidate what the future could be if or when dictated by these oppressive imaginaries. Despite this sounding defeatist or hopeless, Butler tells us that “…the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope”. We do better when we know better, and reading these texts helps us get there.

Something that also came to mind while reading these chapters and thinking through imaginations, was how other historical forms of fictive literature (not just skewed news headlines but literally fiction genres) created by the white imaginary become real world atrocities. Ideas turned reality, born from the imaginations of fear mongerers and money hoarders. As Ellen Samuels points out in Fantasies of Identification”, Mark Twains “Pudd’nhead Wilson” led to the idea that fingerprinting could be used to “delineate the different identities of racially ambiguous subjects” and has been quoted as fact (alongside the fake Will West story) in forensic textbooks and criminal cases! Samuel’s says “…we see that  the blurring of truth, imagination, and desire in the West story is not an  aberration in the story of modern identification but rather its defining  feature”. It is appalling to me that these imagined scenarios became so easily living nightmares.

***

Imagine.

Me, a young 29 year old graduating with a PhD and three months later becoming bedbound with no ability to walk or talk due to a relentless pandemic and corrupt federal public health system. I live in the echoes of my ancestors worst nightmares.

***

Morrison opened a door to many other Black thinkers and Professor Smythe walked me to that door. Isn’t it beautiful when our dreams lead to doors? I mentioned earlier that Morrisons essays helped me shift my perspective on gaze. It is upon this foundation that I began to read Simone Brownes “Dark Matters”, which is also where this journey through Benjamin’s first two chapters took me. There’s too much to say about Dark Matters, but this is another seminal piece that I consistently use in my personal work. It has helped me understand how to better articulate sites, processes, and systems that perpetuate or give capacity for/to racializing surveillance. Because of Browne I'm more concerned with the watchers, the watched, and all of the relations that tie the two together. Importantly in “Dark Matters” Browne conceptualized the term  "dark sousveillance" which she describes as “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one's self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight”. She goes on to say,

“Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being. Dark sousveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with anti black surveillance”, and that it “…charts possibilities and coordinates modes of responding to, challenging, and confronting a surveillance that was almost all-encompassing…”.

My dissertation ended with a chapter on abolitionist steps towards ending family policing and surveillance based on this concept. One thing that people in our community conversations mentioned was that the carceral system and its workers, both the child maltreatment investigators and the police, all had prescriptive processes to deal with violence that not only perpetuated further harm but that also contributed to the lack of creative solutions able to be used by the community. Because people have to rely on (by force or by habit) carceral approaches to violence intervention (dreamed up by our oppressors) our ability to both flex and experiment with our own imaginative restorative and creative approaches to harm reduction are significantly impacted — even if they’re also co-opted by said institutions. I say this to say that it’s important when we think about dark sousveillance, radical imaginations, and collective imagination to remember that we are fighting against people that know just how powerful our imaginations are. It is not just about flipping the script on our adversaries but also finding new ways to remain elusive, new ways to take bold action, and with this also finding new ways to love ourselves and remind ourselves that we are powerful and so are our dreams. 

***

Imagine.

Me being here at 31 still here, still able to write about it, still fighting every system in my way, and still working to formulate my words into a piece of text relatable to those of us traversing, or floating, through the shadowlands. Every day as a disabled Black and Filipino person requires a radically different imagination. The disabled, queer, black, trans, indigenous experience alters the “normative” reality. On paper we are mutants, anomalies, statistical outliers, control variables, monstrosities. We are the spotlight. We are the invisible rays. We are beyond capture and yet the net is wide. The enclosures are constantly shifting to find the traces of us, and the traces remain. We create new realities every day because our experiences require it. Our existence is incompatible with life as is, life as "Man". And sometimes it is too much to bear.  Sometimes it’s wonderful to be elusive. Sometimes it’s beautiful to imagine. Sometimes we have to turn our words, our floating thoughts, our dreams into fruition. Collective study and our communal imagination is the way through.

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Bluesky: @vashetc

Digital CV: veephd.blog

On December 24, 2024, President Biden signed The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, an accountability and transparency bill aimed at understanding the scope of harm caused to children receiving institutionalized treatment. The bill requires the formation of a federal working group, and the initiation of a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Thanks to Paris Hiltons advocacy the bill has brought some renewed attention to the horrors of institutional violence, yet Black youth and families who remain most impacted by institutionalization and congregate care have been absent from recent SICAA press coverage. Centering the plight of Black youth and families can help direct swifter legislative action that addresses ongoing institutional violence and repairs the decades of harm already caused.

According to a Children’s Rights report, Black youth comprise about 13% of the US youth population but make up 23% of the foster care and 26% of the “total institutions and group care facilities” populations. Black disabled youth and youth who also identify as LGBTQ+ face compounded risk of institutionalization. Numerous studies show how harmful residential treatment is and how it may lead to further institutionalization, particularly for black youth. There’s no need to wait an additional four years for SICAA workgroup data to come out, we can demand that our local government leaders and congress to act now with what we know to reduce youth institutionalization as well as the generational harm caused by family separations. In jurisdictions like California where black youth were found to be three times more likely to spend time in foster care or experience a termination of parental rights when compared to white youth, it is imperative to act swiftly, especially if there’s bipartisan agreement over the significance of curtailing this form of abuse. 

In California where there is already a working framework and impetus for reparations, monetary support for children and families harmed by institutional abuse should be braided into or supplement any ongoing or future reparations policy. California’s reparations task force and their respective grassroots partners use the United Nations five requirements of reparations which includes restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantee of non-repetition. Unfortunately transparency focused bills like SICAA often fail to meet any of these reparatory requirements and generally do not lead to any meaningful progress towards reparative action, especially for Black youth.

 These federal legislation gaps are compounded by inadequate reparations policy at the state and county level, where the invisibility of Black youth sometimes continues. For example, the California Reparations Taskforce described the harms caused to the Black family in their reparations report, yet there has not been any recent legislation specifically focused on addressing the extensive harms caused by the “child welfare” system, including residential treatment centers or congregate care. Particularly notable is that child maltreatment reporting agencies are missing from the economic calculation created by the reparations task force, even though there is extensive data on Black family involvement in the system including foster care placement, congregate care placement, and data from  complaints to the short term residential treatment placement ombudsman. Part of the reason Black youth are separated from their families disproportionately is because agencies use administrative data that contains proof of this history with the system. There is work to do on both the federal and local legislative fronts to ensure that youth and families harmed by residential treatment facilities are properly acknowledged and attended to.

 There are several reparations frameworks for policymakers to choose from as outlined in the California reparations report, with direct cash being the priority for most community members. Advocates for family policing system abolition reparations across the country have used Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) as an example of what is possible for Black families in the US. The IRSSA compensated victims who were placed in residential government-funded boarding schools “for harms inflicted on generations of Indigenous children”. However parallel or similar legislation for Black families do not exist, or have not gained the traction that they deserve. 

It’s imperative that we continue moving towards direct action based on the evidence we already have in hand. The recent attention on SICAA is a reminder that we can use this momentum to demand our policymakers to take direct steps to both prevent and repair harm. Although the legislative focus has been on ensuring that abuse does not happen in institutions, there should be parallel focus on compensating those who live with past harm every day. As made apparent by Hilton’s years long advocacy around SICAA, the consequences of institutional abuse are not one and done. As an organizer who used to work with mothers in Skid Row I saw the devastating effects of  that families are impacted for generations by the the shattering of familial and community bonds, experiencing periods of severe stress and trauma, economic instability and limited economic opportunities, as well as loneliness and isolation. There is a need for repair for both individuals and the larger communities, which will require direct cash assistance, community resources, and the dismantling of harmful insitutuins and institutional practices. The passing of SICAA is a reminder of what is possible and what battles lie ahead for 2025.

Co-Founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman's opinion piece about AI empowering humans was published by the New York Times this morning. In the piece, Hoffman writes reductively about “tech skeptics” and their haphazard use of the word “Orwellian”, implying an overstating of the harms of various “technological innovations”. He writes, “what I’ve found through my own experiences is that sharing more information in more contexts can also improve people’s lives” and “I believe A.I. is on a path not just to continue this trend of individual empowerment but also to dramatically enhance it”. The examples he uses of empowerment include Joe Rogans one-man podcast "empire" and an assumption that presidents aspire to be social media influencers.

Subsequently, he describes how the digital tracking of behaviors and activities can and should eventually and significantly drive our decision-making processes, from the complex to the more mundane. He states, “When you’re trying to decide if it’s time to move to a new city, your A.I. will help you understand how your feelings about home have evolved through thousands of small moments…” and “your A.I. could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we’re often barely aware of as we create them”.

Whenever these opinion pieces from big tech stakeholders come out the (many very real) risks to individual and community health, privacy, autonomy, and freedom are watered down to what can be understood as a seemingly annoying impediment on technological progress, or worse, erroneously portrayed as a wide sweeping opposition to all technological innovations without adding any context into the sociopolitical conditions in which people exist. What is conveniently missing from these opinion pieces is any real engagement with the concerns people have regarding the resources (water, land, energy) required to make “AI” happen, and the labor. These opinion pieces attempt to distort realities and persuade people that “AI” can create a portal to a(nother) New World (evidenced by his statement that “those who choose to pursue this new reality”’). This is something discussed by researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres. These beliefs are indeed echoes of the same logics that contributed to the empire of the West and in particular, the formation of the United States.

In fact we see versions of these types of arguments for “AI” in many different areas of work. Though in my area of work algorithmic and “AI” driven decision-making processes are not described as part of a “new reality”, they are touted as a fix to a variety of socioeconomic, labor, and sometimes “equity” issues. These fixes include less caseworker burnout (increasing productivity of laborers), more efficient service provision (reducing the "waste" or "theft" of "scarce" resource), reduction of human bias (implying the decision making can be unbiased), and ability to predict “crime” before it happens (in efforts to uphold the social order). However, each of these touted “uses” are often overstated and muddled with or in already harmful systems and processes. It is not a good idea to make bad things work more efficiently, and it is a bad idea to pretend that some tech-mediated utopia awaits us.

These reductive take that aim to oversimplify and mischaracterize critiques of “AI”, various surveillance technologies, and companies like “Open AI” are intentional and divisive, and unfortunately will be growing in years to come. Whereas Hoffmans (et. al) imagination dreams up a world in which we can and should opt-in to ‘AI” (which he describes as something that will augment and “improve” his already likely surveillance-free life via improved data collection), many people I work and organize with dream of freedom, much of which includes fighting to escape the cycles of entrenchment that mass data collection often guarantees. This includes being victim of incorrect automated benefits determinations that revoke medical coverage, generational family separations that rely on “proxies” of maltreatment and predictive risk assessment tools, incarceration and criminal charges based on facial recognition technology, geolocation tracking that upends user privacy and breaches reproductive rights, and genocide aided by OpenAI and other technologies of destruction. These are not fantasies or fiction that critics made up based on a flimsy reading of Orwell. The harms I listed are very real harms that impact peoples day to day lives. Really, they impact everyone’s day to day lives due to the climate and labor implications alone. In this piece, Hoffman asks the audience "do you feel seen?" by ChatGPT. I amend this question to call to attention a deeper question, who is being "seen", who is "watching", and why? 

Our critiques have never been just about how technology can replace human labor, but rather how technologies and the data it requires or creates restructures the sociopolitical, geospatial, and economic conditions in which we exist. These technologies have a very real impact on who is able to retain true autonomy, freedom, and well-being — and who is doomed to be stuck in cycles of extractive and organized abandonment. In 2025 some of us will continue to speak out and boldly against these mischaracterizations of our critiques, and these fantastical visions for our shared future. True empowerment comes from collectively dreaming with our communities in a way that disrupts the imaginations of those who do not have our best interest at heart, those who wish to capitalize off of our suffering in the name of innovation. It is essential that we dare to remember this in the coming years.

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