MISSION STATEMENT

liquid blackness project’s mission statement: to mentor the next generation of scholars of color and other scholars fully committed to the agenda of Black Studies, while creating a vibrant, extended, and sustainable community.

The liquid blackness project is entirely committed to the aim and scope of Black Studies: centering on Blackness—black people and black art—and critiquing Western civilization’s attachment to the project of whiteness. As we condemn the atmospheric reach of anti-blackness, we also make the rejection of white supremacy and privilege the goal of our scholarly pursuits. 

While we are devasted by the recent most blatant episodes of anti-black violence, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, David McAtee, and Tony McDade, we are aware that this list in no way reflects the pervasiveness of white supremacy. We understand these tragedies in the context of systemic racism and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, class, national identity, religion, and ability. Further, we refrain from expressing shock as a way to dismiss the totality of anti-blackness. Instead, we remain focused on the interrogating the political stakes of representation, to think critically about the efficacy of public statements, performances of solidarity, and analytical language that rely on the tools of oppression.

Our unwavering solidarity with voices raised in protest in the US and all over the world is inextricable from our condemnation of other expressions of violence, including the political and social neglect that caused COVID-19’s devastating effects on communities of color and academia’s persistent disregard for the true needs of these same oppressed communities. We call out white supremacy as the most denied pandemic of the modern era, and demand that white people do the work of eradicating it without relying on the emotional labor of the communities it has already victimized. 

As we recognize these violent continuities, we remain committed to creating spaces for the expression of art and scholarship that is not exclusively tethered to, and indeed may de-link from, anti-black terror, even as we support  art and scholarship pressing historical claims for justice, recognition, and rights into new, and newly expansive, futural registers.