JMM

Wake work is life work. We are working on life, and living. And to live is to have lived. To have existed. To have character. To have iwa.

If we are to continue what those ancestors stood for and enacted, the question must always be for what and whom do we live; to be total and ontologically so

Rigor is not punitive. It is simply a reality that the modern world and its challenges have placed for us. We are faced with thinking a freedom that is not inscribed in the logics of the available knowledges--or rather the knowledges made available to us.

Politicians are not heroes.

Political thought then asserts that the leader is necessary, assuming that leadership will resolve the crisis-experience, all the while obscuring on whose behalf the crisis is understood and imagined, particularly the crisis-experiences germane to market societies.

Reading and writing is long and hard. An original idea is not as simple to conjure as fleeting thoughts and simple observations are to utter. But it is the foundation for knowing.

For it is intellectual warfare that has thus far been waged to prevent us for considering freedom “on our own terms.” The struggle in and for ideas precedes any quest for liberation.

Du Bois’s foundation for knowing however is rooted in a culture that survived plantation slavery to essentially spearhead contemporary movements for societal change—the Black radical tradition.

What ends up being the central conflict in early American history is the “internal enemy.” The exception that forever disproves the mythic rule. Human beings who must be prevented from being human.

In Africana Studies, methodological concerns need not precede research projects; they might have to be pursued in tandem

What Moses’s and other less sympathetic studies in this area portend is the negation of an analysis that considers that nationalist thought was indeed complicatedly, but assuredly, a rhythmic iteration of African deep thought.