Rasul Mowatt & Too Black (P1): Exposing the laundering of Black rage (Ep431)

Written By kamea chayne
Green Dreamer Podcast / Rasul Mowatt and Too Black
“Rage is not enough. What are you going to do in response to that issue? The further the response is from the issue that produced the rage, the more it opens the doorway for laundering.”
— Rasul Mowatt

What does it mean to understand laundering in the context of how Black rage often gets converted to fit the interests of capital — against the very people experiencing that anger as a response to state violence? How do we remain cautious of different forms of co-optation, including through the arts, that end up distancing people from the material conditions that originally sparked the rage?

In this part one of our two-part conversation, we are honored to welcome the co-authors of Laundering Black Rage, Rasul A. Mowatt and Too Black — who guide us to critically reflect on key happenings in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd — and more recently, the murder of Sonya Massey.

Join us in this vital and sobering dialogue as we discuss how activism for social causes is often subverted, redirected, and laundered into forms deemed palatable by the state — only to be fed back into reinforcing the system itself. We also explore how cities, to be distinguished from “society”, are set up inherently as sites of extraction — enforcing complicity by design.

How do we confront our entanglement in such processes of laundering — while staying focused on the types of efforts that can more directly address the sources of systemic harm?

We invite you to…

Green Dreamer / Rasul Mowatt & Too Black
 

About our guests:

Rasul A. Mowatt and Too Back are co-authors of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (use the code “LBR25” for 25% off the publisher’s website).

Rasul is a son of Chicago and a subject of empire while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. Rasul also functions in the State as a Department Head in the College of Natural Resources, as an Interim Department Head in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, and as an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. He is the author of the book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us.

Too Black is a poet, scholar, organizer, and filmmaker who blends critical analysis with biting sarcasm. He has headlined various stages and events including the historic Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, Princeton University, and Johannesburg Theater in South Africa. He is the co-author of the book Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits.  His words have been published in online publications such as Black Agenda Report, Left Voice, Blavity and Hood Communist. He is currently the host of the Black Myths Podcast, a podcast debunking the B.S. said about Black people.

Artistic credits:

Dive deeper:

Expand your lenses:

 
 
 

To support our show and tap into our extended and bonus episodes, join us on Patreon today!

 

episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Too Black: [“Laundering Black rage”] originally began as an analogy, but as we wrote this out and fleshed it out, we don't see it as an analogy anymore. It's simply a form of governing and a form of counterinsurgency and just a way that capitalism works—one of the ways that capitalism works.

So it originally started as a study to try to understand 2020 in terms of when George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25th, 2020. We were trying to understand that response, the rage that rose on the streets, the Black rage and rages of others. We were trying to understand how that rage at a Black man's neck getting stepped on is somehow converted to things that seem to have nothing to do with resolving that actual issue. So stuff like Black capitalism, buy Black, diversity sponsorships and corporate statements, the many commercials that we saw, the Congress kneeling on one knee in Kente cloth,… and then more seriously, Black organizations that received money, such as Black Lives Matter, that did not seem to have a plan on how to take care of those Black people that they received monies on the back of, and many other things that arise. Originally, we were just trying to understand that conversion.

How do you go from a Black man's neck being crushed to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) money? How do you go from a Black man's neck being crushed to a grant?

When something becomes high profile or something catches a wave and there are protests, there are uprisings, there are different responses of Black rage that come with that. So we're trying to understand that conversion.  Laundering became a means of understanding not just the conversion of rage, but the conversion of all types of crimes that the state and the capital do.

Laundering on a basic level is just taking something dirty and making it appear clean. That's if you look up any definition of laundry. So we don't change the definition of laundering. It's not an analogy. We're simply applying it beyond finance and stuff like that. So even within the classic examples that we might understand to be laundering like a drug dealer or somebody who's doing something "illegal " and trying to take the money they make from said illegal thing (I put illegal in-air quotes) and try to convert it into something “legit”. So that money is considered illegitimate. They're trying to convert it into something legitimate. They'll go through a task of a phase of things.

There are three phases to laundering. There's placement, layering, and integration. You try to get the money that you made from the drugs and you try to convert that into money that you can draw out of a bank and that doesn't get flagged, that the state won't put you in jail for, and that you could spend in anywhere you want. And it's considered clean, even though was originally dirty. It was made from something that wasn't legal. But we just said, OK, if you apply this definition beyond these very strict definitions of legal and illegal that are based upon the perspective of the state and the perspective of capital, you have a bunch more options to consider what laundering is.

To sum it up, if you look at the United States, we now call it the United States, we don't call it Turtle Island. We don't call it the names of the Indigenous nations that existed here. So how do you convert it from those Indigenous nations to the United States? Well, the original crime in that case was conquest.

There had to be a means of legitimizing [North America] as a country, as opposed to just an act of conquest. That's where the state becomes important.

We don't just define the state as just a government, but the state as a collaboration of government, corporate interests, and elite interests that sit, as we say in the book, on top of an accumulated base that serves the interests of white capital. So the state and all the different things that come with the state, whether that is government, whether that's business, whether that's tax collecting, whether that's people who create roads, whether that's bringing in settlers to live, all these things are means of converting the original crime of snatching Turtle Island and killing those people off and giving them disease and converting it into a country. 

In terms of slavery, you steal the people from their land. So the slaves are the dirty money and then the cotton is the cling. So you cling to your crimes of slavery by literally the products that the slaves make and then you go sell it. And that's considered legitimate, whatever the cotton ends up being.

So rage is a response to the process I just described at the core. Black rage is looking at this level of oppression, living under it, and experiencing it. And it's a collective response to that level of oppression. But since you have a state that's already based upon converting things to fit its agenda, to fit its status quo, rage becomes converted as well, just like anything else we talked about. Rage becomes converted to fit the interests of the state, of white capital. Again, coming back to that conversion, the rage of the oppressed, the rage of Black people and Africans in this case, the attempt by the state is often to convert that rage against the very people who are experiencing it. That is not always successful, as we note in the book. There is a push and pull throughout history that you can see between Black rage and the state and the different means by which they try to clean it.

But as we also know, rage in and of itself is not pure. It's not inherently revolutionary. And that is why it can be laundered, co-opted, and watered down.

And that's where the fronts come in, because the fronts appear to be working in our interest, but they're often actually not built to work in our interest. 

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate this emphasis that it's not an analogy. It's not a metaphor. It is just laundering period. And as we speak right now in July of 2024, the recent police murder of Sonya Massey in her home from her calling the police for help to check on possible intruders, to her then being killed by the police. This has just been one of the latest incidents of police violence gaining more of a national awareness rightfully reigniting rage in the Black Lives Matter movement. 

And years ago, as you named the police killings of George Floyd and countless others sparked national protests in 2020. And a lot has happened in the aftermath of that in terms of the laundering of Black rage by the system, as you started sharing about, through both co-optation by the state itself and also through people contributing to that co-optation. 

There are a lot of layers to this, and I think this can be a very hard-hitting reflection, but I wonder if you can expand a bit more on this idea of bribery as stability. 

And to just weave in an example from your book, you write: “Unfortunately, we Black artists were like the public art used to beautify a blighted ‘hood, so city planning (gentrification) could push out the undesirables… Or worse, we thought our career advancement was a rising tide to itself, automatically lifting the material lives of most Black folks.”

Too Black: So we talk about the fronts, and I think it's more important to talk about fronts very quickly before we even get to the bribe. So fronts are what you are using to launder your money or launder whatever the activity is. And a front does all the things that they claim to do. So if it's a laundromat, even if they're selling drugs in the back, they still wash clothes in the front. If it's a bakery, they still bake cakes and things of that nature. At least a good front or a successful front does all those things. 

It also pays people to work in it to stabilize themselves. It gives people jobs, some kind of income so they can go and purchase the things they need and come back another day. And this is what capitalism does, it gives you some means of subsistence so you can take care of yourself. But if we think about it as a front, then that is also a bribe, because that is a means of making sure that you continue to work and stay within that front and you don't get outside of that arrangement.

So the bribes become the things that we need to stabilize ourselves within this situation of capitalism where we have to work in the very thing. We do the laundering ourselves, as you said. It's not just an amorphous idea of the state or something else. Like in some way, shape or form, we're all doing the laundering. 

And that's not to flatten it to say that there are no different levels to it. I don't think a custodian is the same as the CEO of Chase or something versus the custodian who may work at the bank. I don't think those are the same things, but they are all doing a form of laundering by simply keeping the thing going even if the thing they're doing is in a mode of dispossession and oppression all at the same time. 

So we all are working at jobs. And we say effectively, all of these things become fronts because they serve the interests of capital. They serve the interests of the state, even when people don't mean it to be that way, because one of the things capitalism does is make all our interests seem like they're the same. We all have an interest in accumulating money and we’re all supposed to have an interest in having a certain level of stability. So we're all going to try to engage in the activity that requires that, even if there are different varying classes do those activities.

Now, some people don't get as many bribes because they’re the poorest people. Those are the people who are often left to beg for bribes because they're not getting the food, they're not getting the resources, they don't have clean water, etc. And those are the people who are more likely to have a more militant rage because they're not being bought off by all these other things.

That's like the general framework of thinking about how capitalism — and the idea of laundering — has to pay you something to keep you doing it. So on one hand, you're doing what you need to survive. But at the same time, we quote Dr. Joy James, you're still stabilizing a very predatory structure at the same time.

Rasul Mowatt: I think in terms of how we attempted to also tackle this, we wanted to move beyond situating things only in the contemporary. We wanted to establish that there was a history to this. So that's why we invoke the period of enslavement.

For us, conquest is very different than necessarily enslavement. Conquest, you can ethically cleanse a population to extract the resources that you wanted out of that particular location. So this is why we understand what has happened here in what we call Turtle Island, as well as in other places and other populations of Indigeneity, whether it's on the continent of Africa or in Asia and so forth. Many different forms of conquests ultimately were related to ethnically cleansing a population so that you can get at the resources and oftentimes leave. 

Slavery does a very different thing, where you are now engaging a population, whether it's the population that's there or bringing in another population and now the labour of extracting the resources from that particular space. That requires you to set up some type of base, some type of settlement to grow that industry and enterprise. 

Cities emerge based on proximity to extraction, such as mines. They allow for the distribution of resources, such as a trading port for extracted resources.

So while many people may enter the book thinking about, let's say, 2020, we had to take them back there. By taking them back there, we can then move to the second important aspect that we wanted to do besides that longer history was tying it into the capital, the work of capital, capitalism.

And so there's these twin things that began to happen with capitalism, extraction and dispossession. You dispossess a population oftentimes by racializing them as some type of ‘other’ so that then they would be the ones who do the work to extract. Extraction is everything we can think of, not just mining, fishing, and hunting, but all types of how resources are gathered and then sent back to some central government. 

And historically, those governments were oftentimes monarchies or they may have converted to parliaments and other particular forms. The form doesn’t matter as long as it’s related to capitalism.

When we’re speaking about laundering, we mean actual laundering. That's why we’re very technical in terms of its definition, its function and operation. It's not just poetic.

So again, the first part was tying it into history. The second part is tying it into capitalism. We see cities growing and developing because they serve capital. Either there's some major area for banking, holding of money and resources that are then monetized and given some type of valuation, or we see cities grow because they serve some transportation route along a rail line or port. Or cities grow because they're proximate to the sites and locations of extraction. If they're not close to any one of those three things, then the city does not grow. 

But it's not enough to grow a place only to do the work of extraction. You have to create a life in a city. And that's homes and that's parks and that's streets and thoroughfares and that's annual events and holidays. There's artwork and there's monuments and there's schools and there's hospitals. These become how life can be a coping mechanism, at least for how people will see it. 

Oftentimes it's the co-optation method of playing into the role which capitalism has for you within a particular city. So again, from our perspective, those of us who are the labor, we're trying to cope when we go to the gym that's part of our life or lifestyle in the city, or the place on a weekend, the bar, the club and so forth and listen to music. These are coping mechanisms.

But these are also the co-optation methods in which we, instead of dealing with our situation of being this exploited labor force that has a long history of being exploited, but also the original purpose of why we're even on this particular land — was this ethnically cleansed population and then some type of settlement placed on top. That's the co-optation that is present there.

The final thing that we're trying to encourage people to see — is that this is not about looking outside and seeing another person and coming up with some type of assessment to the degree in which they and their organization or their activities are part of co-optation. This is why Too Black was alluding to the whole idea that all of us are engaged in co-optation to varying degrees and varying levels throughout our lives because, in essence, most of our activities are never designed to free us of this.

So I know you mentioned and invoked Sonya Massey and it's still early to see what is to take shape. But we can think about possible ways in which what has occurred to Sonya Massey and then of course, by extension, her family, and several possible ways in which that could be co-opted. A law or ordinance could bear Sonya Massey’s name but have very minimal, if not any, connective tissue to prevent what happened to another person.

Too Black: Like the George Floyd Act.

Rasul Mowatt: Exactly. Another form of co-optation could be just simply having some type of hashtag on social media. I know in one part we invoke the hashtag ‘say her name’, but saying her name sometimes can be co-opted because it does not necessarily pursue actual justice for the person.

‘Saying the name’ is not enough. Even remembering the name is not enough. And bearing witness is not enough.

Not only is this family grieving and suffering, but it was also clearly the actions of the state by way of this department, by way of this officer that did this wrong and how will then this state now pay, right? And so that's not pursuing that. And so the co-option could be through festivals in her name, t-shirts in her name, social media posts in her name, these things that do not address the actual issue. Or preventing the issue from happening again. And that's what we're alluding to by the co-optation.

But I wanted to speak to specifically what you did invoke in terms of Sonya Massey. We'll see what may occur, but based upon past situations, which is, like I said, the name of a law and somebody's name, an annual event, or even a conference in the person's name, we've seen these things happen before.

It is important to note, though, that while in past cases there have been some levels of outbursts of rage, it has been subdued and that may be for a variety of reasons, not necessarily related to Sonya Massey, but more so related to being diverted. Our attention is diverted to several different things at this particular moment. So which thing are we going to be rallying around and then responding to?

Kamea Chayne: It feels like there have just been historical processes of solidifying systems of complicity where most people are just forced to partake in actions to survive and live, but that simultaneously also reinforces systems of exploitation and extraction.

I think I struggle sitting with this because I feel like most people today are just doing the best that they can, given their specific context, given what they're told or taught and given their own needs to survive. At the same time, all of this discussion is just a vital reminder for us in terms of where we direct our energy and effort if we're trying to address these systemic injustices.

And so there's the both end of what is being funded and where the incentives are. Individuals might be mostly doing what they can and in many cases following where there is available funding to support their work. But we also still have to be critical of institutional biases in terms of what is being funded, for example, in the name of Black Lives Matter and other movements, and simultaneously what is then systemically being pushed out. 

Maybe you can clarify this, but I don't think the underlying message is that Black art isn't important or that it's not a good thing that some Black businesses and nonprofits have received more material support for their work. But maybe it's just a potent reminder for us to stay focused on the sources of the rage and what it is that actually can bring about, materially, the systemic changes that we're more deeply yearning for. 

Too Black: As Rasul said, we're not looking to do any kind of individual call out of one person or another that could be done. And there are names in the book, but that's not the ultimate goal. We're trying to get people to understand the process. So it's not an attack on any one thing anybody's done.

I mean, there are things to be criticized, but I'm just saying overall, all of those things are part of — and maybe Rasul can speak more after I say this to — the idea of the state, but all those things are part of it.

Some people might have received this or that. Like these things, people may have gotten more materials like Black art is nice. I'm an artist, so I have no objection to Black art. But my poem, or if I was a visual artist or a singer, my song, does not resolve someone's neck getting stepped on in and of itself. Now it can be part of something that will resolve it. But that itself, making that the main thing simply does not resolve the neck being stepped on and the bigger system that is behind something like that, for that incident to even occur. 

So we have to ask ourselves if we're getting a grant to go sing a song at somebody who got killed by the police like what are we doing? Or if I'm gonna say we need Black business in a situation in which Black business has, as we make in chapter six, Black business is severely behind, and the efforts that were proposed in 2020 and even before then, because as Rasul said, we go back in history, those efforts would not resolve, they would not only not resolve the police brutality, also wouldn't even resolve the actual wealth gap or whatever people want to call it that they're also trying to address as well. Neither thing gets resolved.

A lot of these things just become pageantry. They are ways to make us feel good. They are ways to give us an outlet because we're surviving and we want to do something.

It creates, over time, because that's why we talk about it in cycles, it just removes people from material conditions and material realities. So it's not really about addressing the material conditions in many cases. It's just about somebody having a means of feeling good. 

So when we think about the presidential race, there's an entire contradiction between, like we were talking about, the sister who was killed by the police, and then voting for somebody who was formerly a prosecutor, and somehow not seeing the contradictions between those things. I'm not trying to get into a conversation about voting. I'm just using this to make a point about how — are we attempting to address our material conditions, or has our rage been pacified so much to the point that it just needs something to wrap its arms around? I think that that's exploited by the state, that's exploited by capital, even when we may mean well.

And that's what made this for me. I'll say for me, what is so interesting is thinking about these things. This isn't about a bunch of bad actors or people who want to always be grifters or sell-outs. Like, yes, those people exist. But right next to the sell-out is somebody who does mean well, but they still might be doing the same job, because that's the situation that we find ourselves in.

So yeah, it was not a knock on any one person.

This isn't even a pessimistic theory that the world can't be changed, but it is an attempt to be sobering because sometimes we’re not addressing the things we might be branded for addressing.

Rasul Mowatt: Yeah, and I think one of the things that Too Black and I were in a conversation about either before the book, or before even the two articles that ultimately inspired the book, was this question of what is rage, right? And so rage is this true response to the material conditions. Material conditions are acts of violence, which we can see with a shooting by the police or some other type of killing by law enforcement. Missing and murdered Indigenous women is an example of a particular form of violence that a rage could be in response to. Rage could also be a response to other parts of material conditions: the demolishing of a public housing unit, the closure of a public school, or having lead or other forms of toxins within your water supply. 

These are things that will invoke rage and people will come together and dissent — sometimes spontaneously through a riot, a protest, or some other form of anger. That's the rage.

Rage is not enough. What are you going to do in response to that issue? The further the response is from the issue that produced the rage, the more it opens the doorway for laundering.

A school's closed, the response to the school closing is to get that school open backed up. If the issue is lead in your water, the only adequate response is to have clean water, right? And so anything that is then not tackling the actual issue that we were enraged about is what sets in motion, not just the laundering, but co-optation.

Co-optation doesn't mean that we went into this intentionally to divert it in some other way. Our energy to dissent and respond to our issue has been diverted and taken elsewhere. Instead of tackling the issue, we have found ways to move elsewhere.

What's elsewhere? An annual holiday for missing and murdered Indigenous women. It's important to remember so let's not be flippant about that.

There is a need to remember. But simply having a moment in which we commemorate does not tackle the issue.

In this case, police violence is some type of killing by the police. Simply having a vigil does not respond to the actual issue. And so that's what we were trying to tackle; the question of what is rage and what is the truest response to the rage?

And so when other things begin to come into place, concerts, you name it, then that tells us that we've gotten so far away from responding to our material conditions and changing those material conditions that, in a sense, we are only maintaining the material conditions we're in. I hope this is clear.

Kamea Chayne: This also reminds me of when Aboriginal writer and scholar Tyson Yunkaporta shared that every revolution needs poets, but it's not going to be much of a revolution if everyone's a poet. And just like this discussion, I interpret that not at all as a critique of poetry. He's a poet himself. It's not a critique of poets or the arts, but given the institutional biases and these processes of laundering that we know to exist and these systemic forces, maybe we have to be even more intentional about tethering our passions and roles and callings more deeply to the broader movement and what the movement is asking of us or asking us to do more of to help bring about the material and systemic changes that we need.

Rasul Mowatt: If I could jump in right there because I think what you just brought up is a fantastic example.

The issues are true, the material conditions are true, but our hearts are also true in our reaction to the issue. If we need to have a night of poetry to remember our pain and our loss, that's fine. But if we're trying to place that night the in context of it being an act of resistance, as if that's actually going to make the state fear us and that somehow this issue won't continue because they'll hear our words or whatever else, then what's happened is that we're framing our level of activity to be something that is not.  And so that's oftentimes what happens.

Laundering also takes place when issues are flattened or reduced. So when we think of the terms ‘resistance’, ‘revolt’, ‘protest’, or ‘decolonization’, they no longer have the meanings they once had. They’ve become a lot more comfortable.

Some people have been quoted as saying waking up every day is an act of resistance. That's what we're pushing back on in many different ways.

This is part 1 of our 2-part conversation with Rasul Mowatt and Too Black. Part 2 will be published as episode 432.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

Previous

Rasul Mowatt & Too Black (P2): Building movements and navigating funding in systems of complicity (Ep432)
Next

Ben Goldfarb: Road ecology and the normalized violence of transport systems (Ep430)