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?

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