Programa de Trabajo Decente de la OIT

As a non-Black participant of this movement, I have at times acted as an organizer and at other times, a participant. I recognize my limitations in understanding that which I have not lived. Regardless of my proximity to such a struggle, I will always be in some ways an

interloper. For instance, when the official Black Lives Matter chapter was created in Atlanta last year, meetings were intentionally made for Black folks only. This specific example demonstrates the ways in which I am not privy even to a full-fledged observational role, and do to that fact, I invite engagement and critique of the analysis I have put forth in this thesis. I believe that as someone who toes the line of interloper and participant, I am able to provide a unique

perspective that reflects this positionality. Furthermore, I am complicit in the creation of anti- Blackness so long as I do not actively work to dismantle it. In order to dismantle it, I look to the radical actions of Black folks in certain moments of Black Lives Matter and Freaknik in order to theorize on how oppression can be combatted while actively engaging in chimera (Bailey & Leonard 71-72, 2015).

I have laid a foundation for understanding respectability politics as it has emerged and adapted in Atlanta. I looked at moments of critical engagement and outright rejection of

respectability, which I have understood as ratchetness. I have argued that ratchetness should be seen as a realm of political possibility that simultaneously engages non-hierarchical tactics for present dismantlement of oppressive structures with a future conjuring of alternative ways of being. I recognize these moments of ratchetness as emerging from an unlocused self and/or a Black queer sexual politic, whose bursting was highly visible in Freaknik. The unlocused self has the ability to slip into a different temporal and spatial relationality as it navigates an ego

from the necessity to create spaces of sexual leisure by and for the Black community as the doubly binding restriction of a general Victorian, purist sexual ethos as established through Eurocentric values and the particular non-allowance of sexual agency for Black bodies creates an interlocking system of repression (Stallings, 2013). Such an ethos is queered by a flexibility of relationality, where experimentation replaces regulation, bringing along with it creativity and a decentering of the self. This decentering occurs in moments of ego slippage wherein the activity engaged in allows for such an absolute absorption, that the internalization of respectability falls away. I have located this space of the pleasurable as not only purely sexual, but as experiential generally. Ratchetness, as a racialized space that must be seen epithetically by a capitalist order that propagates respectability politics as the ultimate good, takes as its basis a Black queer sexual ethos that navigates territories lewd to common sensibility. The ability to engage in the ratchet is liminal, due to the consistent “snapping back” to respectability internally and externally, and will be liminal so long as hierarchical structures such as capitalism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and the like exist, and therefore must justify their existence through a moral ideology. However, these rare moments of embodiment or flirtation with the ratchet allow for the aggregation of the Black Ratchet Imagination, a space where “postwork imagination and antiwork activities” abound (Stallings 2013, 137). Black Lives Matter, infected at moments by the ratchet possibility in Atlanta as evidenced by Freaknik’s remarkable existence and swift repression has helped to build this Black Ratchet Imagination. As a city that has in many ways perfected the castigation of respectability politics given its entrenched Black elite, Atlanta imbues its residents with particular heightened affects in regards to the respectable and the ratchet.

In order to understand respectability, ratchetness, and how they interact with one another, it is important to understand the way that each arranges bodies and the space around them.

Respectability moves through the spatial and temporal linearly, because it must. The point for respectability is coherence and order. The legibility of the respectable is key to the propagation of its existence, whereas the ratchet’s presence is illegible to a system of coherence. The respectable colonizes, makes its mark upon, and can know no other way of existing without imposing itself upon (Franklin Humanities, 2016). The ratchet does not necessarily decolonize, but it opens up the possibility of imagining and beginning to create the de-colonial through a creative engagement with incoherency. This incoherency creates opportunity in so far as its illegibility can carve out new ways of relating to ourselves, one another, and the earth. This is not to overstate the ratchet. I do not intend to imagine the ratchet as a magical serum that once

introduced to the world will alleviate it of all its problems: the ratchet would likely skirt such a wholesome and holistic characterization of it. However, it does prove itself an ethos

incompatible with the racist, classist state, because of the very fact that the ratchet employs the non-normative, and the state as the arbiter of all moral principles as decided by a racialized and gendered capitalism is certainly the normative. Exposure to the ratchet and unpredictable at once disorients and reorients us to our bodies. If the alienation of capitalism, classism, racism,

disorients us from our bodies by, for instance, making us ignore our need for sleep, sun, wholesome food, laughter, and so forth, then the ratchet reorients the body to itself in that the experiential moves from a synthetic (dis)affect to a visceral attunement. The social constraints that harbor our bodies and our minds is broken, at least momentarily, so that we are able to, without barrier, experience. The gaze, be it male, colonial, or otherwise, is able to fall away for a moment: the necessary self calculation of what it means to be Black and wearing a hoodie, to be Black and walking at night, to be Black and breaking the law is briefly forgotten. The step from impulse to action moves fluidly. Similarly, if the systems of the state serve to consistently tether

me to a bodily orientation in the sense that I am aware of every cellulite dimple, the lightness or darkness of my skin, the proximity of my body to violence, than the ratchet is the ability to disorient from the self awareness that mediates bodies under capital.

I urge moments that lubricate communal ratchetness. These brief moments of active movement politicize the self and others towards engaging in activity that develops innovative breadth; something that is necessary to creating an alternative world that does not replicate the behaviors in this one. The Black Ratchet Imagination awakens and enthralls. We would be mistaken to not pay attention to these gasps of alternative life in our present predicament.