Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Abstract

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

Keywords

Black geographies mobilities racism stillness transportation

I Introduction

In this article, I chart a conceptual path toward an expansion of the mobilities literature to more directly account for racialized mobilities. I do this by proposing a distinct approach I’m calling Black mobilities, broadening the scope of analysis of the subfield. By expanding upon common understandings of the relationship between movement and racism, I suggest rethinking racialized mobility, and constrictions thereof, as more than only another articulation of white supremacy, but also as a form of anti-racist praxis as well as a way of thinking about Black life in spite of white supremacy.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a shift in thinking about the political, economic, social, and cultural importance of movement in the social science literature. What has been called the ‘mobilities turn’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006) has been primarily pushed by sociologists and geographers looking for a new way to understand how movement – and its counterpoint stillness (Cresswell, 2012) – is produced by and productive of unique power relationships. The contexts of this research are multiple and given the focus of these researchers on the complex and contested nature of mobility, the dynamics of racism have been an obvious point of investigation. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people.

While structures of white supremacy necessarily create conditions of Black containment and motionlessness, I argue that an overdependence on uncovering these racist practices ends up reducing and (re)pathologizing Blackness. Instead, I argue that movement (and stillness) is productive of what McKittrick calls a ‘black sense of place’ or ‘the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter’ (2011: 949). Drawing on work from the field of Black geographies, I want to suggest a distinct approach to Black mobilities that takes seriously Black movement as a means of creating geographic knowledges.

The article will be organized accordingly: First, I review the foundations of the mobilities literature to explain the specific project that scholars in the field have laid out thus far. In particular, I use this section to explain the role of mobilities studies in understanding the various ways that movement is deeply intertwined with relationships of power. Second, I examine the current mobilities literature focused on racism. I argue that while much of the current writing in the subfield is useful for understanding various ways the racial capitalist state is evident in white control of movement, we should build upon and push beyond these theorizations as they might end up reinscribing the relationships they are trying to uncover. Using research in Black geographic thought, I show how standard mobilities research on racism often not only pathologizes Black people as inherently immobile, and therefore ungeographic, they also make the immobilizing force of whiteness invisible. Third, I draw from previous literature that has been exemplary of a more complete understanding of racialized mobility, one that both understands the controlling nature of whiteness but also that finds possibility in movement. Finally, I call for a new approach on Black mobilities, which more fully accounts for the complexities of movement as both a means of dispossession and a means of futurity. Building from the insights of Black geographies and Black studies scholars, I show how a Black mobilities lens might be useful for understanding both physical and psychological geographies of being.

II Mobile Pathologies

Scholars of mobilities have been building a rich theoretical foundation for research over the past two decades. The first attempt to condense seemingly disparate studies of movement in a variety of disciplines under the banner of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ was undertaken by Sheller and Urry (2006). Their argument is that the social sciences have thoroughly examined society in space and differences across space; however, this work has largely rendered society ‘a-mobile’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 208). They write, ‘the social sciences have still failed to examine how the spatialities of social life presuppose (and frequently involve conflict over) both the actual and the imagined movement of people from place to place, person to person, event to event’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 208). Instead, Sheller and Urry suggest that the social sciences might examine movement not merely as taken for granted processes or the result of the biological imperatives of humanity but as a socially mediated process that is co-constitutive of a range of relationships of power. This paradigm has been taken up extensively since their original call leading to subject specific journals (Transfers and Mobilities) as well as multiple progress reports in this journal (Cresswell, 2011, 2012, 2014; Merriman, 2015, 2016, 2017). My project is grounded in this paradigm and pays particular attention to issues of justice.

Sheller provides a comprehensive and helpful framework for understanding the relationships between mobility and inequality through her theorization of ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller, 2018a, 2018b). Starting from the ways that mobility is unequally experienced, she provides a blueprint for the ways mobility justice can be understood and applied. There are four specific ways that ‘uneven mobility’ plays out, according to Sheller: the ‘splintered’ connections across space that link and separate space, modes of movement that facilitate or create ‘friction, noise…or turbulence’ of movement, built and political geographies of containment or immobility that create differential rules of mobility, and infrastructures of mobility that favor the rich and elite (2018b: 23). These ‘uneven mobilities’ play out across scale and it is through these scalar contexts that we can observe and imagine more just mobility. Sheller theorizes mobility justice from the body (e.g. racial profiling used to prevent movement) to the urban (e.g. the uneven provision of automobility and its relationship to urban sprawl) to the global (e.g. how carbon intensive forms of movement like air travel benefit few while negatively affecting many) (2018b: 25). Using this framework, we can begin to see how mobility injustice has always been a feature of white supremacy and how mobility justice may be used as a tool of anti-racism.

Movement (and stillness) is fully implicated in broader constellations of power relations through which movement is encouraged and impeded, both given meaning and productive of meaning. Given the racial capitalist order under which most of the world is organized, ‘the challenges of precarious access to mobility (and unsafe or risky mobilities)’, (Sheller, 2018b: 17) is always racialized and often taken for granted spatial processes are beholden to whiteness (Nicholson and Sheller, 2016). This work takes various forms from studies on refugees and migration (Mongia, 1999; Spinney et al., 2015; Wilson Janssens, 2018), to urban transportation (Attoh, 2019; Geurs et al., 2009), to issues of political organizing (Burgos and Pulido, 1998; Grengs, 2002). Seiler writes, ‘scholars of mobility [need] to bear in mind the always raced identity of the traveler/passenger/driver’ (2007: 307) as racism has been not only a merely a facet of analysis of access to movement but as foundational, evident in the racial and colonial histories throughout the world. Much of the writing on racialized mobilities has been situated in the US context and while this article will primarily draw from examples from these studies, I strive to include illustrations from outside the US. Strikingly, it appears that many of the analyses that reify a reductive relationship between Blackness and mobility come from the US, pointing to a particular epistemology (of movement) rooted in anti-Blackness and colonialism. As I will show in later sections, work that exemplifies alternative ways of thinking about racialized mobility come from scholars of and outside Western (specifically US) contexts.

The experience of Blackness in the US has been continually produced by geographically contingent understandings of movement and mobility, however, themes of anti-Blackness applied elsewhere. The roots of Black experience are located within the afterlives of slavery (Sharpe, 2016). Black people’s movements have been bound to white supremacy and white will in, through, from, back to the plantation, continuing post-emancipation through Jim Crow with laws that again prescribed Black movements and stillnesses. This remains true into the present as discriminatory real estate practices keep Black residents in and out of certain neighborhoods (Rothstein, 2017; Taylor, 2019), mass incarceration moves Black people across states and keeps them in cells (Alexander, 2010; Gilmore, 2007), wealth disparities prevent movements both physical and social, and climate change forces Black Americans out of their homes because of extreme weather events (Hardy et al., 2017; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019). While it is important to understand how the racial capitalist state always limits movement, analyses that center and end with the white constraints on mobility end up running the risk of being incomplete, reductive, and preclude alternative futures.

The relationship between racism and movement is clear; however, I believe that insights from the Black geographies literature can be instructive for the ways that these connections are examined. Typically, mobilities and movement-related studies that involve non-white groups primarily attend to the ways that practices of white supremacy end up creating conditions of forced immobility or mobility. While it is unrefutably true that these practices exist and abundant, I want to suggest that the reality is far more complex than this theorization allows for. Building upon numerous examples of work that complicate the stories told about Black mobile geographies, I hope to show how a movement toward a more unified approach on Black mobilities might advance mobilities literature.

The Black geographies literature ‘brings into focus the ways in which racial violences…shape but do not wholly define, black worlds’ (McKittrick, 2011: 947). The widening geographic subfield takes on a number of contexts (Bledsoe, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright 2018, 2019; Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick, 2007, 2016; Shabazz, 2015); however, it is primarily predicated on a conception of ‘a black sense of place…how the relational violences of modernity produce a condition of being black in the Americas that is predicated on struggle’ (McKittrick, 2011: 949). Scholars in this tradition look to find Black life not only within the struggle against racism but also despite the ever present domination of white supremacy, ‘living in the wake’ of slavery (Sharpe, 2016).

However, as explained above, much of the work on racialized movement that has already been undertaken is pathologizing of Blackness as a marker of a kind of aspatiality, or work that creates a hegemonic and reifying narrative of Blackness as stuck in space or pushed out of place. McKittrick (2016) explains how science and scientific critiques come to reaffirm Blackness as necessarily nonhuman through its inability to undo ontological workings of racial hierarchies. She writes,

The analytical and methodological purpose then – to name and dismantle race and racism – tends to move from the physiological figure outward. Black lives are reduced, too, to analytical data and are cast as figures that are biologically determined to become factual parts of a bigger habitual belief system invested in racial differentiation and violence. This discloses a teleological narrative where the body violated by racial and racist scientific narratives is the anchor to a liberatory trajectory and thus can, in this closed system, only realize itself and keep living by…. moving from sub-humanness toward a genre of humanness that despises blackness. (McKittrick, 2016: 8)

Here McKittrick links the unending scientific–academic project of recounting racist practices and institutions within a ‘teleological narrative’ of human versus nonhuman to the overarching design of anti-Blackness. That is to say, without undermining and providing alternative theoretical conceptions that are not rooted in the racial capitalist framework of whiteness as humanness, analyses of race and racism are stagnant. This critique might be leveled at much of the work on race and mobility, as it is continually bound to a binary of white/movement and Black/stillness becomes unproductive.

Davidson (2020) has recently critiqued the presumed radicality of the mobilities research, arguing that although the field has often been critical, failure to uncover the implications of power have restricted its radical potentiality. Davidson writes,

I argue that while necessary, approaches remain critical rather than radical in scope when they maintain given ontological assumptions of what mobility is, presume relatively fixed or descriptive notions of power, scale and subjectivities and maintain dominant binary constructions of valued/devalued, failed/successful or just/unjust mobilities. (2020: 6)

Like Davidson, I argue that much of the literature on racialized mobilities does just this through either explicit or implicit reiterations of the racial hierarchy.

I want to suggest here that many analyses of racialized mobility are themselves rooted in anti-Blackness merely carrying out ‘autopsies’ of the movement of Black death (Woods, 2002). Bledsoe and Wright write,

Black populations are deemed a-spatial as a result of the fact that modern notions of space and practices of spatial production are rooted in specific relations of power…Locations associated with Black populations became wholly ‘unhallowed’ spaces, which would never receive recognition as legitimately occupied. (2018: 12)

Where studies of movement are continually framed through the lens of Black people forced to move through space or stay in place, they uphold the a-spatiality of Blackness; Blackness as nowhere, Blackness as non-geographical. These studies treat Black movement and stillness in two ways.

The first assumption inherent in much of this work is that Black immobility is something almost ‘biologically determined’ (McKittrick, 2016: 8), whereby immobility is a symptom of Blackness. Blackness becomes the absence of agency to move, Cresswell’s (2016) theorization of racialized movements to which he refers to as ‘black moves’ is illustrative of this. He acknowledges,

race and mobility are socially produced in a constantly iterative and circular manner. Each is implicated in the constitution of the other. These mobilities are made up of physical movements…narratives of mobility…and mobile practices. Each iteration of black moves related here carries the ghost of the Middle Passage within it. (2016: 21)

Yet, it appears that his conception of Black movement is overly reliant on the preconfiguration of Blackness as immobile or at the very least constrained by normative white notions of acceptable types of movement. Creswell acknowledges that while he relies ‘on largely negative accounts of black mobilities in the U.S. context…This is not to deny more positive aspects of black mobility cultures as performative forms of self-affirmation in a fluid and often hybrid world’ (Cresswell, 2016: 14). However, his analysis is limited to vignettes of Black people as the victims of racist practices of confinement and control. Explaining Blackness as produced by certain practices of and restrictions on mobility reduces Black people to the nexus of violence and precludes research outside of the autopsy.

The second assumption is the framing of Black mobilities as always in response to the constraints of whiteness. While racialized systems of mobility are always a part of ‘the difficult entanglements of racial encounter’ (McKittrick, 2011: 949), this logic depends upon a theorization of Blackness as unable to exist in the absence of whiteness, yet, paradoxically, whiteness is made invisible through the first assumption of the pathology of immobile Blackness. Only white people are able to create and give meaning to space and they do this by imposing Black people’s relationship to it through forced mobility and/or stillness.

Alderman and Inwood (2016) display this in their article on NASCAR and racialized mobility. The authors explicitly use the term ‘black mobility’ in their analysis of the use of mobility as anti-racism. However, their definition of the term as ‘the range of movement-controlling practices that are reflected in the production of white supremacy and that were central to the exercise of segregation in the Jim Crow South…‘(2016: 602) also seems to equate Blackness to violence. They contrast their concept of ‘black mobility’ against ‘antiracism mobility’ or ‘strategies…employed to resist segregation and the restrictions of black mobility’ (2016: 602). This seems to be another example of the construction of Blackness as necessarily immobile, illustrative of the first assumption. Furthermore, by defining ‘black mobility’ as ‘movement-controlling practices’, the authors seem to equate the category of Blackness with movements compelled by white supremacy. More broadly, we could interpret their dichotomy of Blackness and anti-racism as reductive, collapsing Blackness itself into racism, as if to be Black means embodying the crystallization of anti-Black racism. This is more than semantic in that through the terminology that they choose to use, the agency of whiteness is made invisible. ‘Black mobility’, as Alderman and Inwood use it, is not descriptive of the movements of Black people. Their definition as ‘movement-controlling practices’ are, as they point out, the result of certain expressions of white supremacy (Alderman and Inwood, 2016: 602). The story they tell in their article, on the other hand, describes a much more complete picture than this definition suggests. They explain how Black race car driver Wendell Scott not only used his position to force the segregated car racing sport to contend with its white supremacy but also to live his life on his terms. Scott was not merely using mobility to protest racism but also to redefine Black geographies. Black mobilities, as I want to define it here, may be seen as anti-racist in that it either implicitly or explicitly contests white supremacist constraints of movement; however, it is also productive of new mobile meanings and geographies.

III Mobile Blackness

On May 13th, 1968, a group of Civil Rights protesters gathered together in Marks, Mississippi, to embark on a march to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. These activists were part of a longer legacy of Civil Rights organizing that employed movement and marching as part of their strategy (most famously the Freedom Riders and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that ended with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech). The group in Marks was different than the others, however. Instead of arriving by bus, car, or train, they were marching to Washington as part of a caravan of mule-pulled covered wagons (Freeman, 1998). The ‘Mule Train’ was one of many convoys of activists convening at the capital as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, though the only one traveling by wagon. Inspired and encouraged by NAACP lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, The Poor People’s Campaign, what was to be the final project of which Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a part, demanded an expanded package of economic relief for America’s poor including low income housing, universal income, and guaranteed jobs (Kirk, 2013; Schiller, 2018). The caravan culminated in an encampment on the National Mall known as Resurrection City, from which protesters said they would only move when their demands were met. As history tells us, this campaign was unsuccessful in accomplishing their programmatic goals. However, what is interesting here, as in the other examples of Civil Rights movements (both the literal and figurative), is the choice of being very specific about not just the destination and the activities that would take place there, but the manner in which they arrived. Where many examinations of the Civil Rights Movement focus primarily on the principal goal of organizing for structural change, an examination of the physical movements (or stillnesses) that activists undertook give insight into Black lives and mobility as more than reactions to anti-Black racism.

When mobility is more broadly theorized, we might better comprehend pathways for examining the racialized meanings of movement, not only compelled by white supremacy but through expanded notions of Black possibility outside the confining structures of white supremacy. Civil Rights activists’ choice to sit at segregated lunch counters in the Jim Crow American South were protesting racist policies that refused to allow them to move as they wanted; however, this strategic immobility was more than this. It was a claim on the spatiality of Black life: moving through, unmoved from, creating friction by making Black geographies of the need for nourishment visible. Following those who study the politics of walking (Kärrholm et al., 2017; Pinder, 2011), how might we rethink the Civil Rights Movements’ numerous marches across bridges, through towns, on the streets? What might the example of Black domestic workers choosing to walk or carpool to their jobs instead of ride segregated busses and streetcars say about Blackness as more than a reaction (McGuire, 2010; Parks, 2016)? Through the slow movements of walking, not in deference to whiteness, these protestors were not only making an extraordinary show of unity, though it was. These movements were also affirmations of the right to move through public space in personal time. The Great Migration of Black Southerners to newly emerging industrial cities in the American Midwest and West were not only reactions to fear of death from racist white vigilantes and the poverty of sharecropping. Northward and westward movements were also expressions of hope, possibility, and futurity (Orleck, 2005; Wilkerson, 2011). The movements of the Civil Rights era were not only controlled by city ordinances, policing, and Jim Crow. They were declarations of ‘an absented presence’ of Black life (McKittrick, 2017: 97).

Through history, there has been a multitude of contestations and complications to the white supremacist project of the control of Black people, though much of the work on this has been done outside the mobilities literature. Scholars of transportation history have done excellent work in explaining how moments of political and racial contestation have centered around fights for equitable movement. There is the exemplary case of racialized mass transportation in the story of Plessy v. Ferguson (Kelley, 2010; Seiler, 2007), but there are many more lesser known cases from across the US. These took place not only in the American South in locations such as New Orleans (McLaughlin-Stonham, 2018), Tennessee (Bates, 2016; Burran, 1979), and Florida (Cassanello, 2008) but also in the American North (McCammack, 2010) in cities such as Philadelphia (Zylstra, 2011). The examples are not limited to those in the US, however (Pante, 2014; Rosenthal, 2016). Pante (2014) explains how the importation of streetcars to Manila and Singapore were both racialized mechanisms of colonialism and also means through which native residents of the countries coopted technologies to overcome colonization. Although racialized and paternalistic ideas of capacity for modernity first precluded Southeast Asians from using and working with certain forms of public transportation, through subversive practices of knowledge circulation, technology imported to make the cities organized and legible to the colonial eye was used to expand the mobile possibilities of native residents.

There has been important work on mobilities done by tourism and travel studies scholars into the inherent racialization of tourism and travel (Alderman, 2018; Celeste, 2016; Lee and Scott, 2017) and particularly into how Black Americans, in particular, navigate this racialized tourist landscape (Carter, 2008; Finney and Potter, 2018). Work by scholars of the automobile have begun to interrogate the racialization of personal travel (Alderman et al., 2019). These analyses examine not only the role of the car in segregating space (Henderson, 2006; Kinney, 2015; South and Crowder, 1997, 1998) but also the ways that the car has been used to transcend this segregation (Alderman and Inwood, 2016; Lozano, 2016). Nicholson (2016) acknowledges a more complex and contestable Black mobile reality. In her explanation of how guns become articulated with the automobility of Black people during police stops, she takes time to show the numerous ways cars can provide a freedom of movement and expression. She writes, ‘…the automobile simultaneously signifies contradictions. For police, it can be seen as a weapon, menace and criminality, while for black motorists, it can represent status, resistance and…possibility…‘(Nicholson, 2016: 555). However, much of this work continues to be centered around transportation infrastructure (cars, trains, streetcars.) These issues are important for understanding mobility and at the same time, it is important to pay attention to the original intent of the mobilities literature to also look beyond modes of transportation and understand movement as more than infrastructure. We must ask, how do we expand upon this notion of the multiple forms and meanings of mobility and what might this look like if we move our analyses beyond common modes of transportation?

The racialization of mobility affects more than public transportation. Sharma and Towns (2016) look at the ways tourist tours of gang neighborhoods in LA further highlight the way that Black people are rendered immobile as white people are given the opportunity for free movement. The authors take multiple ‘gang tours’ on which former Black and Hispanic gang members lead bus tours through their former gang turf, recounting stories of their criminal past to primarily white people through neighborhoods. These tours, the authors write, are more than exploitative excursions used to indulge the white tourist gaze. It speaks to the control that white people have over Black mobility. These tours are used as a means for white people to move into non-white spaces where they might not be welcomed otherwise. Tours frame these neighborhoods as dangerous yet accessible, Sharma and Towns explain, laying the discursive groundwork for gentrification (see also Summers, 2019). This ease of movement for white people is not extended to the Black and Hispanic residents of these neighborhoods, many of whom have been forced into and impelled to remain because of redlining, hyper-policing, and the prohibitive costs of living in other areas of the city.

Other authors complicate the relationship between race and mobility beyond ‘autopsies’ of Black immobility (Woods, 2002). Rink (2016) undertakes a ‘mobile ethnography’, traveling by bus through Cape Town, South Africa, to more deeply understand the racial divide between public and private transportation. This divide, an ongoing reminder of the legacies of apartheid, becomes clearer through practices like ticketing and figuring out where to sit (unknown by the white author) as well as the routes that the bus takes through the formerly legally segregated Black neighborhoods of the city. On one hand, this speaks to the way that the inconveniences of the bus such as inadequate infrastructure, length of commute, and high cost have been displaced onto Black South Africans. On the other hand, this shows how Black bus riders (and drivers) have come to create specific mobile geographies to contend with the uneven investment in movement. Other African scholars also explain the radical potentiality of a politics of movement both as a platform for struggle and reclamation of space (Pirie, 2013; Rink, 2020). Khosa (1995) explains how transportation networks are not only representative of broader racist geographic organization, strategically connecting and disconnecting Black and white South Africa but have also been a platform for critiquing and struggling against white supremacy. Mavhunga (2011) opposes understandings of Africa as immobile as necessarily rooted in colonial methods of measurement suggesting that scholars of mobility need new ways of understanding non-Western ‘inertia’. It is this complication of the narrative of racialized mobility, in which agency is reinserted and redeployed, that I want to more fully grapple with here. In the next section, I build upon this work and give a specific example of how a Black mobilities, rethought through the lens of Black geographies and Black studies, might undo or push beyond the problematic assumptions of racialized mobility explained above.

IV Toward an Expanded Approach on Black Mobilities

Bringing the theoretical insights of the Black geographies and Black studies literature into the existing work on racialized mobility will help to broaden the scope of the research being undertaken beyond a mere accounting of racialized processes that help to uphold uneven and oppressive political, economic, and social realities. It may recover and recount Black mobilities as geographic knowledge and practice. I find inspiration in particular from scholars of the Black diaspora Paul Gilroy, Rinaldo Walcott, and Édouard Glissant as their theorizations of the forced and unforced global movements of Black people complicate the rigid categorizations often employed in mobilities research. Cultural studies scholar Gilroy writes,

Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs therefore to be readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits which mark the new journeys and new arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities. (1993: 86)

Blackness, as Gilroy writes, necessarily involves a politics of movement; (re)theorizations of these moves provide the foundations for futurity. Writing through the mobility centered metaphor of the detour, Walcott, also a cultural studies scholar, writes, ‘Detours are the (un)acknowledged routes and roots of black expressive…The detour is both an improvisatory and an in-between space which black diasporic cultures occupy’ (2003: 17). Like Gilroy, Walcott calls attention to not only the ontological reality of Black movement but the epistemological potentiality of always moving Black geographies. Glissant (1997) speaks to this through his conceptualization of ‘errantry’. Errantry is a movement toward a relational life, ‘the will to identity…the search for a freedom within certain boundaries’ (Glissant, 1997) Errantry opposes the movement of colonial territorialization, the drive to uproot and re-root, the search for normative geographies of (white) civilization. Drawing from these insights, I want to suggest a unified approach on Black mobilities as a way of understanding the always racialized certainties of movement. This theorization understands the ongoing racial capitalist order as not only constraining movements but constraining alternatives to a mobile politics rooted in an unmovable racial categorization.

Black mobilities is a project that attempts to move beyond the limitations of these hierarchies, recognizing the historical and present Black movements that have always provided potentiality: or Black movements are ‘everywhere and everything’ (McKittrick, 2017: 98). In this way, Black mobilities takes a racially specific approach to mobilities that

question[s] how mobility theories, practices, infrastructures and discourses reinforce binaries of value in which capability, freedom, wealth, choice and mobility, life, novelty, discovery, innovation, whiteness, masculinity, health…are valued and their antonyms are associated with the negation of value. (Davidson, 2020: 13)

Michelle Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight (2017) is an especially useful example of what a distinct Black mobilities approach might offer. Commander uses both literary and film analysis as well as ethnographic work to understand the paths, both psychic and physical, Black Americans take to ‘repossess imagined origins’ in the aftermath of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (2017: 27). To explain this, she frames her argument through the speculative creation of Black geographies of belonging. Calling this ‘Afro-speculation’, she writes, ‘The folklore and myths that inform imaginaries about Africa are products of a complicated, transnational spectrum of longing…Afro-Atlantic speculative fictions are the result of collaborative processes whereby African cultural epistemologies are exchanged, imagined, and reconfigured’ (2017: 5). These speculations are the catalyst for ‘flights of the imagination,…physical movements or devices of cultural production, [that] reconstruct middle passages to reconceptualize the voyages as well as to lend a sense of revolutionary possibility to freedom dreams’ (Commander, 2017: 7). She shows what these ‘flights’ look like: recovery of origins through cinema, literature, heritage tourism to both slave castles and maroon communities, and the creation of a vision of Africa within the boundaries of the US yet in a place far removed. What is apparent in her work is Black mobilities as Black geographies. Speculation here is the ability to move between worlds, real or imagined, to escape the confines of the white supremacist present. It is the ability to move through life in ways that allow Black epistemologies to be/come free. To borrow from Gilroy (1993), it is through speculative routes to recover roots that Black Americans can find the ‘“freedom just to be,” to attain social life without systemic obstacles’ (Commander, 2017: 129). In thinking about a more comprehensive and cohesive conceptualization of Black mobilities, Commander’s work is instructive. She, like with Gilroy and Walcott, unsettles the standard reductive binary model of racialized movement. She acknowledges the constraining architecture of white supremacy, one that creates spaces of confinement and surveillance and is dependent upon precluding imaginable alternatives. However, her theorization of ‘flight’, reasserts physical and ‘speculative’ movement as possible, always existing, and liberatory.

V Conclusion

Each day, people move through their lives in particular ways that are wrapped up in specific political, social, and economic processes. These processes are rife with racialized meanings and for this reason movement will always be part of the larger project of white supremacy. What I have shown here is the possibility for expanding upon mobility studies to more completely theorize how racism limits movement as well as how mobility provides opportunities for creating new, radical, anti-racist movements and life in spite of white supremacy. While there is ample literature on racism and mobility, I have argued that there is a need for a more cohesive program for complicating a classical binary of Black = immobile and white = mobile. I reviewed past work that has attempted to take on this matter and shown how we might reframe what has been done by utilizing the Black geographies literature so that reductive premises do not end up becoming anti-Black intellectualism. With Black mobilities, complexities of life moving under white supremacy might be more fully understood by thinking about movement outside the confines of whiteness.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Emily Rosenman for seeing promise in these ideas and encouraging me to publish them. I would also like to thank Jacklyn Weier and Jordan Brasher for sharpening my thinking and writing.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bradley Hinger

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