In part I, I gestured toward a suggestion that Black love and romantic love were ontologically distinct.

That was a year ago.

For what it’s worth, I’ve done a lot of more reading, writing, and conversing since then; and am only now feeling as though building on the series of scattered thoughts collected there is even possible.

If what follows here is at all unclear, please forgive me as I grapple with a language bent on foreclosing (or, at best confining) the expression of a positionality it was never intended to include. And, it may also be, as Fred Moten suggests, that this positionality is one bound in a kind of fugitive movement — always-already moving away from being captured. “Opaque” queerily becomes an “achievement” for Black writers and theorists of the Black — an “achievement” that this writing assumes no such aim whatsoever.

In the interregnum (perhaps the only space that there is) a few themes have arisen on which I’d like to remark here for the very first time; not as a way of establishing an authoritative or definitive voice on the matters to be explored, but merely as a way of following my mind’s wanderings along with its philosophical probing and curiosity and situating my thoughts in relation to Afropessimist thinkers.

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II. On ontological distinction

Clarification on this matter is pressing and it’s a matter that I’ve been far less than clear on. In my view, Black love and romantic love are socially ontologically distinct.

When I began musing about Black polyamorous existence, I drew inspiration from both early Fanon and Charles Mills.

Mills’ notion of social ontologly is helpful. For Mills, the terms “social ontology” and “social metaphysics” are

“meant to refer to the basic struts and girders of social realtity in a fashion analogous to the way “metaphysics” simpliciter refers to the deep structure of reality as a whole.”

Said differently, social ontology involves the nature and property of the social world and not the world as a whole. Social existents find themselves always already in a world (regardless of how indifferent to “societies” a world may be). It seems certain that a world can exist without a society, but no society can exist without a world. Thus we should approach early Fanon with some caution and a keenness for perceiving tension when he writes that:

“Ontology — once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside — does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be Black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”

On one hand, the passage might represent a kind of ontological drama so far as it seems to imply that the Black is an impossible thing if, as it turns out it is a “thing” at all. So, Fred Moten is right to probe the question of whether there is “ever anything called a black social life?”

Think again here of Mills’ social ontology. What ever the social existents are—and indeed, race and racial categories being among them — they are so within the larger frame of ontology. This enables the possibility of what we might want to call the “without-within” for the Black; it becomes possible, in other words, for the Black to be a thing marked by a particular kind of socio-ontological obfuscation that, at a phenomenological level, gets experienced as a kind of outside-ness of the contours of a social ontology while simultaneously existing within the larger ontological regime. As such the Black is outside of the inside, but not outside of the oustide — interregnum perhaps? (What or where is the outside of the outside?)

This tension is found in early Fanon; his early humanism comes in to fine relief when we understand how the category of “black” is tethered to the category of “[hu]man” for Fanon, marking a kind of reluctance toward jettisoning the black’s belongingness to that category. (We ask again, where, or what is the socio-ontological position of the black? Is the distinction one to be found in ontology or, indeed, in social ontology?)

Writers picking up on Fanon’s hint travel in several directions. For Frank Wilderson, for example, a requirement for the black to have social ontological standing requires the possibility for the black to exist in a kinship structure, shared with other humans. A possibility which he denies (Indeed what might it mean for the Black to be seen as “kin”?), thus he interprets Fanon as understanding the positioning of the black as outside of the outside.

It also appears in some places that David Marriott reads Fanon in this way as well. For these writers, the distinction goes beyond a socio-ontological one to make, in fact, an ontological one.

Moten’s writings show up more agnostic on the question regarding the positioning of the Blackness. For him, the Black is in a state of perpetual fugitivity — an always already movement away from capture. So, we can’t say with any ontological precision whatsoever whether the Black is inside (?), or outside of the inside but inside the outside(?), or outside of the outside(?).

Much more on this can and should be said, but it’d be best to leave more precise explication for another venue and another day.

Regarding the ontological or socio-ontological positioning of the Black in Fanon, for our present purposes we do well not to demand more precision from the subject than the subject allows.

Be that as it may, there is utility in early Fanon’s phenomenology, even if, as it turns out he is speaking in metaphor or jettisons this position in later writing. We can understand Fanon’s work in Black Skin as attempting to provide a phenomenonogical account of what it might mean or feel like for one to be marked Black. The Black, and more pertinently for my own concerns, the Black polyamorist, needs a phenomenology.

Whatever a phenomenology of Black polyamorous existence might turn out to be, it seems evident that its socio-ontological occupation cannot be ignored so far as we understand Black love to be a social existent.

Crucially, the methodology that my claim of Black polyamorous non-being rests, takes as evidence the fact Black love has a unique history within American history and takes on variations that set it apart socially and historically from the ways intimacy and love has been experienced by their racialized counterparts. For example, when one enters the archives the encounter with terror endured by Black intimacies is staged —one encounters the violence of reproductive labor, forced breeding, forced separation, rape, and infanticide. This seems to me to be within the purview of our social (or socio-historical) landscape.

I’ve argued that non-monogamy occupies a central place in this history — though the foregrounding of its place is typically outside the frame of many historians. The archives also contain stories of adultery, plural marriage, and polyaffectivity, for example.

Tera Hunter’s notion of the Third Flesh approaches this point, but only insofar as it characterizes the the ever-present superior relationship of master (i.e. the third flesh) to slave. However, for Hunter, the third-flesh becomes obsolete the moment formal slavery is abolished.

We should note, though, that slavery is not merely a set of formal political relationships between the state and those whose status it designated as people and those whom it designated as chattel, although it certainly includes this. My work on Black love seeks an analysis of slavery, to riff on Wilderson, that understands it as a 21st century dynamic as opposed to a historical past — one that can accommodate the ongoing suffering of Black people and their intimate relationships.

III. On time

In the section above, I’ve tried to partially explain the distinction between ontology and social ontology as best I understand it at the present moment. Further, I tried to begin to suggest that matters of Black love concern our social ontology (though this be inside of the purview of ontology simpliciter). I tried to round out the section by gesturing toward a need for an understanding of slavery that understands it as a 21st century dynamic as opposed to a historical past.

Time and time again, this endeavor has brought me face to face with history and counter-histories — American history, African-American history, histories of diaspora, Indigenous histories, histories of colonialism (which is to say histories of imperialism; which is to say histories of terror and violence; which is to say histories of suffering; which is to say histories of death and dying), histories of capital and capitalism, and histories of philosophical thought, only to name a few. Perhaps I see now, as clearly as I have ever seen, that a philosophy of history must be as important to philosophers as its histories of philosophy.

What is history? And what of its narratives and the stories we tell about them? How are they told? And who gets to tell them? It seems to me that no questions are more central to the enterprise of epistemology and knowledge production.

Saidiya Hartman’s work invites us to confront these questions. She asks,

“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?”

and

“how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?”

Put differently, how can we tell the stories of those subjects who are not supposed to have stories, without superimposing the impossibilities that contour the lineaments of historical narrative? Can we speak of a position that resists telling? What can we make of the always already, which is to say the “foretold and anticipated”?

The work of Hartman and others like Christina Sharpe, Patricia Saunders, David Marriott, David Scott, and others, approach temporality and chronology with an intention to interrogate its situatedness as a linear construction.

Whereas Hartman speaks of the “foretold and anticipated”, Sharpe speaks of a “past that is not yet past” and emancipation as an “unfinshed project”. Marriott and Saunders orient towards chronology not as a line but as a kind of circularity. For example, Saunders writes that

“the same questions and issues are presenting themselves to us across these historical periods. It is the same story that is telling itself, but through different technologies and processes of that particular period.”

Marriott says that

“paranoia and destruction soon teach us that the future will always return in the form of negrophobic malice”.

What might it mean to understand the future, not as some far-away destination, but as recurring moments always returning? How does a past that has not yet past complicate how we confront the future and its alleged possibilities? And how does this threaten history? That is, how does this challenge or displace the received or authorized account of history? Of time?

In probing these questions, these writers obscure one’s attachment (which is to say their situatedness in relation to) the present “now”. Said differently, when or where is ‘now’ if the past is not yet past? Where is ‘now’ if the future is always already returning? To riff on Hartman, the “what happened when”, is thrown into crisis. It becomes possible to posit slavery as an ongoing relationship, here, now, so far as emancipation is incomplete and unfinished. As Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, “everything is now. It is all now.”

In the last two decades, artists and legal scholars have highlighted the language of the United State’s 13th amendment to its Constitution which reads

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for the punishment of a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

I’m reminded here of the photography of Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun that I encountered in an exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, which catalogues the Angola Rodeo, a rodeo that “triumphantly claims to be the longest-running prison rodeo in the United States”; a rodeo that, as The University of Califoria, Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences remarks,

“thousands of visitors buy tickets …, eager to watch the people imprisoned in Angola ride angry bulls, act as rodeo clowns, and perform bareback horse riding.”

The work of these scholars and artists is quite convincing concerning their arguments situating carcerality as both anti-black and as an extension of slavery. For example, they discuss how mass incarceration (and indeed the anti-black police brutality and anti-black vigilante violence that attends the police-state) disproportionately targets and confines Black bodies and they take the ongoing control and subordination of the Black to be uncontroversial.

I’ve tried to show how the monogamous condition of American marriage is implicated in the ongoing subordination of black folks, both before and after the event of Emancipation, as well. For example, in part I, I drew on historians Tera Hunter and Dianne Stewart that how monogamous marriage functioned as a linchpin in the construction of whiteness in America.

For instance, monogamous marriage functions as the basis on which controlling images of black women as “ho’s” and “jezebels” rests (so far as these images imply participation in multiple and sometimes simultaneous sexual relationships); which is to say that the pluralistic breeding practices that black women were forced to endure in at the hand of their white masters did not care about monogamous pairings.

Partus Sequitur Ventrem meant that children born unto slave mothers inherited the status of their mothers — thus, slave women’s wombs were lagniappes and a primary means for increasing one’s capital, providing slave owners incentive to force the reproduction of Black bodies in horrifically terrifying and inhumane ways.

Subterfuge in other cases is documented as well. For example, quasi-marriages and wedding ceremonies were imposed on slave relationships as a way of ensuring the continued reproduction of slaves by slave couples under the guise that these intimacies were of the slave’s “choosing.”

After Emancipation, historical record shows Freedman’s Bureau agents extending little regard for the complex non-monogamous dynamics that existed in the antebellum. Bureau agents believed that any arrangement that deviated from monogamy contaminated marriage while positioning Black women and children to become state dependents (a rationale that would return in Ronald Regan’s 1976 presidential campaign which cast Black women as “Welfare Queens”) as one Bureau agent recounted

“‘Whenever a negro appears before me with 2 or 3 wives who have equal claim upon him,…I marry him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the bureau.’”

Other legislative barriers evoked judicial and carceral punishment too as penalties were raised for Black non-monogamists. In Georgia, the “Act to prescribe and regulate the relation of Husband and Wives between persons of color” instructed Black folks with two or more spouses, to select only oneto marry

“immediately after the passage of this Act by the General Assembly…If such man, thus living with more than one woman, or such woman living with more than one man, shall fail or refuse to comply with the provisions of this section, he or she shall be prosecuted for the offense of fornication, or fornication or adultery, or, fornication and adultery, and punished accordingly.”

Relevant to our present now, marriage’s anti-black and anti-non-monogamous histories converge in peculiar ways that extend the subjugation of, which is to say the slave status, of black non-monogamists.

For example, the United States Supreme Court has not tried a case on plural marriage since the 1800s. According to legal scholar Martha Ertman, the precedent was set in Reynolds v. The United States (in 1879) where the court reasoned that plural relationships were

“odious among the northern and western nations of Europe” “and almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic, and of African people” and ultimately “fetters, the people in stationary despotism.”

These beliefs were solidified in the public imaginary with the publication of “Uncle Sam’s Troublesome Bedfellows” and “The Elder’s Happy Home” in popular media of the day — both appearing in the wake of the Reynolds decision. Thus, the regulatory shadow cast by legal marriage, or what Anika Simpson and Paul Taylor call “marital shade”, on black non-monogamy was, and is, fortified in language and imaging that is, straightforwardly racist, and anti-black. This precedent and the language that houses it have not been overturned.

I approach newly emerging questions probing the stakes of historical understanding with caution. Which histories get prioritzied in the the retelling of History? Why? How? A chapter in David Marriott’s book Whither Fanon titled “Historcity and Guilt”, comes to mind; a chapter that I have not yet gotten to but am eager to read.

I wonder how much of institutionalized (and indeed linear) historical narrative’s function is to provide a kind of comfort when encountering the past(?); a way of moving on from it; a way of absolving guilt. What do we lose in a failure to untether the now from the past? What do we gain? What if we understand time not as linear, but circular? Hartman’s questioning probes me further:

“… is narration its own gift and its own end, that is, all that is realizable when overcoming the past… And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation? A home in the world for the mutilated and violated self? For whom — for us or for them?”

Attempts to tell of the socio-ontological positioning of Black polyamorous intimacies nuance and obscure the history of Black intimacies.

This obscurity is unsettling to many folks because it is at once threating and disruptive; not only to the notion of racial progress (for whites), but also to the notion of the “romantic” and “romantic love” (understood as monogamous, respectable, and legitimate). For the Black, progress narratives function as a sedative in the pacification of revolutionary ideas and actions.

Take what we might call a “history of marriage futures” through the prism of non-monogamous blacks, for example.

In the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court case that made way for legal recognition of same-sex monogamous dyads, then President Barack Obama proclaimed that “love wins,” as if to say the achievement of legal recognition for same-sex monogamous relationships under marriage in the America constituted an arrival to a future destination not only for Black lovers, but for all lovers — marriage equality, it is so called.

Yet, it is not lost on black non-monogamists that Obama’s claim comes from behind the whitest of picket fences, from a Black husband to a black wife, with two lovely, black children and “Bo.” Obamas assertion and personal politic were bound up in a mononormative, which is to say respectable, imagination.

While the Obergefell decision struck down restrictions barring same-sex, intimate unions from being recognized by marriage, it left its monogamous condition intact. Thus, when Obama, a black husband, claimed that “love wins”, he became further implicated in the reification of a mononormativity that excludes the legitimization of Black non-monogamous intimate relationships.

The monogamous imaginary has “love” also winning in Loving v. Virginia (1967) making way for folks to marry interracially. It has love winning with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 defining the rights of free people including their right to enter in to legal contracts (read as marriage).

Understood linearly, these events are both futures and histories; they represent points to be spun into story of progress — one that allows us to believe that we’ve gotten “better” at recognizing Black intimate relationships.

On this view, these events were futures before they were pasts. Additionally, they are events that occurred before now which is to say they are past relative to our present. Under the normative weight of the linearity of [Western? Modern?] narrative, we are supposed to learn from this past something about progress — things get and have gotten better. What is seldom discussed or engaged is the necessity of suffering embedded in the before.

(No. We are not to interrogate that too closely. For, then, the likeness of suffering of now to the suffering of then might be exposed.)

This is disturbing. This is uncomfortable. Instead, the line disguised as narrative is where we’re to find solace. That solace, which is to say that delusion, is what ought to contour our imaginations — how we think about after now.

But the history of marriage futures offers no solace for Black non-monogamists, for they can see no progress on the question of whether their loves are legible, legitimate. Each of these futures now past get swallowed up by a past that is not yet past for Black non-monogamists. In other words, the future always already returns; it does so as anti-non-monogamous which is to say negrophobic and anti-black.

IV. Resolution, Hope, Liberation, and the future

In recent conversations and interviews where I’ve tried to discuss the social ontology of Black love and Black polyamorous (non-)being, I’ve consitently been asked about resolution, hope, liberation, and the possible acceptance of non-monogamies by future societies.

On different occasions commentators have asked me:

“Can we reflect on the possibilities for flourishing despite all that is going on politically? And Can you give our audience some hope that there is or can be a sexy, erotic, fun, and or pleasure-centered future for us? How might we start our journey?”

and

“How do we learn to divest from [the] things we’ve been socialized in?… What does sexual liberation look like to you and how does ethical non-monogamy contribute to that picture?”

[“Hope? Despite all that is going on politically?,” I wonder to myself in the first case. “Liberation? Ethical non-monogamy contributing to that picture?,” I think to myself in the second.]

I’m also reminded of Mimi Schippers’ work Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities where she describes her method as, speaking from her position of situated knowledge, offering

“fantasy in the form of fictional narrative as both polyqueer cultural production and a temporary move away from the ‘evidence,’ which is always looking back, and toward the futurity of polyqueer potentialities. this is not to say that I will ignore the evidence, but that I will move beyond it through fantasies.”

Whether in conversation or scholarship, I’ve wanted to interrogate the source of desiring hope for a liberated future, which is to say I’ve wanted to interrogate Black imagination and the Black imaginary (whatever they may be).

I’m reminded again of the ways that, for many folks, historical narrative is to provide a kind of comfort when encountering the past; a way of moving on from it. [Here, again, is the line; linearity. Draw one in the sand]

[Does Liberation require recognition? Is it possible to recognize an existent at a location that resists telling?]

Being propositioned for remark on hope for a liberated future is unsettling. Perhaps this experience is made even more so when encountering the work of scholars like Schippers, who acknowledges that marital monogamy is sutured to whiteness as superior and indeed to whiteness as superiority. (Do they realize that asking Black polyamorists for hopeful futures is not asking them to change the world, but to end it? Any “hope” for the liberation of black polyamorists is intricately bound up in the obliteration of racism and the annihilation of mononormativity — and this, without question, would be the end of the world as we know it.)

In America, the history of marriage futures has not shown non-monogamies worthy of its validation, which is to say its legitimation. To be clear, marriage is not the only terrain on which Black intimacies can be validated; however, in the West, the institution has been a vessel through which power, privilege, protection and social ontological obscurity have filtered in ways that reproduce anti-Black violence; a reproduction that is always already a return for the Black non-monogamist.

For example, “The Elders’ Happy Home” appeared in American media in the wake of the Reynolds decision and so, was a part of American resistance to non-monogamy both shaping and reflecting, public opinion. It positions the practice of non-monogamy as synonymous with black marking.

In the image, a polygamous Mormon family is depicted rambunctiously — numerous wives and children scream and fight while their patriarch does nothing. As if the scene was not chaotic enough, paying keen attention to the single Black child in the cradle (although none of the wives appear Black) completes the suggestion that polygamy “Blackens” the entire scene and creates a situation where white domestic ordering gets replaced by inexplicable miscegenation and chaos.

The Black child’s presence points at the ways that visibility aligns with a kind of hypervisibility — as an oppressed racial subject, the child’s humanity gets obscured and ignored while the child’s presence is simultaneously difficult to ignore to the racially perceiving subject — emphasizing how Mormon passage into whiteness (though they be a predominantly white church) must first pass-through monogamy.

So long as we have not and do not revisit resistance to nonmonogamy, this rationale always already presides over the lives and loves all those living in the afterlife of slavery, which is to say the afterlife of the Reynolds decision, each time mononormativity goes unchecked.

This is why, for example, when I confront Schippers’ “beyond” evidence (outside of the outside?) and the commentator’s “despite all that is happening politically right now?”, queasiness rises in my gut. This is why I can’t accept that evidence “is always looking back”; it is a looking now and a looking then; a look at the interregnum. Perhaps the only space that there is.

The question, “What does it mean to be Black and polyamorous,” is poorly framed.

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As far as I can tell, no progress has been made on this question despite the increasing number of bloggers, academics, and influencers who confront it. Black polyamorists typically affirm polyamorous identity by negation; they try to make out what and who they are by appealing to what and who they are not.

In what is, perhaps, the most discussed scene in Fanon’s Black Skin, the scene on the train confronts the question of being through the lived experience of the Black man.

On the train with Fanon, we encounter questions of recognition and non-belonging; of being and non-being. Fanon’s longing to situate his soul “at the origin of the world” is frustrated by the discovery that he, “ ‘A negro’” is displaced as a mere “object among other objects”; a genuinely suffocating “dialectic between [his] body and the world.” He probes a landscape that fundamentally denies “being” for the negro because it fails to accommodate their lived experience. Crucially, Blacks are Black before they are ever human and the Black man is never man.

This dialectic creates an ontology for the negro lover that is all its own. The question of being, for the black polyamorist, is one and the same with the question of non-being.

II.

I worry that inquiry into Black love and what’s more, Black polyamorous being, has not been as serious as it should be. What we colloquially call “Black love” and “romantic love” must be ontologically distinct and any analysis that fails to take stock of this fact is misleading.

It is tempting to think about “black” and “polyamorous” categorically — as empty containers lying in wait to be filled with substance(s) that will create meaning and this is troubling.

First, Black feminisms teach us that social positions like being black and woman are non-aggregative. From the perspective of one’s lived experiences, we cannot isolate these categories; they always and already intersect. Thus, for the black polyamorist, “black and polyamorous” existence (what ever it might or might not be) is not an aggregation of “Black” and “Polyamorous” existence.

Societies fail to recognize Black people in ways that they do not necessarily fail to recognize polyamorous people. After all, Black bodies regularly lie dead on the asphalt from state sanctioned violence whether polyamorous or monogamous; whether single or married; whether gay or straight; whether man or woman.

There are also failures of recogonition that polyamrous people encounter that Black people do not. The sirens blare in our social discourse about declining marriage rates for Black folks and more specifically, for Black women. Black writers have zeroed in on the marriage decline for the better half of the past two decades. For instance, Ralph Banks asks “Is marriage for White people?” and Dianne Stewart highlights America’s war against Black love and African American marriage. But as Black polyamorists pay witness their to their monogamous counterparts walking down the aisle — all dressed in white — their polyamorous selves as such, could not marry if they wanted to. The United States still, by and large, forbids plural marriages with little exception.

We learn very little about Black polyamrous existence by attempting to combine the ways that Blacks and polyamorists confront interlocking systems of oppression. If Black polyamorists can exist, we should instead suppose that the world they face and the oppressive challenges contained therein, are unique.

The second problem runs deeper than thoughts surrounding combinations of allegedly distinct categories but involves our presuppositions nonetheless.

We cannot presuppose the existence of a Black subject — polyamorous or otherwise.

DuBois centrally questions the unification of a Black subject when he speaks of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk — “one ever feels his twoness.” The metaphysical mic check severs the negro from what we learn of “selves” to be.

Fanon provides the occasion, even if only for a moment, to consider the negro in a somewhat non-comparative way. Although conscious of “The white world” and the simultaneous denial of his participation in it, his question is about the very thing that would, on the DuBoisian picture, be either one or two. He painfully brings us to grips the presupposition of Black being. Far from a subject, the Black might well be, a mere “object among other objects.”

III.

In America, the distinction between whiteness and the Black has always been about sovereignty; freedom. When we begin from whiteness, using it as a default against which all others must measure up, we begin with a blind preoccupation with freedom. (Alas, some of the Declaration of Independence’s signatories were also slave holders.) This starting point grants white freedom primarily through relationship to property. Being born white at the birth of this nation meant both that you were not property and that you could own it.

“Being born white at the birth of this nation meant both that you were not property and that you could own it.”

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In the white imagination, the only one thought of as decent, the Black slave was an object; human property to be owned. Charles Mills is right to have had deep ideological criticism for liberal social traditions that take an ideally sovereign subject as its starting point. Those approaches simply aren’t fit to govern the Black American.

Slave standing further politicized its impossibility for being. The Black was not a citizen. As Trump’s bertherism directed toward former U.S. President Barack shows us, Black citizenship has also been questioned ever-after. Citizenship (and the rights therein) grants legitimate purchase of America’s promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

IV.

Today, when people think of happiness and a well lived life, they take intimate relationships to be a part of that pursuit. This is reasonable; human beings are not designed to endure loneliness and isolation. Black’s fraught standing of non-standing, however, has also compromised their pursuit of romantic love.

If romantic love requires freedom and sovereignty, it is clear that Black love and romantic love are not the same; the former is born from freedom, the latter, born of struggle. The instability of Black existence will always determine what is possible for Black love. bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins are both right to suggest that our understanding of Black love must reflect the social realities as experienced under the lived condition of Blackness. Our intimate relationships are anything but apolitical.

“If romantic love requires freedom and sovereignty, it is clear that Black love and romantic love are not the same; the former is born from freedom, the latter, born of struggle.”

We still associate the freedom to choose who we love with marriage today. For most of human history, however, love and marriage were at odds and love played little to no role in marriages. It’s not until the 17th and 18th centuries that we saw a push for marriages of love rather than marriages arranged on the basis of wealth or status. This shift occurred simultaneously as innovations in industry grew a middle class among men; changes that enabled lovers to select a spouse and fund weddings without the involvement of their families. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the women’s rights movement gained more momentum, wives began positioning themselves as equal to their husbands rather than their property. Marriage became a personal contract between two free equals seeking love, stability, and happiness.

Its movement from patriarchy, slight; its relationship to the white sovereign subject, in tact.

V.

There is no point in American history where marriage is not wed with romantic love or free citizenship for Black folks. Under slavery, Blacks were forced to “marry” as a means of producing more capital assests. Exercising new “freedom”, the newly emancipated married — coercively — to access citizenship. Newly “freed” Black women and men were forced to marry as a precondition for obtaining labor contracts and money to sustain their already existing families.

Black love and Black marriage were less about choice than they were about void.

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I.

February brings with it the regular opportunity to reflect on both love (i.e. “Valentine’s day”) and the essential contributions made by Black folks to the very fabric of our democratic society (i.e. Black History Month). But for us, something feels a bit different about this season for the celebration of black history and love.

Late last year, the world lost a bonafide race scholar, feminist pioneer, author, activist and overall giant, bell hooks. For those interested in the intersection of race and love, her influence is par none. She wrote extensively about how, for Black people living in the Americas, experiences with love, connection and the profound transformative promises these phenomena offer, is filtered through racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed lenses. She had an unique ability for capturing one of life’s greatest wonders–love–and communicating not only its essence but also its practice.

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hooks was as concerned as much about liberation for Black folks as she was about love–often thinking about them working in tandem. Best exemplified in her book All About Love, many remember hooks for her idea of “love as action”. For hooks, love is not necessarily something that we feel, but rather something that we do. While in many places, hooks was concerned with the possibilities and pitfalls for heterosexual relationshps among Black folks, others will also point to important work she’s done in thinking about Black lesbian relationships too. As they should, these works are important in their own right.

Sadly, though, many omit hooks’ contributions to Black non-monogamous thought. For example, in her book Communion: The Female Search for Love, where she challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love, she also explores the idea of “circles of love”–which are intimate relationships that allow for sexual intercourse between more than one partner–saying that these relationships may be favorable to women in the progressive era.

Although Communion was published in 2002, hooks continued thinking about Black women, non-monogamy, and liberatory sexual freedom until at least 2008 when she published “‘Who’s Pussy Is This?’: A Feminist Comment” reflecting on Spike Lee’s 1986 debut film, She’s Gotta Have It. Many of our readers may be more familiar with the Netflix adaptation of the film, but our focus here, remembering hooks, turns on her analysis of the film in its original format.

II.

Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It centers around Nola Darling (portrayed by Tracy Camilla Johns), a non-monogamous Black woman entertaining three relata. Throughout the film Nola’s Black non-monogamous existence and relationship practices confront the bounds of normalcy and respectability–not only is Nola a black woman herself, but each of her three relata (Jamie, Mars, and Greer) are cisgendered heterosexual black men. On one hand, it is unusual to see Black women in film managing three sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved; on the other, many might think that it is even more uncommon for cis- het- black men to consent to these kinds of relationships. After all, many still believe that consensual non-monogamy is “Some white people shit.” At the time of its release, Lee’s portrayal of Darling disrupted the more common narratives told about love, monogamy, and consensual non-monogamy.

After (more or less) successfully sustaining her three ongoing sexual relationships for most the movie, the flim ends with a partnerless Nola resigned to singledom after attempting to pursue a monogamous relationship with Jamie. Lee’s resolving the film in this way introduces a critical ambiguity. It’s in this ambiguity that we find the film’s power to compel us to think, reflect, and engage the work more fully. What is the “it” that Nola’s “gotta have”? Is “it” monogamy? Is “it” sex? Is “it” solitude?

hooks remarks that the film’s release in 1986 drummed up quite a bit of social and political discourse. Viewer’s quandaries spanned quite a wide range: was the film ‘a woman’s’ story? Did the film depict a radically new image of Black female sexuality? Can a man really tell a woman’s story? Is Nola Darling a liberated woman or a whore? In some places, folks have openly asked whether Nola is polyamorous, generating the question of whether monogamists can tell the stories of non-monogamists? Should they?

On our view, the film does not provide a straightforward pathway to the conclusion that Nola is polyamorous, although she is unquestionably engaged in non-monogamous relating throughout most of the film. Perhaps for hooks, the space to explore polyamorous identity is foreclosed for Nola. She writes that, Nola is not depicted as an autonomous agent, “as an independent longing for sexual expression, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Instead her assertive sexuality is most often portrayed as though her body, her sexually aroused being, is a reward or gift she bestows on the deserving male.”

Charging Lee with missing the mark of telling the story of a truly sexually liberated Black woman, hooks’ take on, what she calls a “very soulful film,” is ultimately that the frame of sexual liberation for Black women is decidedly far too narrow. hooks argues that Lee’s creation of Darling is informed by “the tendency to see liberated women as sexually loose.” Instead of exploring lesser known pathways to sexual liberation (i.e. the lack of sexual arousal or sexual desire among many polyamorists who are also asexual or otherwise located on the ACE spectrum), “Nola expresses again and again her eagerness and willingness to be sexual with men as well as her right to have numerous partners.” This reflects ideologies of earlier feminist waves that held “that feminist liberation was often equated with sexual liberation” and that this sexual liberation was to be found in thinking about women as being “desiring subjects” themselves, rather than merely the “desired objects” by men.

On hooks’ account, “Nola Darling is the perfect embodiment of woman as desiring subject — a representation that does challenge sexist notions of female sexual passivity.” A close intersectional analysis also reveals that Lee does not depart far from a racist white imagination that has framed black women in particular as sexually assertive, incapable of chastity or monogamy, and as responsible for the robbery of “the [alleged] male right to initiate sexual contact in [B]lack culture.” Ultimately, Darling is punished for her sexual assertiveness and has it weaponized against her when, while raping Nola, Jamie asks “Who’s pussy is this?” to which Darling’s response is “Yours.”

For hooks, She’s Gotta Have It’s Nola Darling’s attempted embodiment as a “desiring subject” is ultimately what leads to Darling’s subjugation by subterfuge. “Men do not have to objectify Nola’s sexuality because she objectifies it [herself]. In so doing, her character becomes the projection of a stereotypical sexist notion of a sexually assertive woman ,” hooks concludes, “she is not in fact liberated.”

III.

Our reading of the film is compatible with hooks’ perspective, though we don’t take a stance on the question of whether Nola is liberated or not. It is more useful to point out complications for Nola’s liberatory pursuit on other fronts. We also want to highlight a few considerations that, from the perspective of 2022, we think fell out of hooks’ 2008 scope. In hooks’ own view, “readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.” Hindsight’s corrective view on matters of the heart needn’t be antagonistic and we hope our tone is read more celebratory than criticizing as hooks’ thought is the foundation on which our considerations build.

With hooks, we do agree that the film is not a woman’s story. Nola acknowledges as much in the opening scene when she says:

“I want you to know the only reason I’m consenting to this is because I wish to clear my name. Not that I care what people think, but enough is enough. And if in the end, it helps some other people out, well, then, that’s fine, too. I consider myself normal, whatever that means. Some people call me a freak. I hate that word. I don’t believe in it. Better yet, I don’t believe in labels. But what are you gonna do? This was the deal.”

For Nola, it is more about public perception and the perspectives others have of her and her non-monogamous lifestyle. It is not a story about whether or not Nola is in fact a sexually liberated Black woman, but instead about what folks think of Black women they believe to be sexually assertive. Disavowing the thought that this film is a Black woman’s story, hooks writes that, “Filmmaker Spike Lee acknowledged that he intended to focus critically on [B]lack male behavior in the film, stating that ‘I know that [B]lack men do a lot of things that are fucked up and I’ve tried to show some of the things that we do.’” The message is resounding, She’s Gotta Have It is not a Black woman’s story.

In spite of all the “fucked up things” Black men do, Lee embeds possibility for non-monogamous virtue among Nola’s relata. Neither Mars nor Jamie really rock with Greer and they each see Nola’s relationship with him as more or less disposable. Yet among Mars and Jamie themselves, Lee introduces the possibility for a sustainable metamour relationship. A more transformative representation of this possibility, however, oughtn’t rest on the disposability of any of her relationships; solidarity is cheapened when built on jeering attitudes. Among Black non-monogamist, polyamorists, and polycurious folks, the possibility of polyandry (a wife with multiple husbands) or of any polyamorous dynamic where Black men “share” Black women is incredulous to many. Jamie and Mars’ portrayals as metamours might provide a blueprint for forging friendships among heterosexual black men who share a hinge partner.

There is space to be critical of whether the film is intended to portray a polyamorous relationship at all. Many polyamorists are quick to point out that “polyamory is not (all) about sex.” While disputes over these kinds of claims dissevers polyamorists into political factions omnidirectionally–separating sexual conservatives from more liberal or progressive Black sexual politics–the truth is that many polyamorous relationships are sexual. To claim that Nola’s relationship isn’t polyamorous because of how sexual they are is a mistake.

We take a different angle, although it is perhaps no less politically divisive than the first. Throughout the motion picture, Nola is not presented as being in any sort of formal romantic relationship with her suitors. On one hand, some polyamorists might be displeased by this acknowledgement of a lack of formality; especially among those for whom relational anarchism resonates. Romantic relational formality, the thought might go, is but another relic of mononormativity that polyamorists should reject. For polyamorists of this political ilk, no tension arises for Nola’s characterization as polyamorous.

On the other hand, however, it might be that plural informal relationships are more true to mononormativity’s form. In the Americas, attitudes around having multiple relationships are relaxed when/if relationships are in a “just dating” or “talking” stage. These relaxed attitudes, however, are in many ways what monogamy’s valorization depends on. By judging these informal plural relationships to be less valuable than “official” ones, stakeholders in romantic love fortify “true love’s” or “real love’s” standing as dyadic–composed of two and only two people. In fact, we believe this point is not unrelated from Lee’s offering a monogamous relationship with Jamie as a pathway to salvation for Nola–a pathway to “respectability”. So, it actually makes no small difference that Jamie, Mars, and Greer are not referred to as Nola’s “boyfriends” or “partners”.

Building on hooks’ insights, PBG goes even further suggesting that the film is more about the “impossibility of being” for Black women who might have non-monogamous or polyamorous desires. PBG sees Nola as compounded by intersecting oppressions which complicate the ‘possibility of being’ for Black women and takes this to be Lee’s aim in making the film. Aside from the documentary styled testimonials by Nola’s relata which are often disparaging, Lee hits his target in the scene where an assortment of black women appear in Nola’s dream attempting to burn her alive (Yes, you read that right.). While the movie has been characterized as going against a more conservative black sexual politics of its time, it is not a story of liberation but one of the subjugation of Black women who have desires for more than one sexual or romantic partner. Whether intentional or not, sexually positive or sexually assertive black women are shown to face unique vulnerabilties around being shamed, harassed, having their sanity questioned, and the possibility of being raped… nothing more.

IV.

Unquestionably, She’s Gotta Have It is an important moment in Black cinematic history, and more specifically a moment in Black non-monogamous history. hooks’ engagement with the movie reinforces her thought that “No aesthetic work transcends politics or ideology.” She answers her own question of “Can a man really tell a woman’s story?”, arguing ultimately that they can but this is no indication that they will do it well.

Similarly, there ought to be space for responding to the question of whether monogamists can tell the stories of non-monogamists and whether or not black feminist analyses of non-monogamy or polyamory have been appropriately wide in their scope. Though we remain noncommittal on these questions (insert polyamorous joke about “commitment issues”; *HARD eye roll*), this reflection on hooks’ contributions to Black non-monogamous thought provides a basis for responding to that question with more thorough detail. It is our hope that it pushes us to think, reflect, and engage with non-monogamous thought more critically.

*PBG Peace sign & Urfavfilosopher looking away in the distance with philosophical puzzlement.

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Long before my ideas appear in journal articles, book chapters, or conference talks, they often start as something smaller—a question in my notebook, a conversation that I can’t stop thinking about, an observation made while watching TV, rereading a novel, or listening to music.

For the past several years, my public philosophical musings have lived on Medium.com, where some pieces found surprisingly large audiences and others reached only a few folks.

One of the things I have tried to resist in academic life is the presentation of my scholarship as though it arrives fully formed. It often doesn’t. My arguments evolve, concepts get more precise, or my attachment to default assumptions loosen. But, I think, this is one of the gifts of an archive; they allow us to see thought in motion and the very curiosities that drive them.

So over the next few months, I’ll be bringing many of my public-facing essays here. Some will be exactly as they first appeared, while others will include new introductions explaining what was happening in my thinking at the time (and perhaps, where my thinking is now).

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If you’ve followed my work for a while, I hope revisiting these essays might produce a philosophically rich sense of nostalgia that you might still be able to learn something from. If you’re encountering my thinking for the first time, I hope it can help illuminate the larger project that has been unfolding beneath these pieces all along.

For me, at least, they remind me that my public writing has never truly been separate from my academic writing. My informal thinking and my scholarship have always been in conversation. That’s one of the reasons behind Mia Mente…not merely to preserve old writing; but to instead make it easier to see the throughlines interwoven between them for old and new readers alike.

Welcome to the archive. You’ll find essays on friendship, love, polyamory, Blackness, literature, popular culture, race, masculinity, emotional affairs, cheating, relationship anarchy, and the pernicious assumptions that organize our intimate lives amidst a range of other things.

Below is a list of the next few articles and their anticipated integration dates:

• Remembering bell hooks - August 4th, 2026

• On Being and Non-Being Part I - August 11th, 2026

• On Being and Non-Being Part II - August 18th, 2026

My Dear Friend,

I write to you today because I want to talk to you about something both particular and peculiar — something that I call polyamorous vicariousness…or, what Black folks call, just “being nosy.”

Now, I haven’t thought about this a bunch and I’m sure considerations will inevitably be left out of what I write to you here. But then again, my Musings are my sandbox; a place where I get to explore my thoughts and give shape to them, usually for the first time.

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I.

I’ve been reflecting on our meeting last year. I got the Macallan 12 (with a single ice ball of course) and I think you got some drink where the splash of tequilia was a bit more cannonball sized. There, we sipped together and caught up. I can’t remember exactly how we got there, but at one point the conversation called for us to think about “community.”

[Community — a notion defined by exclusion? In other words, isn’t it such that community can only be formed if we understand who is not “in”? I asked myself.]

You asked if I had been able to find or establish a sense of community where I am. I don’t remember what I must’ve said then, but I’m being honest when I tell you that the question has haunted me since.

[Community? — Have I been able to find or establish a sense of, … “community”?]

I want to believe that you asked me this because you know, second-hand, how isolating Black polyamorous existence can be in a world largely committed to a monogamous order. And, admittedly, it’s a comforting thought: that by seeking out spaces among others who share our experiences or non-monogamous perspectives, we can alleviate some of the pressures of existing in a world that often makes us feel like “others.” I know that this question (…and others like it) reflect the foundation of caring and being cared for.

Yet, Black polyamorous experience doesn’t necessarily align with the assumption that “community” offers solace from the convergent struggles of Black and polyamorous being. For us Black polyamorists, the notion of “community” is elusive.

The spaces that offer both racial and relational understanding are few and far between. Most non-monogamous spaces are not Black enough and most Black spaces are monogamous. Where, if anywhere, do we belong?

Is it among other polyamorists of all races, where the unique challenges of being a Black polyamorist may be obscured and misunderstood? Or perhaps with Black folks of all relational orientations — monogamists, married folks, those whose love styles and relationships may not resonate with polyamorous suffering? Or is it with other Black non-monogamists, despite the fact that our practices and identities within non-monogamy vary greatly?

II.

I’ve tried to find this “community” with polyamorists and other non-monogamists only to realize that there, too, my polyamory is overdetermined by my Blackness. And certainly I could say more about this, but I am not writing to them right now. I am writing to you and you are Black and monogamous. The tension that exists between you and I is unique.

You see, I turn to you because of the shared fact of our Blackness [— what are skin folk, if not kinfolk?]. I turn to you because it is you who,like me, longs for a kind of liberation and solidarity.

[Solidarity? — especially when all skin folk aren’t kinfolk?]

I turn to you because it is you who has intended comments with enthusiasm and admiration that have fallen flat on my ears. It is you, my dear friend, who have expressed in so many words, your wishes to live vicariously through me.

III.

“I’m tryin’ to be like you Big Dog; you livin’ the dream, I see you playa!,” or “That sounds like a lot; I couldn’t do all that!” you’ve said to me without being solicited for comment. “Yall be having threesomes and shit, huh? What’s that like?” “I just be living vicariously through you bro.”

[Playa? — ew, please don’t call me that… Uh, sometimes it is a lot, but I can’t remember asking you whether you could… And, quite taxing to be honest.]

Don’t you think it’s curious (although hardly surprising) that so many self-proclaimed monogamists fantasize about non-monogamous relationships and sex lives? [How monogamous are yall really? Is it that monogamy simply means the suppression of desire and pleasure?] I even read somewhere that non-monogamous sexual configurations (i.e., orgies, threesomes, group sex, and similar scenarios) consistently rank among the most searched genres in the porn industry. [Talk about “F.A.N.”s, geez.]

What do you think is at the root of that for yall? Maybe you can tell me when you write me back, because I digress.

I hope you hear me when I say this, but I just had to write you about this. You asked me about “community”— and I know you’d like to believe that you are a part of that for me. [You tell me all the time, ironically, how non-monogamy isn’t for you, but you’re still down for the cause — “I don’t see why we can’t just let people love who they love, you know?” you say in the language of ally.] And that’s what’s made this letter challenging to write.

Obviously, Black folks aren’t monolithic, and while you’re not harsh toward me in the ways that more conservative or religious Black folks have been, there’s still this awkward tension between you and I — one that obscures “community” for me.

IV.

When I think about things like this, I wanna call it polyamorous vicariousness — a kind of imaginative participation, an attempt to live out or experience the experiences of another person. It involves engaging — at least in the imagination — with another’s life, perhaps even feeling the emotions of their experiences as though they were one’s own.

Sometimes though, [and I mean this with as much care as I can muster at this moment] your monogamous curiosity shifts into something more objectifying — as I’ve found myself, my life, and my relationships becoming objects of your curiosity; as if my life and experiences are merely a storyline to play out in your mind, merely a backdrop to a pipe-dream of rebellion, freedom, or pleasure for you.

Similar to microaggressions, these remarks — intended with enthusiasm but are often received as reductive — are problematic, and I would like to kindly ask you to refrain from making them.

It seems to me that if we are to have a shot at existing in community with one another, you’ll have to understand that the imagination, plays a crucial role in how we connect with and understand others.

At its best, the imagination enables empathy, sympathy, and compassion to take hold, laying the groundwork for a shared sense of community and fellowship. It allows us to consider how we might feel if we were in someone else’s situation. Thus bringing us closer to one another and informing how we might emotionally support those that we care about.

But the imagination has its limits and can be harmful — particularly when the other’s situation or experience remains unfamiliar, obscure, or markedly different from one’s own. When this happens, our own biases and expectations can distort our empathy.

V.

This is at the heart of polyamorous vicariousness — Black polyamorous experiences are fragmented and you take the pieces that align with your own desires or curiosities, rather than experiencing me as a subject onto myself.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but how else am I left to interpret your eagerness to lean in when it comes to hearing about my so-called “polyamorous gallivanting” — stories that you imagine as thrilling, carefree, or even risqué. But then you leave me alone when our conversations turn to the everyday realities of maintaining multiple relationships or the political challenges we face. It’s as if the more mundane and taxing [albeit still enjoyable], work of relationship maintenance doesn’t fit the mold you’ve constructed.

What’s wilder is that given the high divorce rate and many people’s own complex relationship histories, it’s not immediately clear that most monogamous relationships fit the mold monogamists often imagine for themselves either. [Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.]

Still, when you share details of your monogamous relationships with me, I’m expected to respond with enthusiasm, not cringe. When there’s news of marriage, I’m supposed to offer congratulations. When you’re excited or disappointed about your sex life, I’m expected to keep my curiosity in check, respect your privacy and avoid probing too deeply; and never approach it with a sense of entitlement to your personal details. And when your monogamous relationships fall apart, leaving you in emotional turmoil [before establishing another one], I’m expected to support you with care — not to question or criticize your choice to pursue monogamy. Why is it that I’m expected to listen to stories about your monogamous relationships — even those that have caused you more trouble than they’re worth — but when I try to share the day-to-day of my polyamorous relationships, you respond with comments about how difficult or complicated it all seems? […and, chile, admittedly, some of your monogamous relationships have seemed way more difficult and complicated than any polyamorous relationship I’ve ever been a part of.]

Why then, do my loves and my life become a spectacle? Is it that the cost of polyamory is privacy? Objectification via curiosity? Do these “communities” you have in mind become perverse beneficiaries of my lived experience?

My dear friend, I’m sure you mean well, I really am. But “innocent questions” aren’t always so innocent and I really hope that you can see this imbalance. I care for you, I truly do, but the truth is that this rift frays the fabric of any sense of community I might feel, even among other Black folks, while living as a polyamorist.

Warmly,

Urfavfilosopher

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One of the goals of this Mia Mente was to make my academic work easier to find.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to publish articles in philosophy journals on topics ranging from love, non-monogamy, Black intimacy, emotional affairs, race, and social relationships. Some of those articles have been published open access which means anyone can read them for free without needing a university affiliation or journal subscription.

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I’ve always believed that philosophical ideas should circulate as widely as possible. While I care deeply about academic philosophy, many of the folks interested in the questions I’m interested in are not limited to the Ivory Tower. They’re lovers, organizers, therapists, writers, artists, podcasters, and just folks who are trying to make better sense of their own experiences with intimate relationships or racialized oppression.

This post collects my open access work in one place. If you’re new to my scholarship, this is probably a useful place to begin.

Whether I am writing about love or popular culture, I’m interested in the ways institutions and social expectations shape what kinds of relationships become possible, recognizable, or livable. So while my scholarship explores different questions, they are all animated by a shared concern: How do our intimate lives become organized by history, power, and social norms?

My academic articles often contain finished version of arguments or perspectives that I’ve sometimes first explored here in my blog writings. In other cases, sometimes an academic article opens questions that are better explored through public writing. I think of these forms of writing as being in conversation with one another rather than existing in separate philosophical domains.

As new articles are published, I’ll continue updating this page so it remains a central index of my open access scholarship.

If something here resonates with you, I hope you’ll read the articles, share them with friends and colleagues, assign them in your classes, cite them in your own work, and let me know what they helped you think differently about.

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Black Love

Central Question: What is Black love, and why should philosophers think about it as something more than simply “love experienced by Black people”?

Recommended for readers interested in: Black Studies, Philosophy of Love, Race and Intimacy, Social Philosophy, Black Feminism, Marriage, and the history of Black family life.

• In this article, I argue that Black love deserves philosophical attention in its own right. Rather than treating love as a universal phenomenon that merely happens to occur among Black people, I show how the history of anti-Black racism has fundamentally shaped the social conditions under which Black intimacy develops. “Black love” is therefore not simply an instance of “romantic love”—it is a socially and historically situated form of intimate life.

• The article brings Black Studies and philosophy of love into direct conversation while drawing on Black thinkers to explore how slavery, racialization, and the regulation of intimacy continue to shape what Black love is and what it can be.

Read the article:
Black Love - Journal of Social Philosophy

Emotional Affairs

Central Question: What exactly is an emotional affair—and what, if anything, makes one morally wrong?

Recommended for readers interested in: Philosophy of Love, Friendship, Cheating, Polyamory, Relationship ethics, and Moral Philosophy

• People often speak about emotional affairs as though everyone already knows what they are. Surprisingly, philosophers have paid relatively little attention to defining the them.

• In this article, I argue that emotional affairs are neither simply friendships nor merely relationships that have not yet become sexual. Instead, I develop a framework for understanding emotional affairs through changes in intimacy, emotional distance, and the possibility of relational commitment.

• The article also challenges the assumption that emotional affairs are always morally wrong. Instead, I argue that their moral significance depends on the emotional structure of particular relationships—including consensually non-monogamous ones.

Read the article:
Emotional Affairs - Journal of Applied Philosophy

Polyamory in Black

Central Question: What happens when we think about polyamory through the lens of Blackness rather than treating racialization as an afterthought?

Recommended for readers interested in: Black Studies, Polyamory, Consensual Non-Monogamy, Race, Marriage, Love, Black Feminism, Feminism

• Much of the existing literature on consensual non-monogamy implicitly imports anti-Blackness as its social backdrop. This article asks what changes when Black experiences become central to philosophical reflection rather than peripheral to it?

• The article explores the relationship between anti-Blackness, intimate life, and consensual non-monogamy while arguing that Black polyamorous experiences reveal important limitations in how both philosophy and critical non-monogamy studies have typically understood intimacy.

Read the article:
Polyamory in Black - Journal of Applied Philosophy

Ill-Fated Portrayals of Non-Monogamy

Central Question: Why do discussions of non-monogamy so often begin from misunderstanding?

Recommended for readers interested in: Intimate Relationships, Friendships, Polyamory, Media, Relationship Ethics, Consensual Non-Monogamy, Social Norms, Blackness, and Race

• Public conversations about consensual non-monogamy frequently rely on tropes, stereotypes, sensationalism, or assumptions inherited from monogamous culture. Those portrayals do more than simply misrepresent non-monogamous relationships—they shape the conditions under which non-monogamous people are (mis-)represented, (mis-)understood, and evaluated.

• In this article, I examine the ways non-monogamy is represented in Black media and argue that inaccurate portrayals have important ethical and political consequences. Misrepresentation affects not only public opinion but also how non-monogamous people navigate visibility, legitimacy, and everyday social life.

Read the article:
Ill-Fated Portrayals - Siyabonana: Journal of Africana Studies

“I Don’t Want to Be a Playa No More”

Central Question: How do race, masculinity, and popular culture shape the way we think about non-monogamy?

Recommended for readers interested in: Black Masculinity, Race, Polyamory, Consensual Non-monogamy, Love, Cultural Criticism, Sexuality, and Ethics

• This article critically examines the label of “Player” when attached specifically to Black Polyamorists gendered as men. I argue that the term player, so applied, functions as a pernicious racialized stereotype.

• The controlling image of the player, when applied to African American Polyamorous Men, effectively estranges these men from their own lived experiences, and results in a kind of hermeneutical injustice.

Read the article:
I Don’t Want to be a Playa No More - Analyze: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies

Civic Indifference and Black Suffering

Central Question: What if anti-blackness is a constitutive feature of the Modern world itself, rather than merely one form of oppression among many others?

Recommended for readers interested in: Black Studies, Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson, Social Ontology, Race, Racialization, Racism, Anti-Blackness, Philosophy of Race, Social Philosophy, and Political Philosophy

• In a fireside conversation with Frank B. Wilderson, I explore questions about anti-blackness that have implications for how we think about Blackness in the broader social world.

• Along the way, we discuss common misconceptions about what Afropessimism is and what it attempts to do as a diagnostic of our social condition.

Read the article: Civic Indifference and Black Suffering: A Conversation with Frank Wilderson

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I.

On our way to Moses Hall in the fall of 2015, during a visiting research appointment at the University of California Berkeley, I asked my mentor Niko Kolodny “What, for you, is the difference between friendships and romantic relationships?”

To my surprise, Niko responded that the question was a “good one.” The question hadn’t really struck me as a good one; certainly not one good enough to baffle someone whose thinking about love I truly respected. I was looking for some kind of metaphysical distinction between romantic relationships and friendships; something that would help me identify the necessary and sufficient conditions separating them from one another.

By this time, I had already disambiguated romantic relationships from the activities that are generally thought to characterize them in my work on relational contracts. It was around this time, circa 2014, that I was coming around to what we may call romantic nihilism — the idea that there is no essence to romantic love that distinguishes it from friendship. Around this same time, I concluded that romantic love and their pre-requisite romantic relationships were a social convention. To my mind, this makes the most sense of the historical notion of the romantic (which we see emerging only around the 18th century).

But if romantic love and romantic relationships are social conventions, what of friendship? Might they be merely conventional too? Furthermore, what about the notions that is now at the center of our concentration — romantic friendships? Are they possible? If, so, what exactly are they?

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How we answer the lattermost of these questions depend heavily on how we analyze each of these concepts.

II. Lovers and Friends

A lot about Nathan Rambukkana’s perspective that intimate relationships exist on a spectrum resonates with me. Situating all intimate relationships on one and the same spectrum complicates the thought that the differences between romantic relationships and friendships are necessarily differences in kind or in degree. As such, the distinction between them falls far short of ontological discretion. In other words, romantic relationships are not necessarily more intimate than friendships. After all, some of our friendships have lengthier histories with far more robust intimate experiences than our newly forming romantic relationships.

But what about the response that friendships and romantic relationships are “just different” kinds of things? Perhaps I could be convinced. (I remind the reader of my question to Niko in section I) Yet, when I ask where we might find this difference in kind, I am met with two common responses:

· The first response involves an appeal to certain kinds of activities that are commonly preserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker (i.e. “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, “partner”, “spouse”, etc.)

· The second response involves appeal to particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are believed to be appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

We should take these in turn.

Regarding the first response, the most common activity that gets cited is sexual involvements. Many of us accept as straightforwardly true that several other activities overlap between friends and lovers such as going bowling, watching Netflix and chilling, or sharing intimate stories with one another. But when people are “just friends”, as Caroline Simon notes, there is an implication that they are not sleeping with each other. There is a further implication that because friends aren’t sleeping with one another, that their relationship is significantly less intimate.

“Friends with benefits” (FWB) relationships provide a fine counterexample though. FWB’s characterize relationships between friends where sexual involvement is present. Perhaps calling them “friends with benefits” relationships is a bit misleading though, as friendships just are the kinds of things that we benefit from even without having sex. In the most excellent cases, friends encourage and support our flourishing, which seems to me self-evidently beneficial.

Lawrence Thomas captures this fact wonderfully:

“Friends love one another, and for that very reason they take delight in one another’s flourishing. There is an enormous bond of trust between them — a bond that is cemented by mutual self-disclosure. And they have a commanding perspective of one another’s life — a perspective that comes in the wake of their mutual self-disclosure and their maximizing the amount of time that they spend together. Finally, friends are deeply loyal to one another. Obviously, not all who call themselves friends are friends in this way.”

Friends are, simply put, companions in life assisting us along our very own unique journeys. Sex does not change or complicate this fact. This seems especially true given that many people wish for their romantic lovers to also be their friends. When one’s romantic lover is also a friend, romantic relationships amount to something like friendship plus sex. But FWBs have sex outside of romantic relationships and this rattles the foundation of a conceptual distinction being found in sex.

If we cling to the idea that sex is reserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker (i.e. “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, “partner”, “spouse”, etc.) oddities seem to emerge. For example, it would need to be the case that FWBs sex metaphysically transforms their friendship into a romantic relationship. This would be true independent of whether the relata acknowledge its true (i.e. “Yall really together but yall just don’t know it”). But we should be suspicious of views of romantic relationships that disregard the attitudes of the relata; lest we find ourselves involved in relationships without our own knowledge or consent.

Sex and romantic love clearly come apart. The appeal to FWBs goes some way in showing this. On another hand, though, we must keep in mind that some romantic relationships are not sexually involved either as in the case of folks who are asexual or folks whose disabilities prevent them from engaging in sexual activity. So while FWBs show that friendships can involve sex, they do not necessarily show that they can be romantic, which brings us to our second point — i.e. that romantic relationships (and thereby romantic love) involves particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are believed to be appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

For some, how we are brought to feel about our romantic partners or in our romantic relationships does not resemble the emergent emotions in our friendships. Romantic love is, for them, a unique constellation or complex of emotions. The problem with the thought that romantic love involves a particular complex of emotions including care, concern, vulnerability, jealousy, and the like, is that we often feel these emotions appropriately in our friendships as well. It should come as no surprise that we care for, are concerned about, are vulnerable with, jealous (of or about) matters pertaining to our friendships. (See Thomas’ insight above) This, again, renders the alleged conceptual distinction between friendships and romantic relationship rather weak.

Mass media plays a role in how our default attitudes about love are shaped. We are oversaturated by narratives we inherit from romance genres. The romance genre across various forms of media (music, movies, shows, books, etc.) advertise the association between romantic love and this emotion complex (see section 5.2). But we hear far less about the emotion complexes that characterize excellent friendships — their overlap breathes clandestinely.

It is no wonder, then, that our default assumptions about the distinction between friendships and romantic relationships attempt to attach the emotion complex to the latter and not the former. But for all of the art that imitates life, some art is fictitious.

Both responses about where we the difference lies, seemingly stop short of a satisfactory explanation.

III. Relationships as a Social Convention

Here I would like to return the work of Nathan Rambukkana in more detail. I briefly mentioned earlier that Rambukkana’s work places intimate relationships on one and the same spectrum. Rambukkana’s motivation was to create a framework through which he could make legible the distinctions in value judgements that we make regarding monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and the privileges associated with our judgements. For Rambukkana, monogamy and non-monogamy “are two sides of the same socio-cultural coin”. He goes on to say that, “they are two aspects of a single system for relating sexually, romantically, socially, and culturally, with multiple parts and different articulations.”

These insights are important because they create a landscape where relationships exist within a variegated and interpenetrating field outside of our more traditional social binary — or what he calls the “highly limited heteronormative mold that casts them as separate.” An outcome of viewing the landscape through this prism is that, insofar as friendships are also intimate kinds of human relationships, they too are located at various places across and throughout this spectrum.

Much like myself and Niko Kolodny, Rambukkana’s work makes “relationship” the primary fulcrum along which our analyses of love and intimacy should turn. On a metaphysical level, interpersonal relationships exist whenever two or more people are related through a historical and ongoing pattern of concern. This is true of relationships between friends, family, co-workers, FWBs, monogamous lovers, and non-monogamous ones. Relationships are thus broad; indeed and seem to give more credence to Rambukkana’s landscape.

Kolodny maintains that relationships are also individuated by the identities of the relata. While true, they are also individuated by the conventional labels that we think to assign them. For many people, the nominal distinctions across the list of relationships I’ve just described are not merely putative, but are substantive. It’s this thought that I challenge.

Recall that we’ve already rejected the thoughts that certain kinds of activities that are commonly preserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker and that particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are only appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

What seems more true to me is that the distinction between these relationships is conventional. In many ways relationships are subject to conformance or adherence to accepted social standards, whatever they be, at some place and time (the social and cultural inclusions in Rambukkana’s landscape). Beware that I am careful here to avoid saying “merely” conventional, as for many people these conventions have been imbued with meaning.

In our society, romantic relationships are marked by a mutual agreement in attitude between the relata about the most descriptively appropriate social designation for their relationship. Many people are just fine assigning the readily available (read as preset) names for intimate relationships — for there are many friends, best friends, co-worker, partners, girlfriends and boyfriends, etc.. Still for many others, including those whose relationships have been historically marginalized, invalidated, and relegated to a realm of social and cultural invisibility such as black folx, lesbians, gays, trans folx, and polyamorists, different names and descriptions have emerged as much from creativity as necessity. Thus, we can now more legibly read relationships such as “work wives/husbands”, “FWBs”, “situationships (read as entanglements)”, “throuples”, “triads”, “quads”, or “care networks”.

Whether the assignment occurs formally (i.e. through asking someone out or asking someone to be one’s friends) or not is not the most relevant thing (although for many people these formalities carry meaningful consequences). Instead, more important is that the attitude of the relata must agree. In other words, if asked whether they have a certain relationship or not (i.e. “Are you two more than just friends?”), there would be agreement among the participants in that relationship about whether said relationship exists. Suffice it to say that a relationship’s relata are the one’s whose autonomy reigns supreme in categorizing the relationship(s) they believe themselves to have.

IV. Romantic Friendships

It is likely no surprise that I believe, without hesitation, that so-called “romantic friendships” can exist. To my surprise, in a conversation on Clubhouse, I found that some people are already employing this language to describe the relationships they have with their relata. For them, it appeared to be the case that they wanted to use the designation to describe friendships that were deeply intimate by way of closeness, vulnerability, information sharing, and physical affection that stopped short of penetrative sex. But I am prepared to accepted something broader. For, why can’t it be the case that romantic friends do have sex? Why oughtn’t we accept that romantic friends have no physical affection whatsoever? Or who’s intimacies might be capped by boundary setting?

These questions are not at all easy ones to address and will perhaps disappoint our hopes for a neat (read as hierarchical) social and cultural arrangement of our intimate lives. But our intimate lives are messy, and we should not search for more precision than the subject allows. Whether or not the emergence of romantic friendships is more socially and culturally advantageous or detrimental should be explored. Just as loudly as I can hear the objections rooted in exploitation, I can also see transformative potential for social change through intimate relationship diversification. While the former concern is serious enough, I have far more often tended to be a proponent of the latter.

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In short: I write about the ethics of our intimate interpersonal relationships and the social worlds in which they unfold. This takes me across discussions of love, intimacy, monogamy & non-monogamy, ethics, culture, and critical discourses involving “Blackness.”

The longer version is that I am interested in how intimate lives and loves are organized by power. How does race, gender, sexuality, class, respectability, marriage, monogamy, and the romance narratives shape what people are able to want, name, defend, imagine, and sustain? What happens when Black folks, queer folx, polyamorous folks, single folks, friends, lovers, or families refuse the terms of intimacy they have been given?

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So, depending on how you got here, below you’ll find a few places where you might begin to choose your own adventure, so to speak. Of course, you do not have to read everything or even that you have to read things in order.

For example, if you are here because you are thinking about polyamory or non-monogamy, start with Romantic Friendships, Open Letter from a Black Polyamorist, or Can Relationship Anarchy Be an Identity?

If you are here because you are interested in Black studies, start with The Impossibility of Black Polyamorous Existence, Remembering bell hooks, or What Kind of Black Man Am I?

If you are here because you teach literature, philosophy, gender studies, or Black studies, start with Giovanni’s Room, Romantic Friendships, and The Boy Is Mine.

If you are here because you are trying to understand my broader intellectual project, start with the open access scholarship guide and then move to the book-project related essays.

This page will be fluidly updated as I integrate more of my writing archive here and as new work is published.

For now, think of this as the front room of the house—Come in, read around, send something to a friend, argue with a claim, leave a comment, and subscribe if you want to follow where the work goes next.

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Adventure 1: Starting with friendship, romance, and intimacy beyond the couple

If you are interested in the question of why romantic relationships are treated as the center of social and intimate life, start here.

Romantic Friendships: What If Romance Is Not the Center of Intimacy?

This was one of my most-read blog pieces on my old blog, and I think it’s one of the best entry points into my public writing. In it, I think through the notion of “romantic friendship” and ask why friendship and romance are so often treated as separate kinds of relationship. The piece is useful for anyone thinking about friendship, romance, sex, non-monogamy, asexuality, queer intimacy, or the limits of the romantic couple form.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

In Defense of Intentional Short-Term Relationships

This piece covers how intimate relationships might be meaningful without being permanent. When I wrote it, I was interested in asking what becomes possible when we stop treating open-ended duration as the main measure of relational seriousness or success. Some relationships are brief and still existentially valuable and ethically significant. Some are temporary and still deeply formative. Some are not failures simply because they were never meant to last forever.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Real Love: Love and Fabrication

This essay takes up questions about what makes love “real,” and whether love becomes less meaningful when we recognize the social scripts, fantasies, projections, and forms of fabrication that shape it. It is a useful piece for readers interested in the philosophy of love, romantic idealization, and the difference between love as experience and love as social construction.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 2: Starting with Black non-monogamy and the problem of recognition

If you are interested in the relationship between Blackness, polyamory, non-monogamy, and social legibility, these are probably the best pieces to begin with.

An Open Letter from a Black Polyamorist to Their Poly-Curious Friends

This essay was widely shared by polyamorous folks because it names a dynamic that many Black non-monogamous people know well: the experience of being turned into an object of curiosity, projection, or vicarious experimentation by monogamous people. The piece is about poly-curiosity, voyeurism, community, loneliness, and what happens when Black polyamorous life is treated as spectacle rather than social reality.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

The Impossibility of Black Polyamorous Existence, Part I

This was one of the first public pieces where I began working through questions that now sit much closer to the center of my book project, Love Hates Us. The essay asks what it means for Black polyamorous life to be rendered socially unintelligible by both anti-Blackness and mononormativity. It is denser than some of the other public essays, but I think it is important for understanding the development of my thinking on non-monogamy and anti-Blackness.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

The Impossibility of Black Polyamorous Existence, Part II

This follow-up revisits and refines some of the claims from Part I. I think of the two pieces together as a kind of public record of conceptual development. Part I marks an early attempt to name some of the problems; Part II shows me thinking a little bit more critically about race, non-monogamy, the philosophy of love, and the conditions under which Black non-monogamous intimacy becomes difficult to perceive as fully real.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

What Kind of Black Man Am I?: Failed Metaships and the Double Bind of Black Masculinity for African American Polyamorous Men

Here I think through Black masculinity, polyamory, and the relational complexity of metamours. It is about the double binds that emerge when Black folks gendered as men are navigating non-monogamous life under racialized expectations about masculinity, sexuality, possession, responsibility, and failure.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Bury Me an Honest Man: On the Politics of Black Non-Monogamy

This piece takes up Black non-monogamy as a political question. It is part of an earlier set of writings where I was trying to think about honesty, respectability, race, relational deviance, and the social stakes of Black people refusing dominant romantic scripts.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 3: Starting with Black feminism, bell hooks, and non-monogamous thought

Remembering bell hooks: A Reflection on Lesser Known Contributions to Black Non-Monogamous Thought

I wrote this piece in the wake of the death of bell hooks because I wanted to call attention to something that often gets missed: hooks matters not only as a theorist of love, feminism, domination, and liberation, but also as someone whose work opens important spaces for thinking critically about monogamy and relational possession.

This essay is a good entry point for readers interested in Black feminism, love ethics, anti-domination, and the under-discussed place of non-monogamy in hooks’ thought.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 4: Starting with literature, music, and popular culture

Some of my favorite public essays use literature, music, television, or celebrity culture as an entry point into bigger philosophical questions. These pieces are often more playful, but they are not unserious. Pop culture is one of the places where people rehearse, defend, romanticize, and vigorously debate the social scripts that organize intimate life.

Reading Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room Through Non-Monogamy

This essay offers a non-monogamous reading of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Not every Baldwin reader has agreed with the take, which is part of what made the piece fun to write. I was interested in what becomes visible if we read the novel through the eyes of a non-monogamous perceiving subject. The essay may be especially useful for people teaching Baldwin, queer literature, philosophy of love, or the politics of romantic imagination.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

What If “The Boy Is Mine” Is the Wrong Frame?

This essay revisits Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” and asks what happens if the central problem is not which woman the man belongs to. It is a playful but serious reflection on romantic possession, rivalry, monogamy, and the way popular music teaches us to imagine love through competition and ownership.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Will You Accept These Roses?: The Bachelor, Race, Love, Monogamy, and Non-Monogamous Virtues

This piece uses The Bachelor to think about race, romantic competition, monogamy, and the strange moral lessons reality television teaches about love. It is part of my broader interest in how popular culture makes monogamy feel natural even when its rituals are openly theatrical, competitive, and ethically bizarre.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

The Dissolution of Cheating: Kevin’s Hart

This essay takes celebrity cheating discourse as an opportunity to ask what cheating is, why people treat it as morally obvious, and how public conversations about betrayal often rely on assumptions about monogamy that are rarely examined.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 5: Starting with relationship anarchy, identity, and non-monogamous practice

Can Relationship Anarchy Be an Identity?

Originally published as “The Misadventures of Relationship Anarchism,” this piece asks whether relationship anarchy makes sense as a relational identity or whether it is better understood as a practice, orientation, politics, or set of commitments. Some of the thinking here overlaps with questions I take up in my book Why It’s Okay to Not Be Monogamous.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Non-Monogamous Time Warping, or Polyamorous Dog Years

This is one of my more recent and more conceptually intriguing essays. It thinks about the way time feels different in non-monogamous relationships: how pacing, attachment, availability, transition, relational development, and emotional intensity can seem to move according to a different tempo. I think this is an under-discussed feature of non-monogamous life, and it connects to larger questions about mononormativity, amatonormativity, and how intimate relationships organize our experience of time.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 6: Starting with disclosure, secrecy, sneaky links, and early archive pieces

Some of my earlier essays appeared under the “Disclosures” series. These pieces think about cheating, secrecy, disclosure, romantic possession, ambiguity, and the messy social life of desire. They are earlier pieces, but they help show the development of questions that still matter to my work.

You might begin with:

Sneaky Links, Secrets, and the Politics of Disclosure

This piece thinks about secrecy, casual intimacy, and the social meanings attached to hidden or unofficial relationships.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Boyfriend # Who?

A short reflection on naming, relational status, and the instability of categories like boyfriend, partner, lover, friend, and something else altogether.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

For the Weekend

A reflection on temporary intimacy, desire, and relationships that exist outside the fantasy of permanence.

Coming soon to Substack. Read the original version HERE.

Adventure 7: Starting with my academic work

This Substack also serves as a home base for my open access scholarship. I will keep an updated post with links to published articles, accessible summaries, and suggested entry points for readers who want to move between my public essays and academic writing.

That guide will include work on topics such as emotional affairs, non-monogamy, Black love, care, intimacy, and the philosophy of relationships. For now, you can find these articles below:

• Book: Why It’s Ok to Not be Monogamous

• Black Love — Journal of Social Philosophy

• Ill-Fated Portrayals of Black Non-Monogamy — Siyabonana: Journal of Africana Studies

• Civic Indifference and Black Suffering — Theory & Event

• Polyamory in Black — Journal of Applied Philosophy

• “I Don’t Want to be a Playa No More” Polyamory and Gendered Stereotypes — Analize

• Emotional Affairs — Journal of Applied Philosophy

Adventure 8: Starting with PAGES Pod, podcasts, and public conversations

Some of you may know me through my appearances on the Overthink Podcast, PAGES the Reading Group, PAGES Pod, Abstracted, or other public conversations connected to Black study and philosophy. I will also use this space to share selected updates, reflections, and links from that work.

That may include:

• Podcast episodes

  • Volume XXIII: Adult Children

  • Volume XVIII: On Care and Caring

  • Volume XXIV: The Imagination

• Fireside chats

  • Civic Indifference and Black Suffering

  • Why It’s Ok to Not be Monogamous

• Reading group announcements

• Reflections on public conversations

• Notes from talks and conferences

• Reading lists and discussion prompts

Welcome. Step in to Mia Mente (which translates to something like “My Mind” in Italian).

What is Mia Mente?

For the last several years, my public writing has lived in several different places. Some of it has been on Medium. Some of it has appeared in academic journals. Some of it has moved through social media posts, podcast episodes, reading groups, classrooms, conference talks, and the kinds of conversations that begin in one place and continue elsewhere. That has been generative in its own way. But it has also meant that my writing and thinking has often been scattered across platforms that were not really built to help interested readers encounter the larger body of thinking that the work belongs to.

So, Mia Mente on Substack is an attempt to gather things.

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It will be a home for my public essays, my open access scholarship, notes on what I am writing and thinking about, announcements about talks and conferences, reflections connected to teaching and reading, and occasional dispatches from my wider world which includes PAGES the Reading Group (a reading collective I founded in 2014), PAGES Pod (the podcast component of that collective which features intellectually engaging conversations and interviews), and other projects that sit at the intersection of Black Studies, Africana philosophy (and philosophy more broadly), Critical Non-Monogamy Studies, culture, and maybe even some vulnerable out takes from my life as a Black public philosopher and intellectual.

My hope is that Mia Mente will help make my writing and thinking easier to find, share, sit with, and return to.

What I write revolves—like a prism—around a set of questions that have stayed with (or, read as “haunted”) me for some time now:

• What do we mean when we talk about love?

• How have race, gender, sexuality, and class shaped the those discourses and the intimate arrangements we inhabit?

• Why do some relationships become legible as real, serious, mature, respectable, or worthy of protection, while others are treated as deviant, temporary, impossible, or pathological?

• What does monogamy have to do with the organization of social life?

• What does marriage have to do with the production and regulation of Blackness?

• What kinds of intimate worlds become possible when we stop treating the romantic couple as pinnacle of intimate life?

• And what might philosophy look like if it took friendship, non-monogamy, and the refusal of Black lives and loves, as central rather than marginal?

These questions show up in different ways across my writing—sometimes as academic arguments or essays about pop culture. Sometimes they appear through close readings of literature, music, television, or public discourse or as reflections on polyamory and other forms of intimacy that do not fit the scripts they were given.

I am interested in all of these things.

Doing philosophy publicly and out in the open it gives ideas a chance to float outside of spaces where “knowledge production” is widely thought to live—in academia.

I have a deep appreciation for scholarly writing. I am trained by it and in many ways committed to it. But I also know that many of the people who are most interested in the questions I’m interested in are not always in the purview of journal audiences nor seek that kind of validation. They are always/already thinking. They are always/already theorizing. They are always/already asking questions about love, justice, and freedom from oppression wherever it exists.

Mia Mente is for those readers, too.

Setting Some Expectations

If you have been a devoted follower of my work, some of what appears here at first may look familiar. Over the next several weeks, I will be moving a number of my older essays into this archive. Some of them were among my most-read pieces. Some were early attempts to name problems I am still thinking through. Some now feel like public fragments of arguments that later became part of my academic work and my larger book projects. I do not want those pieces to remain scattered or tucked in the canals of a platforms I am no longer using as my primary writing home.

As I bring that archive here, I will also be adding new introductions, occasional notes, and in some cases reflections on how my thinking has shifted. Some essays still hold up. Some mark earlier stages of a developing argument. Some contain language or claims I might now frame differently. That is part of what makes an archive useful: it shows not only what someone thought, but how a set of evolving questions become more precise over time.

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I will also be posting new writing and thinking.

You can expect writing on love, polyamory, friendship, marriage, anti-Blackness, the philosophy of love and sex, and whatever else I’m unable to leave alone. I will also use this space to share accessible introductions to my published articles, links to open access work, updates about talks and conferences, and notes about projects in progress.

Some of the work here will be free because I want it to be read, shared, taught, argued with, cited, sent to group chats, passed to friends, and returned to when they’re apropos.

There will also be a paid subscription option for readers who want to support the work more directly. Paid subscribers will receive occasional behind-the-scenes notes, reading lists, reflections on works in progress, and other materials that deepen the main archive by bringing my readers in to intimate proximity to the processes that gives rise to it.

Mia Mente is not a replacement for my academic work. Nor is it clean separation between scholarship and public thought. I see it more like a connective tissue: a place where the different parts of the work can speak to each other.

So, welcome…

If you are here because you are polyamorous, non-monogamous, poly-curious, monogamous (and nosy), or simply trying to think more critically about intimacy, welcome.

If you are here because you teach, study, think, or write about love, sex, race, ethics, blackness, anti-blackness, culture, welcome.

If you are here from PAGES the Reading Group, the PAGES Pod podcast, from Medium, Instagram, TikTok, a classroom, a conference, a group chat, or from somebody sending you a link with “this made me think of you,” welcome.

I am glad you found your way here.

The archive is moving. The work is continuing. And I hope this becomes a place where ideas can gather and be shared by readers and lovers they were meant to find.

Subscribe, share, read around, and stay awhile.

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