In this conversation, Bayo Akomolafe and Alnoor Ladha explore the entanglements of identity, activism, whiteness, and emergence in a time of planetary crisis. Bayo challenges the notion of human centrality, advocating for humility as ‘dis-ability’ — an epistemological opening to new ways of knowing, being, sensing and relating in the world. They discuss whiteness not as a racial category but as a terraforming project, shaping the world’s dominant systems. From the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the syncopation of cultural rupture, they examine how disruption invites transformation. Ultimately, they invite us to step beyond certainty, into the dance of becoming otherwise — together.
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 8 – Alnoor Ladha with Bayo Akomolafe
Alnoor Ladha | Welcome to The Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation between Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit advisory that supports organizations, social movements, and activists in creating cultural interventions for systems change. You can find out more at culturehack.io.
This podcast is published by Kosmos Journal, transformation in harmony with all of life. You can find out more at kosmosjournal.org. Our editor is Eber Rodriguez, and I’m your host, Alnoor Ladha.
Today, my guest is Bayo Akomolafe — a dear brother, friend, mentor, and ally. And I’m going to let Bayo introduce himself because no matter how I describe him, it won’t do him justice — and he’ll berate me for it later anyway. So, tell us a bit about yourself, Bayo.
Bayo Akomolafe (01:27) | That’s probably the most difficult thing I know — describing myself. My name is Bayo, as you know. I’m a father — it’s important for me to always start there. I’m a father and a son. I teach, I write, I travel.
I think I’m drawn into — or perhaps enlisted by — some kind of multi-species prophetic process that doesn’t have a name. It’s like a temple without an orthodoxy. And my work is to meander through those loops, through the spaces that are opening up.
Alnoor (02:13) | Maybe say a little bit about your inquiries. I know you were a clinical psychologist, but you’ve also studied the cosmology of the Yoruba tradition, been with elders, and gone on a deep deschooling and unlearning process.
You also seem to be merging various strands — from emergence to ancestral whispers, from posthumanism to cartographies beyond language and post-activism. Can you say more about your inquiries and what’s animating you?
Bayo (02:52) | Well, I started out with troubling questions. This isn’t an origin story — no, the Wayne parents didn’t die here. There isn’t a superhero cartography here.
But for the sake of our conversation, I’ll say that I was troubled by local understandings of well-being. I started as a clinical psychologist, working in Nigeria at a time when there were almost no resources to take care of people. And I started asking questions like:
What if the ways we’re responding to this crisis are the crisis?
What if there are other ways to navigate this moment?
So, of course, this took me, danced me, so to speak to Babalawos, the Indigenous healers. It was quite a revolutionary thing to do in the Christian South, especially for someone like me, brought up as I was. And especially within the institution where I was working — this was my doctorate, and I was at a Christian university.
It was seen as “consorting with the devil.” They literally used those words to describe my research.
But my encounters with those men were a paradigm shift — an inflection point of radical proportions.
Since then, I’ve moved through modernist thinking, postmodernist thought, and then post-postmodernist thought. I’d describe myself now as post-structuralist, even post-humanist. But for those unfamiliar with these terms, I’d simply say that I’ve always been moving away from the idea of the individual as the center. Some kind of apophatic tradition is happening here — meaning, I’m moving away from the notion that humans are the focal point of the universe.
There’s something excessively boring about the idea that it’s all about us — or it’s about our anxieties. I’m keenly aware of a universe that exceeds the human, one that’s inviting us into new forms of participations, new productions of value.
Alnoor (05:25) | You once told me a story about a Yoruba elder you met. You were coming in with your clinical psychology lens, and there was a conversation about voices in your head. Do you remember that anecdote? Do you want to just share it with us?
Bayo (05:42) | Okay, okay, okay. No, I guess I came in with my DSM modalities intact. I was having a conversation with this Babalawo (a Yoruba priest), and I had a question about auditory hallucinations. My aim was to understand how they experienced such phenomena within their own epistemologies or classification schemes — to see if there was some hidden treatment I could co-opt and fit into the DSM, or something like that.
So, I asked: What do you do about auditory hallucinations?
Of course, the person who was translating for me simplified it to “voices in your head”, which was appropriate. But the Babalawo was perplexed. He asked, what do you mean? What’s he talking about?
And I responded: Well, people who hear voices that aren’t theirs — voices that become distressing — do you have clients that present with those symptoms? How do you treat them?
And he was still confused. What is this dude talking about? What if that’s your grandmother speaking to you?
He was absolutely appalled by my assumption that such experiences were inherently
pathological. He couldn’t understand why I was framing them as a problem. To him, interiority is already exposed — there’s no safe and coddled space that is neatly bound, there is no private inner world that isn’t also a public sphere. Grandmothers will whisper back to you. Ancestors can tune in — if you’re in that space, if you’re in that frequency. It’s a spiritual crisis, not something to be amenable for medication.
And so, this was his challenge to me: What if this is your father, your grandmother, an ancestor, or an Orisha trying to speak with you? Why would you want to take pills to that? This shut me up.
Alnoor (08:00) | This idea of blurring and troubling the lines between what is “ours” and “theirs”— between what is “me” and what is beyond me — seems to be a major theme in your work. Especially in how you bring this into post-activism.
Can you say a little bit about post-activism? Why this inquiry? Why trouble the activist of all people? Of all the places to unsettle notions of “us” versus “them,” subject versus object — why there?
Bayo (08:28) | Well, Alnoor, you know we’ve had hundreds of conversations about sci-fi. I know you’re a sci-fi guy, and we still argue about which one is the best. Even though those are puerile, childish conversations, we still entertain it — which one is the best?
Some of my favorite stories involve a kind of involution of roles — or a plot twist of epic proportions, that brings the audience to realize that all along, the hero was actually the villain. Or that the hero was unknowingly playing the villain’s game. You know what I mean? That kind of thing.
Well, it’s not as far-fetched as we think.
It’s often the case that we are enmeshed and entangled in algorithms — patterns of response — that mean that even when we win, even when we achieve victory, we have only resourced particular ways of being in the world — epistemologies, ontologies — particular ways of relating with each other that are the problem.
So the analysis of post-activism isn’t against the activist as I know you know — it’s an unfortunate word. It has traveled too far to be recalled. This isn’t a Toyota vehicle; I can’t issue a recall on it. But my secret term for it is para-activism.
At its core, what I’m really trying to express — at least one part of it — is that sometimes, the way we respond to a crisis is the crisis gaining intelligence.
You can be potently against a reality and still be feeding that very thing.
This is already a post-structuralist, post-humanist gesture — a way of noticing that isn’t just about people responding to their world. It’s about territories — and how territories become stronger, more intense. That even in saying “we will take you down!” you could be reinforcing the very thing you want to take down.
But more importantly, post-activism is about decentering the human actor and noticing of agency as a force-field.
I don’t even want to use the word “agency.” I’d would use affect. Affect is more tolerable to post-humanist and neo-materialist scholars. Affect is the capacity to be in response with. There is a sense in which our imbrication in the city is incapacitating no matter what we frame activism as. That some kind of postural deficit — this is why I always center disability in these discussions — some kind of a shift away from the rectilinear posture of the citizen-subject who “has everything together” is necessary here.
Think about the way we talk about climate justice. Just the other day, I was responding to the news about a group of teenagers taking powerful figures to court over climate destruction to say, “you’re ruining our future”. They are seeking “climate justice.”
And I said: I think climate chaos, as we’re experiencing it, is a calling into question of systems of legibility. How do you take legibility to court? What would be the result of a process where legibility itself is at the docks?
It seems to me that it can only produce more intelligibility — we are seeing like states, is what I’m trying to say. And at some level, we have to move away from the convenient solutionisms that we co-produce in the efforts to respond to these problems. And that takes a different way of reading the world together.
Alnoor (12:55) | And that could be interpreted that you’re saying non-action, but that’s not what you’re saying. What you’re actually saying is: enter the place of humility and not-knowing. Trouble the certainties that come with dualism — with us versus them, with even the idea of justice as an end state rather than a process. And from that space, new superpositions of possibility present themselves.
Bayo (13:21) | Yes. I’m referring to — well, with all great respect to Martin Luther King — I don’t trust the framing of freedom at last, right?
The idea of justice as the legibility of the public, is the intelligibility of public space. It’s about how the public gets creative. But what we’re dealing with here, brother — what we often call climate chaos, racial injustice, or other crises — is something else entirely.
We’re dealing with hyper objects of some kind. I’m using Timothy Morton’s formulation here. We’re dealing with things that exceed the human individual. We’re dealing with territories. Or in biblical language, we’re dealing with principalities and powers.
Alnoor (14:13) | Fields in quantum physics.
Bayo (14:14) | Fields. Quantum fields. Right.
We’re dealing with something far more molecular than a new app or funding can resolve. And so this calls into question the centrality of human actors.
And it wants —and I say “it” as I’m drawing here from Fernand Deligny. We’ve had conversations about this French revolutionary, this visionary who worked with autistic children in the 1960s. Deligny used to say: It’s not the spider that weaves the web. It’s the web that weaves the web.
That’s Henri Bergson. That’s a way of decentering the spider as the actor.
What I’m trying to say here is that the world is infiltrated by grace. And this grace — this graciousness — is agency. It allows us to do some things and see some things but it also incapacitates us in other relational spaces. Our work is to find those cracks, those openings, those breaks where we might see the world differently.
That means feedback loops. I know you’re familiar with the term feedback loops of different kinds. That means craft-making. That means art. That means dancing.
But it definitely means that we are not the magisterial lords of creation that we think we are. We’re not going to gather a room full of geniuses and “solve” the problem. That’s a very Aristotelian/Newtonian way of thinking. That’s the liberal world order, the humanist world order, trying to reassert itself. And I think it’s impoverished at this moment.
Alnoor (16:22) | Even this idea of the hyper object — Timothy Morton describes it as something beyond space and time in the human sense. You exist within it, but you can never fully grasp it.
Climate chaos, ecological breakdown are hyper objects. Capitalism is a hyper object. A black hole is a hyper object.
And yet, within the hyper object of our current context — climate chaos, peak inequality, destruction of ecosystems — there are people who are disproportionately benefiting from that. You have your Putins, your Trumps, your Elon Musks, your Bill Gates, etc.
What would you say to someone who argues that thinking in terms of hyper objects — of the web weaving itself — allows for an abdication of responsibility and agency? Because there are people who are benefiting from the webbing and weaving of this web. How do you resolve that?
Bayo (17:28) | There is no resolution.
Emergence is perverse, right? There’s no yellow brick road to travel.
I mean, we can speak in falsettos. We can raise our voice in some stentorian way, we can be loud about capitalism. And still use capitalist resources — the architecture of that very system — to weave our critique.
The presupposition that we can step outside of the systems we critique to find a through-line path from A to Z — is itself a very modern, very neoliberal way of thinking.
Alnoor (18:13) | In the sense that you either have to be Gandhi or a Goldman Sachs banker and there’s nothing in between.
Bayo (18:17) | I don’t even think Ghandi is safe in this critique, as you know.
I was just having a conversation last night, and I said: Everyone is cancelable. Even Jesus Christ now. Bring anyone back from history, and they’re ripe for cancellation.
The neoliberal world order depends on seeing experience as reducible to individuals. And so, it practices this distancing of the self from the world.
For example, Mandela ought to have known in his time. Why didn’t you, in your work with the ANC in South Africa, call out Gaddafi in his time?
The logics of our social networks and these things — our technologies have removed us from the world we are trying to critique or process. So now, we think everyone can be treated in that algorithm of judgment.
Alnoor (19:27) | One of the places I come to in this is that— from a non-dualistic perspective — there is agency, to a certain extent. There are people who are disproportionately benefiting from the existing system. We can point to that. Even around climate change, research has shown that 92% of historical emissions have come from the Global North. That fact informs how we may move together.
That historical knowledge — that certain places created more of the problem — could inform something like reparations work, for instance. But the certainty that justice has to be a certain way is part of what is perpetuating the certainty of modernity. It does not mean you cannot be informed by historical context, but we don’t want to be overly determined by it. This is what you’re putting into question.
Bayo (20:29) | Yes, yes. When you say that there’s agency, I just want to hold that tension for a moment. When I speak about agency, I’m speaking about networks. It’s the same way I engage my students when we talk about privilege.
We often think of privilege as the property of individuals. So when, for instance, people on the political Left say, Check your white privilege, those accused of privilege sometimes start weeping.
I’ve often said that the ability to approximation of privilege is itself a function of privilege. That kind of analysis drags me to see privilege as something is acting upon the world. Meaning, privilege isn’t something that is owned — it is the unfairness that is written into emergence.
Alnoor (21:37) | It’s distributed.
Bayo (21:37) | It’s distributed and it’s uneven. Emergence doesn’t work in uniform ways. This isn’t to naturalize or codify oppression — colonization is the codification of oppression. This isn’t that.
What I’m drawing attention to is how the world is unwieldy. How we build settlement, and how we are built and designed by the settlement that we build and design.
And, importantly, how this is not left to us in some final analysis. This is not left to humans marching in to save the day. We have to build new alliances, and this takes disability.
Alnoor (22:19) | And humility.
Bayo (22:21) | Humility is a form of disability.
Alnoor (22:23) | There was a line that came to me from a plant much wiser than me.
It said: “The seed of all ontology is ignorance.
Bayo (22:33) | The seed of all ontology is ignorance.
Alnoor (22:35) | And the midwife of wisdom is humility. The seed of all ontology is ignorance. And the midwife of wisdom is humility.
So when you start to even grasp at the ignorance that we hold the consequences of our actions, what 2000 calories a day requires to prop up a western life – the plastics, the discharge that comes from the western way of living. If we could just even grasp that for a second, we would be moved to the deepest humility.
And that starts opening up the space for wisdom. Yes. Without humility, you can’t have knowledge worth having.
Bayo (23:12) | Yes, it’s right there in the name humus. It’s coming down to earth. Humility is disability,
Alnoor (23:20) | Humility is disability? Say more about that. What do you mean by “disability” in this context?
Bayo (23:26) | By disability, I don’t mean a broken leg. You could have a broken leg and still function quite well within the political arrangement.
By disability, I’m talking about all the ways that our bodies do not measure up to an ideal, an archetype, a presupposition about what wholeness looks like, that runs through our conversation, that is embedded and encoded in our technologies stuff.
And yet you could have a hypothetical situation where you are frozen because you find some technology. Maybe you work with Bezos and you find some technology that allows you to live 250 years in advance. And you wake up in a year – 2,400 or so. And you find humans have evolved into two, three-digits creatures. They only have three digits. So all the keyboards and all the technologies are designed after that – you with your five digits would be disabled even in your wholeness.
This is just a thought experiment. So, disability is corporal, but it is political as well. And it is how we move through the world and how the world often disables movement.
So, when I say humility is disability, I’m trying to offer a thesis that I think of humility as epistemological cracks. It’s where the phallic thrust of knowledge as this force of capture is impeded at the moment.
Like Wendell Berry would say, the impeded stream is the one that sings. That idea of impediment is disabling, is generative incapacitation. So, disability is not negative. It is not a place of deficits. It’s a place of potential variation. But humility is a portal to that.
Alnoor (25:37) | When knowledge is a monolithic end-state, learning is not possible.
Bayo (25:41) | There you go.
Alnoor (25:44) | Let’s talk a little about whiteness because I know your forthcoming book is called An Ocean of Milk.
Bayo (25:55) | Yeah.
Alnoor (25:56) | Maybe say a little about whiteness — and also how you, me, we are captured in the hyper object of whiteness. We are not outside of it.
Bayo (26:05) | No.
Alnoor (26:05) | Even though I’ve incarnated in a so-called brown body — really in the black body, Bayo often accuses me of being white, or not African enough, or not brown enough.
We won’t declare your secret racisms as I do with you.
Bayo (26:24) | [Laughs] Okay. Whiteness.
I mean, I get accused, I get a lot of flak for even mentioning the word because a very popular idea of whiteness is white people not, so whiteness is not white people. Whiteness is a cultural project. It’s a terraforming project.
I mean, it’s very difficult to create an origin story for something that you might think of as a hyper-object. But some would say that it began in the United States, in the Americas with the racializing project of the plantation, with the transatlantic slave trade, with the Enlightenment, with the idea that there is a particular ideal human being, and he looks like the white male. Everyone else comes close, but they rank lower on a hierarchy of what it means to be a proper human.
So black bodies, for instance, were conceived as prosthetic devices, if you will, prosthetics. The thesis is the white male. And that which supports the thesis in some subterranean fashion are other kinds of bodies. And this cultural project has been about flattening the world so that the dissociated self, the isolated individual can thrive, can have its way with the world.
So, whiteness is I implicated with the extractive capitalisms of our time.
Whiteness is I implicated with the historical capture of black bodies.
Whiteness is I implicated with the Anthropocene. It’s very difficult to think about these stories without thinking about this racializing imperative. Now it’s one thing to say that, and it’s quite another thing to say white people are evil, which is just boring and
Alnoor (28:38) | Reductionist.
Bayo (28:40) | And—
Alnoor (28:41) | The us versus them binary. Again.
Bayo (28:46) | That is one of the most acutely white things to say, that whiteness is reducible to white people. No, I don’t think that at all.
Alnoor (28:56) | And I’m sure critics have said to you: Why use the term whiteness, then?
Bayo (28:59) | Yes, it’s fraught with risks—
Alnoor (29:04) | Why do you say that?
Bayo (29:06) | That’s what I say that it’s a particular reading from a perspective. Someone asked me recently, why don’t you just say Capitalcene? And I said, it’s easy to do that, right? You could do that. And in some spaces, it might be the more generative thing to explore, right? Concepts are always traveling. They’re not as stable as we think. However, there is the tendency to lose sight of the journeys of the slave ship, a tendency to reduce it to an algorithm and not noticing how bodies are implicated in this racializing tendency. And then all of a sudden, we’re playing the same major…
Alnoor (29:59) | Tones.
Bayo (30:00) | And we forget the minor that is disruptively flowing through it.
Alnoor (30:04) | It creates the syncopation—
Bayo (30:06) | Exactly. Syncopation.
And so the stressing of whiteness has through black scholarship, through the writings of Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, C. L. R. James, Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler—
through these beautiful explorations, noticing whiteness is noticing the man – a Gambian will call it the Anthropos – is noticing the human not as a thing, but as a territory. This is not dismissing human beings. As some might have said, this is not anti-humanism. This is noticing that until now the human has always been a political category that has been denied. Many have been denied access into this category.
So we are performing the human as an algorithm and the human is not us. The human is microbes and viruses and how they are arranged and furniture and design and concepts and weather and temperature. The human is an arrangement, not a thing within an arrangement. And so whiteness becomes this way of noticing the historical, like the Anthropocene. If you read the Anthropocene without reading, talking about the transportation of 11 million bodies from across the Atlantic or from Africa, from the slave coast, from the Bight of Benin, there’s something potentially inadequate and very missing in your story.
And so, whiteness kind of brings it up, but it comes with risks as well as every reading does.
Alnoor (31:56) | And also on the other side, what it has going for it is it’s also acknowledging the invisible architecture of the dominant culture.
That there is and has been not only white supremacy, but as our brother Rema says, white body supremacy and the idea that white is not a race. And so, the social cultural construct of whiteness actually puts all of it on the table.
Bayo (32:22) | Yes, yes.
Alnoor (32:24) | So as you know, the theme around Deschooling Dialogues is I talk to elders, which is not about age. It’s a function of the tribe of the community. And I see you as an elder brother, even though I’m physically incarnated before, which I often like to remind Bayo – only when he’s berating me. Really, what do we need to unlearn as a dominant culture? But also, all of us have internalized the constructs of whiteness, the constructs of colonization, of the separate self, of the atomized individual as the arbiter and the locust of power. What do we need to, and maybe how – means and ways…
Bayo (33:11) | Avenues.
One of my favorite videos of all time is a clip. It’s just one minute, 15 minutes long, one minute, 15 seconds long or thereabout. And it’s this very old gray, black and white filming of the collapse of the Tacoma Bridge in 1938 or 1939 in the United States. Did it collapse in the forties? I forget. But anyway, it’s a bridge and they film its collapse.
Literally the bridge starts swinging from side to side and it had something to do with the marching of soldiers on it. Left, right, left. That is the downbeat left. And somehow that was implicated, and it became a rule going forward and even before that, that when soldiers are marching across a bridge, you break step. You don’t march in rhythm, no left right, because that creates sign waves that give this feedback loop. And so, the bridge starts to dance as well, and then it collapses. So, you break step. You’re not supposed to walk in with a down step, with downbeat. You’re supposed to walk with the upbeat syncopated. But I digress.
And I’ve always thought of that bridge as a figure of white continuity —white stability, right?
And then, these syncopating forces – syncopation is danceability, it’s how things come to dance, right? These syncopating forces disrupt the bridge’s stability, and then the bridge starts to dance and then it collapses.
In many senses, I think we’re in the throes of a mass disabling event, this mass disabling event is psychic. It is eco-sexual corporeal, it is mytho-poetic. It is how we are beginning to experience the grief of other species, for instance. It is also how the individual is melting.
For instance, the proliferation of new gender formations. That makes it very difficult for us to say, “and he made them male and female”. Of course, the left is doing his best to try to capture these chaotic anarchic infiltrations in the dialogue of inclusion.
I think inclusion is one of whiteness’ technologies. So, it’s trying to capture it. Whiteness always polices cracks. That’s what whiteness does. It polices the cracks. So these disabling events are making it very difficult for whiteness to sustain the paradigm of the individual. So, we’re becoming more exposed. Your feelings are melting into mine. We’re no longer as private as we once used to be. We’re becoming less confident about the future, about next week, speak less of the future.
And I think with these generatively incapacitating events comes a strange kind of fugitive wisdom that is bringing us together in new ways that is invoking or instigating new questions, new practices, new experiments. It’s like brother, the major gesture, the major key has been upended by the minor key. And we can never know what the minor and the major is in advance, but somehow this disruption is flowing through the body of whiteness.
Hence my theory of white syncopation. White syncopation is the gift. It is, we’re losing stability. But something about this moment, about loss, means there’s opportunity for us to rekindle new kinds of relationships. Anarchy precedes transformation. And I think we’re in such anarchic moments when the world is inviting us into new kinds of postures.
So to your question, how do we do this? I don’t think it’s us that has to do it. It’s like a knot cannot unravel itself from a string. It needs interference, some kind of transversal disruption. And that’s what’s happening. White syncopation is becoming black, and I think we are all becoming black together.
Alnoor (38:29) | That’s a beautiful way to end.
Thank you, brother.
More to be continued.
And may we let go of the downbeat—
The imperial drum—
And let the gods and the beings—human and more-than-human—have their way with us.
Bayo (38:47) | Yes.
Alnoor (38:50) | Love you, brother.
Bayo (38:50) | Love you too, bro. Beautiful. Well done.