Beyond Distinctions: A Treatise on Abolition and Accomplice Work

Abstract

This paper approaches accomplice work via an exploration of key concepts developed in black social theory, where ‘black’ indexes capacious traditions of subversive political and social thought, and not simply an epidermal characteristic or descriptor. The paper begins by laying waste to allyship, then describes accomplice work as a contradistinctive praxis through which those who might understand themselves as white unravel and unbecome themselves. A paraontological blackness, I propose, following Fred Moten, Tiffany Lethabo King, and others, is the “method” of that unbecoming. This paraontological, black, unbecoming is also a remaking otherwise, and is thus abolitionist, making the claim that a radical alterity from the strictures of racial identity is necessary, possible, and desirable.