06/19/2020
"Marronage, as a politics, does not hold the state’s feet to the fire — at least not in the hopes that it will be improved. It does not think or hope the state will one day get better. Indeed, Black marronage, is by definition the escape from the central spaces of the white supremacist order, a voting with the feet, is an expression of a fundamental pessimism about the colony’s capacity to improve and to do so in a timely fashion. Maroon politics recognizes the fugitive’s inability to overturn the state of things and so flees to spaces where it is possible to live outside of the reach of racist power. Or, flees and retreats to a better position. 2 In fleeing there is also recognition of settler-colonialism’s incapacity to rid itself of its founding ideology: racist violence. This incapacity, of course, is in liberal ideology 3 represented as a series of “failures.” America is perpetually “failing Black communities,” “failing Black patients,” “failing Black voters,” “failing Black students” etc. Representing incapacity as failure implies the possibility of eventual success. It works to encourage Black resistance back onto the hamster wheel. The maroon is Sisyphus escaped."
