‘Black Matters Are Spatial Matters'

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, in June 1998, three white supremacists lynched James Byrd Jr., a Black man in Jasper, Texas. After offering him a ride in their truck, they beat him, desecrated him, chained him to their vehicle, dragged him to his dismemberment and eventual death, and deposited parts of his body in front of a Black church to be found on Sunday morning. I remember hearing about the murder on the evening news and having a newly personal sense of the geography of racial terror. As a child living in California, I could not locate Jasper on a map, but its name, and Byrd’s, were forever fixed in my mind.

Earlier this year, I realized that my great-grandmother was around that same age when, in May 1918, white supremacists lynched Mary Turner and a dozen other Black people, including the baby they cut out of Turner’s abdomen. I wonder if my great-grandmother, as a child, heard the news, and how it affected her. In her case, the lynchings happened not three states but three hours from where she lived in Georgia. Unlike in Byrd’s case, there were no charges, arrests, trials, or convictions of the known and suspected murderers behind these lynchings. I wonder if and how the killings—and the impunity allowing the lynchers freedom of movement—shaped her sense of the landscape.

In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, geographer Katherine McKittrick writes that “Black matters are spatial matters.” McKittrick identifies the social production of space—how landscape is not a fixed background but is defined by relationships. Fugitivity, precarity, and possibilities of life and death are mapped realities that follow social relationships.

Reflecting on this insight, I think of the current pandemic’s maps of infection, death, and vaccine access, which reveal the racial coordinates structuring public health: Poor Black and brown communities are hardest hit, while wealthy, white communities receive vaccines the quickest. I also think of Black people’s past and present spatial contestations of racial terror. During the so-called “nadir” of Black life in the decades following Reconstruction, when the federal government abandoned Black people to white terrorism, Black women organized. Activists such as Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell remapped space. They built communal infrastructure, claimed civic presence, and challenged annihilative horizons for Black life. Today, Black communities continue their legacy. Through ongoing public protest, we refuse racist geographies of surveillance, containment, and policing—landscapes that feature threat as a natural component of the terrain for women, children, and men of color.

Matthew 25’s parable of 10 virgins and their oil lamps is often interpreted with an anticipatory framework looking to the end times. However, I read Jesus’ concluding admonition as a directive for the present: “keep watch,” i.e., stay woke. Be awake. Wakefulness—knowledge of where and when you are—is key, not simply to future liberation but to survival in the here-and-now. Future change begins with present navigation as we work to trace a new geography.