By Zora J Murff April 10, 2025

Liberal counterinsurgency is used by the ruling class to stabilize imperial power by assimilating marginalized groups into positions of relative authority in the hopes that their ascendence will obscure the conditions of naked violence, or even encourage people to want to advance within that structure and become an overseer.” —Dr. Orisanmi Burton

The older I get, the more value I find in honesty and directness. A former boss once told me, “You’re really good at throwing hand grenades into the room.” I didn’t know if I should take offense or thank her for the compliment. I imagine watching my colleagues scramble away from my explosive device that never held a charge in the first place. My mind wanders to a young Kwame Ture, known then as Stokely Carmichael, and his sweaty chest peeking through the curtains of a patterned tie and oxford shirt; his words going so hard that students couldn’t help but rebel behind them. My daydream continues: maybe if more of us showed up with grenades in our hands—and also a willingness to chuck them into these stifling rooms—we might expedite the eradication of systems that use us as mass distraction while extracting every last drop of our purpose.

I never wanted to be a race man, but the world made me that way. I’ve chewed on this sentiment more times than I can count because when I walk into high end gallery spaces—for my own safety—I must assess how I’m being seen or if I’m even seen at all. As I make my way through Tyler Mitchell’s “Ghost Images” I don’t feel seen, and quite frankly, I would prefer to remain invisible.

“Ghost Images”: Pristine tableau vivant depict fit and fashionable black people posed ever-so-rightly in various landscapes. Sometimes they’re enveloped in bright blue skies, or brilliant white sand, or subdued greens and desaturated golds, all familiar pastoral visual language. Apparitions crafted through double exposures are suspended in Teju Cole’s illusory photographic time. Shirtless black bodies lock in an embrace somewhere between support and struggle. “Novel” ways of printing and displaying images: prints on inkjet fabric hang on the facades of wood frames with precise precariousness and pictures printed on mirrors provide opportunities for vain self-reflection. I’ve seen this before and decorative blackness seems to be the limits of Mitchell’s practice, a type of smoke-and-mirrors that relies on bad logic like the false premise of black buying power. It’s black bourgeoisie excellence, palatable and marketable exceptionalism under the guise of rest, something that only ever amounts to continued participation in pursuits of capitalism.

What does it mean to ask someone to rest during this period of rapidly accelerating crises? What would it mean to lay down our heads and close our eyes while the state continues to disappear our rebels, continues to kidnap us from our homes, continues to use their legal system to persecute those of us who dissent, or continues to desecrate our history by selling our cemeteries to developers so they can build condos and parking lots over our ancestors?

The closest moment of genuine relation I find is in the title work of the show, “Ghost Image”, a portrait of a slender black individual trapped beneath a net. The whites of their eyes float in shadow and linger on me. I stare back and nod my head in that way of recognition that we do. It’s an acknowledgement of our preferred places in the First Art World™ (objects of desire); we are trapped in a paradigm I will no longer be victim of and party to. Start making your way towards an exit if you have not yet intended to.

The exhibition statement effectively reflects what’s on display. It’s a most decadent word-salad riddled with expected empty language. It’s all the poetic words meant to staunch the white defensiveness that bleeds out whenever anything real about blackness is uttered. So much beauty unfurls from wispy notions of a Southern gothic mystique; a real black history is flattened to a near unintelligible state that perplexingly echoes the federal order to erase the teaching of accurate black history; and thinly built connections to some celebrated figures from the white art canon as a means for buttressing belief in these works as possessing top-dollar market value (actions reminiscent of a certain corporate support your own downfall buy-cott brought to you by the black capitalist misleadership class).

I want to be critical about the world, but I don’t need to be cynical about it

I came to this realization and wrote it down after working through painful moments when I’ve fallen victim to my own internalized whiteliness (most of my art and academic career). I feel it has replaced my opening sentiment of the world making me a so-called “race man”. It helps me get past wallowing in the dissonance generated by trying to rectify if I’ve cooned away too much of myself in the zone of compromise that is living black in a racialized world. It’s high time we stop, in the words of Dragon Philosopher and Revolutionary Abolitionist George Jackson, “…fanning our pamphlets to the hurricane.” Try the unexpected next time rather than delivering on the oppressor’s desires to spin stories of blackness meant to satiate white lust. Do not stoop, stand upright! Abandon doubt and adopt conviction! Refuse complacency and raise your own and others’ consciousness! Commit class suicide! Put them dukes up and fight back! Bring a grenade! Aim your throw towards our common enemies with the understanding that you may also become a casualty for the cause of freedom!

Rest up, if you must. But, beloveds, know that we should say our goodbyes here and now because many of us will have died in these streets by the time y’all wake the fuck up.

1 Dr. Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, 2020.

2 “The configuration of the power of government, corporate interests, classes of elites, and upper levels of a bureaucratic management class that implements the ruling class’ goals and aims that sits atop an accumulated economic base.” Rasul Mowat, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us, 2021.

3 George Jackson, Blood In My Eye, 1972.

4 “In order to not betray these objectives [of liberation] the petty bourgeoisie has only one choice: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to reject the temptations of becoming more bourgeois and the natural concerns of its class mentality, to identify itself with the working classes and not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to truly fulfill the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.” Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” 1966.

Zora J Murff was the recipient of an ICP Infinity Award in 2023, and his photography was a part of the Museum of Modern Art New Photography exhibition in 2020.