Please cite as: Katherine McKittrick, “Don’t Let Them Steal Your Wonder: Extractions from Dear Science

and Other Stories” from her Don’t Wear Down, (http://katherinemckittrick.com/wornout), 2019: 37-38.

The stories began from the
premise that liberation is an
already existing and unfinished
and unmet possibility, laced with
creative labour, that emerges
from the ongoing collaborative
expression of black humanity
and black livingness.
She baffled the index.
The Souls of Black Folk.
“Poetry and Knowledge,”
Poetics of Relation, Women, Race,
and Class. Black Feminist Thought,
But Some of Us are Brave,
Laboring Women. “The Problem
of Innocence.” The Black Atlantic,
Blues People, Golden Gulag.
Vernacular Insurrections, Dark
Matters, Solidarity Blues.
“Rethinking Aesthetics,” Jazz.
“Developing Diaspora Literacy.”
“White Men.”
Freedom Dreams.
She Tries Her Tongue.
Passing. Directed by Desire.
Intimacies. Cabin, Quarter,
Plantation.
The Better Story.
Patternmaster and “Sonic
Intimacies” and Phonographies
and “Still Life” and
“Housequake.”
They Say I’m Different.
Etc.
I kept your secret.
Bibliographies and endnotes and
references and sources are
alternative stories that can, in
the most generous sense,
centralize the practice of
sharing ideas about liberation
and resistance and writing
against racial and sexual
violence.
Citation points to method and
how we come to tell what we
know. Citation is important
because it frames and supports
(legitimizes) our argument.
Citation is also curiosity. It can
prompt without divulging.
Yet, citation, as a willful practice
of exclusion, risks replicating
longstanding practices of
discursive removal. The premise
of “not citing him” can preclude
debate and didactic. This might,
in fact, conceal the problematic!
And who does the exclusion
not exclude? 1
I want to reference other
possibilities.
Citations as learning, as counsel,
as sharing. Citations are
moments of learning. Citations
are not descriptions.
We share these stories and
notes to collectively struggle
against suffocating racial logics.
Like sorrow songs. Like
freedom dreams. Like flying
cheek-bones.
The collaboration and
conversation (the sharing, the
curiosity, the wonder, the
friendship) has allowed me to
work out, in part, where and
how black people imagine and
practice liberation as they are
weighed down by biocentrically
induced accumulation by
dispossession. Some of the
freedom-stories are in our
endnotes.
I remember that the struggle
against oppression is tied our
flesh and brains and blood and
bones and hearts and souls;
there are underlying, often
invisible, moments of black
liberation. I remember that
quantifying and endlessly
describing black corporeal and
affective and physiological
labour belies what black studies
offers.
There are some things we can
keep to ourselves. Some stories
can be left out. Some things
they cannot have. The citation is
curious. We share our wonder
and we are familiar with the
brutally knowable.
We do not need to measure
and describe all of blackness.
Maybe what we do not describe
is a different form of life.

1
Where and when do cut those purveyors of dreadful feminism? When do we refuse to cite the bourgeoisie feminists, or
the left-leaning feminists, or the western feminists who write about “third world culture” or who adore a two-sex system
or who despise and abuse their black administrative assistants or who fail their black students or who publicly humiliate
and threaten nonwhite women and men? How do we cite those who stole and steal our work, our ideas? When do we
refuse to engage those feminist scholars who despise those who clean their homes and tend their gardens and care for
their children? When do we refuse to cite or read or talk about dreadful awful brutal feminism? Where and when do we
stop citing the nonwhite, including black, patriarchal scholars who heckle, cut down, plagiarize, kick about, ignore, talk
over, interrupt, demote, demean black women?

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 No Place, Unknown, Undetermined.

Ted Grant/Library and Archives Canada/PA-

170252. Restrictions on use: nil. Copyright
assigned to Library and Archives Canada by
copyright owner Ted Grant.

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