‘Liv Good’: dreaming the intersectionally just good life

Abstract

Black radical traditions include an orientation towards dreaming of better futures. In this article, I enter a dialogical space for us to explore the relationship between our desire to live a good life and our conceptions of what doing so might entail. Speaking from the perspective of an African-Caribbean person in Britain, I begin by considering the need for us to dream what it means to ‘Liv Good’—where Liv Good is an intersectionally just version of the good life. I discuss Britain’s credo and the liberal philosophical context it emerges out of that makes distinctions between the right and the good, which I claim undermine our entitlement to dream of a good life and give rise to a tendency to consider the good life as secondary to our efforts to achieve political justice. My aim is to highlight the importance of holding in tandem questions about what it means for us to live a good life with questions of justice. By conceptualising and demonstrating Liv Good methodological praxis, I explore the ways in which we can dream Liv Good into reality, by drawing on our own intellectual traditions and honouring our own dream imperatives. I conclude by offering readers an invitation to join me in dreaming Liv Good, engaging its unified ethical framework as a basis from which we can imagine an intersectionally just version of the good life.

roun a rocky corner

by de sea

seat up

pon a drif wood

yuh can fine she

gazin cross de water

a stick

eena her han

tryin to trace

a future

in de san

- from ‘dreamer’ (1992, p. 33) by Jean Binta Breeze

Love and imagination may be the most revolutionary impulses available to us, and yet we have failed to understand their political importance and respect them as powerful social forces.

- from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002, p. i) by Robin D.G. Kelley

The world is born

Echoes, dancing fires, laughter

We race through the realm of dreams, alongside gods

The world ends.

(Wisdom)

- from The Killing Moon (2012, p. 365) by N.K. Jemisin

‘How ya living?’; ‘Whaa gwaan?’; ‘Grand rising’; ‘Yuh good?’; ‘How t’ings?’; ‘How yah stay?’; ‘Live up’; ‘Walk good’. African-Caribbean diasporic vernacular is replete with phrases like these that speak to our interest in each other’s welfare that is routed through an orientation towards ‘the good’ in the ethical sense of that term—an expression of what we value. ¹ We might describe this phenomenon as part of a postcolonial sensibility, determined to shake off the shackles of domination and recast what matters to us beyond the gaze of Euromodernity, a way to recognise and show regard for the value of each other’s lives. ² This African-Caribbean, post-colonial impetus rubs up against fundamental ideals of liberalism, specifically its anti-Blackness and its separation of politics and morality. While this may operate differently across the heterogeneities of diaspora, Euromodernity’s ideological commitment to a universalised goodness as whiteness negates the quality and value of our lives (Beckles-Raymond, 2021).

Taking this seriously means that even in the midst of our everyday vernaculars of goodness, our realities and the conceptual lenses through which we seek to understand them remain structured by onto-epistemologies that are inimical to our flourishing. Efforts to assert our value, such as the global #BlackLivesMatter movement, indict liberalism’s normative baseline for the quality and value of life. Within a liberal cosmos, we are still struggling even for the right to ‘matter’, not to mention ‘walk good’. Unsurprisingly, African-Caribbean thinkers and activists concerned with the quality and value of our lives and recognising the fierce intractability of intersectional injustice have been forced to wrestle with and for our right to justice, as a means for enabling us to live good lives. Attempts to confine Black liberatory struggle within the imposed parameters of a rights-based context mean that the good life, as a point of emphasis, gets sequenced as a secondary concern that we cannot afford to prioritise until we minimally have our rights respected. However, emerging movements towards Black Excellence and Black Love and Joy seem to suggest that we want to go beyond a framing and lived experience of the African-Caribbean presence in Britain as one of perpetual struggle. ³ Doing so requires us to interrogate and reimagine the philosophical foundations of what it means for us to live a good life.

In this article, I enter a dialogical space for us to explore the relationship between our desire to live a good life and our conceptions of what doing so might entail. My aim is to highlight the importance of directing energy towards holding in tandem questions about what it means for us to live a good life with questions about justice, because the good life for African-Caribbean people in Britain must necessarily entail intersectional justice.

With this in mind, I begin by considering the need for us to dream what it means to Liv Good—where Liv Good is an intersectionally just version of the good life. In the first section, I discuss Britain’s credo and the philosophical context it emerges out of and how African-Caribbean people have responded to the detractions from our entitlement to dream of a good life, let alone to Liv Good. In the second section, conceptualising and demonstrating Liv Good methodological praxis, I explore the ways in which we can dream Liv Good into reality, by honouring our own dream imperatives in recognition of our intellectual traditions. I conclude by offering readers an invitation to join me in dreaming Liv Good, engaging its unified ethical framework as a basis from which we can imagine an intersectionally just version of the good life.

In need of a dream

British values

Britain’s national credo, at least the one that rhetoric about ‘fundamental British values’ aims to instil, neither mentions nor alludes to the good life—what it might be or whether it is something to which we should aspire (Department of Education, 2014). While values of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance intend to establish a basic political framework for justice and order, the idea that people in Britain can be anything they want to be, or that they should expect to be engaged in ‘the pursuit of happiness’, is not a fundamental British principle. Indeed, these ‘mainstream British values’ were codified in what is now widely recognised as a racist, anti-Muslim counter-terrorism strategy—hardly the best platform from which to inspire conceptions of the good life that are intersectionally just. ⁴ Nevertheless, in tandem with the British Government’s 2003 launch of its CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy that included the first instantiation of its ‘Prevent Strategy’, ⁵ successive governments have been trying, through rhetoric, policies and programmes, to convince us that raising our aspirations is the solution to our demands for social justice and economic prosperity. Unleashing aspiration as a buzz word for New Labour in 2007, Party leader Gordon Brown’s (2007) inaugural speech asked, ‘How much talent that could flourish is lost through a poverty of aspiration: wasted not because young talents fail to reach the stars but because they grow up with no stars to reach for?’. Two years later, David Cameron (2009) followed suit at the 2009 Conservative Party conference, condemning the perceived culture of low aspirations and declaring himself the leader of an ‘aspiration nation’ which he presented as the necessary approach for securing Britain’s future prosperity in the context of a new globally competitive economy. This masquerade of aspiration has rightly been criticised as an attempt to gloss over systemic injustice by suggesting that certain groups, namely the working class, and any racialised or marginalised group in British society, owe their socio-structural position to their individual attitudes—their failure to envisage themselves doing better (Beckles-Raymond, 2016; Spohrer, Stahl and Bowers-Brown, 2018). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which promulgations of Britain’s liberal ethos, with its focus on jurisprudence at the exclusion of consideration about the kind of lives we want to pursue, impact our ability to address simultaneously intersectional injustice and our entitlement to live a good life.

The right and the good in liberalism

The current instantiation of Britain’s liberal credo grew out of a much longer philosophical pastory ⁶ of British and Western liberalism, which in some respects charts a flight from religious tyranny and a struggle to end the religious wars that had plagued Europe for centuries. One of the forms that this quest for liberty took was the separation of church and state in the juridical structuring of modern British society. British philosopher and slave trader John Locke, in his A Letter Concerning Toleration (2010 [1689], p. 8), set out this idea, in which he argued that ‘the care of the salvation of men’s souls cannot belong to the magistrate; because, though the rigour of laws and the force of penalties were capable to convince and change men’s minds, yet would not that help at all to the salvation of their souls’ (see Bernasconi and Mann, 2005).

Surrounding the centrality of a departure from religious tyranny, the visions of liberty set out by Locke and other architects of liberalism have taken different forms in different places and periods. Liberalism in Britain unfolds in the context of a centuries-old monarchy, an enduring feudal system, a common law legal framework and a pre-existing population that could not be disposed of as with examples of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006; Adi, 2023, p. 43). As such, there is no blank slate or ‘ground zero’ for liberalism in Britain; it evolves within the confines of a firmly established structure of domination and as such in reference to matters of protections through political rights and freedoms. Contrastingly, in the newly independent America, liberalism gives voice to a postcolonial sensibility, which necessarily entails dreams of a different kind of life and a qualitatively different distribution of power. Hence the US Declaration of Independence (Jefferson et al., 2023 [1776]) sets out the moral vision of a new republic in which unalienable rights for ‘all men’ including, ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’, enshrine protections won through the American Revolution, including, crucially, the right to pursue the good life. As we know, there were racialised, gendered and class-based limitations mediating to whom this document applied and the American experiment began with patriarchy, genocide and enslavement, all of which have been borne out in which groups of people get to actually live, rather than just pursue, the American dream (Human Rights Watch, 2023). However, it is against the backdrop of this promise that marginalised groups in the USA can and have been able to make claims to justice and a better life.

Importantly, this qualitative difference in the expressions of British versus US liberalisms, while allowing space for a conception of the good life in the latter, proves immaterial when considered within the context of one of liberalism’s core conceptual features, which is the distinction between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Indeed, regardless of which kind of liberalism evolved, this pastorical shift in the West, from a religious to a state-based, secular framework of moral and political arbitration, is premised on human beings being able to make rational decisions about their own affairs publicly and privately (Wynter, 2003; Beckles-Raymond, 2021). On this new Euromodern liberal philosophical model, public matters of law, justice and individual rights become the purview of the state (liberal democracies) and are taken up in political philosophy, while questions about morality (the secular framework displacing religion) and how one should live the good life become a matter of personal accountability and preferences, and are taken up in ethics.

This separation of the right and the good occurs at different points in the above models of liberalism. In the case of Britain, we see the political right and the moral good dichotomy evidenced in the emphasis on the juridical over the moral. Contrastingly, America’s version of liberalism appears to hold together considerations of justice and the good life; however, it does so by conflating different meanings within the term ‘right’ (political rights, as discussed above, and the moral right), which masks another separation in liberal moral theory between the right and the good.

To illustrate, under the banner of normative ethics, liberal theory is concerned with moral principles and asks questions such as, on the one hand, ‘what is morally permissible?’ or ‘what actions are right (or wrong)?’, and, on the other hand, ‘what are the moral attributes of a good person?’ or ‘what is the good life?’. The former kinds of questions are theorised within the right, whereas the latter kinds of questions are theorised with the good. While clearly related, a conceptual distinction is maintained between questions about the right and the good. Moreover, within these sub-frames, especially the one concerned with what is right, a driving impetus is to identify which of the things we can determine to be right or good are moral obligations or imperatives (rights) as opposed to those things that are worthwhile preferences (good) and as such are not morally required (Wall, 2017 [2007]). According to this logic, there are some things that we would consider to be morally right, which become rights in the political sense of the term.

Given the role of the state in governing citizens’ codes of conduct, those things that are understood as moral imperatives become a matter of state enforcement. For example, we have a right to freedom of speech, which the state enforces both as a protection from loss of political autonomy and as an endorsement of the idea that it would be morally wrong for a rational individual in a liberal democracy not to be able to voice their opinions. Similarly, we have a right to adequate food, water and housing for which the state makes provision, both as a protection from harm and as a recognition that it is morally wrong to subject people to inhumane standards of living. However, while those things that get elevated to the status of rights can be considered matters of justice, things that are understood as good but not morally imperative are consigned to questions of individual preference. For example, it might be good to have a personal website from which to share ideas and opinions and it might be good to eat out regularly or to have cotton bed sheets, but these are not moral imperatives or matters that the state or our juridical structures will enforce or for which they will make provision.

This conceptual double separation of the right and the good between, on the one hand, the right (political) and the good (moral) and, on the other hand, between the right (moral imperative) and the good (moral preference), allows Euromodern philosophy to treat these spheres as if they are unrelated or minimally as separate realms of enquiry. As such, even in the American liberal approach, where a prescribed version of the good life (the pursuit of happiness) is a central tenet, broader questions about the entitlement to choose any given version of the good life can still be siphoned off from discussions about political systemic justice because they are understood as matters of personal preference. Consequently, in practice, one version of the good life—the American Dream—has become hegemonic. Moreover, in both Britain and the USA, even when questions about quality of life are understood as rights—like the right to adequate housing, food and water—the racist character of Euromodern ideology, which I will discuss further in the next section, gives rise to racialised geographies of interpretation about what the state is required to consider. For example, if any ‘Othered’ person in Britain or the USA is lacking the provisions afforded by any of these basic rights, their circumstance is perceived as personal moral defect—they need to work harder, have the appropriately aspirational attitude or pull themselves up by their boot straps because, in such countries, these amenities are available and the system is understood to be working as it should. Whereas, in countries that are deemed not to function in accordance with liberal political and/or ideological expectations, instances where people’s rights are not being met are understood as systemic failures on the part of those countries—failures to govern their affairs like the West. Moreover, they are understood as moral failures given the presumed limited moral acumen of racialised people, which the West subsequently grants itself both moral and political jurisdiction to ‘fix’.

These practical contradictions that occur in line with multiple points of separation between the right and the good do so because such theoretical distinctions can never be made absolutely or even neatly. How can we, against a backdrop of intersectional domination, separate our so-called individual preferences from our sociopolitical context and the systemic and institutional forces that shape our lives? How can ethical questions about the good be abstracted from the pastorical, political, social, economic and moral contexts within which the person considering such questions is situated? For example, the lack of access that some people (regardless of where they are in the world) have to basic requirements for a decent, let alone good, life is directly connected to the Euromodern conception of how we should live and the extractive economies that drive all its excesses. If it is indeed the case that the version of the good life that one group seeks is environmentally unsustainable and/or undermines another group’s ability to have a humane quality of life, then we are confronted with serious moral dilemmas that need to be resolved at systemic levels. What I am euphemistically calling moral dilemmas go further than what are currently being racially sanitised as the global ‘polycrisis’; ⁷ they are actually prolonged and successive crises of intersectional injustice that have plagued our planet for centuries, as the enduring struggles of African-Caribbean people and people of colour against economic, educational, health, environmental and other related inequities attest. The desire to live a good life is clearly not limited to people in Britain or the USA, or to us of the African and Caribbean diasporas who reside in such places; how we should live is a fundamental human question. However, as racialised people, we have been forced to make possible Euromodernity’s endemic version of the good life while having received neither acknowledgement of the value of our loss nor full access to the entitlements of the Euromodern version of the good life (Beckles, 2013).

African-Caribbean responses to liberal contradictions

What the preceding discussion makes clear is that the philosophical tradition that espouses liberty for all is also the onto-epistemic domain that houses the ideological underpinnings of intersectional injustice (Pateman, 1988; Mills, 1999; Bernasconi and Lott, 2000; Lettow, 2014; Park, 2014; Mills, 2017). The moral philosophers who ushered in Euromodernity are also the intellectual architects of race and racism, such that whiteness, constitutive of justice and goodness within this tradition, is fundamentally synonymous with anti-Blackness and anti-otherness (Wynter, 2003; Beckles-Raymond, 2021). Euromodernity’s Black and gendered negation renders our lived experiences, orientations towards the good and values notably absent from dominant moral theory—there is no framework for Black / Black women’s rightness or Black / Black women’s goodness in Euromodernity’s imaginary. Think of how the most morally upstanding Black people who have fought tirelessly for justice, fairness, equality and democracy have been assassinated, imprisoned and otherwise destroyed at the hands of our governments, or have been left to die alone in poverty. Likewise, as Sara Ahmed (2010, p. 13) rightly argues, the Western notion of happiness, as an evaluative force that defines the good, impacts not only who can access happiness but also who can be good. Ahmed (ibid., p. 223) concludes that for the revolutionary who fights for justice, a different conception of happiness is required. Given the logic of Ahmed’s argument, I would argue that anyone fighting for intersectional justice requires an intersectionally just conception of the good.

In Freedom Dreams (2002), Robin D.G. Kelley aptly presents how the Black radical tradition has always included dreams of freedom: an imaginary that gave Black futurity space to take flight. Reflecting on his work twenty years later, Kelley (2022), reminds us that the impulse to ‘envision a radically different future for all and fight to bring it into existence’ often emerges during our most difficult social and political times; such dreams have emerged not from the luxury of times of peace and leisure but rather have served as ‘the only way to ensure survival for Black people’. As such, far beyond an appeal for recognition of Black thought in Euromodern philosophy, my concern here is reckoning with and averting the very real and often life-threatening injustices that anti-Black philosophical ideas underpin, sustain and reproduce. I do not think it is by chance that the current Black Love and Joy, Black Excellence and Decolonise My Curriculum movements in Britain and the increasing visibility of the Reparations movement emerge in the context of the Grenfell Massacre and Windrush Scandals, and at a time when our Trumpish government is doubling down on its racist rhetoric and silencing voices that offer a critique of racialised gendered capitalism while ignoring the concomitant disparities in the impacts of Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis (Edmiston, Begum and Kataria, 2022; Oskrochi et al., 2023).

As Paul Gilroy (1993, p. 37) reminds us, we need a politics of transfiguration, ‘the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association’. To achieve qualitatively new relations and associations, our efforts to bring about change must be informed by a critical awareness of the philosophies which drive the systems, institutions, policies and behaviours that operate in service of our epistemic erasure; existential negation; and political, economic and spiritual destruction. My concern is that if they are not, at least three issues will continue to plague African-Caribbean people’s efforts for change in Britain:

1. Subscribing to epistemic frameworks that view ideas and expressions of love and joy as unrelated to liberation and justice, hence negating our lived experiences;

2. Defaulting to dominant versions of the good life that necessarily entail our destruction and prevent us manifesting the intersectionally just good Black life;

3. Operating politically without a sound ethical basis for navigating decisions about systemic change, public policy and our own lives. ⁸

Taking account of the current trends noted above, as we rightly recognise the importance of education, we must be mindful that decolonising the curriculum is an important but only partial strategy for a genuinely liberatory education system. We must take seriously that it is our institutions of higher education, especially our most prestigious universities, that have educated the architects, powerbrokers and decision-makers who in turn have fashioned the world with all its injustice that we live with today. Further, we must endeavour to dream of not only a qualitatively different kind of education system but a different conception of the human self. We are not rationalist individuals; we are deeply connected, meaning-making, emotionally rich, spiritual beings who need each other to survive.

Likewise, even as we seek to honour and care for this kind of self by putting love and joy at the forefront of our concerns, we must recognise the fierce intractability of liberal ideology in Britain, and not make the mistake of decentring ‘the right’ as a strategy for advancing ‘the good’. So, as we continue to fight for reparations, we must take seriously the ways in which the British and diasporic ideological and intellectual context will impact not only what we demand and what we envisage reparative justice should look like, but also the futures we imagine beyond repair. ⁹ As Julia Sudbury (1998, pp. 50–92) reminds us, we must advance ‘other kinds of dreams’, ones that are born out of our activism in the broadest sense in which she uses the term.

Simultaneously, as Kelley (2022) notes, we must recognise a more expansive and interconnected conception of intersectional justice and the good life. In preparation for when we get back what is ours, we cannot afford to imagine those resources and their subsequent redistribution on a model of private ownership as the basis for personhood, which has given rise to the ecological catastrophes we are currently facing as a planet and which are disproportionally impacting women and people of colour (Frazier, 2020; Kapoor, Youssef and Hood, 2022, p. 54; Thomas, 2022). Nor can we afford to conceive of Black excellence in capitalist terms (Davis, 1983, 1998; Robinson, 2000 [1983]; Kelley, 2002; Rodney, 2012), mimicking and aspiring to the very forms of social, economic and political relations that give rise to our destruction. ¹⁰ Indeed, Sudbury (1998, p. 237) challenges us to continue the legacy of Black women’s organisations in Britain, which have ‘created a fundamentally holistic politics of transformation which integrates the individual and the communal, connects the local with the global and meshes the pragmatic with the visionary’. Although Black women’s activism continues in this vein, it is not so clear that the ‘philosophical and ideological base’ that Sudbury (ibid.) speaks of is as explicitly understood and articulated as she hopes. While the pragmatic political thrust of conscious Black women’s organising remains apparent in Britain, there remains further ground to be covered for the philosophical import of such work to unsettle the dominant paradigms that haunt our dreams.

Dreaming Liv Good into reality

In the spirit of Sankofa

In stressing the need for a different paradigm, I do so without calling it new. So much of the work that foregrounds the urgency, necessity and viability of such a paradigm shift has already been conceived, theorised and articulated, and has been and is being practised across many of our planet’s countercultural spaces, including those here in Britain. I am not attempting to prove, argue or suggest new discovery. Rather, like S.R. Toliver’s Endarkened Storywork (2022), I wish to invite us to re-invoke the lessons of our forebearers and their forebearers, while recognising that each generation must carry the torch on the next leg of the journey even as we respond to the particularities of our own time. And yet, in order to do so, we need to give ourselves the permission, space and time to listen to the whispers of our forebearers. This requires a reframing of what we delegitimise as ‘first-world problems’ towards a recognition that self-reflexive engagement, through the process of reimagining different versions of the good life, itself is a form of holistic, ethical-political and spiritual activism. Crucially, we must understand one of the aims of such activism to be unsettling the philosophical strongholds that co-opt and reroute our struggles.

However, like a good academic, I found myself being pulled away from dreamy idealistic notions of a Black utopia, drawn by conventional expectations to provide a logically constructed, well-referenced argument to support my three-point claim about issues plaguing our efforts noted in the previous section. I was going to critically analyse two of the relevant trends I mentioned above: Black Excellence and Black Love and Joy. In reference to the former, I was going to write about how so much of our current conception of success relies on the capitalistic notion of individual wealth. And like Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe (1985), Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]) and Angela Y. Davis (1983, 1998, 2003), I was going to caution you about the racialised and gendered pitfalls of capitalism, not just the British or American or other national-level versions, but global capitalism. I was going to tell you that a capitalistic model of success leads to our own destruction. And like Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 2005), Tracy Reynolds (1997), Michelle Wallace (2015 [1978]) and Hanna Akalu (2022), I was going to illustrate the ways in which that celebration of capitalistic success gives rise to controlling images and policies that are fundamentally at odds with our liberation, especially for Black women. Moreover, like Lean Thomas (2022), Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), Frantz Fanon (2001 [1961]), Sylvia Wynter (1995) and Laura Westra and Bill Lawson (2001), I was going to extend these critiques to remind us that capitalism is not just about controlling people; it is about controlling land, every living thing and the entire environment. Before moving on to Black Love and Joy, I was going to end this section with a well-worded wake-up call—with just enough gravity and urgency, and not too much accusation and judgement—that the biggest challenge in addressing our environmental crisis is reimagining this ‘overdeveloped’ Euromodern model of success and the excessive lifestyle expectations to which it gives rise.

Next, to ensure the article was sufficiently balanced and not too biased or, indeed, too depressing—as we know, activist burnout is real and spending one’s life in constant resistance is itself a struggle—I was going to critically engage with the Black Love and Joy movement. Despite my concerns that these approaches sometimes ignore the systemic and the political, I was going to illustrate, like Lisa Palmer and Agostinho Pinnock (2022), that Black Love and Joy calls us to speak to the practical and spiritual dimensions of human existence. And like Robert Beckford (2011, 2014), I was going to remind us that the spiritual must not be reduced to the individualistic or apolitical. Given this desire for love and joy in the face of systemic, intersectional domination, I was going to encourage us to consider what conditions enable love and joy to flourish. Indeed, like Charles Mills (1999, 2017), understanding the totalising force of Euromodernity as a political, epistemic and moral paradigm, I was going to raise a carefully constructed clarion call for us to advance a new, different and alternative ethical paradigm, one that, like Melanie Harris (2017), takes the spiritual seriously and also reimagines our relationship to the material—to land, food, ‘the environment’ and all living things. And because it is apparently always necessary, I was going to remind us, like Sojourner Truth and bell hooks and Audre Lorde and Joan Anim-Addo and Stella Dadzie and Beverly Bryan and Suzanne Scafe and Gail Lewis and Julia Sudbury and Denise Noble and Althea Maria Rivas and Claudia Jones and Hazel Carby and Tracey Reynolds and Debbie Weeks and Ann Phoenix and Carole Boyce Davies and Kris Sealy and Kristie Dotson and Anika Mann and Kathryn Belle and Melissa Harris-Perry and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Saidiya Hartman and Patricia Hill Collins and Stephanie Tolliver and Jaqueline Grant and Kelly Brown Douglas and Katie Canon and Leith Dunn and Eudine Barriteau and Rhoda Reddock and Patricia Mohammed and Katherine McKittrick and Octavia Butler and Nora Jemisin and Andrea Levy and Lorraine Hansberry and Toni Morrison, and on and on and on, that addressing patriarchy and racism intersectionally must be part of this ‘new’ vision.

However, as I was writing this article (feeling that pull to be ‘academic’), I had a minor meltdown—a barrier of some kind that blocked me from giving voice to my ideas. This common experience amongst academics and writers usually requires that we push through the block and produce the output. Instead, this time I paused to reflect on this writer’s fear. I realised that part of the fear of writing academically was the fear of the futility of my words, the pointlessness of all this education and training that I have. I know that those so much more accomplished than myself have said whatever I might want to say and have said it better than I ever could. And yet, despite engagement with their ideas and intellectual contributions by silos of like-minded scholars, their work and its practical implications and applications have yet to eclipse what Henry A. Giroux (2020) describes as the public pedagogies of dominant neoliberal ideology: that our lived experiences and limited discussions of them are still governed by gross systemic intersectional injustice. Why would my work be any different? I fear that no matter what I write, so much of the world we inhabit will remain the same. Regardless of how much scholarship we have written, no matter how many reports, testimonials and pastories attest to the mind-blowing scope and degree of human destructiveness, no matter how much we long for Black Love and Black Joy, these concepts will continue to be an aberration and a blasphemy to speak of, even as we know that it is Black Love and Black Joy and our radical imaginations that have kept us alive. And yet, my tentative hope is that with Liv Good, I am getting at a crucial conceptual key that might unlock and unleash the great work that has gone before while also paving the way for a new way of thinking about our shared existence.

So, instead of wallowing in that nihilism brought on by the possibility of writing that more appropriately academic paper, in the spirit of those who have come before me who might make such futures possible, I attempt here to resist the forces that render my ‘work’ meaningless. My suspicion is that the block I encounter is a message, a sign of the kind to which Nikki Giovanni’s poem Choices (2003, p. 269) calls our attention: ‘since i can’t go / where i need / to go then I must go / where the signs point / though always understanding / parallel movement / isn’t lateral’: an invitation to stop pursuing a path that was not designed for me. An opportunity to consider how what I am aiming to advance by encouraging us to centre Liv Good—an intersectionally just conception of the good life—might be a key to unlocking the unfulfilled potential of our collective knowledge production so that we can, in actuality, Liv Good. By choosing to sit in my own discomfort and produce a work that permits a humanising vulnerability instead of responding to the pressures of academic convention that would push me to be an intellectual conveyor belt of complicity, I take a small and yet meaningful Liv Good step.

Liv Good as praxis

Liv Good is not simply the claim that our dreams for the good life must be orientated to the intersectionally just, whereby the intersectionally just refers to an ethical stance that is emphatically against intersectional domination and the abuse of power in all its forms. Liv Good is about opening up a discussion that interrogates existing ethical paradigms and developing new paradigms that centre intersectionally just principles, ideas and modes of being that are consistent with a conception of humans as embodied, spiritual beings for whom love, joy, creativity, relationality and truth are fundamental to what it means to be part of ecological and cosmological systems that are greater than ourselves whilst affirming our existence. As such, Liv Good is not and cannot be ethically neutral. To Liv Good is for one’s life to be an intentional intervention to dismantle and eradicate intersectional injustice, while fulfilling one’s own promise of love, joy, creativity, togetherness and truth. Liv Good, however, is not intended to be a prescriptive articulation. Indeed, we should be immediately suspicious of anyone who has the answer, especially if that answer has not come about through engagement, dialogue and grappling with the lived experiences of the most marginalised and disadvantaged among us. Instead, like Charles Mills (2014), Liv Good seeks to disrupt timeless, universalistic positioning, which is a core feature of liberal ideology, and to function as what Kristie Dotson (2012) describes as an ongoing and responsive ‘culture of praxis’.

To that end, Liv Good entails: 1) self-reflexive engagement, 2) dreaming as ‘thick’ thinking and 3) collective-reflexive engagement as co-constitutive praxes. Self-reflexive engagement as methodology moves beyond traditional definitions of reflexivity in research, methodology that encourages us to reflect on and be aware of our own positionality as it relates to the research process, and the ‘perceptual, cognitive, theoretical, linguistic, (inter)textual, political and cultural circumstance’ in which research takes place (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009, p. 8). The emphatic use of the word ‘self’ in this methodology seeks to highlight the self as encumbered, whereby ‘morality and identity are not only fundamentally connected, they are co-constitutive’ (Beckles-Raymond, 2021, p. 159). Self-reflexive engagement calls to mind bell hooks’ (1994, p. 15) insistence on engagement as holistic praxis. It thus requires our reflexivity to actively disrupt the social context that produces intersectional injustice for ourselves and others as a matter of transforming the world being co-constitutive with our own well-being. As such, self-reflexive engagement is not a practice that accepts that it is sufficient to take account of one’s positionality and remain detached from our glocal context. It involves us recognising when, where, how and with whom our engagement with the wisdoms of our forebearers is restricted, and choosing alternative spaces in and with which to engage.

Self-reflexive engagement collapses the gap between knowing and doing in the spirit of the often-quoted Maya Angelou: ‘When you know better, you do better’. ¹¹ Self-reflexive engagement can be used as a tool for resisting nihilism, depression, anxiety and the psychological effects of trying to exist while Black. Moreover, self-reflexive engagement as Liv Good practice allows us to traverse the temporalities and entanglements of the African/Caribbean diaspora’s pastorical now and its futures. It functions as a reclamation of our time, our power and our freedom—in service of a refusal to live according to the dictates of racialised time and instead to make time for ourselves and each other (Beckles-Raymond, 2022). Every time we refuse to participate in versions of the good that require us to engage with modes of being that are not consistent with intersectional justice, we fortify our moral selves and Liv Good.

Liv Good dreaming as ‘thick’ thinking speaks to our intentional engagement with intersectionally just futurity. Dreaming as I am using it, and as have others concerned with Black liberation and intersectional justice done before me, is about deploying our radical imagination in service of an intersectionally just good life for all people. Dreaming here is akin to Sudbury’s (1998) ‘other kinds of dreams’ and like Martin Luther King Junior’s I Have a Dream (1963) and Jemisin’s body of work, creating alternative worlds, where beings and the principles that govern their lives are defined and understood in new ways. ¹² Dreaming in this ‘thick’ sense is not whimsical or childish or a waste of time, as dreaming is often framed in a rationalist, capitalist, cognitive paradigm. Rather, it embraces the substantive viscosity of our intentional pronouncements in the world, harnessing our creative energies in resistance to the flow of destructive narratives that negate our futures. It operates in service of bringing alternative conceptions of our freedom into existence. Beyond being a mere feature of Black liberation and intersectional justice efforts, it is necessary, I suggest, for our dreaming to embrace the fantastical, the childlike and the outlandish, not simply as an expression to our creativity but because the scale and scope of what must be done to achieve Liv Good require visions and strategies that are figuratively and literally out of this world.

This is the philosophical terrain upon which the battle for Black liberation and the intersectionally just good life are to be fought and won. Our imaginings will be both the future and the blueprint for how to get there. As Tolliver’s (2022, p. xix) Endarkened Storywork methodology suggests, we must ‘choose to remember our joy, our community, our connection to the land, our traditions. As a radical response to traditional research methods and to anti-Black portrayals of Black existence’. This simultaneous call to reconnect with the past while moving beyond it offers us a space to ground such desires in the substance of dreams whilst resisting the real or perceived esoteric, nebulous or escapist detractors common to Euromodern rationalities that often discourage us from choosing to imagine alternative paths.

Given the richness and complexity of who we are, it goes without saying that Liv Good cannot be individualistic, one-dimensional or indeed one singular universalised/universalising vision. A key facet of the false, extractive and destructive liberal ideology that occupies the Euromodern dreamscape at the expense of the lives and futures of those it ‘Others’ by default is the idea that we, as individuals, can ‘have it all’, without due regard for how even the attempt to do so would affect others. Such thinking ignores the fact that we are fallible, mortal, living beings who need time—to rest, and think, and socialise and love—and resources—material, emotional, spiritual and otherwise—to care for each other, to ensure we have meaning and a humane quality of life. Human existence is relational and temporal, so Liv Good cannot be something that one person alone determines or that remains static. As such, Liv Good calls for a collective-reflexive engagement. Collective-reflexive engagement speaks to a range of co-constitutive dialogical processes with other people across time and space, including reflexively engaging with other peoples’ ideas and strategies from the past as well as with each other in the present. In light of our discussion of self-reflexive engagement above, it should be understood here that the ‘selves’ involved in this praxis are themselves encumbered. By the very act of collective-reflexive engagement, we both constitute alternative realities and ourselves are made anew. These collective processes ensure Liv Good is as multifaceted, multidimensional and multiplicitous as we are.

In practical terms, the collective relational nature of Liv Good requires each one of us to come together—around our kitchen and dining room tables; in our places of worship; with our children, parents and families; in our social settings; in our online chats—to open up a Liv Good dialogue about the thick dreams we have for our pastorical now. Liv Good calls us to bring our best selves, our ethics of Blackness (Beckles-Raymond, 2024), our Black Girl Magic (Jordan-Zachery and Harris, 2019), our ‘Black Consciousness’ (Gordon, 2022) and our experience into dynamic interdependence (Lorde, 1984)—to show up—pure of heart, to envision what it means to Liv Good, to work for it, to test it, to live it, to feel it, to share it, to enjoy it and to love it. Liv Good requires us to intentionally include reimagining our conceptions of the good life as a central facet of our political and systemic strategies for change. Liv Good calls for the space to embark on this journey together. We must do the messy, difficult, time-consuming work of showing up and working things out with and for each other.

An invitation to dream

Consequently, this article serves as a formal invitation to the SUPPER challenge! SUPPER, a framework developed by Angelique Rewers, ¹³ to identify the Specific, Urgent, Persistent, Pervasive, Expensive, Recognisable challenge before us: that we need to envisage a future beyond intersectional domination, that speaks not only to political equality but also to a future that offers a holistic vision of the good life that does not entail the destruction of ourselves and/or other groups of people or the environment.

The challenge in bringing about this new glocal reality is that we live in a global systemic structure that runs counter to the majority of this planet’s population being able to Liv Good even if they have managed to achieve relative success according to that system’s own conception of success. In the glocal context of intersectional domination, is it possible for our journey to be one that feels, and indeed is, uplifting, fulfilling and brimming with love and joy, even as we grapple with loneliness, frustration, disappointment, anxiety, depression, heartbreak and loss? I believe the answer is YES, but like Shirley Anne Tate, ¹⁴ I think we need to reorientate our focus and, instead of asking why racism persists, we must ask: what are the necessary conditions to bring about the futures we seek? And so, I invite us to consider what philosophical principles are required to undergird the conditions for us all to Liv Good. I invite us to embrace Liv Good as a way of life, a destination, a state of being, a method, a philosophy, an art, a fundamental shift in how we approach our own existence and how we dream and make manifest the good life.

Liv Good might not at first appear grand or immediately recognisable as a viable or sufficient solution to the most pressing and serious challenges of intersectional domination. It might prove not to be. Liv Good must be able to grapple with uncertainty and doubt. It requires the kind of radical faith and hope we see in the best of our religious and spiritual traditions. As Alice Walker’s practice of gesturing the butterfly invokes, ¹⁵ Liv Good is underpinned by the belief that even the smallest acts and decisions we make contribute to the fluttering wings of change. It suggests that maybe if we take seriously the transformative and transfigurative call to envisage a different set of philosophical ideals upon which to rest a different kind of future, if I honour that call by daring to write of Liv Good, then maybe others will experiment with their own questions and expression, and we will hear a range of voices and be able to dialogue and consider previously unheard ways of being human. In doing so, we might begin to see the change we claim to seek and ensure we articulate the kind of nuanced approach to social stratification that Sudbury (1998, p. 5) offers, such that thinking and writing are no longer futile luxuries of a disconnected professional elite who has lost touch with those in different socioeconomic positions from themselves but rather a necessary contribution to our collective praxis.

The aim is not to start thinking about how the clarity that the SUPPER acronym provides can underpin a business plan for yet another Black consultancy who will advise dominating institutions about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) or whatever acronym they move to next. Although I understand the drivers for such a move personally, practically and politically, I am mindful of Collins’ (2000, pp. 280–283) critique on the risks of scholars and professionals racialised as Black being complicit with what she describes as ‘disciplinary power’. Yet, if we take Collins’ framework of intersectional domination seriously, we become aware that there is no substantive distinction between having a job within these toxic institutions and being a so-called ‘independent scholar’ or ‘entrepreneur’ because there is no such thing as living outside of the matrix of domination. And so, the where of Liv Good is to dream wherever we are. But, instead of labouring against or in service of people and spaces that devalue us, that refuse to see and hear us, that use us and that require us to defer our dreams, imagine SUPPER transformed into a soulful feast! Imagine doing all the great things you do in the company of others who get it, just like you do. Imagine sharing workspace and heart-space where productivity doesn’t compromise integrity and excellence is not aspiration—it’s just how we do on our own terms. Indeed, Liv Good is an invitation to choose us, and to keep choosing us, until choosing us is no longer a choice but a way of life: our state of being, our reality, our truth and our legacy.

So, let’s pause for a moment and picture it. I mean close your eyes and really dream it: imagine us together, you and me, you and your friends, me and my friends, and our families, our colleagues, our neighbourhoods, our outernational connections, dreaming, planning, creating, laughing, loving, sharing time, resources, expertise, networks, power, music and food. Dream us, simultaneously the fulfilment of our ancestors’ promise and the promise of something better for our children and our children’s children, at once to be, and to bring about, the conditions for us all to Liv Good.