Ethics in Flow

Ethics That Move, Morality That Captures

By Tamice Spencer-Helms

Bayo Akomolafe is someone I turn to in troubling times. His work unsettles, disturbs, and invites deeper wrestling. He doesn’t just offer answers — he excavates the structures we assume are solid, the norms we inherit as fixed, the moralities we cling to for stability.

And in this excavation, he reveals something crucial:

• Ethics move. They flow, they disrupt, they shift, they breathe.

• Morality captures. It freezes, it defines, it polices, it builds walls.

This distinction helps me articulate something I’ve felt for a long time:

The spaces of deepest transformation — the hush harbors of history, the hip-hop cyphers, the Black spiritual underground — are not moral spaces in the conventional sense.

They are ethical spaces.

Places where meaning is fluid, where boundaries are troubled, where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ matter less than what is alive, what is real, what moves.

Think of Ice Floating in a River

That ice cube? That’s morality. It’s ethics, captured for a moment, temp…