Morality Is Ice, Ethics Is the River, & I'm A Muthaf*ckin Monster

Ethics That Move, Morality That Captures

Bayo Akomolafe is someone I turn to in troubling times. His work unsettles, it disturbs, it asks the kinds of questions I find myself asking—questions that don’t just seek answers but invite a deeper wrestling. His thinking is an excavation, an unearthing of the structures we assume to be solid, the norms we inherit as fixed, the moralities we cling to for stability. He troubles these things, not to destroy them, but to remind us that they were never as stable as we imagined.

This article is inspired by my engagement with his thinking. Specifically, the way he reframes ethics as an erotic force of matter and relationality—a kind of sacred, uncontrollable flow—and morality as the moment when that flow gets captured, solidified into rules, hierarchies, and binaries. This distinction helps me articulate something I’ve felt for a long time: that the spaces of deepest transformation—the hush harbors of history, the hip-hop cyphers, the Black spiritual…