#1. antiblackness is atmospheric and omnipresent.

this draws heavily from sharpe's (2019) metaphor of "the weather", helping us see antiblackness not as isolated acts of racial violence or discrimination but as a pervasive, systemic condition shaping relations and ecologies across scales.

with that said, here are some axioms that i've found helpful for understanding and thinking black ecologies, i'll follow these axioms with what i've read to help make my own sense of the field in this way.

still, it's been helpful for my thinking to have "axioms" as ways to structure my thinking, generated across black ecologies texts. these axioms are specific to me, to what most resonated with me or recurred thematically across texts, evidencing how i came into relation with black ecologies.

both insist on specificity, context, relationality. they refuse the dispossessory violence of objectification, extraction, decontextualization, and standardization. trying to generate "starting points" is like imposing universals, which does not work (ever) - all knowledge is relational.

as i read other scholars, i think about the core premises grounding their analyses, the central truths they assume as starting points. i've done that most with work in black ecologies and land education, which is somewhat contradictory...

i have found this so helpful for reflecting on axioms already present in my work and those i wish to presence. axioms orient my thinking toward the 'elsewhere' [of decolonization, as byrd writes], and invites an 'otherwise' reading.

the full article in which tuck describes this is:

Jodi Byrd, Eve Tuck, Maya Caspari, Ruth Daly & Rebecca Macklin (2023) ‘On Being Committed to Indigenous Feminist Interventions’: Jodi Byrd and Eve Tuck in Conversation, Parallax, 29:2, 229-247, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2271735

she continues that axioms help us "read otherwise," starting from different epistemic and ethical locations (i like to think of this as epistemic disobedience and delinking, it's the mignolo in me). these allow other ways of reading to emerge, ways that have been erased/obscured, yet always present.

tuck (byrd et al., 2023) describes axioms as foundational, non-negotiable starting points for convos, analyses, fields. these are agreed-upon premises that ground our work, the conditions we take for granted. our convo starts with the assumption of this reality, "that we're already there" (p. 244)