The black radical: Fungibility, activism, and portraiture in these times

Tiffany King’s concept of Black fungibility is a useful tool that helps to understand the ways that Black bodies are marked for death, and the ensuing Black death spectacle that has paraded across the north part of Turtle Island. Fungibility usually refers to crops, to seeds. For a seed to be fungible, it is replaceable immediately with another seed, and in this way it doesn’t matter if you spread seeds and some don’t grow; you can always have these replaced by more interchangeable/exchangeable seeds. To apply this concept to the slave labor trade and the enslavement of Black peoples as a way of fueling settler expansion is powerful. In this chapter I will explore fungibility and many of the ways that activists in the movement for the Black lives/Black Lives Matter movement act as a direct counter to Black fungibility. I explore the stress and tolls that such activisms take on the movement builders and offer a recent artistic project, The Activist Portrait Series, as a tool for increasing the support of and ensuring the survival of activists on the front lines. Exploring resilience, survival, and radical interdependence, I consider the role of this portraiture in sustaining a movement.