In the present dialogue concerning the question of black progress, there are relentless demands for instant, final solutions: advocates who, in the moment of impassioned suffocation, cling onto any course of action professing to guide light on the dark path forward. At the heart of this plan lies solutions caught in the stone’s gaze of finality defined by its singular, definite, course of action to achieve progress.
What grandiose solutions! But it must be asked: what significance can such solutions bring about? Undoubtedly there is much to lament about in the modern political arena, but–acknowledging that such an arena inevitably shapes our thoughts and actions without the futile attempt to rise above history–such politics calls for solutions that are grounded in the dynamic river of scientific knowledge: a river so tentative, calling for continually revisions accompanied with a multitude of perspectives as to evade the stone’s gaze of finality. Without endorsing a naive, outdated faith in an imagined linear progress of science–one only needs to recall the river’s rapids subordinating the black body–black progress depends upon a cultivation of scientific knowledge.
Just as there is no singular, definitive, ultimate answer in scientific knowledge, there is consequently no singular, definitive, ultimate solution insofar as solutions to black plight depend on scientific knowledge. The stone’s gaze–disconnected from the river’s rapids and experience–will undoubtedly fail to achieve anything meaningful in the modern political arena. As science unfolds according to a process of historical shifts of continuities and discontinuities, so do answers to black progress.