Cultivating Creative Maladjustment
In anticipation of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, I am publishing a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals developed during our earlier gatherings. Each installment is designed to clarify and expand upon the key concepts that emerged, laying the groundwork for the conversations ahead.
This dispatch explores how trauma is weaponized to sustain global apartheid, distorting care into complicity with oppression. Using the figures of a white boy witnessing racial violence and a Black girl navigating its aftermath, it examines how trauma conditions individuals to uphold systems of domination.
Global apartheid persists not because it is inevitable or inexplicable, but because it is sustained by systems of domination that thrive on division and indifference. These systems fracture human lives through violence and neglect, weaponizing trauma to maintain control. The colonizer, traumatized into callousness, is conditioned to dominate and disregard. The colonized, traumatized into submission, is conditioned to accept domination, or navigate it through exclusionary strategies. Both are ensnared in intergenerational cycles of harm that perpetuate global apartheid.
Let us consider two figures—the white boy who witnesses racial violence, and the Black girl whose father is killed by that violence—to examine how trauma distorts care, sustains these systems, and might be confronted and healed.
The White Boy: Callousness, Saviorism, and Re-Enactment
Witnessing Racial Violence
Consider a young white boy taken by his father to witness a lynching. He sees the brutalized body of a Black man, hears the celebratory crowd, and feels a flicker of horror. His father reassures him, “We are protecting our way of life.” The boy’s fear and confusion are silenced by the paternal voice of authority, teaching him to suppress his discomfort and rationalize the violence.
A modern parallel might involve a white boy watching the video of George Floyd’s murder. He feels horror and outrage, but is quickly inundated with competing narratives: “He was resisting arrest.” “This isn’t about race.” “It’s a tragedy, but what can we do?” In both cases, the boy’s initial response of care is disrupted by rationalizations that distort his perception of harm and injustice.
Callousness, Saviorism, and Re-enactment
As the boy matures, his unresolved trauma shapes his relationship to the world in deeply consequential ways. He might internalize the rationalizations he was taught, numbing himself to Black suffering and dismissing systemic injustice as irrelevant to his life. Conditioned by the narratives of his upbringing, he may come to see such harm as inevitable or even justified, growing callous and indifferent to the violence that surrounds him.
Alternatively, his trauma might compel him toward a different response, one of intervention—but on terms that reaffirm his centrality. Adopting the role of a white savior, he seeks to act on the care he could not express as a child. Yet, this saviorism, while outwardly righteous, is fundamentally rooted in his own unresolved wounds. Like a Bruce Wayne or Batman figure, his attempts to address harm become a means of soothing his guilt and reclaiming his sense of moral integrity. In striving to be the hero of the story, he recenters his agency, relegating Black autonomy and resistance to the background of his benevolence. His care, distorted by trauma, serves to perpetuate the very hierarchies he seeks to transcend.
In many instances, this unresolved trauma takes a darker turn. Internalizing the violence he once witnessed, the white boy might reenact it to assert power and mask the insecurities born of his earlier passivity. Unable to confront the cruelty he observed and the complicity he inherited, he channels his fear and confusion into acts that replicate the very harm he initially recoiled from.
Whether his response takes the form of callousness, saviorism, or reenactment, the underlying pattern remains the same: his trauma prevents him from confronting the structural forces that sustain racial violence. Instead of dismantling these systems, he becomes ensnared in their logic, reproducing the cycles of domination that perpetuate harm. His inability to resolve his own relationship to care and accountability leaves him trapped, both a product of these systems and an unwitting agent of their continuation.
The Black Girl: From Inferiority to Exclusionary Excellence
Losing a Parent to Racial Violence: The Trauma
Now consider a young Black girl whose father is killed by police. She grows up hearing how he begged for his life, how his killers faced no consequences, and how the world seemed to move on. Her trauma is not just the loss of her father, but the collective grief and powerlessness her community carries.
She learns that her survival depends on navigating a world hostile to her existence. Her trauma may manifest as internalized inferiority, where she accepts her community’s dehumanization as inevitable. But if she resists this narrative, she may strive to embody “Black excellence,” seeking to escape vulnerability by proving her worth to a world that denies it.
Exclusionary Excellence
As an adult, she may ascend to prominence within the “talented tenth,” using her success to distance herself from the conditions that shaped her father’s death. Over time, she may come to view the vulnerability of ordinary Black men, like her father, as a failure to “adapt”—a fragility she cannot afford to acknowledge. If she becomes a high-powered public prosecutor, for example, this perception might drive her to enforce harsher measures against Black men, channeling her unresolved trauma into punitive actions.
This distortion of care transforms her success into a tool of exclusion. Her drive to escape the dehumanizing forces that shaped her father’s death becomes entangled with the need to prove herself exceptional. In doing so, she risks aligning with the very systems that perpetuated the violence she seeks to resist. While her achievements may be celebrated, they often reinforce hierarchies that isolate her from her community and uphold the logics of domination.
Rather than dismantling the structures that dehumanized her father, she becomes consumed by the need to transcend them on their terms. This pursuit, framed as liberation, ties her aspirations to systems that reward individual distinction at the expense of collective care, ultimately reproducing the isolation and fragmentation her trauma imposed.
Trauma as a Mechanism of Division
The experiences of the white boy and the Black girl illustrate how trauma sustains systems of domination by distorting care. These systems harm individuals and condition entire populations to rationalize and reproduce harm. Both experiences are fractured, their relationships to care distorted by systems that thrive on division.
These distortions are deliberate, embedded in the operations of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. By subjecting different groups to distinct traumas, these systems fragment and stratify care, making it conditional and selective. The white boy turned savior performs self-righteous acts of care only for those he deems as deserving, while the Black girl turned prosecutor limits her care to those who conform to the anti-Black standards of excellence she has internalized. Both are alienated from the relational, spontaneous care capable of disrupting and challenging these systems of domination.
Confronting Trauma, Reclaiming Care
Freudian psychoanalysis offers a starting point for addressing trauma:
Recognize that rationalizations for withholding care are symptoms of unresolved trauma.
Uncover the repressed traumatic experiences that inhibit spontaneous acts of care.
This approach helps individuals confront the origins of their anxieties, but does not go far enough.
Building on Frantz Fanon, we must add a third step: situate personal trauma within the broader power formations that produce and exploit it. The white boy must ask: “How was my trauma manipulated to align me with systems of domination?” The Black girl must ask: “How was my trauma manipulated to isolate me from my community?” By connecting personal experiences to systemic structures, both can begin to dismantle the ideologies that distort their care.
But healing demands more than introspection; it requires a radical, embodied practice of care—what I call a “fugitive erotics”—to mend the fractures wrought by trauma. The white boy must transcend saviorism, recognizing that care is not about fixing others but cultivating community with others through embodied practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair. The Black girl must move beyond the confines of exclusionary excellence, embracing embodied forms of care that affirm the dignity, agency, and resilience of her community. Together, they must confront the systems that have shaped their traumas, rejecting the hierarchies that perpetuate human division and suffering.
Cultivating Creative Maladjustment
Global apartheid persists because systems of domination thrive on division, indifference, and distorted care. These systems condition individuals to uphold hierarchies of power, rewarding those who conform to their logic. The white boy who becomes indifferent or assumes the mantle of a savior, and the Black girl who becomes submissive or exclusionary, are often celebrated as “well-adjusted” to the world as it is. Yet their responses—whether marked by callousness, saviorism, submission, or exclusionary ambition—are not signs of health, but symptoms of complicity in harm.
As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us:
There are some things in our nation and in the world to which I’m proud to be maladjusted, and which I call upon all men of good will to remain maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.
If you or those around you find yourselves “well-adjusted” to life within the genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal machinery of Empire—indifferent to the atrocities of global apartheid and its pervasive violences—it is worth examining how systemic traumatization has conditioned this submission. Beyond the immediate harms of toxic relationships and environments shaped by colonial legacies and racialized rule, we must confront the relentless flood of live-streamed genocides, viral videos of police killings, reports of mass shootings, the trivialization of colonization and slavery in historical narratives, and the glorification of violence in media and entertainment. These mechanisms do not merely (mis)educate or entertain; they subtly condition indifference, eroding collective care, deepening helplessness, and normalizing violence as an inevitable and inescapable reality.
To embrace (re-)creative maladjustment is to reject alignment with systems of domination. It is to resist narratives that justify fractured care, to interrogate the roots of trauma, to reclaim the relational, collective capacity to care, and to envision a world beyond these systems of domination. The white boy and the Black girl, if creatively maladjusted, might refuse the roles imposed on them—he, by standing in common cause with those his society has dehumanized; she, by honoring and uplifting the struggles of her community. Together, they could begin to dismantle the systems that distorted their care, fostering relationships rooted in practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair.
Creative maladjustment is not merely a refusal to comply; it is an active commitment to recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair. It requires the courage to question the rationalization and narrativization of traumatic experiences that fracture care and uphold domination.
This is the work we are undertaking in our AGAPE gatherings—creating spaces to collectively unlearn the conditions of harm, cultivate creative maladjustment, and build practices of care that honor human and more-than-human worlds alike.
