The Politics of Grace: On Blackness, Friendship, and Forensics, Or BFF

Javon Johnson
Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication
San Francisco State University

For Anyah and Cobe. May you find grace, homespace, black homespace, and the kinds of friendship grounded in a transformative politics of love.

I met my dear friend Rachel Nicole Hastings in November of 2001, when we were both undergraduates competing in intercollegiate forensics. She, California State University, Chico, and I California State University, Los Angeles, we had both made names for ourselves regionally and nationally and were set to compete head to head for the first time. Truth be told, she and I did not immediately get along. I was an arrogant competitor who offended her by yawning during her performances. Rachel was fierce, one of the few forensics people who challenged me, and intimidating me in a way that led me to cheap tricks in an attempt to gain an edge. We grew closer once Rachel moved to Southern California to begin her M.A. program at California State University, Long Beach. I followed suit and began my M.A. program a year later at my Alma Matter, CSULA. We were young, black, and critically un/learning the world together, and it was during these graduate years, as well those spent in our doctoral programs, when Rachel, this bad sistah, became my sister.

Rachel, “standing in solidarity with Black revolutionary womanists,” often showed me love and support by challenging my race politics with sharp and necessary gender critiques that recognizes how “forms of…love, as well as those of abuse and domination, have and continue to occur in Black communal spaces.” She taught me the critical importance of intersectionality and how it is a key part in dismantling systemic oppression. Whether it was bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Omi Osun, or any number of other people, Rachel and I talked whatever new theories we were reading as if they were the latest hip-hop albums. To be clear, we also spoke about hip-hop, which “functions as a therapeutic vehicle and a political engine” to continue with the car metaphor, “and debated passionately about its liberatory possibilities. 3 Rachel is one of my closest friends, perhaps my BFF even. No doubt derived from texting and Twitter culture, the term BFF is an acronym that stands for “best friends forever.” While I love this notion of lasting friendship, I want to riff on it to think about how Rachel and I were Black Friends in Forensics - another kind of BFF - who eventually became best friends forever.

Citing only Rachel Hastings’s work, this short essay pays homage to her brilliance and our friendship. Moreover, it is a critical reflection on how we constructed what Hastings might call a “homespace.” 4 Thinking of forensics as site “where intellectual development occurs” 5 the following piece briefly questions that very development, while considering the ways in which Rachel and I chose a performance of black grace to create a space where we could function in forensics and gain control over our own development.

Rachel purchased a brand new 2002 Mitsubishi Eclipse when she moved to Long Beach. She named her Grace, and like us, it was all black: black interior and exterior. In many ways, Grace was a performance of social mobility, of (an almost) arrival. It was everything us poor black kids could dream. We took road trips in Grace, drove to various tournaments, poetry venues, and so much more. Indeed, Grace was a black vehicle to get around, but black grace, what Hastings might describe as a “racialized performative condition,” was the vehicle we used to navigate this anti-black world. 6 And, like Grace, a relatively small black vehicle, black grace was both liberating and constricting in that it is “conditioned by a system of power” of and expectations placed on black bodies. 7

Black grace is often a necessary performance of politics that allowed Rachel and me to strategically maneuver the forensics terrain. We understood too well that forensics was not always a welcoming space for black folks. While well intentioned, the compulsory desires to teach proper speaking is not only off-putting to many young and poor black folks, but also grounded in troubling race, gender, and class politics. The fashionable use of critical race theory and the hoards of white students who speak it like it tastes good can be maddening for people of color. When ethnics study ethnic studies it is not simply a lesson in card cutting; it is a lesson in survival.

Black grace, a strategic performance of respectability, a tactical choosing of exactly when and how to speak up against racialized injustice, often got us through forensics. When every coach introduced me to their newest black competitor, it was black grace that helped me to focus more on the new black kid on the block and not weird and messy racial issues at play. When Long Beach questioned why Rachel, their few black competitors, and myself all spent so much time together (after introducing us all of course) it was black grace that prevented us from blowing up on them. When ballots questioned why so many of our pieces focused on race, black grace was the vehicle we used to create a piece that questioned their problematic question. To be clear, I learned a lot of positive things in forensics, but above all it taught me the importance of the battle to articulate race. Radical Philosophy Review. 12.1 p. 47 creating black spaces even in, and sometimes especially in, well meaning, progressive white spaces who far too often feel as though they are above critique on the grounds they are “one of the good ones.”

Building on our experiences in forensics, Rachel and I continued to construct black homespaces for the survival of our friendship and sanities. Since competing against each other for the first time 15 years ago we have been on a number of panels together, performed for one another’s institutions, edited each other’s work, leaned our shoulders when the academy was unbearable and have always supported one another. I am her first child’s godfather, a position neither of us takes lightly. These days we do not always talk as much as we would both like, life has a way of doing that to friends, but whenever we do it feels as though we have never taken a break.

Rachel is my dear friend, my sister, and, in some ways, one of my teachers. Here is to my BFF, to blackness, friendship, and forensics, to Rachel for allowing me to share in her good black graces. It has all been so life affirming and life saving.

3 Hastings, R. (2009). Black, blue and loved all over: Revolutionary love, ‘Seven’ and the ritual of spoken solidarity. Women & Language. 32.3 p. 17

4 Hastings, R. (2009). “Sole/Daughter:” Race, intellect and the process of creating black subjectivity. Liminalities. 5.5 p. 3

5 Ibid

6 Hastings, R. (2009). Performative decolonization: Critical performance ethnography, Rize, and the battle to articulate race. Radical Philosophy Review. 12.1 p. 46

7 Hastings, R. (2009). Performative decolonization: Critical performance ethnography, Rize, and