Situating Blackness
Image courtesy of Where Are The Black Designers?
A roundtable about Blackness in the design industry and discussion of the ways in which the term collates disparate identities.
The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020, and developed and moderated by Mitzi Okou, an interaction and visual designer who founded Where are the Black Designers?, a platform that supports and connects Black designers. Present on the call were Kaia Charles, cultural projects manager at Greenwich Peninsula and NOW Gallery, who has previously co-chaired the V&A’s African Caribbean steering group; Natsai Audrey Chieza, the founder and CEO of Faber Futures, a multidisciplinary design studio whose work is focused on the intersections between nature, technology, and society; Dian Holton, the senior deputy art director of AARP (a non-profit working with America’s over-50 population) and who has also worked across publishing, marketing, branding, retail display and styling; and Jess Kilubukila, the founder of design brand Kilubukila, which works with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s design and craft traditions, and which applies the pan- African language Mandombe to traditional Kuba textiles.
Mitzi Okou The subject that I want to talk about is the diaspora and Blackness as a monolith within design. We’re in a time that feels like an uprising or a renaissance, so on top of talking about racial injustice in design, there is an opportunity to go deeper, because I’ve seen very little discussion around this issue. I want to start off by introducing ourselves in terms of what we do within design, but also how we identify. So, for example, I’m an interaction visual designer and I identify as Ivorian-American. Both of my parents are from the Ivory Coast, so my experience of growing up in America is interesting because I find myself in this limbo of relating to people, especially Black people, through pop culture, but then also relating to Ivorian culture through what my parents have told me.
Kaia Charles I’m from the Caribbean, where I was born in Dominica. My parents are from Antigua and Dominica, and I strongly identify as Caribbean. I’ve now lived in London for about 19 years, but before that I have also lived in South Africa and Mozambique, and I’ve spent a bit of time in Nigeria too. I’m a curator, as well as managing and commissioning cultural projects for Greenwich Peninsula, which is an up-and-coming neighbourhood in southeast London, where we’ve done a variety of projects spanning design, fashion, and photography.
Natsai Audrey Chieza I was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, moving to the United Kingdom with my family when I was 17-years-old. I now identify as British-Zimbabwean and it’s very deliberate that it’s that way around – “British-Zimbabwean”. It’s a decision to move forwards and live in the now. A lot of people in the diaspora hold back, dreaming of returning home one day, never quite developing a mindset that enables firm roots in the now. Life that way can be transitory, experienced as a kind of haunting. I was born in the 1980s following independence, and am what my parents referred to as a “born-free”. I was part of the generation who was supposed to inherit new freedoms and opportunities after a bloody liberation struggle against British colonial rule. For a while it looked like that: though full of contradictions, I had a beautiful childhood and my parent’s generation seemed to thrive. But then in the late 1990s, the economy collapsed following IMF restructuring and international sanctions in response to the land redistribution programme implemented by the Zimbabwean government. Our worlds changed. I’ve spent my adult life in the UK, trying to find a way to live in a place that is so intertwined with my place of birth. When we arrived, I enrolled in a grammar school in the South East before making my way to the University of Edinburgh to study architecture. I completed Part 1, then shifted direction to enrol on the MA Textile Futures [now Material Futures] at Central Saint Martins. This is where my interests at the intersection of technology and design and nature were developed and nurtured. Since then, and in founding my design agency Faber Futures in 2018, I have been working as a designer in science and technology, trying to shape how the confluence of those worlds can bring about more equitable and just human and planetary futures.
Jess Kilubukila I’m a French-Congolese designer. I spent my childhood between France and the Congo, before being based fully in France for my teenage years. I studied a little bit in the US, as well as in Paris and the UK, before working in institutional finance for the Bank of Africa and Standard Bank. That didn’t give me much energy, so I went into the creative space, where I have since worked with textile design and a bit with linguistics as well. My design practice is a lot about this idea of self-construction. I feel that my Black identity is multilayered – Congolese, French, a bit of London, and a bit Black American when I’m in the US, because that’s how I am looked at there. And I just moved back to Kinshasa three days ago.
Dian Holton I live in Washington, D.C. but my father was in the military so that took me to a lot of different countries growing up, where I learned how to adapt. I identify as Black American and I attended Florida A&M, an HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities, ed.] where my field of study was design. I have mainly worked in media – so newspapers, magazines, and publications – but I currently work for the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons], which is the largest nonprofit in the United States with 38 million members.
Mitzi Even those introductions show some of the diversity that I feel gets lost within how Blackness is portrayed in the media. I’d be interested in hearing about how your upbringing and how you identify influences your design. It’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. I have just gotten comfortable with this limbo of having Ivorian parents but having been born in the US – but I’m still exploring how to bring my narrative into design.
Dian Because of my family background in the military, I moved around a lot, which made me very open to everything. I can honestly say that I didn’t feel like I experienced racism growing up because I was behind the shield of a soldier. Everywhere we went we were either on base, or else affiliated with the base. If people were racist, they weren’t blatant about it or I was just oblivious to it – it wasn’t an ongoing issue in our household or in the communities we lived in. My parents were very open about things – we had the history books, they collected Black art – so I was surrounded by Blackness, even if we weren’t constantly speaking about it. But my first real experience with being Black, Black American, was at Florida A&M. It was very much a culture shock for me, because although I had been a minority everywhere I went, I had never felt like that. Then, at college, I was in a majority Black space, surrounded by strong identities. It was an eye-opener for me. I had known I was a Black American, but the sense of identity and realisation of how people viewed me in the US didn’t come to a head until I got to college.
Mitzi That’s a perspective I usually only hear from foreigners, who say that they didn’t feel Black until they went to America. To hear a Black American say that they didn’t feel Black until college is interesting.
Jess In terms of building my identity, I was very conscious of being French when I was in France, but people viewed me as an African. You know the type of question: “Oh you’re French, but where are you really from?” And when I was spending my summers in the Congo, people always saw me as one of those Africans from Europe. It wasn’t until I left France for London that I realised that I was a person, as opposed to an African or a French guy. In terms of my practice, because I have a foot in a lot of continents, I tend to utilise a lot of community- based design. The idea is to co-design who we are and own it. Let’s not let someone, whether white or Black, tell us who we are, but let’s show the world the narrative of who we are and construct things in that way. So I’m trying to answer this question and also mix traditional practice and craft with what we would call “design” in the West – although really both are fields of design. In a nutshell, that’s how I’m situating my Blackness in my work.
Kaia It’s really at the core of how I approach curatorial projects. I constantly refer back to the material culture of the Caribbean, which is everywhere in my daily life. I’ve absorbed it. Houses were curated spaces with objects that had specific significances; we had amazing colours and were not afraid to express identity through colour, which definitely applies to a lot of the public spaces that I’ve since commissioned projects for. I tend to commission artists who are not afraid of pattern or colour, and I think that comes from my upbringing. I am also heavily influenced by the fact that my parents’ generation really explored the idea of the radical architectural self-build. We have very difficult topography in the Caribbean, and a lot of people built really inventive structures that explored the natural environment and how that then relates to the built environment. These were often built in stages because people couldn’t necessarily afford to build a whole compound in one go, but that process of seeing how houses are built stage to stage was quite influential for me.
Natsai I think Kaia just answered the question for me. It’s not really something that I dwell on too much, but I studied architecture originally and I think that connected and resonated with my parents because of the self-build – everyone builds their own house. So there was a sense growing up that architecture was a real thing, although I can’t say that there is an inherent Blackness that lives in my work. I grew up in a Black-majority country where all of the power is held by the white minority – which is evident based on who is running the institutions, and based on what an education for an African girl looks like – as well as being surrounded by a consensus that Black people could achieve anything they wanted to achieve because they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were business people. I really struggled to connect those two realities in a way that made sense. I grew up in an incredibly racist country where you were taught an alien, British curriculum by people who did not want you there. People who were allowing you to be there, but putting brakes along the way. From a very early age, I developed a very clear sense of justice. When you are living in a country that is supposed to be yours, when you have ancestry there, but everything that you are being taught is to deny you that ancestry, to deny you that language, then you form a sense of self that perhaps recognises that all is not well, and that there are a lot of things in this life which you have to fight for, but which don’t have to define you. So there’s a little bit of a contradiction going on in the sense that I am not somebody who navigated the world seeing my Blackness as being foremost for me. When I moved to the United Kingdom for university, there was a toxic mix of overt racism from the student body, covert racism from the professors, and classism. You’re being Othered in lots of different ways, by different people and institutions, but I think there’s something very particular to being Zimbabwean and how we were colonised that means we have been conditioned to just get on with it – to do whatever you want and to deal with what comes your way. That means that my practice has not been something that has developed around trying to build an identity of Blackness as it exists in other people’s imaginations. My sense of Blackness is that I’m a person who has ideas and that should be enough.
Mitzi I was going to ask about centring Blackness, with an emphasis on the fact that Blackness is very diverse. Blackness is not just one thing and different types of Blackness have different types of needs, so I was curious as to what centring Blackness means to you?
Natsai Yeah, how do you centre Blackness? As you say, there’s a continuum to this. It’s not one thing – its multiple things, multiple realities all at the same time in terms of what the Black experience is. My work is primarily concerned with how we build equitable technological and material futures, so the question of who gets to decide how we build these technologies and who benefits from that is always at the front of my mind. The reason why I care so deeply about that is because I know the Global South is not part of the conversation in any way. But I’ve really struggled with being somebody in the diaspora, speaking on behalf of people who are at home, because that is actually a colonising force in itself. I decided a long time ago that I was going to live here in the UK and I decided to stop dreaming about going back at this time in my life. I was going to do the work here, with the conditions here, but with this constant awareness that there are always disparities in terms of who has access to knowledge systems, to networks, to education. That isn’t just a racial disparity. It’s about people who might be excluded because they’re deemed to be disabled. It’s about people who are excluded on economic terms because we live in a classist society. It’s about language and who that excludes, because we might be talking about a scientific concept that a designer does not understand. At all of those levels, I have this sense of asking how we build something that is for all of us. It is about dealing with what’s in front of us and understanding what those layers and those barriers to it actually are. On a very practical level, in some of the work that we’re developing with partners, that is about asking basic questions. If you could have designers do a residency in your lab for three months a year, how could we build a system to allow for that exchange? If we don’t just want people from MIT going on this residency, how do we provide wider access? Well, OK, let’s make it a global call; let’s also pay for the visas and the flights, because I’m aware of what it means to have a passport that does not allow somebody to just end up in a different country. My multiple lived experiences mean that when I’m thinking about equity, I’m thinking about what a world that is fair and open to as many people as possible looks like. I don’t want to forever only be seen as Black or only be seen as female – there is more to all of us than that. It’s more interesting to focus on what equity means for everyone and then ask how to progress that.
Kaia It’s an interesting one. I would echo what has been said in terms of not being able to speak for everyone. I guess what I do is to create spaces for discourses and I almost see myself as a facilitator for non-traditional discourses. I don’t only curate work by, say, Black artists, but I am concerned about the visibility of Black artists and culture. It is about supporting, facilitating and creating space for ideas that are not necessarily part of the design mainstream. I know a lot of designers who are now doing extremely well, but who in earlier days were seen as outsiders. Over the last two years especially, there seems to have been an embracing of artists with African heritage or Caribbean heritage, and I’m interested in the legacy of this. It has to be longterm – it can’t be just be a focus for now or just be fashionable at the moment to showcase certain types of work. What is the legacy?
Dian I think I would echo what Kaia said almost verbatim. I’ll try not to rehash, but personally I don’t centre. Work-wise, I don’t centre everything I do around Blackness. I feel like I am a facilitator or an amplifier. I think some people do a great job of centring Blackness in their work, but as a person I’ve learned to somewhat play the game. I have realised that if I’m too forceful with Blackness in my work, I’ll be met with resistance. So the way that I handle this is to try and introduce artists who are Black not only into my work, but also to the people who I interact with, either professionally or personally. It’s a long-game strategy. If a project comes up, I won’t come out and say, “Hey, this is a list of five people that you can work with and they’re all Black.” I’ll just float people who I say will be amazing and then it’s down to whomever is approving it. I’ll research creatives who might need a spotlight, or might need to be introduced to an organisation that is very linear. As regards to my personal space and with social media, I’ll do the same thing because I know people are always watching – amplify and introduce. In my social presence, I do more direct amplification of Blackness, whereas professionally it’s more strategic. I feel like social media is a great place because people are watching – I can drop the links in, and people, at their leisure, can then research those individuals.
Natsai Did anything change the day after everyone posted black squares [2 June 2020’s #blackouttuesday campaign on Instagram, ed.]? Was it easier?
Dian No, it wasn’t easier. People were actually being called out for the black squares, because they had misunderstood the purpose of it. A lot of brands who had never done anything for Black people, had never had them in their marketing, whose staff didn’t reflect Blackness, were showing up with a black square but then not doing anything – it was just about saying that they did it. A lot of companies didn’t change, although a few were very open and they did come back with a list of things that they were going to do. I won’t mention any by name, but there were companies that made a conscious and very public change. But a good portion of people still got called out. It was a day of reckoning.
Natsai For me, that was such a pivotal moment, because everything that I’ve been doing by stealth, I can suddenly be very open about. The genie is out the bottle. We can’t pretend that those dynamics are not at play any longer, so when I’m pitching to a client or trying to come up with a project concept, it’s already there in the brief. It’s no longer something that you’re strategically trying to shoehorn in.
Jess From my experience, there were two aspects: a personal and a professional one. On the personal, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced, I had everyone coming at me. “What’s happening? Can you explain it to me? Is that really what you’re experiencing?” It was exhausting. I cannot be an advocate for everyone and I cannot be having these conversations all the time, because they’re painful as well as exhausting. But when it came to my design studio, it became much easier to talk about and advocate for what I was doing. I think corporations, institutions, studios and practitioners became much more open to dialogue. Even if they didn’t have something to say right now, they were more open to taking a step back and learning. The dialogue was much more constructive, which felt good, even if it didn’t on a personal level.
Dian I definitely think a number of companies were open to having a dialogue, but the proof is in their actions. We can talk all day, but if you’re not putting actions to words, then you’ve wasted everyone’s time. It’s lip service. Even in my own company, we had a big staff town hall and the CEO talked very candidly about a number of things, which was really good. But shortly afterwards, there were still individuals who had listened to these talks but remained very much tone deaf. I had to reach out to them and say, “You have a lineup of six upcoming speakers and all of them are white brunettes.” Why am I still having to address this? Did you not hear what I heard? Are you not watching the news? That’s systemic in a lot of companies and corporations. Yes, some of them will happily meet with you, but if they are not actually putting actions behind it, it’s a waste of time – that’s what I felt I saw when the black square was posted. To your point, Jess, it is exhausting. It’s still exhausting when people ask me, “How do you feel?” I’m now just saying, “I’m present.” I’m not going to get into this dialogue with you about how I really feel, because you don’t want to know that. What would help is if you do the work.
Kaia I feel like you can already see that the momentum for the conversation is waning. It’s a furore. If you haven’t been having this conversation five or ten years ago, then at least keep it going now that you are. But I kind of foresaw that this would happen – the appetite to keep the conversation going is not there.
Dian It’s a trend; it was trendy. I feel like we need companies that are willing to actually invest and put the budget in for diversity, equity and inclusion programming, rather than just making random hires. You’re not going to get everybody to subscribe to that, but you do need to put some action behind it so that the conversation doesn’t just stop over the summer. It has to be continual.
Natsai When I studied architecture, I was the only Black person, over a period of four years, in the entire department. So the question is, where are all the Black designers, right? Why was it so rare to see Black people in this environment? That’s an education thing; that is about an entire system of architecture, and talking about the pipeline and where new hires are going to come from. Are people being trained to become new hires? Do they have access to the resources that allow them to sustain their education? Architecture is a very expensive course to engage in, as I found out the hard way, and it’s also about having role models so that people can see somebody at the top of their game in these fields who actually has power. My only role model was Zaha Hadid. But why just her? Why was she the only person with whom I could find some semblance of identity? Today, I think that connection was pretty superficial, because I’d love to have role models who are women, people of colour, and who are developing projects that resonate with who I am as a person. We don’t just want to see people who look like us, we want to see people who reflect our values. But the pipeline for that is really, really long. For the design industry, it’s possible to think of that scope as being more than just who do you hire, because that’s such a myopic focus. It has to go much, much deeper.
Dian It does. One of the organisations I work with does high school mentoring and for a couple of years students were being bused in from different schools to study graphic design, photography, fashion and a couple of other trades. So you got a nice swath of students who had varying backgrounds and we’d bring in different types of designers so the students could hear from those practitioners. Exposure is incredibly key, especially when you know that parents don’t really support the arts and they would rather these kids go on to study science and engineering and things of that nature. STEM is big, STEAM is not. But how to go deeper? We can go to elementary schools, but if the parents don’t understand the design industries, can we figure out how to bring them into this conversation and turn them into champions and advocates? These parents are engaging with design just as much as the next person, they just don’t realise that these are legitimate careers. For my dad, for instance, it did not click until I graduated and he talked to a recruiter at the newspaper I was working for, who happened to be a Black man. When my dad came out of that meeting, he was my biggest fan. He then championed my profession, but he had needed somebody he could connect with to enable that. We need the guardians and parents to subscribe to design, because we can’t as individual designers and teachers do it alone.
Mitzi I want to go back to your point, Dian, that this is a trend, because it’s funny how every single summer people are shocked. This happened last year around exactly the same time, and so I don’t know why people are still shocked about this. I don’t know why no one talks about the fact that not only is this a trend, but it’s a vicious cycle. Every summer, innocent Black individuals die, the video gets exposed, and everybody flares up. “Oh my God, we have to do something about it.” We do all this slacktivism and this performative activism, but people don’t realise that the social media is almost working against us. We have this tendency to memeify the deaths of innocent Black individuals by summing up their lives in terms of their final moments. It kind of angers me when people keep using the hashtag “Arrest the cops that killed Breonna Taylor,” because you’re shifting the attention onto the murderers and you’re not making her life about her. It just goes to show that this is a long game. It’s not going to change and people are going to continue to be surprised next summer when this happens again, because it is going to happen next summer, again. We all know this. Everyone’s going to be on their little performative activism high horse and be like, “Oh, we should do something about it.” And then it’s just going to die down in the fall, as we’re seeing now.
Dian I think people don’t want to put the work in that’s involved in unlearning, because it’s a lot. It takes years to unlearn what you’ve learned, and to talk about painful things.
Natsai It’s also what people are being asked to share and the fact that that is a threat, a very tangible, material threat. If you’ve grown up in a world where everything is yours and you’re now being asked to share, that means your expectations of what is yours have to shift. I think it’s naive to believe that something fundamental has changed.
Mitzi It’s the truth. I think that people are in denial about this and keep thinking that it’s going to change.
Jess Are we? Are we Black people in denial? We’re always saying, “They need to do the work. They need to do something.” I think it’s our job – and this is exactly what we are doing – to build a network, centre Blackness in our actions and try to connect our actions together. In my practice, I’m trying to work by only doing South-to-South collaborations, so not having to go from Kinshasa to London anymore, but maybe going from Kinshasa to Rio de Janeiro, for example, and leaving out the West in terms of institutions and so on. To change things, I think that we have to do the work because otherwise it’s not going to happen. If we can create this network of activists who are political in our business, political in our creativity, political in our designs, then maybe we have a chance. That’s why I came back to Kinshasa. I’m tired of just talking, of having to justify myself and say something, so I’m going to work and I’m going to lead by example. There are a lot of interesting ventures on the ground, which just need fuel from the community. Before this meeting, I had no idea about what centring Blackness was, but that’s my answer – work together.
Kaia I think that’s really important and valid, but there’s a need for a multi-pronged approach. Making our own connections and shifting the narrative is important, but I think there is definitely still a need for activism. Not everyone is good at activism, but it’s necessary. I also think that there’s a need for non-Black people to be informed and not depend on Black communities to be the ones that kind of bring them up to a specific standard. They need to put in the work.
Mitzi The problem is with access, which is what we’re trying to fight for – access to economic equity so that we can do what we want to do. Even on a social level, as designers we’re trying to get jobs, just like our white counterparts, but we don’t have access to the same word-of-mouth networks or we’re faced by the fact that the technology used to hire people and scan for keywords on résumés is kind of racist. The fight that is happening in America is to get access.
Natsai On a fundamental level, if you want to have economic freedom, then at some point you need capital. If a bank is not going to loan you money to start a business, you’re out of the game. But the wealth creation required to build the realpolitik paradigm is dependent on those systems, so it’s a tough old road ahead. That is so different to an African context where there is a little bit more purchase to have the freedom to operate, to being networked in that place, and to having access to people in power in that place. I can definitely speak to that from a Zimbabwean perspective, because there’s so much creativity and coming-together and building-together that is happening based on a real kind of lubrication of the social and economic realm. That is so much harder to replicate here because we are not the gatekeepers at any level and it’s much more expensive. The need for activism, the need to engage with institutions, is the paradigm that I have experienced in my professional life in the UK. However, after 2 June and #blackouttuesday, I feel like there’s more permission to be more selective about the terms of engagement with powerful individuals and institutions. So I feel somewhat empowered. It has opened a door and the question is, do you step into it? And if you do, what can you summon to move this thing forward a little bit? Maybe you can make things a little bit better, a little bit more fluid, but certainly not the revolution that I think we need.
Kaia I would completely agree in terms of the different paradigms. I’m always surprised when I’m having what I consider to be a standard conversation about race and inclusion, and the reaction of other people is to perceive what you’re talking about as being aggressive or just uncomfortable. I become uncomfortable just watching their reactions. I just don’t understand why that’s the case and why it’s so difficult. You’ve had such a contribution from Black communities in this country in particular, for so many years, but it’s still so uncomfortable to talk about issues to do with race, even at the most basic level.
Dian It’s power and I feel like it goes back to unlearning the history. It’s hard for people to come to terms with that and it makes them squeamish, particularly when we add the power dynamic that we spoke of earlier. It should be something we’re able to have a dialogue about, but there’s guilt associated with it. Even if a person is open to embracing everybody, they think about their family history or their generational history and they feel bad. So you end up with white fragility, which you’re now also having to deal with. It’s like, “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m just trying to do my job. I’m just trying to create space for other people who look like me, and giving them an opportunity, because they’re just as talented, if not more so, than some of the people we’ve co-signed for years.” But it is uncomfortable for a lot of people who are not people of colour. I could only summarise it as guilt.
Jess I have a question for you guys, which I think speaks to an opposite point of view. What is success for you and how could Black success be defined? We’re talking about different paradigms, which for me are pretty connected. I think it’s easier to be successful in Africa and then come back to Europe and use that success to promote Black people on the ground. So that’s what it would be for me, but what would Black success be for you?
Mitzi Success for me, and I’m going to be super blunt about this, was based on being better than my white counterparts in high school. They were getting to do all these things that they had access to because of money. Later on, my definition of success started to become about becoming powerful and rich enough so that my family doesn’t have to worry, but it has now started to revert given the fight that’s happening. I think a win is if I’m competing for something, even if a white person clearly has a privilege. If I can even get to their level through hard work, just get on the same playing field, then that’s success to me. That’s very skewed by racial trauma, and it’s such a messed up view of success, but there is a bit of that for me.
Kaia Until we’re accepted from a grassroots level up, I don’t think we have been successful. We don’t necessarily need to present an academic argument. We have lots of great people presenting lots of fantastic theories and academic arguments, but until everyone has been accepted, I don’t think we’ve been successful.
Dian I don’t know what success looks like for me right now. I feel like I’m in The Twilight Zone crossed with Stranger Things. Just getting up every day, I kid you not, I’m like, “Am I going to make it today or am I going to cuss somebody out?” Managing my mental health is probably the biggest thing, which takes time. I’m really just trying to stay present because I can easily be triggered, which is not a good feeling.
Natsai I struggle with how we define success in a racialised, capitalised system that is built on white supremacy, and which has already extracted so much hard work and labour from Black people. I don’t want to play that game. I don’t want to work harder so that I can be better than or meet people at the level they’re at. Success for me has always been “How do you find a way, as much as possible, to know yourself in all of this?” With the lockdown, success for me has become, “Do I have time to even know how I am?” If I don’t have time to know that, then I’m not doing very well personally, and do I have time to make space for others? I get asked a lot if I can mentor people and my immediate reaction is, “Nope, you can’t trust me with that.” I’ve made myself too busy chasing and striving for whatever this nebulous notion of “You made it” is. But I don’t know that I want to make it on those terms. I want Black people to be able to have leisure and to have autonomy, so that we can heal from the traumas that we have had, and leave more in the tank to keep fighting the good fight. The healing associated with having more time, and having autonomy as to what you can do with that time, is a source of sustenance.
This roundtable has been edited for length.
Moderator Mitzi Okou
Panellists Kaia Charles, Natsai Audrey Chieza, Dian Holton and Jess Kilubukila
This article was originally published in Disegno #27. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visited the online shop.