Ashon Crawley: rational thinking gifted us the ideas that existence is a split of mind from body (Descartes), that Africa does not have History (Hegel), the idea of the transcendental aesthetic that averts black life and that dark skin means someone is stupid (Kant). one doesn’t have to rock with religious traditions, one doesn’t have to be a believer in specific doctrines or theological structures.
but if one thinks rationality is less “magical” or made up than religion, i’ve got some bad news for you … rationality isn’t more desirous as a concept than the magical, the fantastic, the mystical, not when one realizes that the grounds of rationality are the suppression of the magical, fantastic and mysticism that made the very concept of rationality possible.
read silvia federici. read cedric robinson. read sylvia wynter. read hortense spillers. not for the same things, of course, no. read them for the ways they help us understand the problem—the gendering, racializing, sexing—of the magical, the fantastic, the mystical, the fleshly. so then what do we do? we have to have a different relation to knowledge. knowledge is still practiced and produced. but knowledge against western rationality must be prioritized. read denise ferreira da silva.
the problem with rational thinking is that it overrepresents itself as the only kind of, and the only right way to do, thinking, thought. we need to have a preferential option for otherwise thought, otherwise feel, called imagination, fantasy, flight, joy.