For Maalik, Naz, Brittany, & Alexis; or, On Loving Black People as a Liberatory Practice

"If you're here with the NYPD or you're with the FBI, welcome, sincerely. We expect you here"—this is the brief greeting spoken by an imam at the beginning of a prayer gathering depicted in the 2015 film Naz & Maalik (Jay Dockendorf). This welcoming to the mosque is a recognition of, and, perhaps a reckoning with, the seeming inevitability of the police surveillance and monitoring of Muslim communities, by way of, for example, the New York Police Department's (NYPD) Demographic Unit (which has since been disbanded). At other times mosques and Muslim student groups have been infiltrated by plainclothes cops or through the work of FBI informants and by way of "create and capture." Of course, the surveillance of Muslims in the United States is not a recent phenomenon; it began long before the current president (then candidate) proclaimed, "I want surveillance of certain mosques, okay … and you know what? We've had it before and we'll have it again."¹ One need look only to the thousands of pages of declassified FBI files on Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam that disclose, by way of redaction and nondis-closure, the extent of the state's targeted actions.

In the film Naz & Maalik, Maalik and Naz, two Black, queer, Muslim teenagers, move in and around Brooklyn by foot, bike, and train, all in the course of one day. Their conversations range throughout the day, skimming topics from the gentrification of Brooklyn to the Qur'an, bystander intervention, prisons, and profiling at airports. At one point they are approached by a white, greasy-haired undercover NYPD cop who attempts to entrap the two into buying a gun. Unsuccessful, the undercover cop reports the teenagers to an FBI agent sitting in a black sedan. This is create and capture: the making of informants such that the FBI (allegedly) outfits its targets with terrorist starter kits in order to manufacture and then foil terrorist plots.² Maalik and Naz sell various things (Catholic saint cards, lottery tickets, perfumed oils) along Fulton Street to raise some cash, but it is their loving on each other cautiously in public that makes them illegible to the FBI. Their acts of loving on each other while moving through public spaces, like the L train, are cautious because of homo-antagonistic surveillance by family, schools, and the public. This illegibility then renders them all the more suspicious to the FBI agent in the black sedan.

I want to hold on to the Maaliks and the Nazs, but not Naz & Maalik, for how they allow me to begin to think with what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of decipherment in her essay "Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes towards a Deciphering Practice." Wynter writes that a deciphering practice "seeks to identify not what texts and their signifying practice can be interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do," and how.³ It is a way of getting at, as Rinaldo Walcott puts it in his discussion of that same essay, "a reconstituted universalism proffered from the vantage point of the subaltern and the dispossessed."⁴ Therefore, it moves toward making alterable our current epistemological order rather than merely being a film or media criticism that is enfolded into, as Wynter puts it, "the instituting of the 'figure of man' and its related middle class subject (and the latter's self-representation as a genetically determined rather than discursively instituted mode of being)."⁵ Black queer love in public makes possible an anticolonial reading of the Maaliks and Nazs in the time of, for example, stop and frisk, the police torture site that is Chicago's Homan Square, the FBI's proposed Shared Responsibility Committees, its Don't Be a Puppet website, and the Department of Homeland Security's monitoring of Black Lives Matter movements.

With this frame, I turn to, first, the leaked "unclassified / for official use only" FBI intelligence assessment "Black Identity Extremist Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers," then briefly to the documentary Whose Streets? (Sabaah Folayan...