Dr. Ayanna Amoke Blackmon-Balogun
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From the beginning, I’ve been clear that this work follows a different path than traditional scholarship. I introduced the idea of a Black Paper intentionally. In the last article I shared that it is,
“Not a white paper. Not a policy brief. Not an academic article competing for space in journals that were never built with us in mind. A Black Paper is research that remembers its people. It is theory with its shoes on the ground. Analysis braided with testimony—data braided with drumbeat. It is Black scholarship that refuses to amputate spirit for respectability. It is scholarship that loves us back.”
I didn’t arrive at this concept by simply opposing a white paper. I began with a spirit of freedom and a deeper question: How do I speak freely—without the constraints of MLA, APA, or any system that polices how our knowing must appear to be valid? How do I let ideas be heard and felt in a space that is for us, about us, and belongs to us? How do I expand Black cosmology, Black intuition, and Black thought without apology?
Because this liberation model is rooted in exploration, aspiration, and a frontier of possibility, a Black Paper became the most fitting vessel. As I shaped this work, I consciously reclaimed the legacy of Black literary societies—spaces where critical thinking, reading and writing the world were acts of liberation. These gatherings lived in basements, churches, barber shops—where text helped us make sense of the world together. This seven-part series is meant to rekindle that same energy: discussion, debate, creativity, fellowship, and strategy. That is the purpose of a Black Paper.
Simply put, a Black Paper is a living space for us to read, write, share, post, listen, and think together in ways that advance the collective movement of Black people. Now, back to the Racial Liberation Ascension Model (RLAM).
As I shared earlier, my fascination with Mae Jemison led me—naturally—into the science of rocket flight. What I discovered mirrored my own liberation journey. Each phase of a rocket’s ascent became a metaphor for the stages of liberation.
So before exploring each phase of RLAM, I will briefly ground us in the corresponding science of rocket launch. Because the journey to liberation is rocket science—infused with spirit, culture, intellect, history, intuition, and a whole lot of common sense.
The Science of Ignition
In rocket science, ignition is the precise moment when a controlled chemical reaction begins inside an engine. Fuel and oxidizer meet under exact conditions of pressure and temperature, producing high-energy gases that generate thrust. Too cold, and the engine sputters. Too hot, and the vessel ruptures. Only when chemistry, timing, and pressure align does ignition occur—the moment when stillness becomes motion and potential becomes force.
Ignition is not a spark alone. It is choreography.
Consciousness has its own chemistry.
Liberation follows the same law. Awareness ignites when conditions converge. The pressure is history itself—centuries of compression under systems designed to distort, deny, and devalue Black life. The heat is lived experience—the daily friction between what we know to be true and what we are told to accept. And the timing is deeply personal and often divine—the moment when awareness and courage meet.
In physics, ignition is irreversible. Once fuel burns, it cannot be unburned. The awakened mind obeys the same law. Once the fire starts, you must decide what to do with the heat.
The Irreversible Moment
Every liberation journey begins with a moment that cannot be undone. Ignition is that moment.
It does not announce itself with certainty or spectacle. More often, it arrives quietly—disguised as discomfort, interruption, or unease. A question lingers longer than expected. A familiar explanation suddenly feels insufficient. A truth presses against the edges of your awareness, asking to be acknowledged. You may resist it at first. Most people do. But once it arrives, it refuses to leave.
Ignition is the instant when something inside you shifts—quietly at first, then unmistakably. You see something you were not supposed to see. You understand something you were never taught to name. And once you see it, you cannot return to the comfort of unknowing. You can look away, but you cannot unsee. This is both the gift and the burden of awareness.
What makes this moment so disruptive is not merely the knowledge itself, but what it does to the stories you have relied on to make sense of the world. The narratives that once explained inequity as coincidence, misunderstanding, or personal failure begin to collapse under the weight of lived experience. What was once tolerable becomes untenable. What was once invisible becomes impossible to ignore.
Ignition marks the end of innocence—not innocence as purity, but innocence as insulation. It is the moment when neutrality dissolves, when the luxury of not knowing gives way to the responsibility of seeing. This is why awakening can feel destabilizing before it feels empowering. You are not yet equipped with answers, but you are no longer protected by denial.
Phase One of the Racial Liberation Ascension Model (RLAM) begins here: with ignition—the irreversible awakening of consciousness that prepares us for ascent. Before strategy, before study, before action, there is this moment of truth. The moment when awareness lights, and the journey—whether welcomed or resisted—has already begun.
Ignition occurs when experience collides with truth.
It may come through a viral video that refuses to be ignored. A classroom lesson that suddenly feels incomplete. A book that names what you have always felt but never articulated. A personal loss that exposes the fragility of the stories you were taught to believe. The catalyst differs, but the effect is the same: the fog lifts.
Ignition often arrives before language. You feel it first as tension in the body, not clarity in the mind. Something tightens in your chest during a conversation you once tolerated. A comment that used to slide past now lands with weight. A familiar institution suddenly feels unfamiliar. You begin to sense that you have been standing inside a structure you did not design, but were expected to defend.
This is why Ignition can feel destabilizing. Awareness disrupts coherence before it offers explanation. The stories you relied on to make sense of the world begin to crack, but no new narrative has fully formed yet. You may feel suspended between knowing and understanding, between suspicion and certainty.
Many people mistake this discomfort for cynicism or bitterness. It is neither. It is discernment coming online.
Ignition does not turn you into a pessimist. It turns you into a realist. It strips away the illusion that injustice is accidental or episodic and replaces it with a more sobering truth: inequity is patterned, reinforced, and protected. Seeing this clearly does not make you hopeless. It makes you honest.
Honesty is the first requirement of liberation.
Gaslighting thrives in pre-ignition conditions. We are told that racist encounters are misunderstandings, that harm is hypersensitivity, that patterns are coincidence. Microaggressions are dismissed as figments rather than named as patterned violence. Ignition requires a sober gaze—the courage to see reality as it is, without soft focus.
This phase demands a commitment: not to despair, but to clarity. Just as a rocket cannot reverse its burn once ignition begins, awakening carries us across a threshold. Awareness lights. The engines of truth engage. And there is no turning back.
What We Know in Phase One
In Ignition, awareness is real but incomplete. This is not a failure; it is the nature of beginnings.
Most of us were educated inside colonized systems—curricula that centered Europe as civilization, whiteness as neutrality, and domination as progress. We were taught to believe in meritocracy: that hard work, politeness, and education could protect us. Many were told that racism was a relic of the past, or that we now live in a “post-racial” era.
Ignition disrupts those myths.
In this phase, people may repeat phrases they have inherited—“Black-on-Black crime,” “at-risk kids,” “good neighborhoods”—without yet understanding how these narratives obscure structural violence and state neglect. They may believe in the achievement gap, or meritocracy alone guarantees safety or cling to myths of a “post-racial” society. Confusion is common. Anger may surface. Experience collides with narrative. Racism reveals itself not as a relic of the past but as architecture in the present. Guilt, defensiveness, or grief may appear. Grief may appear in this stage because one comes to realize that they may have been operating as Freire describes as “sub-oppressors”. Dehumanization for the oppressed and the oppressor is acknowledged here.
Treat these emotions as sacred data. They are evidence that your spirit is awake.
James Baldwin reminded us that “nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Ignition is that facing—the willingness to look directly at the system that shaped our lives and say, I see you.
W.E.B. Du Bois gave language to the cost of that sight. He called it double consciousness—the sensation of seeing yourself through your own eyes and through the eyes of a society that despises you. Ignition does not resolve that tension; it reveals it. Awareness arrives before power. Knowledge arrives before community. That imbalance can feel disorienting. It is part of the journey.
In this phase, many people experience an internal split. You may recognize injustice intellectually while still feeling emotionally loyal to the institutions, relationships, or beliefs that shaped you. You may critique systems in public while defending them reflexively in private. This contradiction is not hypocrisy; it is conditioning loosening its grip.
Ignition exposes how deeply we have been trained to manage racism rather than confront it. We learn how to endure harm, reinterpret insult, and rationalize exclusion in order to survive. Awareness interrupts those survival strategies. What once felt like resilience may suddenly feel like accommodation.
This realization can provoke grief. Not only for what was done to us, but for what we were denied—the fullness of truth, the dignity of accurate history, the possibility of earlier clarity. Grief is not weakness in this phase; it is evidence of moral recalibration.
Ignition does not ask you to resolve these tensions immediately. It asks you to stay present with them. Liberation is not an escape from complexity; it is the courage to live inside it without surrendering your integrity.
“What We Do” in Phase One
Ignition calls us to movement—sometimes tentative, sometimes trembling, but movement nonetheless.
This is not the phase of mastery. It is the phase of learning aloud. Of curiosity over certainty. Of courage before confidence. Liberation does not begin with expertise; it begins with attention.
Ignition calls us to movement — sometimes trembling, but movement nonetheless. We read, listen, question inherited stories, and speak even when our voices shake. This is the beginning of praxis: aligning knowledge with action. Early steps may include:
- Attending a community forum or teach-in.
- Listening to or following Black scholars and organizers.
- Showing up in community spaces to observe and learn.
- Conversing or connecting with someone quietly navigating the same awakening.
- Journaling honestly about privilege, pain, and possibility.
- Unlearning the habit of shrinking or having impostor syndrome in white-dominated spaces.
- Seeking online or “in person” spaces with like minded folx
- Reading texts that were never assigned.
These actions may feel small. They are not. Each one disrupts denial and builds capacity. Paulo Freire called this conscientização—critical consciousness: learning to read the world and act upon what you learn.
Ignition is not about being right. It is about staying awake.
Cultural Memory of Ignition
Ignition is not new. It is ancestral. Long before we had the language of equity or anti-racism, Black people sang of freedom using the sky as metaphor. Negro spirituals—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Steal Away,” “I’ll Fly Away”—were not simply songs of heaven. They were coded technologies of hope, maps of escape, and declarations of desire.
When enslaved people sang of flight, they were imagining themselves beyond bondage—beyond plantations, beyond America’s delusions. Desire became imagination. Imagination became ignition. Ignition became action. This tradition of upward motion did not disappear. It evolved.
In the twentieth century, Sun Ra extended the spark into the cosmos. Declaring “Space is the place,” he refused the categories America used to confine Black life. His music and philosophy were not escapism; they were refusal. He insisted that Black people could imagine themselves beyond inherited scripts of racism, capitalism, and colonialism. Cosmic identity became a form of liberation consciousness.
What Sun Ra understood—and what our ancestors knew intuitively—is that imagination is not frivolous. It is strategic. A people denied the right to define reality must first reclaim the right to imagine it differently. Sun Ra’s music and cosmology were early forms of Afrofuturism — a field that links Black identity with technology, outer space, and alternative futures.
Sun Ra gives us a spark of cosmic possibility — ignition as expansion.
Octavia Butler, one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century, carried this spark into literature. Born in 1947 in Pasadena, Butler wrote Black characters into speculative worlds long before mainstream science fiction acknowledged us. Her work consistently explores themes of survival, change, community, and power.
Butler teaches that the spark of consciousness is not enough; it must lead to collective action. Awareness becomes world-building. Her work shows that flight is not always literal — sometimes it is the creative act of designing a new future.
Modern Afrofuturism — from Janelle Monáe to N.K. Jemisin to the movie, Black Panther — continues the tradition of imagining Black existence beyond the limits imposed by white supremacy: What if Black people were the inventors of tomorrow? What if we were the pilots, the scientists, the architects of new worlds? What if our liberation is tied to our ability to imagine beyond the present?
Afrofuturism consistently returns to the spark: We do not have to stay here. We can build out there. We can become what our ancestors dreamed and never had the tools to articulate.
RLAM’s rocket metaphor grows from this lineage. The Ignition phase is our spiritual countdown — the moment when we gather the fuel of memory, study, and courage and prepare to thrust beyond the gravity of oppression.
Negro spirituals are the first sparks, teaching us to desire freedom. Sun Ra is the cosmic spark, urging us to imagine boldly. Octavia Butler is the visionary spark, showing us how to build what we imagine. Gospel is the communal spark, reminding us that flight requires fellowship.
Ignition declares we were never meant to stay grounded. Awareness reminds us we already carry the coordinates of freedom within. To take flight, we remember that we have always imagined ourselves airborne—lifting, crossing, transcending. Our ancestors dreamed beyond plantations, prisons, and policies. They never stopped imagining themselves rising.
Phase One invites us not just to study this tradition, but to stand inside it—to tend the flame until it steadies, strengthens, and launches us forward. Across generations, Black creativity has been a rehearsal space for freedom, allowing us to test futures long before they became politically possible.
RLAM’s Ignition phase stands inside this lineage. It does not invent awakening; it names it.
Coda: The Song of Ignition
When a student raises their hand and says, “That’s not the whole story,” that is ignition.
When a teacher revises a lesson to tell the truth, that is ignition.
When a family names what everyone feels but no one says, that is ignition.
When someone refuses to laugh at a racist joke, that is ignition.
Ignition is not perfection.
It is permission.
Permission to feel.
Permission to question.
Permission to learn.
Permission to rise.We light the engines not because we are ready, but because we are called.
And once the engines are lit, there is no turning back.