BLOW THIS SH*T UP: A Conversation With Mycall Akeem Riley
Mycall Akeem Riley is a liberatory educator and personal stylist based in Chicago, Illinois.
Words by Alanna Phillips
With Juneteenth and Pride Month just in our rearview, and our country being perhaps on the precipice of an overdue revolution, there are a lot of freedom words floating around. “Liberation” is the word Mycall Akeem Riley is most interested in. As an educator and personal stylist, Riley is committed to guiding people to freedom. Lesson by lesson, thread by thread.
I sat down with Riley over Zoom—unfortunate, because I would’ve loved to witness his energy in person. But he seemed rather comfortable talking from his own space, and I must say that even over a lagging video call, the vibes came through, loud and clear. Our conversation ventured from the specifics of liberation down to body politics and Afrofuturistic notions of a new normal.
We began our talk with a quick check-in. “I don’t lie,” he said. “I strive not to.” He was frank about the heaviness of his identities in the current moment, his Blackness and his queerness, and their attached traumas. “It can be hard to navigate, pretty hard to try to be okay, to thrive,” Riley said. I was glad someone had said it so plainly: This hurts. But it was also encouraging to talk about something like freedom amidst a systemic crisis that has felt like the opposite.
What I love most about Riley’s philosophy concerning liberation is the humility that rests in its core. As someone who has centered their life around intellectual and emotional freedom, he admits he still has his off days. “I still have so much unlearning to do,” he said, after sharing about his recent battle with razor bumps on his chin. He asserts that the small things are connected to the big things, and that even he, a liberatory-inclined educator, is not exempt from the influences of a culture fueled by self-loathing. He stresses that the ways we think of ourselves and others are heavily dependent on the skeletal framework of our society. “Some people cannot do that self reflection, but without it I think so much of our work is null and void,” Riley says.
In many cases, Riley says, our bondage can be a result of another’s quest for empowerment, and vice versa. While this appears both on a mass level (think anti-Blackness, queer-antagonism, trans-antagonism, fatphobia, etc.) and individual ones, he implies that it all comes down to neglecting to do the necessary, self-interrogative work of questioning our position in these structures and a failure to see our neighbors as just as in need of liberation as we are. He insists that liberation is not entirely about being unbothered by others, but that there should be a concern for the ways we make it harder or easier for others to get free as well. We need a come-to-Jesus, check-your-privilege moment, if you will.
Yes, we marginalized folk have privilege, too. In talking about the relationship between collective and individual liberation, we also agreed that being raised in church is one of those early, formative experiences that can often feel contradictory. How can a place so concentrated on spiritual freedom leave so many feeling bound? Many of us have witnessed racist remarks, sexist leadership, and classist attitudes, even within the walls of a sanctuary, all of which merely speak to the fact that no human is completely outside of the pervasive systems and structures of our world. This includes our institutions. Our churches, just like our schools and workplaces, are composed of people who hurt, cry, and face insecurities all the same. Our best bet in combating oppressive systems is education and investigation in every arena, which is exactly what Riley aims to do. He says as much in his Intro to LGBTQ Studies course at DePaul, and in his client work, that interrogation “is just as vital” in our classrooms as it is in our closets.
I told Riley about a dream I’d been having, more often in my waking hours than in my sleeping ones. It was one of a world in which Black people, their intersectionalities, their interests, and their joys are able to exist without external interruption or self-sabotage. This is not to say that Black people live problem free in this dreamscape, but that their problems are no longer race specific, and neither are anyone else's. It is a dream where we have recognized that our liberation depends on one another. It may sound lofty, but I think it’s unattainable, so I asked Riley how we might be able to get there.
“That’s a good question,” he said, “I think, to answer it simply, we’re gonna have to blow all this shit up.” I laughed, but he continued, “And I mean that [in terms of] the physical space we work in, the ways we think about productivity and who’s worthy of x, y, and z, and money and time and desire—but I also mean a more intrinsic, internal kind of [blowing up]. Blackness is so vast and so limitless, but we’ve been stifled for such a long time that so many people have internalized a lot of that.” He wonders if we’re ready for that sort of expansion of consciousness. “A free Black body? We don’t know what that looks like yet because our world hasn’t created a space for it; it snatched all of that.” He admits it is a scary thought, or, at the very least, a challenging one for many Black folk, but he’s set on blowing shit up all the same. “We’re gonna have to do a lot of destroying, dismantling, and then rebuilding. But to get to that place where we can rebuild, we have to get out of where we’re at.”