Ethics That Move, Morality That Captures
Bayo Akomolafe is someone I turn to in troubling times. His work unsettles, it disturbs, it asks the kinds of questions I find myself asking—questions that don’t just seek answers but invite a deeper wrestling. His thinking is an excavation, an unearthing of the structures we assume to be solid, the norms we inherit as fixed, the moralities we cling to for stability. He troubles these things, not to destroy them, but to remind us that they were never as stable as we imagined.
This article is inspired by my engagement with his thinking. Specifically, the way he reframes ethics as an erotic force of matter and relationality—a kind of sacred, uncontrollable flow—and morality as the moment when that flow gets captured, solidified into rules, hierarchies, and binaries. This distinction helps me articulate something I’ve felt for a long time: that the spaces of deepest transformation—the hush harbors of history, the hip-hop cyphers, the Black spiritual underground—are not moral spaces in the conventional sense. They are ethical spaces, places where meaning is fluid, where boundaries are troubled, where “right” and “wrong” are less important than what is alive, what is real, what moves.
Think of ice floating in a river.
That ice cube is morality—it is ethics, captured for a moment, temporarily frozen into a form, a rule, a structure. But it is still made of the same thing as the river. And given time, it will melt. It will return to flow.
And here’s the thing about movement: it threatens. It disturbs. It refuses to be contained. That’s why, when systems of order are challenged, they create monsters—figures who are not dangerous in and of themselves, but whose very presence exposes the hidden violence of the norm.
Christendom built its power on frozen morality—on boundaries, exclusions, and rigid definitions of who belongs and who does not. But what happens when those marginalized bodies begin to move? What happens when the ice starts to crack?
It tries to name them monsters.
But the monster does not create disorder—it reveals that disorder was already there.
The enslaved preacher in the hush harbor was a monster to the plantation because his very existence revealed that God was not on the side of the oppressor.
Hip-hop was a monster to the music industry because it proved that ownership, authenticity, and value were never as fixed as the industry wanted people to believe.
The queer Black theologian remixing sacred texts is a monster to the church because they expose the false moral binaries that Christianity has used to justify exclusion.
But the monster does not bring the chaos. The monster reveals that chaos was already there, simmering beneath the surface of so-called order.
I'm a Muthaf*cking Monster
Let’s talk about monsters.
I am a Black queer theologian, a remixer of sacred texts, a disrupter of the binaries that structure belonging in Christian spaces. And in a world where morality functions to preserve the status quo, anyone who refuses capture is a threat. The hush harbor preacher was a monster to the plantation. The hip-hop artist sampling old records was a monster to the music industry. The queer theologian who names their own body as holy is a monster to the church.
But the monster does not create violence.
The monster exposes it.
The monster does not break the system.
The monster reveals that the system was already broken.
And that’s what I want to explore here—what it means to live as an ethical force in a world that prefers morality, what it means to be in flow when the world demands you be frozen, what it means to be the monster that forces people to see what they do not want to see.
In trying to explain ethics, Bayo points to a film called Concrete Utopia. It's a South Korean film about survival after a devastating earthquake, one apartment building is left standing while the rest of the city is in ruins. The people inside have to decide—do they open their doors to the thousands of survivors coming toward them, or do they close them? At first, their morality seems reasonable: there is limited space, and limited food. They need rules.
But soon, those rules harden into something else. The people who weren’t original tenants are forcibly expelled. Fascism emerges in the name of survival.
Then, a rupture occurs: water bursts forth from underground, disrupting everything.
That moment—that breaking open—is what ethics does to morality. It reveals that what was called “just” was actually violence disguised as order.I think about that rupture every time someone tells me I don’t belong in the church.
I think about it when people say my existence is against God’s design, when they call queerness rebellion, when they claim that to be fully myself is to be in sin. I think about how it is not me that is violent—it is the system that requires my erasure to function.
I am a rupture. I am a monster. But only because I refuse to be frozen into the morality they need to smoke screen their violence and keep their structures intact. And this is what I mean when I say the monster doesn’t create violence—it reveals it. The hush harbor preacher, the hip-hop artist, the queer theologian—they were never the threat. The threat was always the system that needed them to be monsters to justify its own violence.
Hip-Hop as a Fugitive Space: The Sound of the Uninvited
Hip-hop didn’t start as a movement. It started as survival.
In the late ’70s, while mainstream America was still grooving to disco and selling the dream of middle-class prosperity, the Bronx was burning. Buildings were abandoned or set on fire for insurance payouts. Poverty was deepening. Violence was rising. The world outside looked like it was thriving, but for Black and Brown kids in New York, they were not invited to the party—literally.
Disco clubs had dress codes. They had velvet ropes. They had unspoken socio-economic requirements that meant if you were poor, Black, Brown, or living in the Bronx, you weren’t welcome.
So hip-hop was born because there was nowhere else for divine potential to go.
Divine potential has always had to find a fugitive space. The hush harbor was one of those spaces. Hip-hop was another.
DJ Kool Herc didn’t throw the first block party because he was trying to change the world. He just wanted to create a space where kids like him—kids from Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Black neighborhoods—could exist, dance, and be free. Hip-hop was a hush harbor of sound, a gathering of the uninvited, a space where those considered “nothing” made something the world couldn’t ignore.
This is why hip-hop is ethics, not morality.
Morality belongs to the system—the system that decided who was allowed in, who was worthy, who deserved access.
Ethics belongs to the people—the people who built something out of what was left behind, who refused to accept that they were disposable, who remixed the ruins into a movement.
Hip-hop is disruptive because it wasn’t planned, sanctioned, or even expected to survive. It came from people who weren’t supposed to create anything. And yet, from the abjection and nothingness of black American neighborhoods of New York, it took over the world.
The same thing happened in the hush harbor. It eventually became the Black Church and the greenhouse for civil rights movements that would influence the globe.
The same thing is happening in queer theology.
The system always assumes that if you are excluded, you will disappear.
But what happens when the ones cast out refuse to go? What happens when they build their own spaces? Their own theology? Their own culture?
That’s when the system panics.
That’s when the monsters are named.
But I prefer to name myself.
I Am A Monster Because I'm A Rupture & I Refuse Capture
And if I am a monster it is because I am a rupture. Since I refuse to be frozen into the morality they need to keep their structures intact.
They've made me a monster.
And these days I wear the title proudly.
Monsters like queerness destabilize categories.
A vampire is both alive and dead.
A werewolf is both human and animal. Monsters disturb moral and binary structures because they are about maintaining order—and monsters are the ones who remind us that the order is a lie.
Morality is rigid.
Ethics is fluid.
And monsters remind us that fluidity is the deeper truth.
Monsters are prophets.
Monsters are revealers.
Monsters are possibilities that the system tried to kill but could not destroy.
So if I am a monster, I will own it.
I will stand in the hush harbor and sing.
I will stand on the Bronx block and rhyme.
I will stand in the sanctuary and preach.
And I will remind the world that the monster was never the danger.
The danger was the system that needed a monster to justify its own violence.