There are many scholars whose outlook on the world I admire and find appropriately attentive to the flesh, and who are also accurate about our contemporary quagmires. But why don’t I want to slot them into the category of “the intellectual”? It’s not because they lack power or acumen, but because the question of the intellectual in these times is about who gets attention. And getting attention is about who can captivate the algorithm.
In my own personal feed, the posts I click on most frequently are from @the.black.gaze, an Instagram account created in 2019. Sometime in 2022, I saw someone repost one of Lorna Simpson’s striking paintings of a Black woman with some words from June Jordan. The juxtaposition was compelling and it contained an entire argument in around twenty words. I pushed follow and have been thinking with the account ever since.
@the.black.gaze constellates a particular nexus of Black thought. Its profile photo is an image of a printout of the first page of Calvin Warren’s essay “Black Care” in a three-ring binder; the name on the account is “Sawubona”—a Zulu phrase that translates to “I recognize you”; and its bio reads: “Looking with/through Black film and art with #blackcare #blackfeministregard *As shaped by Christina Sharpe, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Tina Campt ‘n ‘em,” with a link to support the Jericho movement for political prisoners. The account has 75.6K followers and follows no one.
There are three posts pinned to the account. One is from January 27 and features a clip of Selamawit Terrefe critiquing Black liberalism while in conversation with Frank Wilderson and Joy James. Another is a clip from April 28, 2022 of Jared Sexton saying, among other things: “All thought insofar as it is genuine thinking might best be conceived of as Black thought.” And, finally, a screenshot from 1995’s Welcome II the Terror Dome featuring Suzette Llewellyn raising shackled hands above her head. The caption quotes Selamawit Terrefe: “Perhaps Black love in the space of violence, as the remnants of the violence within which we have been thrown, looks like none other than [her] unapologetic dissent.”
The account publishes posts like these a few times a day. They are often a mixture of visual art and film clips with snippets from academic talks or articles, focusing on the intersecting legacies of colonialism and enslavement alongside insights about Black radicalism and Black power.
I enjoy this account immensely. The images are unexpected and beautiful, and the captions cropped just enough that I pause my scrolling and click through to read the whole thing, which is generally brief but citationally dense. All images, music, and words are attributed to their sources. A recent example: on January 28, 2026, the account posts a blurry image of Surya Bonaly from the 1990s doing her signature move, a backflip on ice skates, to “Drop” by The Pharcyde. The caption:
#timespacemotionandblackness
Surya Bonaly
Image rp via radio [site]
Photog (?) Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (?)#onamove1
It’s not exactly a direct commentary on Ilia Malinin—the US figure skater who, in 2026, was hyped for his ability to perform the same stunts that Bonaly was not permitted to do in the 1990s—but the differential treatment between a white male athlete and a dark-skinned Black woman is hard not to conjure. But really the focus is on Bonaly’s incredible athleticism and a Black femininity that is out of time with the current conditions of the world. All this meaning, all this analysis of historical conditions, all this provocation toward a different way of thinking and being, is suggested by this small square on a grid.
The account does very much want your attention. It wants to seduce you into the politics of the radical, which are not meant to be kept quiet. And it is smart about it. It hits beats of nostalgia (like 1990s hip-hop group the Pharcyde) while introducing just enough novelty in the key of Black feminist thought.
There’s something subversive here too. The account is anonymous, which means that even in relation to the idea of the intellectual—who we usually understand as a discrete individual, one might even say “brand”—it isn’t about boosting this particular user’s (or users’) fame. And, although certain scholars are cited more frequently than others, the account does not stay with one thinker. @the.black.gaze draws on different Black thinkers while also cannily making an argument to treat artists as theorists in order to make sense of the present.
By placing visuality at the center of its project—through eye-catching images that hold attention for that extra beat—the account shows how the workings of visuality, as a practice of domination, can bring together different archives of violence and resistance. And since we are a culture that relies so heavily on the visual (not only to charm the algorithm), being savvy in this arena is yet another mark of contemporary intellectualism.
The dangers of the visual are also about what is at stake in keeping the account anonymous. I read this choice as a deliberate decision to sidestep the traditional pressures of fame that might accompany being called an “intellectual,” especially for the problematic extraction of emotional and cognitive labor that happens frequently with Black femmes. And here’s the rub: For those who have traditionally been excluded from the category of the intellectual, inclusion might not even be desirable at all. Why not share your knowledge free from the persecution or demonization that comes from being a token Black feminist intellectual?
As evidenced by the copious citations, @the.black.gaze doesn’t negate the work of individuals but prioritizes the transmission of a perspective onto how the world has been shaped by anti-blackness, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. In piecing together its arguments through images, sounds, and words, @the.black.gaze assembles a community of thought that is part of an ongoing conversation about blackness, so that both an assessment of the simultaneous ongoing crises of the present and the potential for a radical break can rise to the surface. I see this as a manifestation of an ethos of collectivism. Although the attribution of sources and citation is important, it is because they produce a polyphony, offering multiple points of entry into seeing and thinking through the Black gaze, making an argument for both its specificity and its importance.
See →.