Type $h*t
on Labor, Legacy, and the Preservation of Black Genius
I’m bout that grant life. Not solely, I also believe in selling the things, sweat equity, and creating your own economy (shoutout Judah). I also believe no one owes me anything, save the opportunity (shoutout pops). So for the past two decades, I’ve applied for every available grant, fellowship, and residency I could. Submitted for things I was recommended for, recommended folks for things I submitted for, and, if you’ve read my book, you know that sometimes you have to float in the streams you want to thrive in, hence my adjacency and one degree of separation from MacArthur and now Doris Duke winners.
Most recently, I submitted the idea of archival practice as both a tangible possibility and a social experiment in the grant space — to gauge whether archiving the intangible yet substantiated intellectual property created by Black folks throughout the diaspora (usually within the safe haven of “the culture”) would be seen as a viable project to fund. Neither made it past a few rounds, except this last jont I submitted as part of a larger performance art piece comprised of three separate works. The following started as part of a conversation with the “council”, two of my closest friends, each respected in their own fields, with whom I discuss, as some of us do, the state of the African diaspora and the Black American influence on global culture, commerce, economy, and intellectual property. The following is the foundation for what I call. “The Unpaid Work Archive”.
By the end of 2015, black buying power was at $1.98 Trillion, enough to rank if we were a single nation among the top 15 countries in spending power. Yet the ability to spend does not equate to wealth acquisition, sustainability, or equity in how we are valued. What it does mean is that we, as a collective, are buyers. Not savers or accumulators but purchasers of goods. Whether that be the psychological and physical byproducts of systemic oppressive tactics and institutional embargoes on self-sustainability, or the empty platitudes from the majority that claim we would thrive if we were to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, as evidenced by the Rosewood, Black Wall Street, and Oscarville, all, by the by, were destroyed by those same proponents of bootstrap upward mobility.
Likewise, the most recent rollback of all things DEI, in concert with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, is part of the great experiment we call America, one that has always maintained and enforced the double-tongued ways in which we, as a country, speak about democracy, fairness, and inclusion. When the plaque at the foot of the statue asked that the huddled masses be welcomed, there was an asterisk somewhere that led to fine print on parchment, untethered from the Constitution, that added the underlying understanding that those huddled masses were to be of a certain hue and open to assimilation without cultural preservation.
At least that’s the latest talking point from those who want to roll back the clock faster than Walmart temp knockoffs. The most current language that is floating is the idea of homogenous culture, sadly the buy-in by black free thinkers and conservatives who fall into the same pick-me devices and traps as other social and racial groups that conflates adjacency with acceptance, usually find that irrespective of fame, fortune or family, that melanin and provenance oft times lead to you holding the bag for those who merely tolerated you until they needed a scapegoat to, well, hold the bag.
In concert with these foundational understandings and while composing songs for the play Young John Lewis, I found myself down the rabbit hole of the civil rights movement; songs of protest, the unsung heroes usually marginalized because they didn't fit a neat narrative, and the legacy of Black folk who stood on business, ten toes. All that led me to some thoughts as we confront this current uptick in black conservative pseudo-intellectuals, the MAGA and MAGA adjacent, fascists, and the erasure and obscuring of the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, even when discussed amongst Jewish people with differing understandings of those terms as they stand on either side of the genocide in Palestine. We exist in a space where mental and verbal gymnastics happen amongst these groups, in some instances, clear cognitive dissonance and dissociation, and yet, in the midst of these conversations, members from these groups use terms taken directly from African American culture.1
Why and How Sway?
If my people haven’t contributed to the fabric of this country and were not considered in the foundational documents or amendments, why are they using the language of the oppressed? If there is nothing enviable about black culture and language, why are they/you using it and then acting as if our terms, music, art, or whatever cultural contributions we provide, are somehow, now, American in essence? Nah moe. I remember the colloquial terms and black cultural seasonings of my youth that found their way into advertising, product placements, movies, songs, and on stages, arriving there not as an homage but as stolen property. My thoughts also turned to who exactly benefits from this unattributed intellectual property of language and cultural sauce? Who eats off the intangible cultural creations that are born from black culture, and then later used by outside forces to extract a portion of that 1.98 trillion dollars out of our communities?
Having worked at one of the top US law firms with an amazing IP practice group, I learned more about trademarks and patents while preparing filings and supporting documents for submission to the USPTO or Library of Congress. The understanding of how IP is controlled and enforced became clear: who is first to market, and whether there is confusion in the marketplace around that mark, are key to establishing one's case. As a musician, I’d been filing copyright forms for decades, with the understanding that owning was far more beneficial than not owning.
The conversation around intellectual property in America tends to focus on patents, trademarks, copyrights — all ownership structures legible to institutions. But Black cultural production has historically existed in a more complicated space. Much of it emerges communally, improvisationally, orally, spatially, socially — before it is ever formally codified. That energy of creating something from nothing, which is often part of the brilliance of Black cultural practice, has also made it extraordinarily vulnerable to extraction. America has consistently consumed Black invention while resisting the idea that Black creators should maintain long-term ownership, attribution, or economic participation in what they create.
What happened to the creators of Whasssssup, the high five? Where are the creators from the LGBTQIA+ community who have made “clock it” and the use of ASL to sign for 8, as in she/he/they ate, the cultural standard that has white folks (and some of my melanated peoples) tapping the wrong fingers to emulate the genius of metaphor that is now an acceptable American cultural staple? A term and gesture that has moved from the deep margins of black gay culture, into black/brown cultural margins, into the broader white cultural lexicon without provenance or remuneration.
How has the term woke, a byproduct of the 1920’s and mostly attributed to its usage by Lead Belly in an effort to warn people about racial discrimination and danger present in the South, been turned into this bastardized politicized version coopted and conflated by far-right and right-leaning conservatives to mean far-left liberal ideology? Each of these terms serves as an example of how those on the outside of culture and coded language are both overly sensitive and severely uninformed, due to their own biases. Sadly, these are also just two out of the millions of receipts, with “receipts” being an example of standard vocabulary that, when contextualized through a cultural lens, conveys a different intent, which could be presented to exhibit the abuse of our intellectual property.
Each of those words, phrases, and gestures originated in Black American life, utilizing language that Black folks have been remixing, coding, and improvising since this country decided we weren’t fully human. This use of language and the language itself is more than slang; this is living linguistic architecture, bearing meaning that is simultaneously spiritual and secular, coded by design to move around and beneath the institutional systems of race and classism that have governed this country since its founding. It is language built for survival, for communion, for joy, and it has consistently been taken.
At the center of American cultural consumables exported throughout the planet, Black trauma and the language of that trauma, our language, mannerisms, and intellect have also been our greatest export and our most exploited and unremunerated product. Mitigated by the billion-dollar media, fashion, and sports industries, which exact profits that rarely reach the pockets of the creators of these goods. This particular kind of egregious theft that happens in America is never treated as theft because it is veiled as gratitude and adjacency, as a vehicle toward acceptance by the larger populace. By the time it reaches the hype beasts and mass visibility, it is frequently detached from its provenance, stripped of context, and either repackaged as someone else's innovation or presented as having no beginning at all.
At the height of the social media creator/influencer economies, we saw it in TikTok and IG dance challenge repackaging, pandemic inventions, and even memes and stories co-opted to obscure their origins, with original creators/influencers of color overlooked by major brands to cow-tow to the white usurpers of intellectual property.
Verily, verily, there is nothing new under the sun, says the writer in Ecclesiastes 1:9, and this, too, is not new. It is the pattern, older than recorded music and older than film. Black labor built the economic foundations of the United States through literal extraction of physical work, and the afterlife of that extraction evolved into culture itself. Minstrelsy transformed Black expression into commercial entertainment for white audiences while excluding Black people from both economic benefit and authorship. Blues, jazz2, rock and roll, house music, techno, hip hop, dance vernacular, slang, fashion, aesthetic frameworks, and digital cultural language — all have followed similar trajectories.
What disappears in this process is provenance, and provenance matters because it explains how something came into being. It carries geography, conditions, labor, influence, risk, and meaning. Without it, culture becomes aesthetic residue detached from the people who produced it. A dance, phrase, musical approach, or style is absorbed into the zeitgeist of the moment as an invention or innovation from the ether, when the minds and bodies that create the work should be credited with its invention and be the subjects of any income or opportunity generated. However, the social conditions that produced the work also disappear, and with them any possibility of understanding culture as labor rather than spontaneous entertainment.
We need a spot to house these cultural assets, which is why I proposed creating The Unpaid Work Archive to address the disappearance of provenance. The Archive is not simply a collection of ephemera but is an opportunity to build a counter-system. It looks to examine the labor, process, and emotional and intellectual infrastructure behind creation. The Archive would be used to interrogate Black cultural labor with the same intent reserved for financial assets, property records, or institutional histories. This focus on labor happens because one of the most effective mechanisms of extraction is making labor invisible. Once labor disappears, culture appears as a natural occurrence rather than as the product of people, environments, histories, and specific conditions. All of which creates tangible pathways toward economic return, not just historical acknowledgment. The Archive is focused on the gap between cultural influence and material benefit and attempts to trace that disconnect in real time.
The Archive project also examines how archives themselves function politically: often treated as neutral repositories, they are systems of governance and, as of late, are used to perpetuate an agenda seeking to erase history. An archive determines what survives, what counts as legitimate knowledge, and whose contributions become historically legible. Historically, Black cultural production has often entered institutional archives only after its value has already been extracted elsewhere. By then, the originating labor is secondary to the value generated downstream. The Archive pushes against that logic by centering attribution, lineage, and economic continuity from the outset. It explores alternative models of licensing, ownership, and value tracking that make visible how Black cultural production circulates through mainstream systems — who profits, and who gets written out along the way.
Digital culture accelerated this process exponentially. Platform economies thrive on the circulation of content without context. Algorithms reward replication over origin as visibility supplants authorship. The internet, in tandem with manipulated and flattened timelines and geographies, made provenance increasingly difficult to trace while simultaneously generating enormous economic value from Black cultural output. Entire industries now depend on forms of Black expression that move at speeds too fast for attribution systems to meaningfully keep up. To keep it a solid bean: even the math can be made to math when it comes to who gets seen — these algorithms can be mathematically weighted to favor one creator over another, erasing attribution and provenance in the process.
Artificial intelligence intensifies this further. Large language models, image generators, recommendation systems, and algorithmic training structures absorb enormous quantities of human cultural production, including Black language, aesthetics, rhythms, humor, and social practices, often without meaningful consent, compensation, or acknowledgment. We are entering a period in which not only the products of Black culture but also the patterns of Black thought and improvisation are becoming extractable assets. Black language, or what has been called AAVE, is being ingested by these LLMs and other systems that will spit it back out, stripped to the frame, without accreditation, and once rendered neutral, sold back to those originating communities in pay-per-use increments or subscription models.
Existing intellectual property frameworks are ill-equipped to address this because many were designed around static objects and individual ownership. Black cultural production often functions differently — iterative, communal, improvisational, geographically specific, deeply relational. America benefits from these forms, culturally and economically, while maintaining systems that are structurally incapable of protecting it. I feel that the Archive is not just an artist's attempt to make an audience uncomfortable, but beyond that, it has the opportunity to create actual systems with real-life impact. It is ultimately about infrastructure.
I’m asking whether systems can be designed to preserve provenance alongside participation. Whether attribution can function as something more than symbolic recognition. Whether archives can serve as tools for economic continuity rather than posthumous validation. The issue has never been whether Black culture influences mainstream culture. We already know. The question is whether the systems that receive those contributions can maintain context, attribution, and economic return once those ideas leave the communities that created them. Right now, most are not.
So what we need and what is required is governance inside institutions willing to understand cultural labor not as the generation of disposable content but as labor with material consequences. We need our own archive that documents not just our products, but also conditions. It requires updated systems that recognize provenance as economic infrastructure rather than a historical footnote. Most importantly, it requires abandoning the idea that theft only occurs when something physical is removed. Cultural extraction is still extraction. The fact that America celebrates the product while obscuring the producer does not make the process benign. It makes the theft harder to name or seeks to pass that theft off as homogenization.
Calling a thief a thief matters because once provenance disappears, labor becomes invisible, and cultural contribution becomes detached from economic return; history can be rewritten, exploitation is normalized, and entire communities remain locked in cycles of not profiting from what they produce, and we have to collectively give an aht-aht to this extraction.
Moving forward, we need to ask who created it, who spread it, and who got paid when it went global or viral…
and who didn’t.
easy
k
about:
KOKAYI
Artist | Author | Speaker | Producer | Preeminent Improvisational Vocalist, GRAMMY-nominated musician, and multidisciplinary fine artist, is a Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition (the first emcee to have achieved this distinction). Host of the Interledger Foundation’s Future/Money podcast. Author of You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales, creator of HUBRI$ and Blackness and the Infinite Potential Well, whose artistry and work reflect a rich tapestry of life experiences shaped by DC and the cultural innovations of the Black diaspora—an enduring legacy that continues to shape the world, often without the proper recognition. Here for all the panel discussions, podcasts, interviews, DJ gigs, and speaking engagements, should you need me, holla.
where to holla: linktree | Website | IG | Linkedin
Sidebar and note: I will not yet address the diaspora war efforts of FBA/ADOS individuals specifically when there are maps, books, and an understanding that black folks in America, whether descendants from indigenous peoples or formerly enslaved Africans, are from the same people. History books exist, as does discernment and understanding. Yes, the crucible of America is responsible for the unique culture of black/African Americans reared in the United States, and our fights to self-determine and wrest the recognition as human beings with inalienable rights have been foundational for the benefit of othered groups who have faced similar fights. However, this does not give us the right to ask the rest of the diaspora to call us Saib… and if you don’t get that reference, holla at your history teacher.
This word is a marketing tool. Some refer to this as Black classical music or Black American Music. The term “jazz” has an etymology that was both sexual in nature and considered derogatory in the way in which the empowered version of this word was used to discriminate against black/brown artists, in its use to demean and depict artists as atavistic in nature and experience. The use herein is only to give a box to the unboxable beauty of black musical expression.