An infomercial from the company Dax introduces Lazercism, “The exciting technological revolution … that allows you to laser your racial glaucoma away.” Random Acts of Flyness, Season 1, Episode 1, “What Are Your Thoughts Raising Free Black Children?” (Terence Nance, HBO, 2018)
This May 2026, the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies published Prof. Jessica Ruffin’s newest article, “‘Fluid in All Aspects, Except for Race’: Black Faces and the Limits of Abstraction,” as part of a dossier edited by Tess Takahashi entitled “The Matter of Abstraction: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Experimental Film and the Arts”. In the article, Ruffin thinks with the experimental TV series Random Acts of Flyness (Terence Nance, HBO, 2018-2022) and early 20th century abstract cinema as she addresses anti-Blackness and implicit bias through the lens of aesthetics. Tracing manifestations of aesthetic bias from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy to violent encounters and contemporary news, Ruffin elaborates the central thesis that the racialized and white-supremacist content of the philosophical foundations of Euro-American aesthetics, particularly Kant’s “ideal of beauty,” introduced the racial as a transcendental aesthetic category urgently in need of engagement and intervention…