 As Africana philosophy becomes a professionally recognized field (as opposed to a vibrant but heterodox enterprise or tradition, overlapping only slightly with mainstream knowledge production), the work begins, one might say, to riff on the discipline’s accepted movements and schools. Africana professional philosophers put mainstream professional resources into conversation with many of the concerns and innovations that animated the earlier philosophies born of struggle. Far from simply applying sophisticated resources to pre-philosophical raw material, this exercise at its best blends two modes of philosophical reflection. One enjoys mainstream recognition, while the other benefits from testing and refinement by application in areas that its counterpart ignores; and each can, in principle, compensate for shortcomings in the other. What results is work that often—as Moten, following Robinson, says of Black radical Marxism—involves both “retention and disruption, originality and response” (Moten 2017,  9–10).[3]  (It is also what one might say of the difference that Afro-diasporic musical practices made in and to European traditions, producing new forms like samba and jazz along the way. Hence the appeal to “riffing.”)