The Challenges of Doing Black Intellectual Work in England – Saying Goodbye to Ricky Cambridge
England is not kind to its Black population, particularly its Black activists and scholars. Universities still do not hire with the relish they do in the U.S., the thinkers in their midst nor do they provide the means for their work to continue. The closing of the African History project of Hakim Adi’s History unit at the University of [...]
OF RACIAL/COLOR SCHEMA AND BRITISH-AMERICAN RACIAL COLONIALISM
A reparations discourse with all its unfulfilled claims is still an open point of contention for those whose ancestors were used to create the wealth which the British royal family still enjoys. When Meghan Markle married into the royal family, I heard it said half-jokingly that this was not to be considered our reparations. Perhaps a Caribbean GPS is best [...]
“Until America Does Right by Black Women, Indigenous People, the Dispossessed…”
There is a line at the end of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) when Celie delivers a curse to Mister: “Until you do right by me, everything you think about (everything you touch) will crumble.” America is seen around the world now, a nation in decline, a failed dream which constantly becomes a nightmare because of its unwillingness to [...]
The Promise of Kamala Harris
We still revel in claiming firsts: First Black person to be president, senator, congressman. And this is not just a United States phenomenon. It occurs across Africa and the African Diaspora. Following enslavement and European colonialism across the Americas in particular, Black populations are still in the mode of recovery; gaining the kind of political and economic power that would [...]
POLICE VIOLENCE, THE PERFORATED BLACK BODY AND THE IM/POSSIBILITY OF ESCAPE
The most recent public case of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot in the back on Sunday, August 23, 2020, in the presence of his children, who were sitting in his car which he attempted to enter, demonstrates again how aggressive and corrupt policing can render one dead or permanently damaged in an instant. Jacob Blake, up [...]
Kwame Ture and the Global Black Power Movement*
I still love Frantz Fanon’s opening line from his chapter “On National Culture” in his classic The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1967): “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” From the time that Stokely Carmichael voiced the term “Black Power” in 1966, there was a shift from an older Civil Rights [...]