Africa World Now Project

I opened today's program with a track titled ALie Nation Ft. John Trudell by A Tribe Called Red. As a tribute to all indigenous peoples of the Americas. Considering tomorrow, we at AWNP pay tribute to the survival of indigenous peoples despite decades of marginalization, oppression, and attempts to rewrite their historical contributions to the formation of the US.

Through their material and spiritual contributions…captured in cultural production, indigenous communities continue to live and evolve their traditional ways of being…

This process of and evolution in the development of cultural production is not categorically different than the processes of cultural production from Africans and people of Africa descent around the world…

Today, we will listen to Part 1 of a two-part series titled: Hip Hop as Critical Consciousness. In this series, we will engage a range of artists, activist, & thinkers in deeply exploring the essence of and finding the continuities in African and Diasporic sociopolitical thought and behavior—focusing on hip hop as a form of cultural expression and creative resistance.

The series specifically seeks to engage in a substantive discourse on the viability of hip hop being a platform for developing a critical consciousness. A platform based in Pan African activity that has implications for all oppressed people.

The idea is rooted in moving the conversation beyond "mainstream" discourse about hip hop and situate it in a proper context…addressing real-time problems faced by African and African descendant communities across the globe…

It does this…by examining the origins and continuities in African and Diasporic dimensions of hip hop…and secondly, looking @ its ability to transmit complex messages that have collective sensibilities in inform the formation of a critical consciousness…

With this, a number of fundamental questions arise, which asks, but are but are not limited to:

1. What culture is hip hop reflecting—globally?

2. How can hip hop be used as a force for creative resistance?

3. Can hip hop serve as a platform for developing a critical consciousness? If, so, in what can we root it?

4. What is the role of the artist?...Or More importantly what is the role and responsibility of the listeners?

Today, in this Part I of this series…will explore East African hip hop—specifically Kenyan hip hop with Dr. Priscilla Gitonga. Dr. Gitonga is an scholar and artist who currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!

The ability to make language—words extend from the page…to become alive… to dance in the mind of a reader…creating vivid pictures that map time and space…weaving multiple experiences into a common tapestry of human history is an ability that only a few writers possess. It would not be a stretch to place such writers in the deep tradition passed down by generations of ancient priest, mystics, thinkers, storytellers, teachers who are often referred to as oracles.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o fits seamlessly in the long line of historical oracles who possess foresight and insight in the continuities that crisscross our human past, present, and future. Every group of people have these oracles, but to hear them…to see them is an art. We have lost the patience and humility to listen to them. These vessels of ancestors, conveyors of deep thought…channelers of truths…that provide guidance for our deep praxis of humanity.

Ngũgĩ, as he is known, comes from an oral tradition of storytellers. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who sits alongside the likes of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in the modern African pantheon, he is a recurrent favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ngũgĩ’s life encompasses British colonialism and the anticolonial struggle for Kenyan independence; the tragedy of despotism in a free Africa; and exile…all of which he effortlessly weaves into his work.

According to a November 16, 2016 interview in the Financial Times with Ngũgĩ , the author recounts Ngũgĩ’s reflection of winning a Nobel:

“A Nobel would be validating but not essential.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 a village north of Nairobi, one of 28 children. In the 1950s, his older brother, Good Wallace, joined the Mau Mau anticolonial resistance against the British occupation whose prison camps were described by the then-solicitor general as having been “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia”, according to previously secret documents released by the British Foreign Office in 2012.

According to Ngũgĩ in the article:

The British response to the rebellion was brutal and relentless. It even extended to weaponizing language itself”

Further recalling this period, Ngũgĩ goes on in the article to say that it is was “the British who gave movement the name of Mau Mau— as if to say it was a meaningless movement”. Ngũgĩ reasons that “If they had said or called it the, ‘Land and Freedom Army’, as [the fighters] called it themselves, then they would be articulating the aims of the movement, right?”

Today, I invite you to listen to a recent reflection by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Dr. Micere Githae-Mugo…on their work…The Trail of Dedan Kimathi.

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a collaboration between Ngũgĩ and Mi Sheree-Mugo, is a response to colonialist writings about the Land and Freedom Army (aka the Mau Mau movement), which traditionally depicted the movement and its leader, Dedan Kimathi, as mentally unbalanced and vicious. They choose to present a counter narrative to this image by highlighting how the movement and its leader was seen by many of the peasants and laborers of Kenya.

In this reflection, they explore the politics of memory; the relationship between naming, forms of power, and resistance.

Enjoy the program

The dominant narrative presented on the ANC, the struggle against South African Apartheid, the conditions and systems implemented when the ANC became the ruling party suggest that in a post-Apartheid South Africa, the people of South Africa experience distinctly identifiable improvements in their lived-conditions.

However, according to Benjamin Fogel and Sean Jacobs, in their article Zuma is not the Only Problem, “Over two decades after taking power, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is less associated with national liberation than with corruption, cronyism, and neoliberal economic policies.”

Radical platforms remain at the grassroots. Many farm workers in the Western Cape province, for instance, have joined the Commercial Stevadoring and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU) — a relatively small union that employs militant class politics in its struggle against some of the most powerful commercial agricultural interests in the country. As well as, the Shack Dwellers Movement, South Africa’s oldest social movement, who continue to mobilize for more equitable access to land, housing, and services with tremendous success, even in the face of state repression and political assassinations.”

The former trade union leader turned billionaire, Ramaphosa with the backing of the ANC, unseated, Zuma, who was once considered to be the shrewd, political astute Teflon-lined leader of the ANC, to become the current president of South Africa.

While Ramaphosa’s “supporters have heralded his victory as a triumph over the corruption, criminality, incompetence, and repression that have characterized Zuma’s presidency. Once a darling of the Left, Ramaphosa’s reputation will forever be stained by his involvement in the 2012 Marikana massacre.

To relegate systemic inequality, corruption, and violence to one person, negates the reality that the nexus within which these interdependent practices thrive are contradictory to the values and ideals that South Africans rooted, and root, their resistance in.

Today, we invited Nii Akuetteh back to have a much-needed conversation on the current conditions in South Africa.

Nii Akuetteh is an independent Africa policy analyst based in Washington, DC and was the Executive Director of African Immigrants Caucus. He was formerly the Executive Director of Africa Action and former director of OSI West Africa in Nigeria. Prior to that he was a Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of African Affairs and former Research Director at TransAfrica Forum. Mr. Akuetteh appears regularly on various media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, NPR, The Real News Network and many more.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Enjoy the program

“As I face Africa, I ask myself: What is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain?”

This was a question W.E.B. Du Bois asked himself in 1940 and we might imagine time and again before and after that moment. It was the question that guided his scholarship and his activism. Africa, was as Nahum Dmitri Chandler has argued, “the limit of the world,” and thus we might say, the beginning of Du Bois’s imagination for a future world, free of the toil and misery of modernity. How to explain this feeling was also how to produce an epistemological break that would generate a liberative politics out of that very feeling.

Born 150 years ago on February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began his journey back to the future through his grandmother Violet’s memory of a song her ancestors brought from Africa. It was that song which he heard again in the churches he visited while attending Fisk University. The search for the meaning of that song took him to the libraries of all the major Western universities, whilst becoming the first African to receive a PhD from Harvard. And then to Atlanta, where he found it being sang again in the deep South. He wrote about it in The Negro, published in 1915 and then attempted to place the urgency of the plight of its producers before the international community with his series of Pan African Conferences during the 1920s. He then connected it to the Mother herself, with his 1924 trip to Liberia.

Its meaning was loudest to him in 1945, where in Manchester England, a younger Du Bois discoverers of what it meant to be African in the world during the 5th Pan African Congress, inaugurating in many respects the African independence movements.

A year later, he sat down to remap his earlier works on Africa in his major undertaking, The World and Africa.

He connected the song back to the soil when he left the United States to live permanently in the Ghana imagined by Kwame Nkrumah’s movement. And it was there where he uttered the words:

“Awake, awake, O sleeping world,

Honour the sun;

Worship the stars, those vaster suns

Who rule the night

Where black is bright

And all unselfish work is right

And greed is sin.

And Africa leads on;

Pan Africa...”

And so it must lead…

We will think of W.E.B. Du Bois as more than a narrator of American racial experiences, but as one who understood those experiences to be “but a local phase of a world problem.” Or we will not think truly with Du Bois. For this is what his work ultimately meant, and what it should continue to mean for us.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

According to Hotep Idris Galeta, the famed south African jazz-musician and educator, in his article, "The Development of Jazz in South Africa", he wrote that "South African Jazz has had many elements contributing to its evolution and development. The most prominent and significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the country’s inhabitants and the influence of African/American musical culture upon it over the years. These two variants coupled with an environment of legislated racism, gross human rights violations, created the unique artistic forge and mold responsible for the evolution of South African Jazz. The first informal contact the inhabitants of Cape Town had with African Americans was during the American Civil War, when the Confederate warship the “Alabama” came into the port of Cape Town in 1862 to replenish its supplies. The “Alabama” patrolled the South Atlantic where it would lie in wait for Union Ships to come around the Cape from the Far East on its way to the east coast ports of Philadelphia, New York, New Port and Boston. It would then attack, plunder and sink them. The “Alabama” was one of the most notorious and feared Southern commerce raiders on patrol in the South Atlantic sending some fifty-eight Union vessels to the bottom of the ocean during her two year patrol.

The Alabama was finally tracked down and sunk off the coast of France by a Union Warship on the 19th of June 1864.

On June 19th 1890 South Africans had their first formal contact with black-Americans and Black-American music when the “Virginia Jubilee Singers” from Hampton Virginia presented a series of concerts in Cape Town. Orpheus McAdoo was born in 1858 in Greensborough, North Carolina. As a young man he attended the Hampton Institute in Hampton Virginia, where he studied and graduated as a teacher in 1876. Before turning to music as a professional career in 1886 he taught school in Pulaski and Accomac Counties in the state of Virginia for ten years. In 1886 he toured Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East after joining five members of the original Fisk Jubilee singers. Upon his return to the U.S. a year or two later McAdoo formed his own company by recruiting some ex students and graduates from Hampton amongst who were his future wife Mattie Allen and his brother Eugene.

South Africa has deep and clearly identifiable connections to the African diaspora, particularly in the experiences of people of African descent who live in the U.S.

What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s tribute to Hugh Masekela who transition to the ancestral realm on January 23 2018, through a collage of music, a 2012 Ted-talk by Hugh Masekela himself, 2014 interview with AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali, and reflections from various people who live in Southern African—specifically Malawi where Mwiza Munthali is currently on the ground…

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Music:

J Dilla-African Rhythms

Hugh Maskela-Herb Alpert & Hugh Masekela - Foreign Natives

Hugh Masekela - Night in Tunisia

Hugh Masekela - The Big Apple

HUGH MASEKELA Bajabula Bonke (Healing Song)

Hugh Masekela- If Theres Anybody Out There

To understand, analysis, or critique the conditions within which the African world lives without centering the role of settler colonialism as a function of racial capitalism has proven to be limited in range and scope in understanding the conditions within which the African world finds itself, today.

Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. It is because of this fact that radical historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.”

In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, released January 22, 2018, Gerald Horne shows that the seventeenth century was an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex-self-sustaining system involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “the United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers.

Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Gerald Horne provides a harrowing map of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history.

Monthly Review Press argues that Gerald Horne’s work is an essential tool that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.”

What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s senior research, content contributor, and production director, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne.

Gerald Horne is John J. and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston. A prolific scholar, he has published more than three dozen books, including Confronting Black Jacobins and Race to Revolution, Monthly Review Press; The Counter Revolution of 1776 among many.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

In a 1968 lecture, Walter Rodney argued that “the first dilemma which one faces in attempting to utilize African history as one of the weapons in our struggle is a realization that, in a very real sense, we, as black people, are placed in [the] invidious position of having to justify our existence by antecedents, having to prove our humanity by what went before. Now this is very invidious. Humanity is not a thing one proves. One asserts [it] perhaps, or one accepts [it]. One doesn't really set out to prove it.

Rodney continues, “But, unfortunately, the historical circumstances in which black people have evolved in recent centuries have implanted in the minds of black brothers and sisters a certain historical conception and, in order to destroy that historical conception, one has to engage in this type of game of saying, "This is what the white man said but no, it isn't really so, we have a past," and that sort of thing.”

It is absolutely not surprise, and quite frankly highly problematic that overtly racist comments in main stream discourse are once again being normalized. A la the days of Jim Crow U.S., colonial Africa and Caribbean, Apartheid South Africa.

The fall out (albeit I personally am not sure why there is such surprise) from the recent report of comments from the White House about African countries and Haitian citizens being from s-hole countries.

According to a Washington Post article by Philip Bump titled Most Americans consider Trumps s-hole comments racist, the racist comment also started another line of questioning that unfolded on Google. On the afternoon of Jan. 11, after The Post report, searches for “is Trump racist” spiked in the United States. The article highlights a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans think that Trump’s comments were racist. That includes majorities of independents and nearly all Democrats. It includes just over half of whites, 7 in 10 Hispanics and nearly 9 in 10 black Americans. White men, Republicans and white people without college degrees were more likely to say that the comments weren’t racist.”

The African Union, South Africans protested in Johannesburg, Haitian and Haitian-American citizens, Namibia, Senegal, Nigeria, Bostwana, Ghana, nearly all African countries responded to the comments made by Trump. Have not read nor heard much about the Northern portion of the African continent. Likely Trump nor these nations consider themselves a part of the African continent, hence the often-proliferated separation of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. But hat for another show.

Today, we will move beyond racist comments made by an undebatable racist President (there’s no debate on this issue). Our program will explore the context, historical and contemporary within which these comments can actually be made, but more importantly why is this a surprise

Joining us today is Nii Akuetteh an independent Africa policy analyst based in Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of African Immigrants Caucus. He was formerly the Executive Director of Africa Action and former director of OSI West Africa in Nigeria. Prior to that he was a Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of African Affair and former Research Director at TransAfrica Forum. Mr. Akuetteh appears regularly on various media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, NPR, The Real News Network and more.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

The idea and practice of maroonage is an intriguing part of the vast story of African world resistance; a story that has deep implications on the idea and practice of freedom for the 21st century; it provides alternative models of social organization that challenge the current model of the nation-state; and a lens through which an African world future can be brought into sharp view—a sort of lens through which the thoughts and actions of those who say they are for liberation, justice, and equality can be measured.

It must be noted that freedom was difficult to maintain for many maroon communities. For example, a settlement of rebellious slaves was razed on Hispaniola in 1522. In Peru, Gonzalo Pizzaro sent a force to conquer 200 maroons who were living in a marshy area just north of Lima. In 1545, a bloody battle was fought in which every one of these “blacks” was killed. In 1795, a large band of Venezuelan slaves from the Ser-ra-nia de Coro region rose in revolt and established a close-knit chain of mountain retreats. Expeditions sent out by the Spanish quickly subdued them. A group of local planters reduced a runaway community near Mobile, Alabama, in 1827. The fugitives had inhabited the site for "years" prior to its destruction.

At least four cases exist of Cuban maroon settlements that negotiated permanent treaties with the island's Spanish colonizers. Carlos Rojas, in the province of Matanzas, and Palenque, near Havana, are two examples. A third is the settlement of Poblado del Cobre in Oriente province. The origins of this last community went far back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. For two hundred years its inhabitants thwarted Spanish attempts to destroy them. In 1800, the blacks signed a treaty of freedom with the whites. The town they established is still occupied today.

There are three documented instances in which maroon groups in Mexico were parties to enduring treaties with white colonizers. The first recorded example is a treaty agreed to in 1609, between Spanish officials from the port of Veracruz and a group of blacks under the leadership of an African named Yanga. As in all the previously cases, the whites agreed to this type of accommodation only after repeated failures to reduce the blacks. The treaty declared the maroons free men, and gave them a royal license to found a town, which they named San Lorenzo, or Yanga.

Nevertheless, the anti-black root of the current discourse surrounding U.S. anti-immigration policy and rhetoric must not be lost.

Here today is Dr. Beau Gaitors. Dr. Gaitors is an Assistant Professor of History where he teaches courses on Afro Latin American History and Latin American History at Winston Salem State University.

He received his PhD from Tulane University, in Latin American History. Dr. Gaitors holds a B.A. in International Relations and a B.A. in Africana Studies from Brown University (2008). He received his M.A. in Colonial Latin American History from Purdue University (2010). He has been a Fulbright scholar where he studied in Mexico. He just completed his book manuscript titled, Presence and Persistence in the Port: African Descendants in Early-Independence Veracruz, Mexico

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program

This program is intent to push the boundaries of Black thought as Black Critique.

What do I mean?

Contextualization is an art, an art that I find an affinity with and seek to perfect. Not for a personal gratification, but to discover and map a “rhythm” ---much like John Coltrane or an African shaman---that can serve as a spark of our critical consciousness.

Black critique is a process of organic and evolutionary resistance to complicity, racial capitalism, colonialism/neocolonialism, imperialism, neo imperialism sexism, racism, as well as any and all forms of discrimination/marginalization against people historically and contemporarily marginalized, centering the African world experience, and mapping outward.

To understand Cornel West’s critique of Coates, one must engage with the long genealogy of Black Critique centered on Black Reason.

Social media has its way of Christopher Columbus-ing things that have already been (for centuries in fact). The critique of West on Coates is in line with a long tradition of intellectual and ideological engagement; an invocation of critical dialogue and reasoning to discover paths towards freedom. To find ways to correct sociopolitical wrongs, with economic rights, cultural degradation with spiritual revitalization. Black Critique is built upon Black Reason. This argument is not simply aesthetically— racial. Black is used, here, as qualifier of resistance. An assertation of African world humanity. A notice that declares---it has always been.

To understand Black reason is to understand the nature of the universe of thought and action itself. Both, its negative and positive reactions and responses.

As Achille Mbembe writes in Critique of Black Reason, to understand Black reason is to understand what constitutes reason as we know it— the reason of state, the reason of capital, the reason of history.

Today, we intend to start a critical conversation that moves beyond the aesthetic of critique...

What follows is an exploration of the current state and future of Black Critique with Dean Corey Walker.

Dr. Corey Walker is currently Vice President and Dean of the Samuel Dewitt Procter School of Theology as well as Professor of Religion and Society at Virginia Union University.

Dean Walker is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press) and has completed the manuscript for his next book entitled Between Transcendence and History: An Essay on Religion and the Future of Democracy in America. He is editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures” and Associate Editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has published over fifty articles, reviews, book chapters, and essays appearing in wide range journals such as the C.L.R. James Review, Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Recently, Dean Walker was named to the Task Force for the Identification of the History of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Virginia

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Enjoy!

The conceptual and practical use of racial capitalism by many young activists who were shocked and ignited by their exposure to the events that spurred Ferguson, the uprising in Baltimore, continual state violence at the hands of a hyper militarized police force…and the many reflective actions produced in settler colony seeking to still become a nation-state…has taken on a life that I would argue is less a tool of analysis, but simply a catch phrase.

The work to bridge the gap in intellectual engagement and the work it necessitates once understood, is still wide.

However, this work is not something that Africana thinkers and activist have shied away from. The long tradition of radical thought and revolutionary practice is found in the cultural membrane of African peoples wherever they are found. The struggle—internal and external—to express and evolve ones’ full humanity is the eternal beacon that motivates Africana social, economic, political, and cultural life—whether consciously or unconsciously.

So, what is racial capitalism? What did Cedric Robinson mean when he highlighted and explored the development of racial capitalism?

Cedric Robinson challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.

In addition to this, Robinson was acutely aware of Du Bois’s articulation of racial capitalism in his work Black Reconstruction, where he wrote that “The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire,

Today, we will take a deep dive in expanding and solidifying our understanding of racial capitalism in the context of this temporal space we call…right now…with Robin D.G. Kelley.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, and current Chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is author of a number of books, which include Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class;

His latest book project is tentatively titled, The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Enjoy!

Image: Johana Londono