Africa World Now Project

Religion or one’s spiritual practice are the center of one’s understanding of themselves in relation to the world within which they live. It is indeed the essence of who are. And for better or worse contextualizes and informs our identity. The development of practices and/or rituals that seek to help us understand the relationship between humanity, nature, and the universe are both a science and an art. When exploring the contours and continuities of Africana radical traditions, religion and/or spirituality or spiritual practices are often explored in relation to Western European traditions, in many ways, intentionally. More than this, it has operated to silence traditions that have fallen outside regnant post-Enlightenment understandings of religion as “faith”. This has meant that, for the better part of a century, religion has been deemed synonymous with Christianity, and the institutional Black Church, in the U.S, in particular (Pérez, 2014: 82). Yet, Africa, still flashes through. There have been calls to reevaluate the grand narratives of Eurocentric religious thought and entertain the viability of de-centering the Black Church (Pérez, 2014: 93). I mean, was it not Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, and Dutty Boukman, a houngan, presiding over a Vodoun ceremony that gave direction and energy to Africans to free themselves in Haiti? What about our maroon ancestors? In Working Roots and Conjuring Traditions: Relocating Black ‘Cults and Sects’ in African-American Religious History, Pérez argues that it is imperative to de-center the Black church in order to approach the heterogeneity and richness of lived religion…” (73). In relation to the Black radical tradition and Islam, specifically what’s considered its unorthodox formations, little attention is given. Accordingly, narrow conceptualizations of Islam, or any spiritual practices of Africana peoples for that matter, marginalizes the impact of unorthodox communities. We miss the fact that Clarence 13X, Father Allah, a dissident follower of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, use the “Black God trope that 13X learned from El Shabazz to articulate their humanist worldview” (Collins, A Disciple of Malcolm X: Clarence 13X Smith’s Embodied Black God Rhetoric, 2020). In the final analysis, a historical consciousness that does not inform a radical imagination that invents paths to an African future is counterproductive to liberation. Today, we will explore, contextually, Islam and the Black radical tradition. AWNP’s, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is in conversation with Dr. Bilal Ware. Dr. Rudolph (Bilal) Ware is a historian of Africa and Islam. He is currently an associate professor at the UC-Santa Barbara, and the founding director of the Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR). His first book, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, explores the history of a thousand years of Quran schooling in the region. His research and teaching examines Muslim anti-slavery movements in Africa and the Atlantic World. His most recent book, Jihad of the Pen: Sufi Thought in West Africa, with co-authors Zakary Wright and Amir Syed, explores Sufi thought in West Africa. Dr. Ware is currently working on: Visionaries: Second Sight and Social Change in Islamic West Africa; and The First Atlantic Revolution: Islam, Abolition, & Republic in West Africa c. 1776. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! artwork: twitter - @msale; IG - msale_

[Note: This program was produced and aired in 2016] Image: Acclaimed Kenyan street artist & muralist, Wise 2 [https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/wise-two-5599] Today, we will listen to Pt. 2 of a two-part series titled: Hip Hop as Critical (Pan African) Consciousness. In this series, we 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 specifically on hip hop as a form of cultural expression and creative resistance. The series engages 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 the entire African world as well as other oppressed people. Today’s conversation, in particular, is intent on sparking a shift in our approaches to cultural production, resistance, and art as emancipation practice—it seeks to interrogate what we know?—And how we have come to know what we know?—knowledge production not simply for the sake of knowing…but for the purpose of guiding our doing—framing our activity. We are working to move conversations beyond "mainstream" discourse about hip hop and situate it in a proper context…addressing real-time problems faced by Africans and African descendant across the globe… It does this…by first, examining the origins and continuities in African and Diasporic dimensions of hip hop…and secondly, look @ its ability to transmit complex messages that have collective sensibilities in inform the formation of a critical consciousness… With this, several fundamental questions arise, which asks, but are but are not limited to: 1.Why is culture such an important place for contestation? 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 must it be rooted? 4.What is the role of the artist?...Or More importantly what is the role and responsibility of the listeners? Today, in Part 2 of this series…we will listen to a recent wide-ranging conversation with scholar, activist, and artist Will Boone. Dr. Boone is an Associate Professor and chair of English at Winston Salem State University where he teaches courses on African and Diasporic Studies. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African 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!

Image: Ella Baker at the November 1974 Puerto Rican Independence Solidarity Rally Attempts to distort, rewrite, dilute, misdirect, and misguide the impact of our radical scholars, radical thinkers, activist, artist, and advocates are carefully planned practices by those who hold perceived positions of authority. The exclusion of important Africana thinkers and activist is not a matter of simple exclusion, but a matter of intentional attempts to disrupt the continuity of radicalization. Ella Baker words from a speech titled, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle” delivered at the Institute of the Black World in 1969, are still sharply true today. Ms. Baker reasoned that: “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms.” Barbara Ransby, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers and activist, writes in Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement that “those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker’s words, “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader.” Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her 50-year career working in the trenches of struggle, but what she meant was specific and contextual." Professor Ransby, who also wrote the important, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, suggests that “Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to “change this system as rooted in exploitation, oppression, and the idea that Whiteness equals supremacy.” Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single “end” but rather an ongoing “means,” that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle.” Employing an Africana critical human rights consciousness if you will. In addition to Professor Ransby work, it is vital and essential that I highlight and call attention to the work of Joanne Grant who provided us with: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis 1619 to Present, 1968; Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, 1998; Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest, 1969; but she produced an important documentary film titled: Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker. Joanne Grant, a radical journalist and activist of African descent who served as an assistant to W.E.B Du Bois; she was a member of the Communist Party, which made her a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee; was an author; documentary filmmaker is yet another important link in the genealogy of Black radical praxis that have continuities with not only Diaspora exemplars such as but not limited to, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hammer, Madie Hall Xuma but continental Africa as well, Winnie Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Mariama Ba to name a few. Today, in response to screening of Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker AWNP co-sponsored this past August, we will listen to a conversation I had with Zach Norris where we explore the continuities of the praxis of Ella Baker. Zach Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, author of We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities, and co-founder of Restore Oakland. Zach is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation’s youth incarceration epidemic. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant 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 peoples! Enjoy the program!

Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president after declaring their independence on March 6, 1957…founding member of the Organization of African Unity, wrote in the preface of the 1969 second edition of his work titled Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization that: “Since the publication of the 1st edition of Consciencism in 1964, the African revolution has decisively entered a new phase, the phase of armed struggle. In every part of our continent, African revolutionaries are either preparing for armed struggle, or actively engaged in military operations against the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. The issues are now clearer than they have ever been. The succession of military...” [https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/consciencism-philosophy-and-ideology-de-colonization-kwame-nkrumah]. According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his 1974 article titled Kwame Nkrumah: His Years in America, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life." Key to the maturation of his sociopolitical thought, it is during these 10 years, Kwame Nkrumah, along with Nnamdi Azikiwe the first president of Nigeria attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Dr. Clarke goes on to suggest that “there is no way to understand the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, or any other man, without also understanding the country in which he was born and to what extent that country and the circumstances of his birth did influence the total of his life...” Today, Africa World Now Project Radio will bring you a recent exploration into the Social and Political Philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah with Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere. Dr. Dompere is professor of economics at Howard University. He is author of many scientific and scholarly works in economics, philosophy, and decision theory. Some of this work includes his 2006, Polyrhythmicity; his 2017, The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity; 2006, African Union: Pan African Analytical Foundations; 2017, The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism in Socio-natural Systemicity and Complexity; 1995, Epistemics of Development Economics: Toward a Methodological Critique and Unity. 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…!

Photo: Col. John Charles Robinson of Chicago In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin DG Kelley writes that “most black people believed there was an order higher than the Constitution. Throughout the Africana experience in the Americas, Psalm 68, verse 31 of the Bible promised redemption for the black world. It reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” Kelley goes on to suggest that this passage was as important to Pan-Africanist and emigrationist sentiment as the book of Exodus, even becoming the theological and ideological basis for what became known in the nineteenth century as Ethiopianism. One of the earliest published examples of this doctrine was Robert Alexander Young’s Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Blackman’s Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom (1829), which predicted the coming of a new Hannibal who would lead a violent uprising to liberate the race. Just like Haiti, Ethiopia's reputation as a beacon of hope and strength for the Africana world was solidified in 1896, after the defeat of Italy at the Battle of Adwa. The histories of Afro America and Ethiopia interacting are both deep and complex. But what is clear, Ethiopia held its own space in the sociopolitical thought of the Africana world. In his New World A-Coming, Roi Ottley wrote that "Negroes first became aware of the black nation [of Ethiopia] back in 1919, when Ethiopian dignitaries arrived in the United States on a diplomatic mission. During their stay in New York, this group received a delegation of Black folk from Harlem. During a ceremonial reception for this diplomatic mission, held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, delivered a speech expressing Ethiopian and Afro-American unity. Throughout the 1900s, African responded to various official invitations and appeals recruiting technically skilled Black Americans to settle in the country. Universal sympathy expressed by Afro-Americans for the Ethiopian-Italian war was shaped into concrete reality through the activities of several war relief committees. Actual participation in the war was expressed through the military activities of two Afro American airmen. "Colonel" John Charles Robinson, of Chicago and Trinidadian-born "Colonel" Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who arrived in Ethiopia in late 1934 (as volunteer pilots for the only two Ethiopian planes that were airworthy during the war). After the war, Robinson remained in Ethiopia to establish commercial air service into East Africa and the Sudan. With the purchase of an old World War II surplus DC-3 aircraft, Robinson became service crew and pilot for the forerunner of the present Ethiopian Air Lines [Shack, 1974]. I wanted to contextual this deep historical context of U.S. African descendant connections and continuities with Ethiopia in effort to prime your historical memory of the importance of Ethiopia in the context of Africana internationalism and its place in the radical black imagination as a platform to understanding the current conditions in nation. More importantly why Africa, its nations, and the conditions within which communities face there are directly related to the conditions within which Africana people’s faces across the world. Today, AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali speaks with Ayantu Ayana, doctoral student and a member of the Oromo Advocacy Alliance, where she contextualizes the current conditions in Ethiopia. Aynatu Ayana addresses the underlying historical-rooted issues that manifest today in the country. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant 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 peoples! Enjoy the program!

Wangũi wa Kamonji in her article, Women in Kenya rebuild resilience amidst an eco-cultural crisis, published in February of this year, a few weeks before the current global pandemic takes its cripplingly hold, writes that: “in the global North, it has become more common to declare that indigenous peoples hold the solutions to the climate crisis. Such rhetoric risks being only lip-service if solutions do not recognize and resource indigenous-led work to repair damage to indigenous cultures, commitment to an indigenous resurgence and the full integration of wisdom of these indigenous values in projects that seek solutions. After decades of shame, [violent] suppression and devaluation, much indigenous knowledge held by groups like the Tharaka [in Kenya] has been forgotten, hidden or impaired. Tharaka women [have] often commented that it seemed like “everything was going to disappear.” Facing this eco-cultural crisis, remembering, and restoring indigenous women’s knowledge and practices, grounded in a paradigm of respect and collaboration with the Earth, emerges as the most salient pathway to recovery and restoration. Professor Gloria Emeagwali adds sharp clarity to this notion when she argues that, I must quote in its totality: “Throughout Africa, in spite of ongoing colonization and the continuing effects of globalization, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who still associate their existence to, and with, the land, and with their immediate socio-physical environments and surroundings. Land has been a source of Indigenous identity for Africans, in that through associations with the land, local cultures, spiritualities, politics, economics, and the relations of society to Nature are defined. There are knowledges associated with the land that continue to guide everyday existence. People continue to negotiate identities, cultures, and spiritualities with particular understandings of the place of the human in their environments. These phenomena constitute important dimensions of the knowledgebase, and such knowledge also informs everyday existence. African indigeneity must be read as both a process and a form of identity. It is an identity that defines who a people are at a particular point in time. But it is also a recognition that such identities are in a continual process of existence. The lesson here is that a peoples’ indigeneity and indigenousness is not simply taken away from them simply because they encounter others on their homeland [or beyond]. The Eurocentric constructions of the Indigenous as primitive, culture-based, and static is a ploy to privilege European identity, and should be distinguished from what the people claim and assert of their own indigeneity and indigenousness. The latter is about the affirmation of self, community, history, culture, tradition, heritage, and ancestry. Eurocentric constructions are about establishing cultures of hierarchies as a way to accord privilege and power. This is how racism worked and continues to work. Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui [@DrT_Siddiqui] is in conversation with activist and thinker, Wangũi wa Kamonji [@_fromtheroots]. They explore the contours and practice of indigenous knowledge and ancient technologies as that inform a decolonization that is simultaneously in resistance & restoration. Through research, dance, storytelling and facilitating diverse public spaces for critical consciousness and transformation, Wangũi wa Kamonji is retrieving and restoring indigenous Afrikan lifeways and practices. [Also see: @afrikahai_] Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant 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 peoples!

[Image: Claudia Jones Paul Robeson Amy A Garvey with friends in London England, Source: Source Pan African News Wire] W.E.B. Du Bois (1933) in, Pan-Africa and new racial philosophy, presents his early articulations of Pan Africanism as “the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro people” wherever they are in the world. George Padmore (1955) in, Pan Africanism or Communism, asserts that “the idea of Pan Africanism first arose as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity among Africans and peoples of African descent" (95). I have explored in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, why Pan-African discourse is not a dominant expression in African diasporic resistance in the U.S. today. This is not to say a Pan-African discourse is not present at all, but when situated in the historical and intellectual genealogy of African decedent experiences in the U.S., it is marginal at best. Even with this contextualization, the marginalization of Africana women in the formation and evolution of Pan African thought and practice is important to center. This disarticulation has distorted the historical narrative of radical and Pan African thought of the fact that in “early coverage of the 1900 Pan-African Congress reveals delegates, “all eminent in their sphere” who represented the United States, Canada, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the then Gold Coast, most of the islands of the then British West Indies included Miss Anna Jones (Kansas), and Mrs. Annie Cooper (Anna Julia Cooper, Washington, D.C.) among others (see Adi & Sherwood 2003, for listings). Mabel Dove Danquah attended the 2nd Pan African Congress. Her husband Joseph Boakye Danquah, himself a major pan-Africanist was one of the African students that Amy Ashwood Garvey nurtured in the West African Students Union in London (Davies, 2014: 80). Adelaide Casely Hayford, who married the pan-Africanist J.E. Casely Hayford in 1903 and as a pan-Africanist herself, briefly held the position of lady president of the UNIA branch in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She spent two years in the U.S. studying girls schools, became an associate of U.S. women like Nannie Burroughs, and would later develop her own school for girls. In 1927 she attended the fourth Pan-African Congress in New York (Davies, 2014: 80). Today, we explore the current rebellion through a Pan African lens with Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. Africans Rising is a Pan-African movement of people and organizations. Next, you will hear, in order, of speaking: Coumba Toure, co-coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity; Hakima Abbas, executive co-director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID); M. Adams, community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc; Taalib Saber, Pan Africanist, filmmaker and principal attorney at The Saber Firm, LLC, where he practices Education and Special Education Law, Civil Rights, and Personal Injury Law; Dimah Mahmoud, co founder of the Nubia Initiative, a humanist, activist, and passionate change-maker; Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator, Mathare Social Justice Center and member, Social Justice Centres Working Group in Nairobi, Kenya; and Yoel Haile, Criminal Justice Program Manager with the ACLU of Northern California. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant 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 peoples! Enjoy the program!

[Note: Produced and aired in 2017] For more than four centuries, the communities formed by such escaped enslaved peoples dotted the fringes of plantations in the Americas, from Brazil to southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as quilombos, mocambos, or mambeses, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members that survived for generations and even centuries. Their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves in several parts of the hemisphere -for example, in Suriname, French Guiana, Jamaica, Colombia and Belize. For generations, historians believed that even the most remarkable of maroon settlements in the North America did not rival the achievements of maroon communities in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. Nevertheless, according to a number of scholars such as Cedric Robinson, Gerald Mullin as well as Herbert Aptheker evidence of the existence of at least fifty such communities in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been found. Taken further back, Herbert Aptheker’s work shows us that the 1st maroon communities pre-dated Jamestown settlements by 82 years. They were slave insurrectionists from abortive Spanish colonizing efforts in North and South Carolina. With this……We will listen to part of a discussion between famed independent filmmaker, activist, scholar Haile Gerima and Dr. Akinyele Umjoa where they discussed maroons and Dr. Umjoa’s book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement… Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Gerima immigrated to the United States in 1967. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa (1993). Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films, including his most recent, Teza, which won the Jury and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Akinyele Umjoa is a scholar-activist, who currently serves as the Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). Dr. Umoja’s writing has been featured in scholarly publications such as The Journal of Black Studies, Black Scholar, Radical History Review and Socialism and Democracy. And a number of edited volumes. He is also author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. We then turn our attention to the theory and practice of the Black church. I sat down with Dr. Torin Alexander, where we explored the deep epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the black church. Paying attention to the differentiation of the Black church as an institutional-physical space and incubator of liberatory practice. Dr. Alexander is a scholar of African American religion and religious experience. His interdisciplinary research and teaching are influenced by phenomenology, critical theories on race and gender, and post-colonial/post-structuralist studies. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant 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 peoples! Enjoy the program….

We are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class continues to produce and reproduce ways of interacting. This process has found ways to attach itself to our very construction of individual and group realities, therefore entrenching conscious and unconscious acts of racism as being natural and/or universal occurrences. We live in a world where racial diversity is understood as ideological diversity…a constructed reality where the ascription of power is imposed on old ideas of identity and re/incorporated in new forms of marginalization. This holds true, despite any claim of post-this-or-post-that…that is made by dominant discourses. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 in Souls of Black Folk that: “THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the colorline..." Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource rich lands were dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as W.E.B Du Bois is known to do, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations. In the Preface of the 1953 Edition of the Souls of Black Du Bois argues that: “I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.” Often ignored by the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals, are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism). Within this environment, the meanings of race are constantly re-configuring itself as various forms of exclusion built upon the consequences of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism are perpetuated and refined. Today: We will dive deeper into understanding race. What we will hear next is Charles W. Mills describe how race was materialized with the advent of modernity. He argues that capitalism is racialized, and white supremacy was interwoven within it from its origins. Charles W. Mills is a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books on race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017). Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program Leith Mullings, Race and Globalization (2004); Clarence Lusane, Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the Millennium (1997) https://sdonline.org/issue/33/du-bois-and-question-color-line-race-and-class-age-globalization

[Note: Produced and aired in 2017] In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: “Decolonization never goes unnoticed […] it infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity...” (Fanon 1961:2) However, the process of decolonization has yet to reach full expression. The praxis of decolonization, the promise of a radical humanism, a new relation of being in the world, remains severely arrested. If decolonization was an intentional and direct response to colonialism, decolonization failed in uprooting the colonial repressive systems…on mass scale. For Fanon, “the colonial world is a compartmentialized world […] a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border…” An idea Du Bois names as the color line, the poverty line…a siphoning of the world’s resources into the hands of a few, safeguarded and securitized by barracks, the police station, drones, the banks, multinational corporations, private interests and capital. In the past twenty years, throughout the Africana world as well as the global south, burgeoning social movements constituting what Sylvia Wynter describes as “the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the favela/shanty town’ of the globe and their jobless archipelagos…at the national level, Baldwin’s ‘captive population’ in the urban inner cities, (and on the Native Reservations of the United States),” have reinvigorated and expanded the arena and language of grassroots politics and political action (Wynter, No Humans Involved: 60). We see this, in particular with the youth movements across Africa and more clearly with the “Black First, Land First” which invokes the Fanon postulation that: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (Fanon 1961: 44). Today, we will deeply engage with the language and praxis of decolonization through one of the most important land and dignity movements in South Africa… Abahlali baseMjondolo, also known as Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement with Dr. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, an assistant of Professor of Peace Studies at Goucher College. After this, we look at the the community of Buenaventura (along with communities in the Chocó region of Colombia) where a general strike was launched (May 16th)) demanding that the Colombian government meet the basic human rights to water, education, health, culture, land and freedom from racism and violence. The strike caused businesses to closed, road blocks were set up at several points along the main road and peaceful protestors chanted, sang, danced and banged cooking pots to call attention to the desperate situation. According to a recent report from the Black Alliance for Peace, released on June 12, after many hours of dialogues and negotiations an agreement was reached in the early hours of Tuesday 6th June, bringing an end to a 22-day strike in Buenaventura, Colombia. The strike, in the mainly Afro-descendant and Indigenous city on Colombia’s Pacific Coast was an inspirational reminder of how collective, local level and “people-centered” human rights processes can challenge economic powers and neoliberal politics (Baraka, 2013)[1]. We will hear a report on what happened and prospects of this agreement from Afro Colombian human rights activist Charo Mina Rojas of Black Communities Process in Colombia-International Working Group (PCN); and Afro Colombian Solidarity Network. Enjoy the rest of program. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African 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.