Africa World Now Project

Data shows that, one (1) in five (5) of Rio de Janerio’s inhabitants reside in one of its more than 1,000 favelas. It is in these spaces where inequality and human potential is molded, identity is created, resistance is formulated. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, favelas began to rapidly appear. Majority moved to urban areas to take part in and create informal economies, primarily due to official policies between former plantation owners and government officials who prioritized immigration of European migrants. It is within this abbreviated history that we locate Marielle Franco, a black queer woman, mother, sociologist, socialist, human rights defender, councilwoman from the favela of Maré who was assassinated March 14, 2018. Marielle was born & raised in one of Rio’s favelas and was murdered representing her and other communities like it. Of the many continuities that we can identify with the assassination of Marielle Franco & the efforts she fought to expose, extrapolating them to conditions and experiences around the African world, we must not forget that Marielle Franco was a part of a long tradition of freedom fighters... In the statement, On the Imperative of Transnational Solidarity: A U.S. Black Feminist Statement on the Assassination of Marielle Franco, Professors Kia L. Caldwell, Wendi Muse, Tianna S. Paschel, Erica L. Williams, Christen A. Smith, and our very own Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, writes that: “it is important to recognize that Black Brazilians have also been speaking out and organizing against anti-black police lethality and brutality for generations. Black resistance can be traced back as far as the wars between slavery-era quilombos (maroon communities) and Portuguese military forces”. Today, in the tradition of holding up those who contribute to freedom, in recognition of the afterlives of Marielle Franco, we explore Afro and Indigenous Womxn’s Radical Resistance in Brazil with Joênia Wapixana of the REDE party and Congresswoman for the state of Roraima in the Amazon region, and first indigenous woman ever elected to the Brazilian Congress; and Sara Alves Branco, a black Brazilian human rights lawyer advocating for the promotion of racial and gender equality, as well as legal adviser and project assistant at the black Brazilian organization Center of Studies of Labor Relations and Inequalities (CEERT). 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! Sources: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/life-and-battles-marielle-franco/; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco;https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/the-life-marielle-franco/; https://nacla.org/news/2020/03/10/mariellepresente-reading-list-marielle-franco; https://newint.org/features/2020/01/24/museum-working-class; https://www.theblackscholar.org/on-the-imperative-of-transnational-solidarity-a-u-s-black-feminist-statement-on-the-assassination-of-marielle-franco/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/may/17/five-days-favela-complexo-mare; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3BRTlHFpBU; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2017.1298243; https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/04/killings-brazilian-police-human-rights-crisis-un-review; https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/JoeniaWapixana.aspx; https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-4/abolition/; https://psol50.org.br/

Place as understood in Africana deep thought and practice, is both material and nonmaterial. The seed of humanity’s ability to evolve is rooted in the practices that are intent to create a balance between this fact. Imbalance, conscious and unconsciously created have deep implications on the lived realities of every community around the globe. Being so, the remedy to imbalance can also be located in mapping Africana praxis, of resistance---of being. The roots of current sociopolitical and cultural disorders can be traced to the processes of European projects that (re)defined the human and the justifications for the creation and maintenance of private property. There is little to debate on this fact. Racial capitalism is not a simple economic system, it is ideological and cultural; it creates, orders, and structures life systems and the polices the knowledge that are out of these systems. Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui (تسنيم صديقى Twitter: @DrT_Siddiqui) is in conversation with Ashanté Reese (Twitter: @AMReese07). We will have the privilege to sit and listen to the minds of deeply intelligent, action-oriented educators, think through black geographies, the right to food, memories of resistance and the role of land in the scope and range of Africana freedom. Ashanté Reese (Web: http://www.mamboanthro.com/) is assistant professor in the department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Ashanté earned her bachelor’s in history with a minor in African American studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating she taught middle school at Coretta Scott King Leadership Academy. She later went on to earn a master’s in public Anthropology at American University and a PhD in Anthropology, specializing in race, gender, and social justice. Her work is situated around Black geographies, specifically, the ways Black people produce and navigate spaces and places in the context of anti-Blackness. While she is interested in and committed to documenting the ways anti-Blackness constrains Black life, her ultimately is intent to seek answers to the question: what and who survives? Including being a valued member of the AfricaNow! and AWNP multimedia educational collectives, Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the department of history, politics, and social justice where she teaches courses that explore the ways of being, practices of resistance, and knowledge production throughout the African world. #HBCUsWork 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!

In, Amilcar Cabral and the Theory of the National Liberation Struggle, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that: “Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to understanding the success and failures of liberation movements, resides in his demonstration that national liberation struggles have two phases: the national phase and the social phase, with the latter being more crucial to its ultimate conclusion (1972: 102-110). This analysis is of course theorized within the reality that nation states themselves have deep inherent structural implications that will come into conflict with communities of people that are excluded in its fundamental assumptions of how and for whom society should be organized. It also is based on the reality that nation states, as advanced through European projects, were themselves developed as a direct product of imperialism and its attendant forms of colonialism (direct, indirect, neo, settler, internal). According to Amiri Baraka in Towards Ideological Clarity, “the 18th century [a time when European nation states, driven by the old wars between tribal Europe rapidly began to solidify their existence in national entities] was, also, the time when European capitalism amassed the initial wealth it needed to bring about the unprecedented technological advances responsible for what was later called the: industrial revolution. This primitive accumulation cannot be separated from the European Slave Trade...". Writing in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney further argues that: “throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and for most of the 19th century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, [the formation of international corporations-such as but not limited to, the African Royal Company, East Indian Company, etc], capitalist agriculture, technology and the manufacture of machinery...". The legacy of this is encapsulated in an African world left to wrestle with the contradictions inherent in sociopolitical and economic structures where the exploitation of human and natural resources is the foundational ethos and the human response is a reclamation of its humanity as developed from a critical consciousness—in the case of the African world, a critical Africana consciousness. Today, AWNP is in conversation with veteran activist and political theorist, Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. In 1966, Chairman Omali Yeshitela after ripping down a racist mural from the walls of City Hall in St Petersburg, Florida, developing a political and intellectual trajectory informed by anti-colonial movements around the world and the struggle for liberation by people of African descent in the U.S., Yeshitela has dedicated his life to refining a praxis that seeks to institutionalize freedom for the African world. In 1972, the African People’s Socialist Party was formed along with the worldwide Uhuru Movement and the African Socialist International, with branches active in the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and on the continent of Africa. Last year, Chair Omali, as Malcolm X did 55 years ago, traveled to London to participate in the formal debates at the Oxford Union. He was asked to argue in favor of the house embracing an ever-closer African union. 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! For more: https://apspuhuru.org/

To unpack the complexities of Africana resistance, particularly its most “radical” elements—whether expressed through collective or/and individual activities and thought, it is vital to identify and map the traditions that inform and challenge their praxis. To be clear, the processes of identification and mapping is to highlight points of continuity and discontinuity, in order to understand distortions to expressed objectives, particularly if those expressed objectives are justice, equality and freedom. Being so, let’s apply this perspective to Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael. The 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress held in London, proved to be an important catalyst in the praxis of Kwame Ture. The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) took place in London’s Roundhouse between the 15th and 30th July 1967, it was an attempt to ‘demystify human violence in all its forms, and the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action.’ Ture (Carmichael at the time) contribution to the Dialectics of Liberation conference and elsewhere, were premised by his expressed purpose to expose the forms of oppression endemic to the institutionalized norms and practices of white, Western, or “advanced” nations. Unpacking the endemic violence inherent in racial capitalism and its fortification in Western institutions, Carmichael exposed the limits of white liberalism, which he characterizes as “sympathetic [to the cause of black struggle] in an empty sense,” missing the big picture of the institutional forms to which its adherents contribute, despite their “good intentions” (Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism: 78-79). The importance of revisiting and deeply exploring this lecture from Kwame Ture in this period of being quote ‘woke’ unquote and the rampant and narrow postulation and self-congratulatory circles that posit that scholarship is in fact activism (i.e. write a book about history, not understanding or even unpacking the relevance of their ideas to the ‘now moment’ and in many cases not even reading the very people these scholars- activist are writing about today) is absolutely essential. The extreme danger in such individualistic, neoliberal sensibilities are: 1) they coopt and distort the range and foresight of the ideas presented, relegating them and subsequently binding them to a period. And the way time is understood in a Western context is antagonistic and debilitating to the way ‘time’ is understood in relation to space (physical mental and spiritual) as well as the power of the ‘word’ in an Africana context (we will deal with this in another program); 2) this framing ensures that future generations betray the instructions of those who come before are urge us to create another future through substantive engagement with the past. Knowing an event happened on a certain date does not necessitate an understanding. Nor does it consolidate into a movement. In short, it does something that one of our important thinkers, Tom Porter, always reminds us of: it is the Negation of the Negation. Moving unconscious to conscious is an intentional, protracted, collective process that requires 1) (collective) study; 2) (collective) deep thinking; 3) (collective) engagement/application; for collective 4) refinement/evolution/correction. More important it provides accountability and serves as a mechanism of self and collective critique. Study, thought, and action must always equate to collective progress. These factors are exemplified through the praxis of Kwame Ture.

On October 12, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minster of Grenada and one of the founding leaders of the New Jewel Movement, was placed under house arrest at the orders of Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii). On October 19, Maurice Bishop and five other central leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government and the New Jewel Movement were murdered, at the orders of Deputy Minister Bernard Coard. On October 25, thousands of U.S. Marines and Army Rangers landed in Grenada to establish a military occupation of the island and brutally reversed the far-reaching advancements that were implemented as a result of the March 13, 1979, revolution. In less than two weeks, the Grenadian worker and farmer government established after the removal of Granada’s dictator, Eric Gairy, saw the U.S. military at the command of President Ronald Raegan, invade the island. Notwithstanding this history of oppression, there is a clear history of resistance. The new jewel movement was formed in 1973, as a result of the merger of two organizations that were established the previous year—the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP), and the Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation (Jewel). The new organization showed its capacity to mobilize mass support through rallies swelling up to 10,000 people. In a 1977 interview, Bishop articulated the ideological foundations of the movement stating that: “the idea of Black Power that developed in the United States and the freedom struggle of the African people in such places as Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau and unquestionably through the Cuban experience we got the chance to see scientific socialism up close” (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii). What must not be lost is that Maurice Bishop and Unison Whiteman are exemplars of what I called a critical Africana human rights consciousness, a praxis that evident in Africana sociopolitical and cultural practices. The praxis of their critical human rights consciousness is rooted in an African ethos and expressed through the processes of: refining and gaining international perspectives; building ways to institutionalization the movement; refining and clarifying ideological guidance; understanding the conditions of struggle as being centered on questions around human rights; developing and disseminating a counter discourse, through various multimedia platforms. Radio Free Grenada was a nod to Radio Free Dixie, established by Mabel and Robert F Williams when they were exiled in Cuba. C. L. R. James is known to be a strong radical intellectual influence on the movement and its members. What we will hear next, is one of the last engagements Maurice Bishop had on U.S. soil; a June 5, 1983 talk Bishop gave in New York. This is one day after he was honored speaker at the invitation of TransAfrica, held on June 4, 1983, an organization of which I, as well as AWNP’s own Mwiza Munthali, who was Director of Public Affairs worked with. The June 4 1983 TransAfrica event was filmed by Haile Gerima. It is the intention of AWNP to bring you the voices of those from whom you would not normally get a chance to hear, as they articulate their ideas with their own words; due to the direct efforts of historical marginalization for political purpose. Some of you may have heard this before, while some of you have never even heard of Maurcie Bishop. Either way, AWNP is a platform for building, expanding, and applying ideas. As once explored by Kwame Ture, moving the unconscious to conscious. Forward Ever, Backward Never 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!

The ghosts of Hegel, Hume, Locke, and other so-called enlightenment thinkers, are not ghosts at all. The limiting racialized reasoning; the logics of racial capitalism they espoused are in fact material and nonmaterial at the same time. We are living in the 21st century, with 14th century logics and reasoning. The complexities of the language formulated during this period have ensured that this will forever be the case. That is until projects (mass in character) that intentionally and comprehensively disrupt the very power relations that are attendant to the languages that are a product of the racial capitalist logistics that guide everyday racialized reasoning are met with in full force by an African Future. At the heart of Africana world liberation, is a desire to practice humanity. A desire that is rooted in collective sensibilities that are guided by a constant search for an understanding of the relationship between nature and the universe. Paul Zeleza has argued that “African identities, like African languages, are inventions, mutually constitutive existential and epistemic constructions.” This postulation was rooted in questions around the “challenges of defining “Africa.” Arguing along with other scholars that whoever defines and constructs “Africa,” in considerable measure, guides how we identify and analyze African identities and languages. In The Invention of Africa : Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, V. Y. Mudimbe interrogates the construction of Africa through Eurocentric categories and conceptual systems, which produced enduring dichotomies between Europe and Africa, investing the latter's societies, cultures, and bodies with the representational marginalities or even pathologies of alterity (Mudimbe, 1988; Zeleza, 2006). Elsewhere, Mudimbe, argued that one of the most important aspects of Africa’s representation lies not in its invention per se, a phenomenon that is by no means confined to the continent (think of “Asia” and the “Americas” and “Europe” itself and indeed the origins of the names of numerous nations and ethnic groups), but in the fact that Africa is always imagined, represented and performed as a reality or a fiction in relation to master references—Europe, Whiteness, Christianity, Literacy, Development, Technology, even Islam, as codified through Arabic invasions—mirrors that reflect, indeed refract Africa in peculiar ways, reducing the continent to particular images, to a state of lack until their arrival (Mudimbe, 1988; Zeleza, 2006). Without. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o must not be understood as a singular path on a multipath map. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o work must be situated in what Dr. Greg Carr argues that all Africana phenomenon/a must be situated, in a long-view process of memory, translation and recovery. To do so, we can then begin to see how Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work begins to intersect, inform and be informed by those other Africana thinkers that are committed to identifying, mapping and conceptualizing frame works for understanding human experience, as we move across time/space. Ayi Kwei Armah, Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Achebe, Tess Onwueme, Ifeoma Okoye, Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, Alice Walker, May Ayim, Audre Lorde, to name a few. As listed, the principle of gender is not categorized, as this very abbreviated list does not distinguish Africana female writers from male projecting counterparts…these writers are writers organizing their rhythms of knowledge production through a lens…either way they lead to a common point, as they are writing for freedom. 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: Nairobi, March 2019

Writing in Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, CLR James argues that: “the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased." The range and scope of CLR James’ work cannot possibly be captured in our limited time with you this evening. However, it is the intent for us to spend our time effectively in a way that encourages you to explore the work of CLR James as we hear reflections by those who had the opportunity to work closely with him. The epigraph above brings into sharp focus two of Western Europe’s deadly gifts of modernity, its attempt to redefine the praxis of being human as the justification(s) for the creation and maintenance of private property (Note: the great intellectual-cultural worker, Sylvia Wynter has provided a map that we can follow on this ‘gift’). This thousand-year process, according to Cedric Robinson, culminating into a racial capitalist system that feeds off the ideas that has structured our current world as a result of chattel [and other forms of] slavery, colonialism/neocolonialism, the salience of race as a cultural ideological class construct, the demonization of gender, and iterations of imperialism has left a deep wound on our collective human consciousness. It forms our consciousness by appealing to our unconsciousness. Next, you will hear, in order of speaker, reflections on the Legacy of CLR James from those who worked closely with him: James Early, Former Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution. Kojo Nnamdi, Host of the Kojo Nnamdi show on NPR/WAMU FM. Sylvia Hill, Former Professor of Administration of Justice, Department of Urban Affairs, Social Sciences and Social Work at University of the District of Colombia. And Aldon Nielsen, who is currently The George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University and author of C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction. This program was moderated, in part by, E. Ethelbert Miller. E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and former board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). He is also a board member of The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine. He was previously the Director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University and former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. He is currently a Resident Fellow at UDC. 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! Music referenced: KAMAUU: Bamboo & LăVĭNDŭR (LaVeNDeR) [Moving Still]; Kojey Radical: Water; Robert Glasper Experiment: Find You (KAYTRANADA Mix) ft. Iman Omari

In a November 1797 Letter to the French Directory, Toussaint L’Ouverture writes a warning to the French and its allies in Haiti of any attempts to (re)institute slavery in Saint Domingue: “Do [the forces of reaction] think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? ... If they had a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us…” Though most reports point to this current iteration of Haitian resistance are being sparked by the Haitian government’s announcement that it was going to cease subsidizing gas and diesel, it must not be lost that the current uprising in Haiti is a reverberation of what was started in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but intentionally interrupted over the next few centuries. As a result, this announcement can be better understood as an accelerator that added to the conditions of poverty, which was proliferated by massive corruption involving members of the previous and current government, including the president, Moïse. To date, “journalists, human rights groups, and a state auditing body have all issued hundreds of pages of reports documenting how up to $2 billion from the Venezuelan fuel assistance program PetroCaribe has been diverted into politicians’ pockets. According the article, Why Haitians are Protesting En Masse via Jacobin Magazine, as well as other sources, “every day on the air, elected officials sling accusations of kickbacks and graft at one another. In addition to this, last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. According to Haitian human rights advocate Marie Yolène Gilles, this vote was a quid pro quo. Yet, not surprisingly, the US-dominated OAS has yet to meet officially about the Haitian crisis —although there was a secretive and unofficial US-led trip—even though conditions on the ground are pretty close to the circumstances decried in the January resolution on Venezuela. Environmental [neo]Colonialism The conditions in Haiti are a direct product of the continued conditions of colonialism, neoliberal economic policies and an unjust approach to tackling climate change. The environmental degradation, which is exacerbated with each drought and hurricane season, can be traced back to French colonial rule over Haiti when land and forests were abused, rendering large swathes of the country barren and infertile (https://portside.org/2019-10-01/what-really-behind-crisis-haiti). The US approach to the Haitian economy has been predominantly extractive. The country has an estimated $20bn of mineral deposits consistently exploited by US and Canadian corporations. Today, we take another look at the conditions on the ground in Haiti, through a recent conversation between AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali and Nicole Phillips . Nicole Philips is an attorney, specializing in human rights and rule of law and professor at the University of the Aristide Foundation law school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti as well as a professor at UC Hastings College of Law at the University of San Francisco. Our show was produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, 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!

To understand the music of John Coltrane you must understand the long genealogy of the genre of African Diasporic cultural expression—called Black (or American) Classical Music or jazz as it is often labeled particularly, as it moves back and forth on the time/space continuum. From the Now moment. To the Future moment as yet seen. To the complexities of the past. Back to Now. Never in a linear path. You must listen to Sun Ra. Diz. Bird. Sonny. Brother Ah. Abdullah Ibrahim, Celia Cruz, Tito. Hugh Masekela. Abby. Max. Ella. Nina. Holiday. De La. Tribe. Guru. Heavy. The birds. The Wind. The rain. You must be able to map the material and non-material experiences…often improvised in response to the conditions within which Africana peoples found themselves. You must understand the deep ancestral, historical, and spiritual memory of a people to simultaneously be aware of these conditions while also seeing a world beyond those conditions. John Coltrane—the person, the musician—is a vital link in the long chain of humanity—a representation of an African vibration of humanity. Amiri Baraka in his article John Coltrane: Why His Legacy Continues? writes: “Why does his legacy continue to influence our lives, our music, and the arts?...Trane emerges as the process of historical clarification itself, of a particular social/aesthetic development…When we see him standing next to Bird and Diz, an excited young inlooker inside the torrent of the rising Bop statement, right next to the chief creators of that fervent expression of new black life, we are seeing actual point and line, note and phrase of the continuum. As if we could also see Louis and Bechet hovering over them, with Pres hovering just to the side waiting his entrance, and then beyond in a deeper yet to be revealed hover, Pharoah and Albert and David and Wynton or Olu in the mist, there about to be, when called by the notes of what has struck yet before all mentioned. Trane carried the deepness in us thru Bird and Diz, and them, back to us. He reclaimed Bop fire, the Africa, Polyrhythmic, Improvisational, Blue, Spirituality of us…the Free Jazz! Was parallel to Free Angela! Free Huey! The Ballot or the Bullet! Free Black People!” (192: Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music) ---Amiri Baraka adds more clarity---I love Music (For John Coltrane)-- For Amiri Baraka, and others, “Trane still sounds inside us as the freedom we seek, the total expression of our lives as the expression of the Human headed soul, teaching that the flaming paradise of his music is in us to create the world we live in” (194: Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music) But above all of this…more than any of this…to understand Trane you must understand his wife, Alice Coltrane. You must listen to her organized vibrational melodies that seek in their own space to free people, who did not know they needed to be freed, and as of yet still not know they need to be freed. Today, we will listen to a radio documentary produce by the Pacifica Archives, titled Trane Lives. We hear Alice on Trane…and Trane, less than a year before he moved beyond. For complete program: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/pz065901-02 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. Image: Alice and John Coltrane: no copyright infringement is intended

Robin D.G. Kelley argues that Cedric Robinson’s book is “a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora.” Kelley goes on to suggest that Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism.” In fact, it was Robinson who proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Accordingly, such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. I have argued, elsewhere, rooting my perspectives in a critical reading of Robinson, Marimba Ani, Oliver Cox, Audrey Smedley, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James and W.E. B. Du Bois, that race must be understood at a deeper level. To better understand the salience of a fictitious, yet deadly concept, it must be examined as a cultural-ideological class construct, further building on the argument of Du Bois, that “the world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. According to Audrey Smedley in, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, race is a “cosmological ordering system structured out of the political, economic, and social experiences of peoples who emerged as expansionist, conquering, and dominating nations on a worldwide quest for wealth and power.” Being so, we can see that race is expressed in material and non-material ways. It is, in fact, a culturally ingrained, ideologically-driven mechanism that has permeated sociopolitical structures and economic imperatives which guide institutional practices for the expressed purpose to serve deeply rooted insecurities that are wrapped in the myths of white superiority. Today, we bring you, a public critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition with Acklyn Lynch, Haile Gerima and AWNP collective’s member, Josh Myers. This critical reading is part of a series that is curated at Sankofa Video and Books in Washington, DC. Dr. Acklyn Lynch is a revered scholar/activist of African and African Diaspora history, culture and politics. He has taught at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Howard University, and University of Massachusetts Amhurst. He is author of Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance. Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University. 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 in (1993). His films have won numerous awards and are internationally acclaimed for the range and scope of their storytelling, cinematography, and innovations. Gerima continues to produce and distribute his films, including his most recent award-winning film, Teza (2008). He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally. Josh Myers currently teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He has published a number of scholarly journal articles exploring Africana history, politics and culture. He is author of the forthcoming, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.