Africa World Now Project

Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs asserts that, fantasy can be a form of social protest, but fantasy can also be a form of mental conquest. The imagination of the black mind has produced some the most advanced conceptualizations of justice, freedom, citizenship, and peace. The sovereignty of the black imagination has also been constantly under assault. It is the duty of those who create to educate their audience into the habits of thinking. According to David Scott in his interview with George Lamming, the sovereignty of the imagination has neither to do with the sequestering of creativity from, nor its absorption by, the world of affairs—this would be merely bad faith. Rather an authentic sovereignty of the imagination has to do with the active will to refuse submission to the customs that seek at every turn to inspire our self-contempt and our unthinking docility, and to command our understanding of, and our hopes for, what it might mean to live as a free community of valid persons”. The use of and control of popular cultural platforms are a documented method of social control and political consolidation. Today, Drs. Todd Steven Burroughs, Jared Ball, and Mark Bolden explore the continuities in popular culture, futurism in black literature, and the sociopolitical implications on the histories and futures of black think. Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs is an independent researcher and writer based in New-ark, New Jersey. He has taught at Howard and Morgan State University. A professional journalist since 1985, he has written for The Source, Colorlines, Black Issues Book Review and The Crisis magazines, web-based blackamerica.com and The Root.com, and newspapers such as The New York Amsterdam News, The Afro-American (New Jersey edition) and The Star-ledger. He is author of Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography From Stan Lee to Ta-Nahisi Coates, as well as co-author of Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today with Herb Boyd, and A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells. He also curates a popular culture blog: drumsintheglobalvillage.com Dr. Jared Ball is a father and husband. After that, he is a Research Professor of Communication Studies in the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and is the curator of imixwhatilike.org, an online hub of multimedia dedicated to the philosophies of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting. He is author of I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto and co-author of, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His work has been published in The Black Scholar, Radical Teacher, International Journal of Communication, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Journal of Black Studies, The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, Journal of Pan African Studies. He is the creator and curator of the multimedia platform: www.imixwhatilike.org I mix what I like is Dr. Ball’s homage to the great activist-theorist Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like. Dr. Mark Bolden is an African sovereignty psychologist in private practice. 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: Visit imixwhatilike.org

Writing in his 2006 work titled, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account, Dr. Kola Abimbola argues that Yoruba sociopolitical religious practices—( Òrìṣa tradition and culture) were expanded and intensified throughout the Americas due to the Transatlantic human trade which saw the enslaved millions of Africans. He writes: “Today, the Òrìṣa tradition and culture is practices by about 100 million people in Argentina, Australia, Benin Republic, Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, Spain, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, the US, Venezuela, and other places. In all of these places, Yorùbá religious practices play a significant role in, music, dance, the arts, and many facets of day-to-day living.” (24) Kola Abimbola goes on to suggest that while there is a significant amount of good material available on various aspects of Yorùbá and Òrìṣa culture in different parts of the world, no one has yet fully explained its philosophical underpinnings. What philosophical affinities do Candomblé and Batuque (Ba—Tooque) in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Benin Republic, Vodou in Haiti, and Òrìṣa worship in Nigeria all share in common? (24) To date, many scholars have been content with explaining the details of the rituals, the arts, the music, and even the languages that all these different manifestations of Yorùbá culture share. But no good account of what unifies these traditions, that is, their philosophy, exists. Simply put, the philosophical and theological ideas that unify all these traditions under the rubric Yorùbá have not been adequately explained. (24) For Dr. Abimbola, the widespread inadequacy of the treatment of Yorùbá culture can be traced to three separate but interdependent erroneous assumptions implicit in the writing of some scholars. He captures these inadequacies, conceptually as: tribal fetishism, methodological straitjacketing; and hierarchical dogmatism. (24) Toady. We will hear a recent conversation I had Dr. Kola Abimbola on Ifa’s Anceint Future…meditations on the deep tradition of African thought and its relationship to the physical and non-physical world… Dr. Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá studied the Ifá Literary Corpus as an apprentice under Wándé Abímbọ́lá and Babalọ́lá Adébóyè Ifátóògùn. He received his PhD studies in Philosophy of Science under John Worrall at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a second PhD in the Law of Evidence and Criminal Justice under C. John Miller at the University of Birmingham. He has taught at Seattle University, Haverford College, Temple University, and at the University of Leicester (Lester) School of Law. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington DC. Kọ́lá is the Editor of Journal of Journal of Forensic Research and Criminology. He was President of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies from 2006 to 2010, and a British Council Commonwealth Academic Scholar from 1989 to 1992. 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!

Today, we bring to you a recent wide-ranging conversation exploring the HBCUs as a response to and product of coloniality, sovereignty of the black imagination, the philosophical roots of Black Thought/Black Study, and the impetus of evolving black institutions (back) to becoming a maroon space with Corey Walker and Josh Myers. Dr. Corey Walker is a visiting professor at the University of Richmond. He collaborates with campus and community partners on research, teaching, and public programming on the University’s recently acquired Wyatt Tee Walker collection. He is also Senior Fellow in Religious Freedom at the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington, D.C. An accomplished academic leader, Walker served as vice president and dean of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University just prior to coming to the University of Richmond. Other leadership roles he has held include serving as founding dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business, and Education at Winston-Salem State University, chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, and inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the University of Virginia. A dedicated teacher and scholar, Walker has served as a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia, Brown University, Winston-Salem State University, and Virginia Union University. He was also visiting professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena in Germany and non-resident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Dr. Walker is author of the book "A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America," editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on the theme “Theology and Democratic Futures,” and associate editor of the award-winning SAGE "Encyclopedia of Identity." He has published over 50 articles, reviews, book chapters, and essays appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals. He co-directed and co-produced the documentary film "Fifeville" with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. Walker's scholarship focuses on the complexities of religion, philosophy, history, memory, culture, and public life. In addition to being a valued member of the Africa World Now Project & AfricaNow! collective and its affiliates, Dr. Josh Myers is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with the DC area collectives, Positive Black Folks in Action and the Nu Afrikan Cultural Vanguard. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Knowledge, and Society, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces. His book, “We are Worth Fighting For: The Howard University Protest of 1989” is forthcoming. 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!

In order to understand the current sociopolitical conditions and deep Africana radical cultural influences moving in Sudan today, the long historical genealogy, the evolutions in physical geography, and the migration and interaction patterns of various communities of African peoples of the region must be explored. Despite the growth and retractions of the region, one of these descriptors that has lasted the evolution of time and space is Nubia. Throughout history Nubia and its component geographical part had a number of other references. Among one of the earliest is Ta-Setiu or the ancient Egyptian (Kemetic) reference to the area as being the “land of the bowpeople”. Another ancient Egyptian reference is to Ta-Nehesi which reflects the name of an ethic group of Nubia. The Greek invasions applied the term Dodekashoenos to the describe lower Nubia. Arab invasions used Butn al-Hajr (roughly translated as the Belly of Stones) for the section of the Nile from the second Cataract. Kush is another descriptor that was used to give reference to ancient Nubia. As used, Nubia is associated with an ancient word used for gold…the region often referred to as the ‘land of gold’. Imperial and linguistic efforts to control and redefine the peoples and regions by the Greeks, referred to Nubia as Ethiopia which included at times, parts of Libya. The central reason for this linguistic application was used to reference to the phenotypical identification of the “brunt faces” of the Nubians. Other descriptors, included Meroe. Christian Nubia refers to the three kingdoms of No-ba-tia, Mu-kur-ra, and Al-wa that cover this region, and Nubia was the reference to the region until the end of the 19th century. It was at this time, the name “the Sudan” came into used, from the Arabic expression Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “land of the blacks”. Which was essentially an Arabic translation of the Greek “Ethiopia”. It was further used throughout Muslim literature generally to refer to Africa beyond the Sahara. The continuity of Africana radical tradition follows the trajectories of resistance, internationally. The influences and evolution of Africana radical thought and practices can be seen in Malik el-Shabazz praxis. According to the article X Marks the Spot: Mapping Malcolm X’s Encounter with Sudan, though Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) travels in the middle East and Africa put him in touch with the most revolutionary movements of his time, it was his ongoing contacts with students, scholars, and religious leaders from Sudan that had a truly transformative effect on his beliefs about race and religion. Today, we add to this genealogy and discourse a conversation with Alsarah of the Nubatones. Alsarah is a singer, songwriter, bandleader and a somewhat reluctant ethnomusicologist. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, she relocated to Yemen with her family before abruptly moving to the USA, finally feeling most at home in Brooklyn, NY where she has been residing since 2004. She is a self-proclaimed practitioner of East-African Retro-Pop music. Working on various projects, she has toured both nationally and internationally. Alsarah & the Nubatones were born out of many dinner conversations between alsarah and rami el aasser about nubian ‘songs of return’, modern migration patterns and the cultural exchanges between sudan and egypt. To learn more visit www.alsarah.com and explore the catalogue of music…. 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!

The relationship between spirituality, science, language, the political, the transference and production of culture presents a rich terrain to understanding the relationship between liberation, humanity & justice. At this point in human history, no matter how hard those who seek to dominate, distort historical record to marginalize the deep-rooted African genesis of human existence, the facts, the realities come through. They are ingrained within the fabric of the African unconscious. Writing in African Unconsciousness: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology, Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum suggest that: (Page 155) Today, we expand and explore the ideas Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum presents in his work. Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum is a clinical psychologist, a practitioner of kundalini yoga, and author of several books of poetry, psychology, and has published numerous clinical articles for scientific journals. Dr. Bynum was the former director of the Behavioral Medicine & Anxieties Disorders clinic at the University of Massachusetts Health Services in Amherst and the winner of the national Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize for Chronicles of the Pig & Other Delusions, Dr. Bynum is also a recipient of the Abraham H. Maslow award of the Division of Humanistic Psychology from the American Psychological Association for "outstanding and lasting contributions to the exploration of the farthest reaches of human spirit". His corpus of work, thus far, includes: Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent, Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality; The Roots of Transcendence; The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology; The Dreamlife of Families: The Psychospiritual Connection; Families and the Interpretation of Dreams; Transcending Psychoneurotic Disturbances: New Approaches in Psychospirituality and Personality Development; The Family Unconscious: An Invisible Bond; The Luminous Heretic; Gospel of the Dark Orisha; The First Bird: Songs of the Dark Body in Flight; The Magdalene Poems; The Dreaming Skull; Godzillananda: His Life and Visions, a Prophecy Compiled and Translated from the Ancient Meroitic Texts by an Unknown Scholar of the 14th Century; Chronicles of the Pig & Other Delusions; and the edited volume, Why Darkness Matters: The Power of Melanin in the Brain. He is the producer of a ten-part audio lecture series on science, psychology, spirituality and African psycho-historical and philosophical systems. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and has appeared on radio, television and in documentaries. His research interests include depth psychology as it pertains to neuroscience, neuromelanin, consciousness research, as well as the analysis of dreams, family dynamics, the philosophy of science, ancient history, anthropology-archaeology, and yoga. Dr. Bynum’s books can be purchased directly from the publisher at Cosimo Books, www.cosimobooks.com or from Amazon.com. To find out more about his work, please visit his website: www.obeliskfoundation.com 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!

The relationship between the rise of capitalism, the exploitation of labor and natural resources, the control of productive forces are important components of interests when attempting to understand the imposition of the negatively constructed sociopolitical and cultural institutions of the West. The contractions that move capitalist societies have been subjects of those who study and try to organize folk who are caught within the fissures and cavities of the eventual conflicts that arise from capitalism. According to the article, Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings, while the idea of social reproduction is most often associated with Marxist feminist literature from the 1970s, considerable work was done around that concept in a wide range of rather disparate bodies of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s. While this work is important, it must not…it can not be lost that the work of African and African descendant women from Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth to Claudia Jones and the proper expansion of capitalism to be properly contextualized as racial capitalism preceded these notions. And once contextualized we can see the limits of the aforementioned critiques. Drawing genealogies of social reproduction from the perspective of black women’s experience, pre and post-slavery to the racist politics of the welfare regimes, Africana women demonstrated that the domestic confines of the housewife was the problem of white working- and middle-class women. Many of these ideas were first articulated in Claudia Jones’ important 1949 essay, “To End the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman. It is here, Jones introduced the idea of the triple oppression of working-class black women. She showed that, having had to work alongside their men, black women were never confined to the “domestic” sphere alone. From here, writing in the 1970s and the early 1980s, black women, such as, but not limited to, Angela Davis and Hazel Carby continued the line of thought articulated by Jones. in partial response to Wages for Housework, Angela Davis wrote that “Throughout this country’s history, black women toiled together with men under the whip of plantation overseers, suffering a grueling sexual equality at work.” Dr. Davis continues...After slavery, black women were employed in vast numbers in a range of industries, from tobacco and sugar, to lumber and steel. It is here that Professor Davis shows how black women’s labor was mobilized in the reproductive realm as well as in the manufacturing and service industries long before discourses of the “double burden” emerged in white feminist thought. Today, Silvia Federici will revisit ideas that she presented in Caliban and the Witch through her new work(s) titled: Witches, Witch-hunting & Women; Reenchanting the World: Feminism & the Politics of the Commons. Silvia Federici is an Italian-American activist and the author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, an organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign, and was involved with the Midnight Notes Collective. Silvia Federici has taught at several universities in the US and also in Nigeria. She is now Professor Emerita at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY). 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!

According to the article, Reform or Transformation? The Pivotal Role of Food Justice in the U.S. Food Movement, the global food price crisis of 2008 ushered in record levels of hunger for the world’s poor at a time of record global harvests as well as record profits for the world’s major agrifoods corporations (Lean 2008). According to the United Nations World Food Program, more than 90 percent of the world’s hungry are simply too poor to buy enough food (2011). Some of the planet’s most hungry people live in the Global North, though hunger is measured as “food insecurity”. Food insecurity in the United States is characterized by a nationwide epidemic of diet-related diseases that result in an estimated $240 billion a year in health costs that fall disproportionately on low-income communities of color (Schlosser 2001; Baker et al. 2006). Researchers have shown that what is called the food-justice movement emerged from several sources, including movements for environmental justice (Bullard 1994), working-class communities of color dealing with diet-related diseases (Herrera, Khanna, and Davis 2009), critiques of racism in the food system (Self 2003; Allen 2008) as well as critiques of racism in the food movement itself (Slocum 2007; Guthman 2008). Moreover, the very notion of ‘food justice’ developed within the “context of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies” (Alkon and Norgaard 2009). The deep-rooted influences, practice, and knowledge that filters throughout discourses on and around food, land, and resistance, are undoubtedly rooted in the humanity of Africana peoples. In fact, nowhere is this captured better than how rice made its way to Americas, first to Brazil and then to the Carolinas. Here is a story recounted by a Brazilian woman: “An enslaved African woman, unable to prevent her children’s sale into slavery, placed some rice seeds in their hair so they would be able to eat when the ship reached its destination. As their hair was very thick, she thought the grains would go undetected. However, as they disembarked the slave ship, the planter who eventually bought them discovered the grains. In running his hands through one child’s hair, he found the seeds and demanded to know what they were. The child replied, ‘this is food from Africa.’ This is the way rice came to Brazil, through the Africans, who smuggled the seeds in their hair” (Judith Carney, With Grains in Her Hair: Rice in Colonial Brazil, Slavery and Abolition, 25(1), 2004: 1–27). Today we will hear the second keynote address from this past Oct BUGs conference, held in Durham North Carolina by Leah Penniman. Leah Penniman, is Co-Director and Program Manager at Soul Fire Farm. Leah has over 20 years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist, having worked at the Food Project, Farm School, Many Hands Organic Farm, Youth Grow and with farmers internationally in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to reclaim our inherent right to belong to the earth and have agency in the food system as Black and Brown people. Her areas of leadership at Soul Fire include farmer training, international solidarity, food justice organizing, writing, speaking, “making it rain,” and anything that involves heavy lifting, sweat, and soil. She is author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, 2018. 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!

"It could have easily been called 'Afro-American Fight Song'. My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can't play right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and hate and persecutions, and how unfair it is. There's a sadness and cries in it, but also determination." --Charles Mingus, Haitian Fight Song, The Clown, 1957; Maurice Jackson, Friends of the Negro! Fly with Me... The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. However, this dominant narrative must be critiqued, specifically the notion of-slave rebellion. This frame of conceptualization masks the clear fact that to frame it as a slave rebellion, misses the deep and clear idea that it was a people who was thrust in a global system of various forms of enslavement which attempted to dehumanize whole communities of people, who freed themselves. The fact is, the reason the Haitian Revolution was successful is because of the African human agency of peoples who understood strategy, military and environmental, who possessed a clear cosmological and ontological understanding of human freedom... C. L. R. James argues that critically examining the Haitian Revolution as an exemplar of true revolution...The implications of the Haitian Revolution, specifically on the Africana world are further described by Kwame Ture when he argues that... In 1825, Haiti was forced to pay France $22 billion at literal gunpoint following France's establishment of a naval blockade of the newly freed island nation. Moreover, as Haiti struggled to get out from under this crippling debt, the United States was repeatedly involved in destabilizing the country, economically and politically. Haiti was still under a mountain of debt when hit by the devastating 2010 earthquake. Following the disaster, Haiti was primarily forgiven of its obligations but curiously had to borrow roughly $2.6 billion despite worldwide charity efforts to support rebuilding projects. Currently and over the course of months, particularly since April, Haitian citizens have taken to the streets, expressing their historically rooted, contemporarily manifested frustrations with elite and governmental mismanagement of funds and overt corruption. These include, a mass protest held on October 17. On November 18th, Haitians mobilized a nation-wide general strike and demonstrations—another important historical date, as it was on this day in 1803 when Haitians defeated France at the Battle of Vertieres which led to the country’s independence in January 1804. With the recent uprisings, which a number of people have been killed and wounded by the police, Haitians are demanding a complete transparent investigation of the PetroCaribe scandal and the resignation of President Moïse, a clear path to address the economic problems and an immediate roll back of austerity measures. PetroCaribe is the Venezuelan subsidized energy program provided to Haiti to assist in rebuilding efforts following the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country. Today, we explore the historical circumstances and international context surrounding the recent uprisings with Ms. Nicole Phillips, Esq., who is currently a professor at the University of the Aristide Foundation law school in Port-au-Prince, as well as an adjunct professor at UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Ms. Phillips was formerly Staff Attorney, at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). 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! Picture Credit: https://www.antenna.works/ayiti-cherie/

In the last speech you heard, was of Thomas Sankara. In it he asserts that: “Our country produces enough food to feed us all. In fact, we can produce more than enough. But because of the lack of organization. We still need to beg for food aid. This type of assistance is counterproductive. And has kept us thinking we are only beggars who need aid….I am asked where is imperialism. I say, look at your plate. You see the corn, rice... Imperialism is right here” According to Thomas Mitchell, in From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, the story of the federal government’s failure to deliver “forty acres and a mule” to freed slaves after the Civil War has long been a part of African American folklore. This history has been highlighted in an opinion by a federal judge in a landmark settlement of the class action lawsuit filed by black farmers against the United States Department of Agriculture. The case is known as Pickford II. The original Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit, named after North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford was filed against the USDA in 1997. The history of those African descendants who purchased land in states throughout the South during Reconstruction, however, remains largely unknown and uncelebrated. Research suggests that, in total, this group acquired approximately 15 million acres of land in the South in the 50 years following the Civil War. Further, unlike the large numbers of poor white men who were able to acquire land from the public domain under federal homestead laws in the late 1800s, African Americans who acquired land did so mostly by private market purchases, often under intentional and direct violence, limited access to credit, and overt discrimination. Furthermore, in relation to food security and insecurity issues, Margaret Marietta Ramírez in her article, The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces, argues that “in recent years there has been a growing conversation amongst food scholars, activists and policymakers questioning the ability of community food projects to serve low-income communities of color (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Allen 2010; Guthman 2008; Slocum 2006). Within these conversations, the issue of participation is often raised, framed as something that can be remedied by conducting “outreach” or building a more “inclusive” project that better engages local residents. However, it can be argued that these efforts for “inclusion” in community food projects will continue to struggle to build participation in communities of color if they do not shift the power structures that exist within the organization itself. Today, we will hear Dr. Monica White, who gave one of the keynote speeches at this year’s BUGS Conference which was held in Durham North Carolina, Oct. 19-21, 2018. Dr. Monica M. White earned her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in Sociology. She is currently an assistant professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. Her book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880-2010, was just released. 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! Links: https://www.blackurbangrowers.org/2018-bugs-conference Monica White: https://dces.wisc.edu/people/faculty/monica-white/ Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469643694/freedom-farmers/

Today's program covered: The 60th Anniversary of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference | Held: December 5-8, 2018 | Institute of Africa Studies | University of Ghana The histories of Pan African activity are often incomplete, not because we do not know them. But often because academically, African and Diasporic academicians do not engage with each other. Interesting notion, when this class of folk claim to be experts in the very subject matter they do not practice. Moving forward we must examine pan Africanism in more detail and intentionally. I have argued in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, “in relation to the Africana world, the forms of resistance that challenge the dominant narratives which are produced and reproduced from the sociohistorical and cultural processes which attempt(ed) to strip identity formations from African peoples provide a nuanced frame of reference to understand the relationship between identity, belonging, resistance, and power. The various perspectives that are produced have deep implications that are useful to understanding the evolution in the forms and practice of oppression over time and space. To be clear, we must pay attention to the processes that produce a Pan African critical consciousness that challenges or impedes the development of an African collective consciousness, which then becomes the most press point of concern today. The questions that form will attempt to peel away the relationship between ideas of identity formation and what does it mean to be African, presently and moving forward? Is the descriptor Africa or African meaningful to launch a program for liberation? How can and do we truly begin to return to the source? We may find that the very idea and practice of Pan Africanism, while having a long and vital history in constructing a united front against centuries long attacks against the Africana world, must address what has Pan Africanism as an ideological guide to institutional formation actually produced. Today, AWNP’s executive producer, human rights activist, and international media journalist, Mwiza Munthali caught up with Dr. Gnaka Lagoke, an Assistant Professor of history (world, African, and African-American) and of Pan-Africana Studies at Lincoln University (PA) to talk about the 60th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana. Dr. Gnaka Lagoke is also a specialist and a political analyst in African and world politics, focusing on International and African development, comparative politics, international justice, Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu Philosophy. He founded the Washington DC-based “The Revival of Pan-Africanism Forum” and the Thomas Sankara Annual Conference in 2007. As a political analysist, he has appeared on Voice America, Russia Today, HispanTV, Australian Broadcast Corporation, Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, CCTV, TVC News. Dr. Lagoke is also a member of the Organizing Committee of the 60th Anniversary of the All African People's Conference. Today’s program is 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! Music Highlighted: Tall Black Guy--Water No Enemy Jaden Smith -Icon (Instrumental) Little Brother-The Way To Do It (Instrumental) Speech(es): At the beginning--Kwame Nkrumah opens the 1958 All African Peoples Conference; Speech at the end: Forces Against Africa Image:http://africanactivist.msu.edu/image.php?objectid=32-131-1DE