Black Agenda Radio 11.09.20

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Margaret Kimberley, along with my co-host Glen Ford. Coming up: Will a Joe Biden administration be an ally of the Black Lives Movement? Two of our guests say most emphatically, NO. How can the grassroots Black movement for social justice bring real power for Black people? We’ll talk with a young scholar who says the movement should follow a path of “communalism.” And, a Black people’s movement is making itself felt in Argentina, a country that long pretended that it had no Black population to speak of.

But first – Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pulled off a cliff-hanger victory over Donald Trump, last week, largely on the strength of Black voters. We spoke with Dr. Johnny Williams, a professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. Williams says Joe Biden is no friend of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Justin Lang is a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University, and author of a scholarly article on former President Baraka Obama’s unsuccessful attempts to quell the movement to abolish prisons and the police. Lang predicts that a Joe Biden administration will also try to co-opt and confuse the Black movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement has spawned a number of political currents during its brief history. Shay Akil McLean espouses a politics of “communalism.” McLean is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He wrote an article for Black Agenda Report on Black health. We asked McLean to explain what he means by “communalism.”

The South American nation of Argentina, like the United States, was founded on the dead bodies of native peoples and the labor of Black slaves. But, for centuries Argentinians have pretended that its Black population had died off. Erika Edwards has written a book that explains how Black Argentinians are resisting being written out of history. It’s titled, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Public.”