We begin our program today with an update on current activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mwiza Munthali, Africa World Now Project executive producer, human rights activist, and international journalist recently caught up with Kambale Musavuli. Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo and one of the leading political and cultural Congolese voices, is a human rights advocate, Student Coordinator and National Spokesperson for the Friends of the Congo. Kimbale has work his appeared in Washington Post.com, Foreign Policy in Focus, The Huffington Post and numerous other academic and news publications. He has appeared on various media outlets on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, ABC News, Al Jazeera English Television, Radio France International. We then turn our attention to Brazil, specifically the role of black women and the fight for racial justice against the land grab. In her book, Black Woman Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry argues that “spatial exclusion is at the core of gendered racial stratification in Brazilian cities, the thus exclusion produces mass black political organization, as is occurring in neighborhoods in the city of Salvador. The racial logic of modernization and urban renewal informed by European models of development nurtures a nostalgic desire for the colonial past on the part of white Brazilians. Taken together, with various construction projects that separated black residents from white residents and access to other resources in the 1960s, the need to articulate a politics of land permeance and ownership was formed” (xv). In South Africa, according to an April 2017 article on Black Opinion, the author asserts that: “The liberation of Black People in South Africa can only be truly complete once the majority of the Black Nation has full access to the land and all its offerings. Land provides means for people to fend for themselves and it endows them with a sense of dignity and pride." The question of human freedom rest at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility. This question was, once again highlighted here in the U.S. a number of times in the various manifestations of Diasporic struggle for human rights. Dr. King brings sharp critique and clarity on the contradictions that are exposed when the question of human freedom does not meet at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility. Weeks before he was assassinated he highlights what happened just after the Civil War… Next, we will listen to a recent conversation that I had with Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry on the question of land, racial justice, and black women in Brazil. Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in the critical study of race, gender, and politics in the Americas with a particular focus on black women's activism, urban geography and questions of citizenship, feminist theories, intellectual history and disciplinary formations, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement. She has conducted extensive research in Mexico, Jamaica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. Professor Perry recently completed Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil which is an ethnographic study of black women's activism in Brazilian cities. The book examines their participation and leadership in neighborhood associations and how and in what ways their interpretations of racial and gender identities intersect with urban spaces. She is currently writing Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice while working on two other research projects. She is engaged in a study, which documents and analyzes the historical paradox of citizenship and black land ownership and loss in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States.