In this episode, Dr. Nikka Lemons examines genocide by attrition, the slow, structural annihilation of African Descendants of American Slaves (ADAS), through the United Nations Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes. Drawing from her groundbreaking dissertation, she reveals how state power, urban planning, and racial capitalism converge to produce conditions of containment, dispossession, and erasure.
From the colonial legacies embedded in planning to the complicity of reformist “solutions,” Dr. Lemons calls for a radical shift rooted in restitution and accountability, inviting us to confront the ethical stakes of our work.
This is a conversation about care, memory, and resistance, anchored in truth, and refusing the comfort of abstraction.
About Dr. Nikka Lemons:
Nikka Lemons is a human rights scholar-practitioner. She describes herself as her ancestors’ wildest dreams and humbly honors those whose shoulders she stands upon. (personal website here). Dr. Lemons draws strength and inspiration from three primary sources: her maternal grandfather, her mother, and her Sun. Having spent her formative years in 53206-America's most incarcerated zip code per capita, she set out to understand her community's conditions as well as build models for resilience. This passion led Nikka to become a lifelong social impact accelerator, scholar and tech inventor. She attributes her early motivation to wanting to liberate her community kinsman and family members. Her scholar work is epitomized in her dissertation (front matter here, logic model here) which: 1) evidences the U.S. is committing genocide by attrition against African Americans. It is the first and only three level analysis which utilizes the United Nations' framework of analysis. 2)demonstrates the role of spatiality/urban planning in creating internment and entrapments camps (ghettoes) and 3) the founding state ideological goal to create a permanent racialized proletariat to extract and hoard capital- genocide as a the means to a capital accumulation end.
After becoming a mother to a black boy in America, she forced her fear to take a back seat and accelerated her commitment to transforming the world to be safer- hoping her son, like all black mothers, has the opportunity to experience the fullness of his wings unimpeded by race. Her lived experience and navigation in executive spaces as the "only one" has informed the founding of her tech startup (here) and architecture of her tech tools which function to: 1) preserve state stability,2) mitigate human rights violations and 3) protect the indiscriminate access to the American Dreams by advancing inclusive resilience and prosperity.
Access the full episode guide and reference material here.
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