Any talk of womanhood, especially in grammatically gendered (neo)European languages, puts us into a colosseum of “Western” notions of gender and fe/male, where we lose because the fight is on their terrain, using their terms as faux weapons. Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí has successfully argued the categories of “gender” and “woman” are not cross-culturally inherent in social relations, and remarking how these social construct entering the English language in the late 19th and early 20th century have been used uncritically.[1] In the context of Oyèwùmí’s Yorùbá culture, the category of “woman,” as biologically determined, did not exist until British colonial rule. The Yorùbá language, like the Akan language of Ghana which I speak, are gender-neutral. They do not grammatically declare gender. Cultural context does.
Essays
On Reparations (Again!)
EssaysCommentrep·a·ra·tion / repəˈrāSH(ə)n / noun: 1. the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. 2 the compensation for war damage paid by a defeated state.
ARCHAIC. the action of repairing something.
In a previous essay, ‘Political Organization v. Reparations,” I had made the case not for nor against reparations, but for a grasp of reparations—as historicized concept and practice, as individual compensation, and as an organizing strategy. Here, I want to reaffirm my position, which remains unchanged, and suggest there’s no way to have sensible discussion about reparations unless we put all its meanings on the table and then decide which ones support broader-than-the-individual strategies in the African world.
In a time when every human effort constitutes a “movement,” with self-appointed leaders and spokespersons, with or without organizational structures, reparations because of its iterations lacks cohesion and thus cannot be a movement. There is no shared aim or strategy. For the pay-check expectants, what happens then the day after getting the (unlikely) compensation? What individual desires should be tempered to feed collectivist needs, and how will those needs receive remedy? This monetary approach to reparations, if we can call it an approach, justifies itself as a solution, but the layered predicaments of “black” life in white societies is no mathematical equation solved with a number-crunching solution. For those who want an apology, and are satisfied with that alone, then the ends justify the means, for this, too, is a dead-end approach. For the justice-seekers, what does the justice they seek looks like and justice (whatever this means) for whom and from whom? They cannot bring a collectivist suit, representing their angst and aims, against the U.S. government—or any government—and expect to win in their courts. For the law-making sponsors of reparations, there have been decades of bills introduced in Congress to study reparations, not to grant it, and this approach continues elected officials asking for or creating reparations task forces and commissions to study “the effects of slavery and create recommendations for reparations.” And, finally, for the this-will-save-democracy and bring-racial-reckoning-to-a-close proponents, nothing in nor through reparations will accomplish either, except reconfigure U.S. empire as it marches on with less-than-disgruntled “descendants of slaves” (pun intended!).
Democracy and its discontents
EssaysCommentMy argument is that the United States, or its forerunner colonies, was never a democracy nor can it become one for this reason: if democracy is a “government by the people,” where sovereign power is vested in “the people” who exercise power directly or by elected official,” that system of governance requires rational people and most of the 330 million people in the United States are irrational, including their elected officials. By rational, I mean a person or people able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically. The implication is that it doesn’t matter who becomes the president, nor which party is in power, for there’s a feedback loop where incoming regimes usually do their best to eviscerate the body of work belonging to the previous administration, regardless if that some of that work benefits “the people.”
Voting as a Tool for What in 2020?
EssaysCommentAs the U.S. presidential election day approaches on Tuesday, November 3, there is the idea the (f)act of voting is a tool, but we need to ask for what? Voting presents us—or is presented to us—as a quintessential right, safeguarded by the blood of fallen troops and shrouded in mythos of liberty and justice for all… whom matter. Whether we accept or reject this presentation, we must admit voting as a performative act or a tool through which to direct action needs to be framed in history. “The great force of history,” James Baldwin reminds us, “comes from the fact that we carry it within us,” and that “history is literally present in all that we do.” But what has been carried into the present under the guise of voting and, through voting, what do we keep ever-present? We start where history nudges us to look—ancient Rome. The socio-political and economic structures regulating U.S. society, and around a globe molested by western European violence, are plagiarized forms of Roman law and institutions. Their story is a mirror to us.
Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and Chadwick Boseman
EssaysCommentI moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.
Gendered | Intimate | Household | Violence
EssaysCommentBorn into a family, we recreate it so others can cycle in and out. With each entry and exit, we accrue unresolved-ness that plays out in our being and in our family, at times violently. My view is simple: the source of and success against gendered intimate household violence is our families. If Covid-19 exposes, laying bare more than some imagined, the (ill-)health of family discloses intergenerational violence while granting us the tools to expunge it. I’ve digested Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí’s The Invention of Women, as well as Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. And yet, I’m unconvinced the central problem is nor can be resolved by focusing on women/girls or men/boys as if contestants in the oppression game—jostling for who is the most oppressed. These approaches seem too schizophrenic and divisive. They fall short because they embody rather than challenge assumptions about the common denominator—gender.
Monuments and flags
EssaysCommentSymbols as representational images matter. Whether casted as monuments, flags, currencies, or other icons of the nation-state, they shape perceptions of who we were and who we now claim to be. They always speak to us, because they are co-defendants in the myths upon which our lives (r)evolve, rotating like that caged hamster on the wheel. Symbols keep us on that wheel, as if we have a real stake in “our democracy,” the democracy that dispossesses those who cry out its name. Symbols matter because even if the hamster in us wants to get off the wheel, realizing its energies are spent to remain in place, there’s the cage.
A Note on “This moment is different”: Is it?
EssaysCommentA chant, “this moment is different,” has been heard, seen and printed from these weeks of protest. Protesters have embraced this chant, echoed in the mouths of Obama and official spokespersons for Black Lives Matter. Attached it to another, that declared, “unlike our ancestors, we will not sit down.” The two slogans are related. Their message has one target: the efforts of ancestors. But this is what they suggest: that somehow those in the present moment are more strong-willed, more prepared, more tactical to seize a moment their ancestors might have accepted, or to which they would’ve acquiesced. Organizing a protest of 150 deep in a small Texas town known for Klu Klux Klan activity, they felt embolden, especially after a planned counter-rally by the Klan never materialized. They have also had enough, “unlike our ancestors.” That’s why “this moment is different.”
“The March had already been co-opted”
EssaysCommentOn their website, the Movement for Black Lives coalition claims to be anti-capitalist. Google lists their “type of business” under “social movement.” In the past month, they have raised over $100 million from a billionaire, foundations, and the same Democratic Party for which they disavowed any affiliation in 2015. The ante of pledged financial support is now close to two billion dollars.
Complex Societies in Africa: Wagadu, Mali and Songhay
Essays1 CommentUnderstanding how complex societies developed in Africa can be as challenging as how to tell the histories of Africa. These interconnected issues are true for scholars who sort through equally complex evidence, but also for teachers and students who rely on scholarly interpretations of the past. In many instances, social and political complexity was achieved with centralized authority and a ruler, but also with collective rule based on pacts between lineages, ritual specialists, and autonomous settlements. Nowhere was the mixture of environment, nature’s resources, and the economies and relationships that flowed from them clearer than in pre-1600 West Africa.
Historical Significance of Transatlantic Slaving
EssaysCommentThe modern world owes its origin to transatlantic slaving, otherwise known as the transatlantic slave trade. If this seems surprising, it is because the overall significance of transatlantic slaving in the creation of the Americas and the modern world more broadly is not a celebratory history. It is a history of greed, immeasurable misery, and more importantly denial. To say slavery created the modern world is to say the historical obvious. But to accept this statement is to confront its denied cruciality, to bypass the idyllic scenes of picking cotton, and to come to terms with the barbarity and systemic humiliation of millions, the societies ruined, their lost possibilities, and the psychological if not financial debt owed to the collective skilled labor force that produced the opulence “modern” people enjoy or envy.
The Research Process
Essays2 CommentsToward the end of the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali Ben Said settled in Alabama, where his narrative and the paper trail for his life ends, but where the research for my Transatlantic Africa book began. Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 retold the story of transatlantic slaving through the lived experiences and intellectual history of Africans who lived through it. In that way, uncovering Mohammed’s story was fortuitous because Mohammed was an African, a Muslim, and an enslaved or indentured person for most of his remarkable life. For all these insights Mohammed’s extraordinary story provided, it left an equal amount of questions. These questions became the legs of my research, conveying it along an exploratory journey.
https://www.google.com/_/chrome/newtab?rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS754US754&espv=2&ie=UTF-8
The Fate of Black People in White Societies
EssaysCommentThough I am aware of Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, released today, what follows is a condensed version of my views, stirred principally by BWM but also by the repurposed essays and anecdotes that form the contents of Eight Years in Power. More importantly, there has been insufficient consideration of what BWM’s argument portends for the fate of “black” people—a race identifier used grudgingly but in no way do I subscribe to it. My concern is the defective premise, a story if you will, anchoring Coates’s argument and its dead-end implication if we were to follow that argument to its logical conclusion. I offer another way to think about the fate of black people in the United States and in white societies more broadly.
The Civil Rights-Black Power Nexus in African American History
EssaysCommentWhen I was a graduate student at Cornell University, I became fascinated but equally frustrated by the Civil Rights-Black Power movement nexus in North American historiography. On one hand, historians presented the African American Civil Rights movement as a watershed phenomenon unto itself and which forever changed the course of North American politics and race relations; on the other hand, the Black Power movement became its demonic inverse and thus reduced to an aberration led by fragmented groups of gun-toting, dashiki-wearing, Kiswahili-speaking nationalists.
The more I read, the more I became frustrated with, essentially, the same characterizations about the Black Power period of the 1960s and 1970s, but the stubbornness of those narrative accounts also fueled my fascination. The individuals, families, organizations, and African diasporic networks of culture and politics fascinated me, but, more importantly, many of the same (kinds of) individuals belonged to both movements and shaped or, otherwise, equally informed the other. In essence, the dialectic between the two freedom movements in the second half of the twentieth century was more symbiotic and simultaneously distinct than previously thought, and this realization prompted a number of young scholars, including myself, to reconsider the nexus and the demonization of the Black Power movement.