Just as often as anti-Blackness seeps into new places and discussions, Black folks always find new ways to clap back. According to a racist on social media, recently, my “type are not going to be ...
Tag: Global Black History
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.
Hilton Head Island—Haunted by Its Own History
Historical traces of racism and exclusion remain on the island. It’s just that new residents can’t—or won’t—read them.
Nobody Verzuz a Nation
Though a new phenomenon, Verzuz isn’t new. Black artistic, scholarly, athletic, and political spaces have always been made into battlegrounds.
Electric Laboratory
“What are the compartments that have been placed around how we understand slavery and genocide and its impact on our lives and the world?”
Haiti’s New Political Worlds
Throughout its history, residents of Haiti, especially those of African descent, imagined and created their own possibilities for new social worlds.
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
What if Black Women Were Free?
The transnational struggles of Black women throughout history are different experiments in the practice of freedom.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
When Black Humanity Is Denied
Critiquing the Enlightenment is essential, because there the asylum, prison, and science itself unveil their violent foundations.
The Black Rebel Athlete: Spectacle and Protest
As more and more protests make clear, the bodies of Black people playing sports are not outside history. Indeed, they never have been.
Making Black Lives Matter in Italy: A Transnational Dialogue
“So, dear sister, do you think that Black Italian movements have changed qualitatively in the wake of George Floyd?”
Translating Italy, Translating Blackness
For two Black womxn translators, bringing Afro-Italian stories into English is an act of radical self-love and resistance.
Building Black Futures in Italy
When will new generations of Afro-Italians finally be heard and recognized as full and active members of Italy’s culture and society?
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."
Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”