This is America

I grew up on American pop culture. This isn't a unique experience as a black child growing up with the steady growth of American imperialism. I grew up when it was cool emulating "black American" culture through music and movies. I think I may have been shocked to learn that African-Americans were not the majority in their country because they occupied so much of our cultural public discourse in South Africa.

Watching Roots was my first introduction to American slavery. It was the only time mama allowed us to stay up late during the week in order to follow Kunta Kinte's journey. We spoke about Kunta Kinte as though he was someone we knew. It wasn't until I read Sojourner Truth's Ain't I a woman in a copy of Daughters of Africa that I began to get a deeper understanding about black women's relationship with American imperialism. I began to seek out writers such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde and bell hooks. I've always felt like I'm always catching up because there are so many African-American women who have been writing about what it means to live in this country. And this trip to New Haven has been part of this journey in understanding how black women relate to the violence that is global white supremacy.

A friend of mine recommended me for a teacher exchange programme hosted by the The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Slavery isn't a new topic for me but talking about it in the context of a Trump administration where the words white supremacy are not abstract, it seemed apt to be having these conversations. The first part of the trip was visiting the Amistad Center for Art and Culture which is hosting an exhibition featuring black artists. This was followed by a trip to the Connecticut Historical Society Museum and Library which is hosting a travelling exhibition Black Citizenship in the age of Jim Crow. What was striking about both these institutions is the way in which American history is documented intentionally. For all it's faults, America's obsession with institutions means that when there is good work which challenges racism and white supremacy, it is done through institutions which create a holding space for making sure people can access the stories which show up the dark underbelly of this country's violent past and present.

I began to realise the dangers of the haphazard nature of South Africa's institution building which began with the rainbow nation rhetoric which tried to lull our consciousness into a weird dormant state rather than challenging the history intentionally with the establishment of cultural and educational institutions to host this work. While the diversity and transformation sector has grown in South Africa it has largely been hijacked by a discourse that encourages integration rather than having conversations about structural reform that overturns racism. If a country such as America is still reeling from its past of slavery, Jim Crow and the current reality of mass incarceration, who are we in South Africa and the continent at large in fact, to think that we can create warm and fuzzy slogans in order to masquerade that we have moved on?

Listening to the presentation about Jim Crow*

One of the reflections I've had on this trip has been the global nature of white supremacy, largely located in the politics of America and smaller countries in Europe as well as global resistance. In South Africa we love to feel exceptional about our problems and talk ourselves into a frenzy because we are incapable of looking up and learning from other parts of the world (beyond the skewed school curriculum which teach world history as though it's World War I and II). Even more so from looking into what is happening on the continent. This is to our detriment. If we do not locate anti-black racism in the context of slavery and immigration we cannot locate ourselves within the global resistance movements many of which are right under our nose such as Black Lives Matter. But there are more movements which are inevitable erased from the kind of attention that Black Lives Matter receives because of its location in the global north. What is even more damaging is that many South Africans do not know about our own relationship with slavery which I first learned about i Prof Pumla Gqola's book What's Slavery to me: Postcolonial/Slave Memory In Post-Apartheid South Africa. 

Part of the Exhibition at the Amistad Centre*

I'm writing this on the 4th of July.  This is the second time I am experiencing Independence Day in the United States. But this time I'm less enthused by it as I was last year when I wrote about it in this blog post. Earlier this morning I finished watching Ava Duvernay's documentary 13th.Today I want to opt out and think about global white supremacy and the ways in which it has morphed like a cancer. There's a quote that is attributed to Malcolm X (I'm yet to see it in context): Racism is like a Cadillac; they bring out a model every year. This captures the current cultural moment as I experience it in South Africa. White supremacy changed from the white settler colonialism into the brute force in the images of apartheid and iterated into economic supremacy which continues to perpetuate the inequality between the rich and the poor. This mirrors the ways in which in America, slavery became Jim Crow laws, the war on drugs became the vehicle for mass incarceration in the form of the prison industrial complex.

Part of the Exhibition at the Amistad Centre*

I'm still thinking about what it means to resist in this moment. Thus far I have opted for the one of the lessons I've learned from black women's historiography. I write about white supremacy and when in a room and it rears its ugly head I name it. I've taken Nontsizi Mgqwetho's words to heart: Asinakuthula umhlaba ubolile. We cannot keep quiet when the world is in shambles. This past week a friend and I organised an open letter to the President about the insidious role played by white researchers in our education system. I was very afraid of writing this letter because support was not guaranteed because it requires people to put their names on a letter that challenges a group of people who hold power. It is also a letter that is saying to the state that we know that they are complicit in the ways in which black, often radical researchers, are not given space to guide policy because their ideas are threatening to the people who hold power. I see this letter as whistle-blowing. I hope we can build momentum about the social justice issue behind the language policy and African language development in our education system which ensures that black children continue failing because they are taught in a language they do not understand. For as long as we have an education system which privileges English hegemony we keep in tact an education system which perpetuates coloniality.

The lectures during the summer school were conducted by Prof Keisha Blain. We had a brief chat which convinced me I'm on the right track with my research and that there's so much more fulfilling work at the end of the PhD. She gave me a copy of her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom  which is going to be central to future research and will get a post all on its own once I've finished reading the book. We also received a copy of a book she co-edited Charleston Syllabus. Both these books are an example of the ways in which African Americans ensure that the current political moments are seen through the lens of history. This will also be another blog post in the future.

For now it seems apt to end this post with Childish Gambino's This is America:

*Pictures: Seila Senoamadi