Mapping the Contours: African Perspectives on Anti-Blackness and Anti-Black Racism

By DIO Press Inc

This edited collection examines the significance and implications of anti-Black racism and anti-African racisms for schooling and education in African contexts. It seeks to address the following questions: How do we speak about race, racism and anti-Black racism in Africa? In what ways do practices of anti-B

• Language: English
• Publisher: DIO Press Inc
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781645041719

Book preview

MAPPING THE CONTOURS

AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES ON ANTI-BLACKNESS AND ANTI-BLACK RACISM

George J. Sefa Dei and Rukiya Mohamed

ISBN 978-1-64504-169-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64504-170-2 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64504-171-9 (E-Book)

Library of Congress Control Number:

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© 2023 DIO Press Inc

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No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

This book is part of the Race, Indigeneity and Anti-Colonial Studies Series.

Series Editor: George J. Sefa Dei

DIO Press International Editorial Board

Anijar-Appleton, Karen, University of Arizona, USA, Emerita

Brock, Rochelle, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA In memorium

Carley, Robert F., Texas A & M University, USA

Down, Barry, Murdoch University, Australia

Echeverri Sucerquia, Paula Andrea, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia

Evans-Winters, Venus, African American Policy Forum, Planet Venus Institute, USA

Giroux, Henry McMaster, University, Canada

Goodson, Ivor, University of Brighton, UK, Emeritus

Holder, Winthrop, New York City Department of Education, USA, Retired

Ibrahim, Awad, University of Ottawa, Canada

Kim, Myunghee, Soonchunhyang University, Korea

McLaren, Peter, Chapman University, USA

Milne, Ann, Kia Aroha College Community, New Zealand

Soler-Gallart, Marta, University of Barcelona, Spain

Souranta, Juha, Tampere University, Finland

Vega Villareal, Sandra, Instituto de Pedagogia Critica, Mexico

Zalmanson Levi, Galia, Ben Gurion University & Hakibbutzim College, Israel

INTRODUCTION

African Perspectives on Anti-Blackness and Anti-Black Racism: An Introduction

George J. Sefa Dei and Rukiya Mohamed

CHAPTER 1

Making Sense of Anti-Black Racism from an African Perspective

Njoki Nathani Wane

CHAPTER 2

The Price of the Ticket: The Melodramatic Life of Living Black in a White Space

Paul Banahene Adjei

CHAPTER 3

Anti-Black Racism: Corporate Media and the Politics of Racialization and Criminalization

Patrick Radebe

CHAPTER 4

Arriving Departures. Solidarity, Ruptures and Home

Sylvia Bawa

CHAPTER 5

Black Lives Matter, Anti-Black Racism and Blackness through the Lived Experiences of Francophone Africans in Canada

Gertrude Mianda

CHAPTER 6

Reclaiming the African Identity: Need for engineering African self-respect

Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, Kolawole Raheem & Peter Kwegyir-Aggrey

CHAPTER 7

Death as Metaphor: Black Lives Matter and Pass Law in Black Literature

Abayomi Awelewa

CHAPTER 8

Ensuring Black Learners Matter in the Nova Scotian Education System

George Frempong

CHAPTER 9

Cultural renewal: A re-unification force for Africa with Diaspora Black Peoples World-wide

Mawuadem Koku Amedeker

CHAPTER 10

Historical Constructions of Anti-Black Racism and Critical Counter-racist Reconstructions

Ali A. Abdi

CHAPTER 11

Black Lives Matter: Decolonizing Whiteness in Higher-Education Academic Spaces in Canada

Edward Shizha

Table of Contents

We decided to put this edited collection together to give space and voice for African scholars both on the continent and in the global diaspora to reflect on anti-Black racism and global anti-Blackness, and further, to define their situatedness in, and connections to, the current and ongoing discussions on the topic. Our learning objective is to address how the issues and challenges of anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness implicate African and Black education in general.

There is no question that, as African peoples, we must continually cultivate a strong voice on matters of race and anti-Black racism. Particularly, in the current anti-Black and anti-Indigenous hate we must prepare our learners to combat colonial violence alongside other systemic oppressions. There is no place on earth where there is no racism. Race is relevant in Africa, and we cannot sweep racial issues under the carpet. Racism is a problem for everyone, not just the oppressed nor the global Diaspora. One of the editors recalls vividly a couple of years ago at a conference meeting. An African colleague was so unfriendly to my focus on racism in discussions on African Indigeneity and implied that racism is not an issue for him working on the continent. There is a reason why African Indigeneity is always in question and denied, and we are often asked to explain its relevance: racism. This same editor was once advised not to bring his North American issues to Africa when discussing social differences, schooling and education in Africa. Why? Incredulously, because race is not the issue here, meaning Africa! We know these stories are not isolated. Many scholars will point to similar encounters, even if we have once not held such discomfort in speaking race and Africa.

If we accept that race is important in Africa, then we must also ask: What understandings do we bring to race in Africa? Race is about social conventions rather than science. These conventions can be imposed, resisted and claimed, implying race is a social construct. Race is relevant for understanding African social history and public policy decisions. Africans are often racialized as a group. Even if we insist that Africa is made up of different ethnicities and cultures, we must also acknowledge the correlation and the co-determinant status between ethnicity and race. Race is central to understanding anti-Black racism. As editors, we have asked perhaps a very simple and direct question: What do studies of anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism have to do with Africa and African peoples on the continent? We will say a lot! It does not require a stretch of imagination to connect the dots between race, racism, colonialism, Blackness and Africa.

Race and racism are congealed up in supremacist logics. Globally, we live our fears and anxieties in colour-coded terms. Racism has been a global cancer. Everywhere African peoples confront anti-Black hostility and outright anti-Black racism. Anti-Black racism also plays out in different ways, even in majority African or Black countries. African countries are seduced by Euro-Whiteness. Our institutions are rife with validations of Western values, ideals, rules and codes of conduct. These have become the metanarrative and we are continually adapting to the narrative rather than creating our own narratives. Then, there is the fact that the African body, no matter how much we may decry the colour descriptor of ‘Black’, we are continually confronted by our Blackness in transnational mobility. The African will always be a Black person. We must deal with this reality. Denying ‘Black’ for ‘African’ does not make the problem disappear. It may even be worse to the racist. Fanon (1967) long ago spoke about the Black mirage. Colonization and enslavement are twin pillars of European/White racism and African peoples continue to suffer such colonial legacies.

European colonization of Africa is ongoing. Rooted in colonial logic is the hatred of the Black subject and the denial of humanity. The idea of race became an essential feature of early societal formations as White European explorers as they searched for social explanations and answers about the nature and consequences of human differences in everyday social relations. White hegemonic notions of essentialized Blackness were evoked to construct and maintain essentialized notions of Whiteness, which depict White people as intelligent, deserving, competent, and superior, which became a powerful tool for sorting out human ‘differences’ determined by European explorers, conquerors and colonizers. Reynolds and Lieberman (1993) long ago argued that the origins of the race concept must be appropriately tied to Western European philosophical and belief systems, and particularly, to the colonial and imperial expansion activities of the Western powers and economic capital in the seventeenth century (as cited in Dei, 1996, pp. 40–41). These discourses highlight how race and racism were historically encoded in White European power and belief systems, ultimately creating socially constructed identities (Dei, 2017; Leonard, 2004), which did not exist prior to the Transatlantic slave trade and European colonization of Africa.

History and social context are key to understanding structural racism. White European explorers granted themselves the power to define others. The legacy of Black bodies and lives traded for profit is highlighted in and through the development of colonial structures and institutions rooted in the violence on African and Black bodies. The injustices and destruction of Black futures are examined in what Saidiya Hartman (2007) calls the afterlife of slavery. Centuries of colonialism, exploitative and racially subordinating policies amount to racist systems and structures that govern lives in material and consequential ways contributing to Black social death. Accompanying such Euro-modern processes of colonization and enslavement of African peoples and our wealth and labour is an insidious practice of anti-Blackness compounded by anti-Black racism that weaved into the moral fabric of society. There is also a synergy and convergence of Africanness, and Blackness and we must theorize Africa beyond a particular physical space (Dei 2010, 2017).

If we admit then that race and racism as significant categories to engage in African and Black education, we also must think of engaging in transformative, subversive or radical pedagogic, instructional, and communicative conversations to affirm our African and Black humanity. The case for connecting Africa and the colonial problem of race and racism is a no-brainer. However, the problem is that many of us have been schooled to deny race and skin colour as significant in our lived realities in Africa. An idea that race lacks a scientific validity should be disregarded as it is not useful in thinking through practical solutions to the problem of racism and anti-Black racism. If science cannot account for race, the problem is science, not race.

Similarly, we have also heard the argument that the category of ‘Black’ is meaningless in Africa. We beg to strongly disagree. As Dei (2017, 2018) argues, Black and Blackness have always been relevant categories and conceptions in Africa. The difference is that African Indigenous meanings of Black and Blackness were never encoded in the racist, Eurocentric juxtapositioning of White and Whiteness. Black was never seen as the counterpoint of White, the way European racism cemented in our minds. When contextualized in the Indigenous African discursive space, Black had multiple meanings of happiness, resistance, joy, and fear, not deviant and criminal. Similarly, White could symbolize fear, anxiety, joy, happiness and not necessarily pure, innocent and benevolent (Dugassa, 2011, citing Melba, 1988).

While it is important that we do not understand race as strictly skin colour, the fact of the matter is that race has everything to do with skin colour and much more. Race and racialization work in multiple geo-spaces relying on the tropes of ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, disability, religion and culture to seek advantage and preferential treatment over other groups, as well as punishment and unequal treatment. Groups can be racialized as different on the basis of culture, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, sexuality, etc. and subjected to unequal treatment. Social understandings and practices around race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexuality, religion and language point to slippages, synergies and convergences, as well as divergence gender, which make constructions of boundaries or clear-cut distinctions among groups and individuals a difficult undertaking. For example, the claim of African ancestry suggests such complex ethnic and racial configurations, while the processes of racialization also reveal complex intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, sexual and disability differences even in Africa.

We are all witnesses to the ongoing global coalition politics of #Blacklivesmatter and the rightful insistence on affirming our Black and African humanhood alongside the fight for other social causes. #Blacklivesmatter as we note later, has brought onto global public consciousness the ills of systemic racism, and particularly anti-Black racism as expressed in police brutality against Black bodies in North America. But how do we speak about anti-Black racism in African contexts? In what ways do practices of anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness converge and diverge from anti-African racism? How might we understand anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness in majority Black countries? How does anti-Black racism connect with interstices of difference (i.e., class, gender, sexuality, ability, language, religion, etc.) to offer complex readings of social oppression and resistance in African contexts? And how do we embark on decolonial education informed by these the intersections of anti-Black/African racism and other forms of oppression (e.g., gender, sexual, class, [dis]ability violence)? These are some of the questions this book will address. Race, racism, and anti-Black racism are very much part of our collective psyche and social existence. In the face of silencing courage, denials, deflection, and organized pushback, we must reflect on the dialectics of theory and practice to respond to global anti-Black racism. The state-sanctioned violence and senseless murders of many Black individuals reveal significant lessons for Africa. Every Black death resulting from systemic racism and police brutality anywhere must be of concern for Africa and African peoples. And, in the face of Black despair, anger and rage, there is an urgency for politics of hope and possibilities (rather than cynicism and limitations), as we collectively seek to design new African futurities.

As African peoples, we must hold ourselves accountable. Addressing this accountability is examining the significance and implications of anti-Blackness, anti-Black racism and anti-African racisms for education, broadly defined to include schooling and off-school educational and social settings in African contexts. In most African communities, ethnicity performs similar functions as race. Although race and ethnicity are conceptually different, their effects could harm groups and communities. We have witnessed ethnic violence promoted by the colonial policy in some parts of Africa. In these contexts, ethnicism has become a form of racism compounded with gender, class, sexuality and [dis]ability, violence and hate. There are prejudices and bias that African peoples can have of each other that may coalesce around Black hate. We allude to discriminatory practices against ethnic minorities and preferential treatment of one’s own ethnic membership. These are rooted in colonialism and colonial policies, and when exhibited today, they constitute a form of Black anti-Blackness. It is internalized racism that needs to be addressed. But we also caution that let us not throw out the charge of racism lightly. Racism, as noted, is about institutionalized power. It is worth emphasizing that while ethnicism works with tropes of [White] racism, they are by no means synonymous. Similarly, ‘Black on Black’ violence does not absolve a critique of systemic and institutionalized racism encountered by Black and African bodies. In condemning Black anti-Blackness, we note the politics of denials and deflection, so often on open display when institutional and state forces are called upon to acknowledge the profound effects of structural racism and White privilege.

Similarly, gender and patriarchy also work with similar tropes of racism. These are about institutionalized systems of male power that disadvantaged females. Collins (2000) advances how Black women’s narratives of their neighborhoods, communities, and love relationships offer a forceful critique of capitalism, systemic racism, and patriarchy when being examined in tandem with intersections of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, religious identity, and other identity markers. However, it is critical to mention that conversations and resistance projects that are made both visible and invisible are continually intertwined within relations of power and narratives of the dominant as clearly articulated by Davis, Black women have been invisible to the dominant culture; their unique ways of knowing and understanding the world have not been known (1999, p. 152). Counternarratives ranging from the saliency of race, the fetishization of the Black body, and socio-economic challenges provide a framework for beginning to engage the intersections of gender, ability and class. They further account for how to be attentive to the other axes of identity and recognize the situational and contextual variations of lived experiences. This owning and sharing of narratives is critical to exercising agency against the messaging of inferiority and toward collective healing and self-determination (Villenas, 2019, p. 5). Reflecting on history, Davis (1998) asks, [w]here is the critical voice which speaks to Black women’s identity constituted in the experience of slavery, exile, pilgrimage, and struggle? (p. 83).

Papers in this edited collection tease out the connections and possibilities of decolonial pedagogies and anti-racist practice as a response to the specificities of anti-Black racism, anti-Blackness and anti-African racisms. In the current context of the globalization of anti-Black racism, there is a need for a more nuanced examination of myriad racisms to develop more effective ways of addressing systemic colonial oppressions and their interstices. For example, we need to examine the ways anti-Black and anti-African racisms are rooted in African histories of European colonialization and enslavement, African cultural and political narratives, as well as spiritual memories of African existential realities, and the continuing existence of Black life and the African humanhood today. We cannot write about the convergences and synergies of anti-Black and anti-African racism, anti-Blackness, etc. without reflections on the politics of Afrofuturism, the interstices of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and racial oppression, African Indigenous cultural knowledges, the African self as an entry point of embodied learning, and the pursuit of a politics of hope and possibilities. Similarly, resisting anti-Blackness, anti-Black racism, anti-African racism also call for radical, anti-colonial and decolonial pedagogies, critical understandings of outsider-within, #BlackLivesMatter, and Black/African liberation.

In making a case for African schooling and education to broach anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness, whether in classroom pedagogy, school curricular lessons, and other instructional practices, we will highlight identified inter-related areas of engagement:

‘Race and the Globalization of Racism: Beyond the Colour Descriptor

As noted, race and racism are global phenomena. While it is generally accepted that there is no intellectual and scientific status for race, it is nonetheless a meaningful, relevant, and consequential concept (see Omi and Winant, 1993). Race is a social construct with socio-political meanings and historical conditioning about humanity. Systemic practices of racism affect all of us. Race informs our understandings of ourselves, particularly, the illogical realities of racial hierarchies. Throughout human history, race has been a convenient category for sorting out groups for distributions of social goods and rewards (Biddiss, 1979). Race assigns privilege to some and punishment to others. Dei (2013) has argued that it is racism that makes race real. In the hierarchy of races, African and Black peoples are the bottom. But race has come to signify more than skin colour. Race is systematically tied to gender, class, gender, sexuality, disability, language, culture, religion while acknowledging the saliency of skin colour/pigmentation. In the twinning of race and racism, the global practice of racism reveals itself as a social/systemic practice, operationalized through racial hierarchies and sustained by institutionalized power. Race is more than Blackness. Arguably, one can also claim an African identity and still benefit from an institutionalized racial superiority conveyed in White skin privilege. South African offers important lessons on this.

Blackness and Africanness in Transnational Mobility

‘Black’ is a self-defining term. Black is also largely a socio-political construct. While Black is largely seen as a colour descriptor, Black has come to mean or also signal a particular politics, identity, location, and history over the years. In this sense, Blackness becomes particular conceptualizations of Black and being Black. The fact that Black and Blackness go hand in hand also moves us to a level of interpretation regarding how Blackness and Africanness are engaged in transnational mobility. There is no disagreement that skin colour is an important defining factor of Black and Blackness. The Black skin as signifier of racial difference (Hall, 1997, p. 20). But if Black also highlights related understandings of identity, culture, history, location, politics and resistance, it means our conception of Blackness is also fluid and heterogenous. Black and Blackness in their socio-geographical and historical conjunctures have revealed complex understandings of the global dispersal of peoples with African ancestry. Throughout human history, a global dispersal of peoples of African ancestry has meant a need to bring a far more nuanced understanding to Blackness in transnational mobility, and the connections of Blackness with Africanness.

In the pedagogy of anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness, African educators must present learners with a critical understanding of Blackness, one which is shared and also contested by Black peoples globally. Our understanding of who we are as peoples of African ancestry require a differentiated analysis of what Black means (e.g., Black male, Black queer, Black female, etc. and how this Black relates to Africa, etc.). Given the multidimensionality of Black and Blackness (e.g., as read from the lens of race, gender, class, geography, location, and global history), the presence of Black communities outside Africa and in the Caribbean, Latin America/Latinx, Europe, and North America offer different lenses for understanding global anti-Blackness. This is why it is important that we understand Blackness, its nuances, and complexities in discussions about anti-Black racism, anti-Blackness and #Blacklivesmatter today. The noted synergy and convergence of Africanness and Blackness reveal itself in the fact that every African everywhere is confronted by his Blackness.

Anti-Blackness and Anti-Black Racism: A Conceptual Distinction or Linkage?

In articulating the specificity of anti-Blackness, we point to the socio-historical and political conditions of Black existence, the totality of Black existential realities, including the everyday individual and systemic hostilities and violence mapped onto the congeniality of the Black body with profound concrete, material, and spiritual manifestations of Black life and the Black body (see also Dei, 2020a, b). This violence is racialized, class, gendered, and sexualized and manifested in culture, politics, knowledge and it is this understanding extends the meaning of anti-Blackness beyond anti-Black racism.