Aaron Kamugisha is Professor of Caribbean and Africana Thought at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus The tradition of Caribbean intelligentsia insists on a grounding with the masses against the elites. What then are the responsibilities of Caribbean intellectuals? I draw my definition/sense of the intellectual here from figures as diverse as Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Claudia Jones and Audre Lorde. For the purposes of this essay I am twinning the thought of George Lamming and Walter Rodney – specifically Lamming’s succinct description of an intellectual as someone whose fundamental orientation is a life of the mind, . . .
Opinion Pieces
Black Liberal, Your Time is Up
You are here to translate an uprising. You are here to show your black skin so that you can claim the mantle of authority on anti-Blackness that white liberals have bestowed upon you. You are here to sit at their pundit tables, before their cameras. Your face beaming across the world as it provides the safest possible interpretation of a revolution in order to police its possibilities and pave over the threat of abolition with as mild and ineffective a reform as possible. . . .
The African Woman: The Invisible Soldier
A society without women can be compared to humans without air. Africa without African women is like a mango tree without roots. The indispensable role that African women play in the development of society in general and community, in particular, cannot be matched or debated. However, despite this role African women from Toronto to Harare to London to Kingston find themselves often invisible. . . .
Capitalism Was a Source of My Childhood Trauma
In many radical Black and Brown spaces on the Internet, I’ve seen many people pose the question “What radicalized you?” And, for some time, I could not bring myself to give anything close to a direct answer. When relating the struggle for African liberation to our personal lives, many of us have our own stories or narratives that push us forward into the realm of consciousness, especially when having to do with both race and class. However, for some of us (like myself), it may have taken a while to understand how the latter is connected to the former. Growing . . .
In Memory of Baba Abdus Luqman
“The best way for success is that you always have to allow for people to grow. If you can’t allow people to grow, your movement is gonna calcify, as we see a lot of times, and it’s gonna be static. It’s not gonna be helpful for anyone. Because what’s gonna happen is, those same people that you reject, they’re gonna be the ones fighting against you. So there’s a true thing; what it means to wins the hearts and minds of people. That’s a real strategy.” Baba Abdus Luqman This week the editors of Hood Communist are mourning the loss . . .
How Not to Celebrate Juneteenth
Any effort to make Juneteenth a national holiday should be viewed with caution. Such a designation would only continue the telling of false tales. It would allow the bad actors of the present day to get away with cheap theatrics while continuing the legal and economic structures which still oppress Black people. The true story of the past would be kept hidden and the story of the present would be sugar coated. . . .
China, Africa(ns), White Supremacy & the White Left
For many in the white left, their conscious or unconscious embrace of white supremacy prevents them from recognizing how much those backward ideals influence their perception of China today. Their constant labeling of China as no different than European capitalist/imperialism is an example. . . .
Kamala Harris and The Americas
In March, the White House announced that Vice President Kamala Harris would take charge of the Biden administration’s “efforts to deter migration to the southwestern border by working to improve conditions in Central America”, comprising the nations of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Harris’ tour of the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) allows her the opportunity to advance on the world stage as a “clean up woman” after the exposure of the Biden administration’s continuation of migrants in cages and child separations at the US-Mexico border. The idea behind the tour is to establish some understanding between leaders on . . .