Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist,Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist For decades, most Black political commentary has expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, but recently, a new phenomenon has appeared, particularly on social media platforms, which accuses all Palestinians of being anti-Black racists, and asserts that aligning with them is either of no use to Black people or even that it is detrimental to our own cause. Some of these individuals are Democratic Party operatives attempting to maintain Black voter loyalty as Israeli war crimes in Gaza remain a campaign issue. Others are of a right . . .
afro-pessimism
Between A Rock & A Hard Place: Reflections on Cuba
My body has been back in the United States of Amerikkka for three days, but it’s a shell housing a consciousness forever stuck there and then with them. Perhaps it’s a “blackened” consciousness, forever outside of time and place, which would explain why it feels like I’m out of time; matters are urgent. After being in Cuba, time, itself, passes differently—somehow slower yet faster, a cautious drag and then a rushed pull like a tug of war. Time now skips past me with its tongue stuck out and hands wagging at its ears like a teasing bully. I trace its . . .
Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness
What, then, are we fighting for? I want to open the door to this critical, but absent, conversation around anti-racist organising – the space for such conversations is desperately needed. Indeed, many of the claims about race that I have challenged created a suffocating climate in the last decade in which dissent from shared assumptions and attempts to develop theoretical grounds for solidarity are routinely characterised as ‘anti-black’. . . .