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
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’. . . .