Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, and scholar-activist. She is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is author of Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture and an art and poetry chapbook Saltwater Healing – A Myth Memoir and Poems.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means” – Walter Rodney, Groundings with my Brothers (1969)
“Every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work towards its overthrow.” – Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise. We affirm our humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation. – “About Black Lives Matter” (founded in 2013)
The struggle for Black liberation is ongoing. There should be no doubt about this. But if there was, certainly the past few weeks have revealed the depths of continued systemic racism through state violence. We must feel the pain and anguish from the experiences and horrors of violence being perpetrated on Black people in North America. This racial violence is state sanctioned through police and vigilantes who justify their actions through racist beliefs and stereotypes. We can understand this as systemic racism and white supremacy; these systems born out of and cultivated through colonialism, patriarchy, and global capitalism. This is why the Movement for Black Lives Matter resonates globally. The recent protests and uprisings are perhaps even more intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic because of racism, existing health disparities, and economic challenges facing many people. Disproportionately the most impacted in COVID deaths have been African Americans, Black Migrants, and Native Americans in the U.S. bearing the brunt of inadequate response and healthcare systems.
Arundhati Roy’s poignant reflection that “the pandemic is a portal” resonates in the face of global uprisings: “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it” (Financial Times, 3 April 2020). She has also responded in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by also raising difficult questions of anti-Blackness and colourism in India.
The uprisings and protests should be understood in relation to the pandemic and failures of global capitalism, social and racial inequalities, and economic and climate crisis. People are outraged globally and have connected with the Black Lives Matter movement because they too have witnessed and/or experienced police violence, racial and economic injustice, and other forms of oppression. These eruptions reveal shared experiences, feelings of empathy and outrage, and a clear demand that the systems in which we live are broken, racist, and classist and must be changed. In the Caribbean, we have seen protests in solidarity with Black Lives Matter with different approaches and varying degrees of success in the context of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown. In both Jamaica and Trinidad, local protests have drawn attention to police violence and killings that often go unreported with little to no accountability, particularly upon poor and working class communities that are criminalized and under constant surveillance and scrutiny.
In Trinidad, an ethnically diverse and multiracial space, local protests created a frenzy of responses that ranged from clear solidarity with and affirmation of Black Lives Matter to defensive and anti-black racist commentary across social media. Some insisted that Black Lives Matter is a North American thing and can’t be brought into our context – with mostly people of African and Indian descent and a police force that is predominantly Black. Others took the opportunity to discuss anti-blackness and how it functions within our society and the wider Caribbean. And some (especially those of us in social justice and human rights activism) argued that in the Caribbean we have much work to do to affirm all Black Lives – poor, working class, women, LGBTI+, with disabilities, and otherwise on the margins. The intersectional feminist organisation WOMANTRA issued a statement in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and participated in a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy with demands of local policy accountability. They held up signs with the names of people killed by police since 2013. The human rights organisation, Jamaicans for Justice, has long been calling for police accountability and investigations into police violence and killings particularly in poor and working class Black communities.
Black Lives Matter protests and uprisings have sparked new and needed conversations about race, class and race relations across our world. And in our region, we are in desperate need of them. The irony though is that some of the most profound and brilliant thinkers on these issues have come from our region – Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Walter Rodney, Andaiye, Stuart Hall, and Sylvia Wynter, to name a few. They have offered clear understandings of colonialism, historical and philosophical constructions of race and humanism, and how these intersect with gender, class, and colour. They gave us the tools to understand our complex region and question the colonial histories we continue to teach our children year and after year. They contributed to postcolonial and decolonial theories, Pan Africanism, and Black Power Movements. They insisted that Black liberation was an ongoing struggle and would mean freedom for all.
The demand and revolutionary call of #BlackLivesMatter is necessary and born out of 400 years of struggle – to be Black and Human and Free. Sylvia Wynter reminds us that Black people were never considered to be human in the system of global capitalism and Western civilization. In this system, we were never human. And so this is why Walter Rodney insists that it must be by revolutionary means that we as Black people prove our humanity. We should all be enraged that we are still fighting for this simple proposition – that we are human. And it is this shared experience of colonization and dehumanisation that ought to bring people of colour together. Yet the notion of divide and rule remains entrenched through silent acceptance of white supremacy and internalised racist beliefs and anti-blackness that pervades our families, our education and social systems, our very social fabric.
This is the time for us to be activating the brilliant thinking of Walter Rodney – as we remember the anniversary of his assassination (13th of June). May we be as fierce and fearless as Rodney in the face of injustice and speak out even when governments and those in power attempt to silence us. May he always be a reminder that the work we do in our struggles against oppressive systems is necessary. And may he also be a guiding light for us in our work across this region so wrought with racial, ethnic, and class tensions that his insights and research provide us with the tools to dismantle and activate meaningful solidarity and movement building.
In Black Power in the West Indies, Walter Rodney addressed the multiracial context of the Caribbean, and noted that for the most part, “poverty resided among Africans and Indians in the West Indies and…power is denied them.” We see an elaboration of this understanding, for example, in the work Attillah Springer has done so radically and beautifully through the “Black Power Hour,” archived as a podcast, which tells the story of the Black Power Movement of the 1970s in Trinidad and Tobago that shows the history of solidarity between Africans and Indians.
The lessons for me in these moments are clear: we need more spaces to talk about anti-blackness and anti-black racism – rooted in white supremacy and colonialism. We must insist on difficult conversations about race/colour and how it intersects with class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc. We have to be honest about light-skin privilege and colourism. And we need to do the work to expose and root out internalised racism and self-hatred. At the same time, we also need deep conversations and confrontations about power and privilege, state and police violence — because these are too invisible. We must uncover how racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia function in our families and in our communities.
We must reason and reflect on how Black lives are dehumanised across the world—see and feel the inter-connections among Black, Brown, Indigenous experiences of oppression and colonialism. We need real talk about the deeply flawed system of meritocracy (just work hard and you will succeed) that supports the system of global capitalism, which relies on keeping many people in poverty. We must confront our deep investment in systems that were never designed for us. They must be dismantled as we decolonise our consciousness and rebuild from inside out. This is what decolonial justice looks like.
Finally, we have to acknowledge and heal our ancestral rage and colonial trauma. We need to see each other and fight against divide and rule, fight against all structures of oppression that are interlocking. For me as a Black mixed-race, light-skinned, Caribbean queer woman who grew up poor, I hold onto the words of Audre Lorde, published in The Uses of Anger in 1981: “I am not free while any one woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
