Lockdown 2.0
What exactly did South Africa’s government do with the time they gained through the two-month COVID-19 lockdown, except to brutalize its people?
#BlackLivesMatter
Abolition across the Atlantic
Why are South Africans not in the streets against police brutality like Americans are? It has less to do with the internet or middle classes. South Africans are captured by punitive logics. Break that.
The class character of police violence
Police violence and the murder of black people in the United States have provoked outrage and protest around the world, including on the continent. But, why is there so little outrage over police violence in African countries?
We cannot reform ourselves out of the times we are in
To end racism, we will have to change the structures from which it draws its mandate, and get rid of liberal and right-wing politicians who give it oxygen while we are being asphyxiated.
Why I’m no longer talking to Nigerians about race.
On writers, empathy and (black) solidarity politics.
Black America’s Africa
Black Panther arrives as black America diversifies, but the US becomes more isolationist. It's not beyond many African Americans to reflect nativist tendencies.
White masks in Tunisia
Racism against its black citizens permeates the social, institutional, and political strata of Tunisia.
Black African immigrants, race and police brutality in America
Most poor African immigrants to the US can't pull the “get out of black”-card when confronted with racism, something middle class Africans can pull.
Still doing the right thing
It is eerie (and tragic) how relevant the themes of racial tension and structural violence of Spike Lee's 'Do the right thing' still is--both in America and South Africa.
Sandra Bland and The Beatles
Bland, who died in police custody after a traffic stop in Texas, embodied a rare charismatic self-possession that disrupts social orders.
The stranger among you
How does one ask the black church to offer hospitality after a white, racist stranger made the historic inner sanctum of the black community the space of death?
The art and activism of Gabriel Teodros
This past weekend I had the immense pleasure to sit alongside Gabriel Teodros, Bocafloja, and Linda
Why we can’t breathe
The last few years have revealed that, particularly at the state level, justice for Black Americans is an impossibility.
Black death and revolution
In the days leading up to the grand jury decisions in the separate murders of Mike
Lessons for black South Africa in black America
Many middle-class black South Africans hold poor and working-class blacks in disregard if not disdain, and believe poor blacks hold themselves back.