yaspora

joined 1 year ago
[–] yaspora@baraza.africa 0 points 1 year ago

'Anyone who is [most humans on earth]' is too big a category for me to make a useful recommendation. Are you reading for a certain purpose? For example, to understand a specific issue, deepen some relationship, help decide on a course of action, or just feel good?

[–] yaspora@baraza.africa 0 points 1 year ago

I'm not an abolitionist because "abolition" doesn't go far enough. It's no accident that abolitionists mostly talk about "abolishing" visibly repressive arms of the state but not so much the nation-state system in its entirety, or the European cultural base it rests on. Most of them shy away from even fighting to abolish the nation-state they live in because then they wouldn't be able to demand policy changes from it.

 

This is admittedly A Take, but it's genuine and I hope it will be engaged as such.

I noticed the language here refers to "minorities" in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn't demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it's power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.

Some might try to point out that in some areas, non-white communities are literally minorities. I only think this is true from the viewpoint of majority-white, European colonialist countries, and that isn't a viewpoint which should be assumed or taken for granted, given they are the oppressors in this situation. Globally, no single race constitutes a majority. Locally, "minorities" quickly become "majorities" if you draw boundaries appropriately—for example, a given group may be 20% of the population of a given city, but in certain neighborhoods of that city they are 60-90% of the residents.

I'm pointing this out because in general decolonization is neglected in "people of color" spaces so that racially oppressed people strive to become equal participants in a racially oppressive system rather than destroying that system altogether. It would be nice if that did not happen here.

 

cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/299555

Some excerpts I pulled are below.

with extremely few exceptions, especially outside of southern Africa, scholars of continental Africa do not engage the complex ways that race continues to be significant in this postcolonial moment.

The North–sub-Saharan Africa divide shapes continental and global politics (take, for example, the coverage of the “Arab Spring”). … in treating these two geographical areas as distinct—without the associated analysis of the basis of this distinction—we lose sight of the impact of global racial projects in maintaining such a separation

We need to take bold steps to dismantle the established theoretical, methodological, and epistemological structures that continue to impede race analysis on the African continent.

 

So that if you paste a link to one of those big social media platforms, it offers to replace it with a working alternative front-end.

[–] yaspora@baraza.africa 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not a Beehaw user but I just wanted to let Africans (including the diaspora) know that baraza.africa is an option.