Africa’s Place in the Global Anti-Racist Discourse

As we continue to live in a moment where #EndSARS protesters have made explicit the issue of police brutality in Nigeria, connections drawn between other movements outside and within the continent provide a framework to think about liberation as a global struggle.

Written by Chinonye Otuonye

Oct 29, 2020

ARNE HOEL/WORLD BANK/FLICKR

In the United States, we are still in the middle of a reckoning. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders have ignited an unquenchable rage stemming from centuries of racialized violence at the hands of police and the state. The insidiousness of racism, which has been known and protested for centuries by Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour, has been made explicit to a world that insisted on denying its reality. As a result, there have been worldwide protests not just against state-sanctioned violence but against institutional violence at universities, unequal access in the publishing realm, gendered violence and inadequate corporate diversity and inclusion efforts—also known as systemic and institutional racism that leaves Black people at a disadvantage and highlights white privilege.

Like the COVID-19 pandemic, the violence present on US soil further exemplifies that local issues are also global; that racism is a problem across borders not simply within them. The anti-racist readings lists that have been commonplace all over the internet, highlight a possible hunger to learn more and, ideally, to do more. Alternatively, they may simply signal a superficial appearance of knowledge consumption that sits in the realm of theory divorced from practice. However, as the reading lists have poured out as a pedagogical measure positioning and reducing Black American voices to racial educators, many may be left wondering: What place does Africa have in this conversation?

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About the Author

Chinonye Otuonye

is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY, Graduate Center and an associate editor of The Republic

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Africa’s Place in the Global Anti-Racist Discourse