Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Critical Race Theory and Black Liberation w/ Zoé Samudzi

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

[Originally released Oct 2017] Zoe Samudzi is a black feminist writer whose work has appeared in a number of spaces including The New Inquiry, Warscapes, Truthout, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue,BGD, Bitch Media, and Verso, among others. She is also a member of the 2017/18 Public Imagination cohort of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) Fellows Program, and she is a member of the Black Aesthetic, an Oakland-based group and film series exploring the multitudes and diversities of black imagination and creativity. She is presently a Sociology PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences where academic interests include biomedicalization theory, productions of race and gender, and transgender health. She is a recipient of the 2016-17 Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. Her dissertation "'I don’t believe I should be treated like a second citizen by anybody': Narratives of agency and exclusion amongst male and transgender female sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa" engages hegemonic gender constructs in South Africa as they affect identity construction and health of transgender women and cisgender men in sex work. Zoe sits down with Brett to apply critical race theory to our current US society. Topics Include: The Anarchism of Blackness, Double Consciousness, Zoe's experiences growing up as a black girl in the Midwest, the failures of white liberalism and the democratic party, Trump, racist and sexist tropes in film, the White Gaze, and much more! Here is Zoe's website: http://www.zoesamudzi.com/ Outro: "African Son" (featuring Chindo Man, Songa, Wise Man, Mic Crenshaw. Recorded at Watengwa Studios, Kijenge, Tanzania as part of the Afrikan Hiphop Caravan 2015) Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

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Five for equality. Fight against the right free. Fascist ideology. in and turn it up loud revolutionary left radio starts now welcome everybody this is revolutionary left radio i am your host and comrade o'Shea and today i have a very good conversation i'm really excited to have we've been planning this for a few weeks now um we're going to be talking about black feminist anarchism trump white liberalism race and a lot more with zoie sam woodsy did i say that right yeah you got it awesome Would you like to go ahead and introduce yourself, Zoe, and say a little bit about your background?

Yeah. So I am a freelance writer. I'm a PhD student in medical sociology. I identify roughly as an anarchist, and although I generally self-describe as being someone of the left. And yeah, I think that's all the important stuff. Yeah. I found out about you through Twitter. The Twitter page for our show, you know, we follow you. And that's how I got, wow, sorry, I got to edit that part out. That's how I got into contact with you. But then also I read a lot of your articles leading up to this interview and they're really, really good. So we're going to link to that in the episodes. I urge people to go follow Zoe on Twitter and follow those links and read Zoe's articles because I think they're really, really, really good stuff. So, yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and dive in. So you say that you identify as a black feminist anarchist. Can you please tell us how you came to embrace anarchism and how anarchism fits in with feminism and black liberation? Yeah.

So I think my first introduction to anarchism, like a lot of women, unfortunately, was someone that I dated. But as I kind of came into my own, and I started having a really thorough understanding of the kind of unique oppression of black women in the United States, the ways that black women's labor, our reproductive labor, our physical labor, and quote-unquote productive labor, our expropriated sexual labor.

And I came to have a really good understanding of the way that the state, in the ways that black women are vulnerable, will never be able to protect us. And the most thorough and whole and complete kind of protection for black women can only come from community and come from organizing, outside of the state. And so I kind of came to this rejection of the state in the name of black women's safety because we will never be protected through these public safety campaigns, which revolve around protecting white women and protecting white women from all of these different

racialized threats that include black womanhood and indigenous womanhood and black and brown masculinity and manhood. And so anarchism, I think, fits within black liberation because I have this understanding of blackness as never fully being situated within the American social contract. Black people have never been citizens. We will never be citizens. And so we cannot rely on this exclusionary social contract to grant us any kind of rights or freedom in any true sense of either word. And so blackness has always been and will continue to be anarchistic within this country. And we cannot continue to rely on rights. because rights can be so easily taken away from us.

Yeah, absolutely. And in your article, the anarchism of blackness, which you wrote with William C. Anderson, you actually said this quote, you said, Black America can be understood as an extra state entity because of black exclusion from the liberal social contract. Due to this extra state location, blackness is in so many ways anarchistic, close quote. Now, I find that argument really fascinating. Could you please maybe, you touched on it a little bit in your last answer,

but could you please elaborate on the notion of black America as a quote-unquote extra state entity and connect that up with anarchism? Yeah, so Charles Mills writes really incredibly in the racial contract, all of these different ways that anti-blackness is codified within kind of the liberal social contract of all of these Western democracies. And so, you know, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, we see this beautiful language about egalitarianism. And yet within this understanding of rights and egalitarianism, there was no contradiction with the fact that all of the people who were signatories to these documents were all slave owners. And so foundational to the United States is this, you know, this complementary and negative relationship between blackness and indigenity. It's the genocide of indigenous people and the expropriation of black labor. And because of these, you know, indigenous people also can never be a part of the social contract because if the American Settler Project were to be successful, there should be no more indigenous people at this point.

Black people will never be a part of the social contract because in so many ways, race in the United States revolves around anti-blackness. It is at the core of our, of mass incarceration of carceral systems, even in the way that we saw the state going after Antifa, they were using the, they were using, they were using, language around, like, people being thugs. They were using gang injunctions. They were using all of these anti-black structures to squash the resistance organizing of people that we actually all assume are white. You know, the entire state apparatus revolves around anti-blackness. And I think in this way, there is no space within that state apparatus for black people to have rights, right? for black people to be understood as being humans and to have a place in the United States.

And I think that it makes sense for our organizing to kind of start from understanding and negotiating community from there as opposed to, you know, trying to build from the civil rights movement and the kind of assimilatory politic of the civil rights movement and hoping that if we get all of these rights,

even within a fundamentally white supremacist framework, that those rights will be respected and never be rolled back. But those rights can never be respected because America can never not be anti-black. If that makes sense. Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think we're seeing that on a lot of different fronts right now.

Not only the election of Trump, not only literal Nazis marching with torches in the South, but even Colin Kaepernick's peaceful protest where the confusion for most Americans, for white America, is Kaepernick is protesting police brutality. And he started that protest actually under the Obama administration. But because he silently takes a knee during the anthem, there's this confusion around what is he protesting. And a lot of white America see protesting racism as synonymous with protesting America itself. And it's almost this, you know, underhanded give on their part. Like they're telling us that's even how they think.

Totally. It's revealing and it's really, it's incredibly interesting. It is. the ways that like liberals and conservatives you know tell on themselves yep exactly and you had that great line i think it was in that article where you said you know black folks are not citizens of america we are residents in it and and it's always been that way um and in that before we leave that article and in that same article you argue that the democratic party specifically has led a black america down a dead end how has how has the democratic party done this and why in your

opinion, does the Democratic Party still enjoy so much electoral support from the black community broadly? I think that the Democratic Party, so I'm not very old. I'm about to turn 25. So my, my kind of political landscape kind of begins at the Bush administration. But I think that like the Bush administration, because there are so many things about his politics that were so contemptible, it ushered in this, this really acute hyper-partisan. And because everything about George W. Bush and everything about neoconservatism and everything about the Republican Party was so bad, the Democrats could effectively coast on just not being as bad as the Republicans. And because the Republicans are so obviously bad and are so obviously racist and are so obviously working in oppositional to all of the interests of the black community, there's no way. real doubt that black folks in mass will vote for the Democrats, but because they're enjoying all

of the support without actually providing any kind of plan for protecting the black community. They're not providing any kind of at like redress to mass incarceration and how it's destroying the black community. They're not planning or discussing any kind of means of keeping the black communities across America safe from like fucking Nazis that are like running around the country. they're not doing anything for like say her name and all of you know looking at black women who are killed by police they're not actually delivering anything for black communities and yet they're enjoying black communities as a massive voting block and i think no matter how embarrassingly unambitious they are in the run-up to 2018 or to the next presidential election in 2020 like i think they're going to continue to get the black community support because i think if 2016 is bad, 2018 and 2020 are going to be even worse. And because black folks generally are pretty pragmatic, we vote for harm reduction. But harm reduction doesn't necessarily mean anything positive or anything kind of like actively, not just reducing harm, but like actively putting good

into the world and actively revitalizing and reviving and investing in communities is going to come out of it. And there's something incredibly, I mean, I would be disappointed if I didn't know how white worked, but there's still something that's tremendously disappointing about seeing black folks get taken for a ride despite being such kind of loyal constituents, like election after election after election. Yeah, and I think that's how ubiquitous and insidious white supremacy is in our society. It lowers the bar so much on what the Democrats have to do. The Republican Party is such an out-and-out white supremacist, vampiric party that the Democrats,

for so much of their existence and really have to point at them and say, hey, at least we're not them. So they don't have to do anything constructive. And Hillary Clinton's campaign was basically premised on the fact that she wasn't Trump. And that's not necessarily inspiring for a lot of people. But for the black community specifically, it totally makes sense why when you're faced with a candidate like Trump specifically and his neo-Nazi base, why they would say anything is better than fucking Trump anything and um it just didn't she didn't even feel like she needed to

answer for her complicity in the whole super predator um campaign that her husband was a part of she didn't feel she had to answer for literally any of the grievances that she was party to as first late as in her various first lady capacities or as a senator um and that's that kind of liberal arrogance. Yep. Exactly. Yep. So moving on a little bit, W.E.B. Du Bois coined a term called double consciousness to illustrate the psychological experience of being born black in a racist, white supremacist society. It's a deeply powerful and moving concept, which like when I was first introduced, it overwhelmed me with like a lightning strike of understanding. Like it hit me and I kind of saw it for what it was and I thought is a very crucial concept for people to

understand. So what is double consciousness and how have you personally experienced it throughout your life? So double consciousness is a doozy and it's basically the way in which you are trying to navigate through white supremacy as a black person and as you, because white supremacy is incredibly it's it's it's deep like the conditioning is so deep the way that you come to understand yourself is so deep and so powerful and so harmful so as you try to see the world for what it is you begin to internalize um all of these white supremacist scripts that are imposed upon you um and these tropes that you're forced to fit into and you are constantly seeing the world and also measuring and understanding yourself through that same lens.

My experience with this kind of double consciousness, I grew up in Missouri. And I was trying to understand what it meant. My parents are from Zimbabwe, what it meant to be like Zimbabwe and to be African and to be whatever, while also understanding and trying to learn the most effective way of navigating white supremacy, the way that I perform blackness in a way that isn't so threatening, the way that I carry myself and have conversations with white people to make myself seem the most to be to seem safe and attractive and and and respectable um and it's it's it's some stuff that I have to do in the academy it's this respectability

politic that you even as a as a radical or whatever sometimes find yourself playing in order to be safe in order to to to to enable your your career to be as successful as possible you know it's And it's, and it's this thing that hopefully you understand yourself for what you are, right? You understand yourself as something beyond this construction of white supremacy, beyond a Jezebel or beyond a angry black woman or whatever other, you know, controlling image white supremacy makes for you and to try to understand yourself as what you are. But it can be incredibly difficult because, you know, it wasn't for, it wasn't until I was maybe in my late teens, early 20. that I started to have any understanding of how white supremacy worked. It's seductive, especially as like a middle class black person. It's incredibly seductive.

Yeah, and I think, I think, you know, that's an example that doesn't get talked about a lot of white privilege, you know, that double consciousness or that having to constantly be aware of your surroundings and how you're talking and how you're behaving because you don't want to play into certain stereotypes that a white supremacist society has about you, you know, that's a burden that white people don't have to carry. That's a burden that white people have never had to carry and are totally unfamiliar with. And so I urge, you know, white folks to kind to think about that. Think how hard it must be. You know, I interviewed Tanisha Hudson about, you know, white supremacy in the South and the monuments and all of that. And her stories of

sort of what she has to put up with and also what it's like to be a mother of black children and the conversations that black parents have to have with their kids that white parents like myself never have to have. You know, it's heartbreaking, but it's also eye-opening in a lot of ways. Growing up as a black girl in Missouri, of all places, do you have any moments that stick out to you of, like, explicit or maybe more subtle forms of, like, racism that you had to deal with, maybe in the classroom or whatever? That's a big question, I'm sure.

There are a couple of things. that stick out to me the most. There were all of these really interesting ways that teachers would respond to me challenging their authority. So while my parents were, you know, professional African folks, they were both PhDs,

they were both incredibly anti-authoritarian in a really interesting way in as much as they really encouraged me to not put up with people's bullshit if I felt that it was unjust. And for that, you know, there's a lot of things to say about the way that they raised me, but that is something that I very deeply appreciated. But that is something that white, a lot of white teachers are not prepared for from black students,

especially when it's a black student that can articulate themselves in a particular way, is very confident in a way that they articulate themselves. And so a lot of teachers would threaten very frequently to get me in trouble, even though I was a good student, whatever, they just didn't like the fact that I was challenging me. So, for example, when I was in seventh grade, I didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance because I was like, this is weird. I don't, why are we a nation under God? I don't think I believe in God.

I don't want to do this. And my professor or my teacher was just, you know, he was incredibly rude. Other students had said similarly, and he was like, whatever, I don't care. But he was like, if you don't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, you have to get a note from your parent and kind of was scoffing about it. And everyone was like laughing at me. And I was like, okay, bet. I came back the next morning with a note from my.

mother um basically being like zoe is trying to understand what it means to be an american and to believe in god and so if you have any other questions you know let me know give me a call and it was just all of these times that you know i would be a little bit challenging but the ways in which they would try to discipline me for challenging would be completely disproportionate to whatever infraction i had actually done um yeah i think that's what stands out to me the most. And also, you know, people telling me, you know, that I was cool because I wasn't really black. You know, I didn't talk like a black person and that I was actually white on the inside. And for the longest time, speaking of double consciousness, that's something that I took as a

compliment. And then I was like, hold on a second. That's fucked up. Yeah, for sure. I'm a black person. This is just the way that I talk. Yeah, I had a, like one of our first episodes, we did an episode on hip hop and race and one of the people we talk to he's a he's a black man but he was adopted by white parents and um there's this earl sweatshirt line uh where he talks about being too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids and that that's something that that some you know black kids have to deal with based on whatever community live in or or who their parents may be or whatever and that kind of reminded me of that um in those times growing up in those conditions

what were some of your interests or hobbies or ways of escaping sort of what i assume would be kind of a stifling sense of otherness that you had to live through? I read a lot. I read a lot of things. I think something that made me feel a little bit less alienated. In high school, I found the autobiography of Malcolm X. And I started to really unravel a lot of the things that my parents had told me as immigrants about the black American condition.

I just I was bullied really badly but I was also incredibly arrogant so it didn't really bother me to spend a lot of time by myself but I you know I would watch a lot of movies my parents were super into

academic stuff so they would keep me busy with things like I you know I did my homework I played soccer I was on the debate team I kept myself busy I didn't really have friends because I think there was an interesting kind of racial alienation where they would be friendly to me enough in

school and I was an athlete so I kind of was you know whatever but there was never this attempt to really get close to me or to invite me to stuff and that was something that I'd kind of gotten used to and really wasn't that upset about yeah so it's kind of like a retreat into your own intellect and building up your own interests in those conditions yeah I can see that yeah it's interesting. So moving on a little bit, one thing that is, you know, contested on the left or for, I think it's kind of settled from principled leftists. Like it's not really an issue that a lot of leftists that I know and respect still struggle with because I think a lot of us have kind of, you know, worked it out to some extent. But there's always this tension between

focusing on race and class. So like how are the higher, how are the class hierarchies of capitalism rooted in the racial hierarchies of white supremacy or put another way more broadly maybe how does race and class interact in your opinion this is something that really fucking frustrates me because it's really not that difficult in my opinion to understand right um so you know sedrick robinson constructed this concept of racial capitalism robin kelly in the tradition of cedric robinson says over and over and over again that class is actualized through racial identity. Poverty is racialized, right?

The ways in which black people have been excluded from economic opportunity historically is something that constructs poverty and constructs class on a particular front. The ways in which white supremacy necessarily needs a lot of white people to remain poor and to be laborers for capitalist, industrial systems is another component of poverty.

These groups of people interact in different ways, and there can be comparable levels of poverty amongst black and white people, and yet there can still be white supremacist hierarchies in the ways that a lot of poor white people sometimes understand poverty as being something that is something that they're willing to bear in order for black people to not get a, you know, to not have access to mobility or to still feel as though they are superior despite this poverty because they continue to be white. And, you know, we see in the Southern strategy you have Republicans who were trying to alienate poor white, pro and working class white folks from their own class interests in order to have an interest and an investment

in white supremacy and to make electoral decisions. on those bases. Like, if we look at the ways that, like, neighborhoods are drawn out, that cities are planned, the ways that people are denied access to home loans,

the ways that people are denied access to good education because of the ways that educational facilities are attached to property taxes and then neighborhoods are racially segregated. If we look at all of these

kind of, like, spatialities of, like, race, and if we look at the way that, like, food is distributed, I just I'm baffled I'm truly baffled that people don't understand this the simultaneity of racial oppression

and class depression and I don't and I think that people when we talk about capitalism and we talk about class we're only talking about half of the story if we don't explicitly name it as racial capitalism because capitalism in the United States is built upon the expropriation of black labor and there can be no capitalist America without that.

And so, therefore, there can be, you know, Patricia Hill Collins really beautifully uses, you know, historical materialism to map out, like, black classed existence in the United States as emerging from this expropriation of black labor. Although I have heard a lot of, like, Marxists say that slave labor isn't, we don't necessarily need to talk about slave labor because the only labor that was within the capitalist system that's worth mentioning is, like, way. labor and I was just like if what yeah those are trash Marxists I'm like you're really bad at all absolutely yeah and I think um the notion of you know the American capitalism being racialized

if we if we expand on that to see that American capitalism over the past century has been exported to the rest of the world global capitalism is also racialized you know the global South is preyed upon by, you know, Western white countries for the most part. So because capitalism is so rooted in the genocide of Native Americas, in the forced labor of African slaves, and then it's exported through imperialism, through the bombing of Japan and dropping nukes on people and this constant, you know, bombing all over the world to maintain its power, it's inherently racialized, and it never can not be. If you want to get past racism, it's decomming. It's, Constructing capitalism won't do it by itself, but it's the necessary first step.

I mean, and we talk about the Industrial Revolution, for example, and we talk about the really important kind of economic evolution that was brought about by industrialization. I think something that we kind of fail to do sometimes is to pick apart exactly what industrialization like necessitates, right? Like you need, you have to have factories and you have to have laborers and factories, right? Okay, so all the factories were in Britain or were in Britain, right? So where do you get the raw materials that were necessary for textile mills? You get them from the American slaveocracy.

You get them from the American South pumping cotton to the factories that were in England. You also have colonies all over the world that were also putting, that were also exporting raw material to the factories. And so you have all of this racialized labor all over the world that was necessary for industrialization to happen. And then you also have the people in those countries who are transformed into markets where their own domestic economies are being ruined so that they are forced to purchase relatively cheap products from or finished products from these markets in Europe. So it's just like historically this has been the relationship, not even just in the United States. This is the relationship all through imperialism where all of Africa and Latin America. America and Asia were turned into giant plantations for cotton and minerals and rubber and everything else. And if we don't have an understanding of capitalism as being part of this global economic exploitation that looks different in each of these, in these different settler colonial states and these different imperial powers, like I don't, you actually have no understanding of how capitalism functions if the only thing you think that's important is race is is class stratification.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, perfectly said. And I would also just add one more point about the carceral state that the Clintons helped create, you know, Bill Clinton in the 90s really gave this a big push, but it goes back much further than that. And politicians from all sides of the political spectrum have contributed to it. But when you have a racialized carceral state and the 13th Amendment allows for slavery in the case of people being in prison, you literally are still having slave labor extracted. from, you know, mostly black and brown folks to propel the capitalist machine. And so it's still happening right now, you know. Absolutely. So moving on to, because I do want to talk about, because you write about so many topics. So it's like I was trying to fit all these different topics into this episode. But moving on to like Trump and white liberalism, in your article, Donald Trump and the quote unquote good white people, which I highly recommend, you take on white liberals and you lay out

how they benefit from and perpetuate white supremacy. Can you please kind of summarize that argument for our listeners and maybe touch on the concept of epistemologies of ignorance? Yeah. So I don't think that when it comes to talking about white liberals, anybody, too many people have said it better than Dr. King when he, in the letters from the Birmingham jail, talks about how the biggest stumbling block for Negro liberation is the white progressive that favors, or over justice. And there's this way in which, you know, all white people are socialized into being invested in white supremacy in a particular way.

We obviously have comrades on the left who are taking it upon themselves to do all of this, you know, really thorough anti-racist work and do what they can to kind of destroy white supremacy in their capacities. And we also have folks who, for all intents and purposes, are anti-racist, quote-unquote, And yet, you know, they say, well, you know, if you wouldn't be alienating in the particular way that you disrupt Bernie Sanders or disrupt Nancy Pelosi as a bunch of really amazing undocumented activists did recently, you would have much more success if you didn't alienate your allies and if you didn't do XYZ. And ultimately, as much as they claim to be against racism, they're still invested in this racial order. because they are invested in public safety, quote unquote, which necessarily entails an anti-black, anti-everyone who is non-white status quo.

And so in attempting to kind of do this milk toast hashtag resistance, they're still propping up white supremacy through dictating to people of color exactly what they understand to be the most effective means of negotiating and fighting against white supremacy. Steve Biko also writes about this really amazingly, and I Write What I Like, and he has a chapter that's called White Skin, Black Mask, or something like that, when he also talks about liberals kind of defining for black people what they perceive to be the most effective means of us attaining our liberation, basically so that it's not any inconvenience to them,

so that it doesn't throw their sense of safety and existence in the world into any kind of tailspin so they don't actually disrupt so white supremacy isn't actually disrupted and it's incredibly sneaky and insidious because they come at you with some really nice

you know let's have a panel let's have a discussion let's have a dialogue let's have all size represented and then they do some shit like put Richard Spencer on the panel and then put some like black activist on the panel and try to make equivalent a politic that presents an existential threat to black people with black people being like, hey, can police stop killing us?

And say that they've done a good thing because they've made a dialogue for everyone. So all sides are represented. So everything can be fairly and reasonably and rationally evaluated in this kind of public market of social discourse. And it's incredibly dangerous. Yeah, I think there's this liberal obsession with dialogue because it ultimately, it gets nothing done most of the time, but it makes liberals feel very good about themselves as if they did something. And then putting a black activist up against a scumbag like Richard Spencer and be like, go ahead and debate whether you should be forcedly removed from this society violently by white supremacist. You know, it's like, this is the very notion that this is even in debate is offensive. And there's something so deeply humiliating about begging for your existence of.

begging to be seen as a human begging to be seen as someone who doesn't deserve to be murdered and this kind of you know you asked about the epistemology of ignorance so epistemology is you know the study of knowledge and knowledge production and the interesting thing about the epistemology of ignorance i got this also from charles mills who's just absolutely spectacular he talks about ignorance um the epistemologies of ignorance as being not only that which you do not know, but also that which you refuse to know. And so there's something about white liberalism that entails a refusal, a refusal to understand a world beyond the kind of the comfort of a status quo being what it is,

the comfort of reform as this superficial change that kind of placates you enough to just kind of, oh, sit back down, that a refusal to understand that white supremacy exists far beyond Donald Trump and that simply organizing in resistance to all of the weird and fucked up things that Donald Trump decides to do is not even close to being adequate. And so it's this

it's this refusal to engage with the world beyond kind of these like these kind of like simple fucking lay like just lazy as hell engagements with people and with people's fears

and with people's freedoms and with people's freedoms and rights and safeties. Yeah. You know, it's kind of how I understand it in a lot of different ways. Absolutely. And I think when push comes to shove for white liberals, their comfort trumps the liberation of black people, the liberation of oppressed people. Ultimately, when they're forced to choose, it's really telling what side they will take.

And it often is the side of their own comfort over anything else. And I think that's what Martin Luther King was pointing explicitly at in Letter from a Birmingham jail. And that's the Dr. King. that they refuse, that they refuse to acknowledge exist. Absolutely. They just keep talking about he was peaceful. He wouldn't disrupt.

I was like, he got arrested like 27 times for like nonviolent civil disobedience. He was a gun owner. He was organizing around poverty and housing and jobs and all of this like really socialistic stuff. Like he was really constantly indicting white liberalism for it's just utter refusal to embrace the cause of black liberation. but you just want to talk about him having a dream, whatever. Exactly, yeah.

His anti-capitalism has never mentioned, his attempts to address poverty and his quotes about, you can't address racial inequality without addressing the capitalist system that holds in all that stuff is whitewashed away, and he just becomes like this, you know, purified Gandhi figure who's just all about peaceful resisting, by no matter what, just peace all the time.

And that's the liberal comfort, you know, notion of MLK. I really urge my listeners to go read that article, Donald Trump and the good white people, as well as the anarchism of blackness. I'm going to say that throughout this interview because I really want people to go check out your work. But moving on to the next question, and I know you touched on it a little bit in the last answer, but as a woman of color and a revolutionary, what does Trump represent for you? What does his election say about a society that in large part tries to convince itself that it's making good progress with regards to race? So something about Trump's election After Trump got elected My mom really was kind of freaking out

And I thought that she was just being weird And paranoid and whatever And I was having more conversations with her about it And she was like You know, there's something that's incredibly scary To me about Donald Trump My mom was born in a British colony So she was born in Zimbabwe

When Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia And it was still administered by the British and then later on it was an independent kind of colonial fucking settler mess but she was like you know Donald Trump reminds me of Ian Smith who was the president

sorry the prime minister of Rhodesia and she was like and I I didn't I came to America thinking that this would be a different space from what I grew up in and it came to America thinking and hoping that it would just be

completely different, that I would have an opportunity to have maybe children and to have a life that was completely separate from what I experienced. And after Trump got elected, I was just so angry and devastated that I have to go through this again. And I was just like, wow, that's heavy. And so for me, Donald Trump's election kind of represents, you know, this, the internationalism of settler colonialism, of the settler international that's the United States and Canada and Australia and South Africa and Zimbabwe, or at least formally South African Zimbabwe, but it represents on one hand this kind of like intergenerational resistance to white supremacist violence that my family in Zimbabwe has had experienced from when the British arrived in the 19th century

and the Portuguese were there beforehand. It feels like America ripping off the veil of progress that followed President Obama's election. And it also demonstrated to me that America was not ready for a black president. Because if the response to a black president in this kind of arc of progress moving forward in some whatever capacity, if the response to that, was like the Tea Party in 2009, and then a man who's mobilizing neo-Nazis in 2016, like what kind of delusions of progress do we actually have?

Like, what does, and it's kind of like throwing into question, like, what does progress actually mean? Like, what are the blinders that we're putting on to put ourselves under the impression that America is getting better? I mean, yes, we don't have, what we do have slavery, we don't have this kind of, wide extra prison chattel slavery apparatus anymore but like we have people who are being threatened by Nazis we have swastikas that are being drawn on synagogues during jewish high holidays recently we have fucking tiki torch rallies it may as well be fucking burning crosses in in the carolina's like what for me it should be this like glaring I told you so, right?

Like, we've been saying this shit for hundreds of years. Like, we fucking told you that this is what's going on. And people, instead of being like, oh, shit, okay, y'all were right. We're hell of sorry. We didn't listen. Like, let's get serious about this. Are like, hmm, maybe it's not a good idea to punch a person who, whose website hosted a full-length argument about the merits of black genocide, Richard Spencer.

Like, maybe we should be reasoned. Maybe Antifa and anarchists are being a little bit unreasonable in like running up on proud boys. Like maybe we should just be a little bit like decent and like mild-mannered and like easy about this and just have a big conversation like instead of everyone being like, oh shit. Like we've seen all of these things happen before because the thing about neo-Nazis is that like they don't just have opinions. Neo-Nazism and white nationalism are all material politics. And I say this all the fucking time because a lot of people don't seem to get it. Like the thing about white supremacy is there are these moments in history of like of mass violence and an apartheid and segregation and Jim Crow and mass extermination of people that a lot of people like want to go back to. And history, historians of genocide and everybody, like they have made, they've written books that are basically playbooks about how to get there, playbooks about how all of these conditions were brought into being.

And it's so much easier to return to a particular point in time than it is to to actualize a thing that we don't even know yet and are trying to put on small kind of scales in our communities like into practice on a wide scale. What we're doing is like world building. And that shit's hard. And what they want to do is bring back all of these horrible things that they've already done. and we maybe outside of the left don't really have an answer for any of that and yet you know all of these little pieces that are that are making clear all of the things that like leftists and folks of color have been saying like that buzzfeed expose about how bright bart was quote unquote creeping into public discourse um instead of being like oh shit

that's true you had that news in whatever carolina calling the team Cheeky Torch Rally Part 2, quote-to-quote white activist. Right, right. You have white activists, and then you have people legitimizing the idea of black identity extremists. I saw that, yeah. We're in this moment of incredible urgency, and there's just this utter lack of urgency. That's really beyond being infuriating in this kind of political sense,

and the idea of, in the sense of my own safety, of the safety of so many people I love, and the safety of so many people I don't know, but still want to keep. safe there's something so terrifying about the fact that if shit were to really hit the fan like would people really come out and protect us I don't think so and that kind of resignation I don't know is really is really frightening and so I think that's kind of where I am it's this kind of just shock and disgust and like this this this vulnerability of almost feeling like a sitting duck sometimes and just being like, well, this, we're going to try to do what we can, but what the fuck's going to happen? Yeah. And, and, you know, I'll say it again.

I say it all the time, but, you know, white supremacy, these neo-Nazis, these torchbearing alt-right proud boys, whatever you want to call them, they are not to be debated. They are to be crushed because that threat to the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society is implicitly violent. When they are marching down our streets, that is a, that is a threat. That is a physical, explicit threat to the people in this society who have the least amount of power and can't defend against it. So they must be crushed, but it leads to this next question, which I framed as what would you like to see non-black comrades do to helping the struggle for black liberation,

but maybe in the process of answering that broader question, you can touch on what you think white leftist's responsibility is to engage in Antifa or these sorts of movements that that militantly confront these fucking Nazis. What are your thoughts on those two questions? I think that's something that's incredibly important is to really

not just kind of make a space to talk about anti-Blackists, to talk about indigenous genocide, to talk about all of these different racisms that happen, but to have all of these racial violences for your entire anti-capitalist framework to revolve

around racial violence. For anti-blackness and settler colonial genocide to be at the center because the entire American apparatus like revolves around those two things. All of this, you know, Islamophobia. It's about these, it's the way that we see Islamophobia in this post-9-11 moment and the way that Muslim communities are being securitized, like has evolved structurally out of these different ways that like black communities have been monitored and securitized by the state. That all of these different expressions of racialized violence like come from this, like these kind of anti-black logics that are expanded to different racial identities, to kind of have anti-blackness

in the core of everything that is understood as being of violence to non-white communities. So for non-black folks of color, that means understanding how you are also complicit and deeply invested in anti-blackness. and it's not just the domain of white leftists. And then I guess white folks, like, it means understanding that your mission is basically understanding that it is an impossibility for white people to ever not be racist, right? That's just the nature of white supremacy.

But to understand that, like, you have, the quorum of white folks has agreed in some capacity that white supremacy is a cool thing. And I think the responsibly that you have is to understand how you are situated and implicated in that system, the ways in which you benefit from white supremacy, the ways in which you perpetuate white supremacy in the everyday and to kind of, not kind of, and to be explicit and dramatic and deliberate about divesting from white supremacy in whatever ways makes sense in the way that you navigate and move through the world. And would you say that includes, you know, your influence in your personal sphere as a white person? So, you know, calling out maybe friends or family members that make that racist joke or say that thing. And does it escalate all the way up into like white leftist having a responsibility to be on the front lines of some of this more militant work precisely because our white privilege, you know, kind of shields us from some of the worst that the state or that the far right does? and there's a responsibility there for white leftists

to kind of commit to that work if they're able to? How do you think about that question? Absolutely. I think that this anti-racist work goes all the way from telling your like fucking uncle to shut the fuck up at Thanksgiving to, you know, to organizing around, you know, to cop watching, right? To de-arresting folks, to, you know, monitoring, you know, ICE has been stepping up their game. really dramatically across the country,

to supporting people who may be in the process of being deported. And to, yeah, and it goes from the, and the thing about it is that it's going to be alienating. And if you are dedicated to anti-racist work, you have to be comfortable with the fact that it is going to be alienating and has to be alienating sometimes. The thing about John Brown is that everybody thought he was crazy. everybody thought man's was nuts

and he kind of didn't help by talking about like hearing all of these voices from God and whatever but I think that that's really emblematic of the fact that like a lot of people a lot of white folks, a lot of good white folks quote unquote are really comfortable with you know making these

Facebook statuses that talk about how hashtag Black Lives Matter but not feeling as though they need to connect this kind of what is kind of turned into this like empty maxim from a lot of people into a kind of more tangible material politics. Yeah.

Yeah, perfectly said. And that notion of alienation being a gauge, like, you know, if you're a white leftist and you're pissing off white liberals or your white uncle that's a racist or some of your friends from high school have blocked you on Facebook, I mean, it's kind of a gauge of like you're doing the right thing because there's no way to engage in this sort of activity as a white person and not alienate other white people because white people are so fucking invested in white supremacy intuitively that it's going to it's going to just fucking piss them off when you come out unapologetically you know and stand for black liberation um absolutely

yeah so we're we're coming up on about 50 minutes here i have two more questions we're going to shift a little bit more to other articles you've written um i could talk to you for days but So we're going to move into your article on Beasts of No Nation and Hegemonic Black masculinity. In that article, you talk about the film on Beasts of No Nation as, quote, yet another example of Hollywood's gleeful consumption of African disaster porn. The blood mineral replete, eternally poor, authoritarian leader abundant continent that also happens to be a single perpetually flowing stream of blood. Well, first of all, that's just an amazing fucking sentence. Thank you. But for the question, what ideological role does this popular trope play in the maintenance of white supremacy and of global imperialist capitalism?

The trope of, you know, African disaster porn and whatnot? Yeah, I think that the idea of Africa as being this dark continent, it justifies the ongoing colonialism and colonialism and colonial exploits on the country. continent. So Africa, as a continent, existing in the state of disorder, it justifies Afrikaum missions. It justifies the expansion of military operations on the continent, both with the leaders of nation states and kind of in the vein of quote unquote global security in this global war on terror. And part of, you know, with being mineral replete, you have countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, that is kept actually in the state of a particular kind of chaos so that countries can continue to mine the shit out of it

and continue to have access to cobalt and tungsten and tantalum and all of these different minerals that we need for our electronic products. Africa, as this chaotic state of existence, continues to justify the World Bank and the IMF sending in financial experts to help countries continue to implement economic liberalization policies in order to keep countries in debt and dependent on international financial institutions, like when everybody was going through structural adjustment in the 80s and everybody's economies got destroyed because the very first things that get cut are like health and education. And Beasts of No Nation was, it was very very very,

Visually arrested, like it was a beautiful movie to watch, but it was so, like, Idris Elba's role in it was so disturbing to me because I couldn't tell if I, if his acting was so good, or if he was just typecast in a particular way as this like smooth talking commandant of this cadre of child soldiers. And I was just like, I'm not one of those people that in the name of respectability politics thinks that we should. just never talk about any of the bad things that black and brown folks like get up to like I think it's important to talk about poverty and conflict and violence but what does it mean to have this kind of single-minded obsession

with with war and criminality in these particular ways with you know fucking blood diamond and all of these just all of these tropes and context that at the end of the day your takeaway is like wow this place is a mess and it doesn't give you any kind of context for how it's such mess exactly um so yeah and i think that's an extremely important point and i think everybody you

know i like i like films a lot too i'm a big movie guy but it's super important to to remember that that films play an ideological role the directors and the writers that give rise to films come out of a certain cultural condition and that cultural condition in this case white supremacy perhaps is reflected in the the films that they make intuitively without even them trying to slip them in necessarily. Before we move on to the next question, what are some other popular tropes of black women and black men that you often see in film that you think people should be conscious of and be on the lookout for? Does any come to mind right away? So you've got the like, the sidekick, the native sidekick. You have a white man who's

going to do some dangerous whatever thing, and he has some native guy who is helping him to navigate the social, political, economic landscape. You've got the warlords. You've got, maybe you've got like a woman who's kind of interesting and has a little bit of depth that becomes some kind of clandestine love interest. You had that in The Last King of Scotland, which is a film about Edia Mean. You have, you also have black poverty as being this. this modality for white moralization

where you have a white person seeing this condition of poverty and hunger and pain and anguish that ends up teaching him some lesson about himself that he takes back to like whatever country he came from and he doesn't really do anything to like help and support the people that he saw

he's just like, I saw these people and they were so happy with so little and I've learned so much about my stuff. That's something that I hear a lot about white folks who go on like mission trips and stuff and they take all these pictures with children. Yep. I think those are some of the ones that come to mind

first. I think you also mentioned earlier the angry black woman trope pops up a lot. You see that in a lot of films. But then I also this and I kind of want to go into this next question about how you talked about the sexuality of black

men. so so in that same article you know no beasts on beast of no nation and hegemonic black masculinity you discuss the white gaze and the connections between white supremacy sexualized racism and the history of the patriarchal domination of women can you elaborate on those connections for us explain what the white gaze is and how it operates in our culture so something that was really alarming to me about the movie and I think maybe this was something that they were trying to do intentionally, but I was just so wrapped up in my own frustrated feelings that I just couldn't appreciate it, was that Idris Elba played, you know, the commandant, the commander of this child soldier army, and he was still incredibly sexy and virile, even though he was kind of, he was sexually abusing some of these boys.

And there's something really important about the image of this hyper-sexual, hyper-violent black, black, man in that I personally believe that white supremacy revolves around white womanhood. White supremacy revolves around ensuring that white, that cis white women are able to make more white children and ensure the safety and the propagation of the white race, right? You know, the 14 words. And so by continually reinforcing this idea of, of terrifyingly aggressive, both sexually and violently black men, you have all of these justifications for mass incarceration and carcerality. You have these justifications for, you know, this was the justification for the anti-cannabis laws in the 19th century or 20th century, early 20th century, where they were talking about how

cannabis will make black men terrifying and rape white women. And obviously, you know, nothing is more sacred to white supremacy than white womanhood. And there's never any consideration of like the particular danger that like black men might pose to black women through gendered violence um it's always this way that non-white masculinity is presented as a threat to the safety of white people particularly particularly white women um and i think that you know I even heard a lot of white women talking about how sexy they found Idriselba and I was just like nah like you shouldn't be that okay talking about the man being sexy because he's sexually abusing

these children like and then also the hyperaggressive black men, the scary violent dingo black man is one of the few things that poses a threat to unseating white masculine white male dominers and so in order to preserve white male

dog because black men are not just like strong they're like monstrous they're larger than human and stronger than human super predators There are these super people that will just wreak havoc in these ways that are just completely unprecedented and unfathomable to us.

And so they particularly have to be put down in these different ways. And so, you know, these tropes of like super scary black men are incredibly important. They're incredible. They're harmful as hell. And unfortunately, yeah. And I think we saw that with Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, the way they were described in the media as, as, you know, they're teenagers. They're young guys, but they're portrayed as these huge, large beasts.

And that hits something intuitive in white America's gut. And that goes way, way, way, way back all the way to slavery, but it's still, you know, operating today. And your notion of the connection between white women's reproductive nature and racism, when you look at a lot of these white supremacist posters that you see around, from Identity, Europa, and other neo-Nazi organizations, It's always like a picture of a white family, and that's no mistake because that sort of white fear and that racialized sexism is present in all of that. And one thing we should always remember is the story of Emmett Till. I don't know the exact time frame, but I think he was 13, and he whistled at a white woman and he was executed, a little child, you know.

And so that just kind of highlights that history. I don't know it's it's horrible absolutely absolutely and and I think that there's something that's really important about the role that white women play um in white supremacy and I've written about this previously about you know people were talking about you know white women didn't vote for Hillary Clinton and you know the majority of voting white women voted for Donald Trump and I was talking about how you know as a person who feels as though like black feminism and intersectionality are incredibly important, right? You cannot force me to distinguish my blackness from my womanhood because these two things are co-constructed. There's a way in which white women

often do prioritize their whiteness over their womanhood because they do understand that they will reap a greater number or greater amount of benefit from their proximity to whiteness and from their benefit from whiteness than their womanhood. And so I, you know, I kind of argued that white women voted for Donald Trump because he could make white womanhood great again in a way that Hillary Clinton within whiteness did not have the power to do. And so I think it's incredibly important

that even though white women are subject to misogyny and, you know, patriarchal violence is in all of these different ways and in different spaces, they are still deeply invested in whiteness and they do have conditionally a lot of power in that. They do have the power to get black men killed, as we see with Emmett, as we saw with Emmett Till, and as we've seen throughout history, as we see, you know, today. You had Lena Dunham complaining about Odell Beck, O'Dell Beckman, O'Dell Beckman, the football player.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. And the way he refused to engage her in this way, in this particular kind of entitlement that she felt she had to his attention and to his time and to his energy as a white woman. And you have this trope of virtuous white womanhood and the ways in which white women do self-victimized when confronted by non-white womanhood or by non-white manhood. And they retreat into

white supremacy. And I think that that's an incredibly important dynamic that I don't think that we discuss enough when we're talking about white supremacy and we're deconstructing all of these different dynamics within white supremacy and talking about how we can fight against it. Yeah, absolutely. And before we wrap up, I would like to officially invite you back on this show in order to have an entire discussion about queer theory, about feminism, about the intersections of race and sexual orientation and gender identity, because that deserves its own show. And you write a lot about it and you think a lot about it. So would you ever be interested

and coming back on to have a whole episode about those topics? Yeah, let's do it. I'd love to. That would be great. Yeah, so thank you so much for coming on. But before we end, can you please let listeners know where they can find your work and maybe give a couple of recommendations outside of your work for anyone who wants to learn more about anything we've discussed tonight?

Okay, you can find me on Twitter. My handle is Z-T-S-A-M-U-D-Z-I. In terms of recommendations What am I reading? I'm reading Mark Bray's Antifa Which I love Yeah absolutely we had Mark Bray on the podcast, yeah He's fantastic

I'm reading Oh God Imagine Communities Which is also really good It's about nationalism Um No Mercy Here by Sarah Haley is a really great book around black womanhood and the labor of black womanhood in the

construction of the Jim Crow South and kind of in the United States. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good start. And we'll link to your Twitter too so people can follow you. And then I would also toss out a couple of recommendations. A Netflix documentary just came out. I think it's new, but it's called The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Oh, no, no, no. Okay, so what happened was Raina Gossett, who's this incredible

a woman, she did a project, Happy Birthday Marcia, and basically the Netflix documentary guy took a lot of the work that she did and kind of like ran with it in his own project. Oh, shit. Really? Really? Yeah. So I was excited as I was going to be about that. When I heard her describing what had happened and all of that, I was like, I actually can't watch it. Oh, okay. Well, okay, that's good warning, but I think people should study, if not the documentary, study about Marsha P. Johnson because she was a fucking hero. Yes, yes. Heroes that they've been treated horribly in the way that their lives ended is just so fucking tragic, and they did so much for the liberation of the LGBTQ community, and not enough people know about them. And then you mentioned earlier a letter from a Birmingham jail by MLK. It's just a central reading for anyone because so much of what he was called. criticizing white liberals at that time is still so relevant to what we're going through today.

But yeah, so thank you so much for coming on. I think you're absolutely brilliant. I'm going to continue to read your articles. We'll talk outside of this and we'll get another episode planned because you deserve the platform. People should just listen to you talk and read what you have to say. It's so brilliant. So thank you so much. I'm honored to have you on the show and I really appreciate you coming on and talking to us. Thank you so much for the invite. This is a great conversation. Double happen this one. Sucke's a dayn, Mpumakolone,

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