28 December 2020 — Black Agenda Report

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
South African Police More Lethal Than US Cops / Capitalism + Covid-19 = Mass Death in US / Corporate Baseball’s “Feeble” Gesture to Negro Leagues

South African Police More Lethal Than US Cops 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
“South African police kill between two and three times as many people as US police do, per capita,” said Paul Clarke, a doctoral candidate in African and American Studies who has done extensive research on labor, policing and privatization in South Africa. However, “it’s difficult to tell” if the Black majority regime kills more of its citizens than its apartheid predecessor, “because so many killings by police were covered up” during white rule, said Clarke. South Africa is also the biggest incarcerator on the continent.

Capitalism + Covid-19 = Mass Death in US 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
“The US health system has failed utterly and completely to protect the people” in this country, said veteran activist Sara Flounders, co-editor with Lee Siu Hin of the new, 50-writer anthology “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of Covid-19 in China and the US.” The US accounts for a quarter of the world’s infections and a third of deaths, a catastrophe due to “the cost of health care for profit, of no national health care, and no national coordination,” said Flounders, who notes that the US “does not lack infrastructure in police, in the military, and in prisons.”

Corporate Baseball’s “Feeble” Gesture to Negro Leagues 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Major League Baseball’s recent moves to recognize the contributions of the Negro league teams they once excluded amount to only “the beginning stages of any kind of restitutive or reparative justice and wouldn’t even come close to restoring” the Black players and teams to their proper place in history, said Josh Myers, professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University. “Baseball was not just a pastime for Black people,” said Myers. “It was on the baseball diamond where community was forged, where people came together” during American apartheid.

FROM LAST WEEK’S BLACK AGENDA RADIO:

Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power Meets African Liberation 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
In the political hotbed that was Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1967, US Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael, who had not yet changed his name to Kwame Ture, made both friends and enemies among the continent’s various African liberation groups. “Stokely Carmichael understood the Black Power revolution to be a global movement that centered Africa, but also African descended people” elsewhere in the world, said Toivi Asheeke, a post-doctoral Fellow in sociology at Vassar College. Asheeke authored an article titled, “Black Power and Armed Decolonization in Southern Africa: Stokely Carmichael, the African National Congress of South Africa, and the African Liberation Movement.”

“Colonial Logics” Remained for Black Women in “Liberated” Zimbabwe 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
Black women “posed a problem” for the Black government that replaced white rule in Zimbabwe, because their bodies were thought to “disturb urban space,” said Rudo Mudiwa, a PhD in Community and Culture and a Research Fellow at Princeton University. Under colonial rule, “women were supposed to stay in the village to produce more laborers,” said Mudiwa, a native of Zimbabwe. But after liberation, “colonial logics were still operating,” resulting in massive arrests and harassment of women on urban streets. Dr Mudiwa wrote an article titled, “Stop the Woman, Save the State: Policing, Order, and the Black Woman’s Body.”

Sex was Central to Dutch West Indies Anti-Colonial Politics 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford 
Sexual issues were loudly debated among anti-colonial activists in the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Curaçao and Aruba, said Chelsea Shields, a history professor at the City University of New York. Among colonized people of color, the connection between sex and violence “was why it was so urgent to reclaim sexuality as a vital aspect of self-determination,” said Dr Shields, author of a book on the subject and a recent article titled, “Sex, Socialism, and Black Power in the Dutch Atlantic.” However, Curaçao authorities created an economic model reliant on tourism” – including sexual tourism, which remains a drawing card for the island. Shields’ forthcoming book is titled, “Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy after Empire.”