1 June 2021 — Black Agenda Report

Black Agenda Radio for Week of May 31, 2021 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
George Floyd Not a Martyr / The Politics of Performance / The CIA’s New “Woke” Façade

George Floyd Not a Martyr 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
The effectiveness of the social justice movement should be measured by “what material conditions have actually shifted for Black people” and other vulnerable groups, said Kovie Biakolo, a widely published multiculturalism scholar specializing in culture and identity. “George Floyd was “not a martyr,” according to Biakolo. “He’s a man who wanted to live – he didn’t give his life for the cause.”

The Politics of Performance 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Performance art has the power to make the future felt in the present. “We are in the world that we want to create right now,” said Troizel Carr, a doctoral candidate in performance studies at New York University and teaching fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. “When we talk about abolition,” said Carr, “we have to talk about it as if we are on the run, as if we are on the run together, because that is what the enslaved people were doing.”

The CIA’s New “Woke” Façade 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
The planet’s premier assassination and regime-change agency is advertising itself as a “woke” workplace populated by young Black, Latina and LGBTQ staffers. The ads are “an attempt to blend identity politics and intersectionality with imperialism,” said Ramiro Sebastion Funez, on his podcast “Unmasking Imperialism.”