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Hello {{ first name | friends}},
Monday was the sixth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder - may he rest in power. Before we get into the regular reading list, here’s the poem I updated last year: Remembering George Floyd. Since then, it hasn’t just been going back to business as usual, but turning the clock back a couple of centuries. That means the work we all do matters more than ever.
And now to this month’s reading list. I have to admit I’m particularly pleased with this edition. It’s always one of my aims to bring new authors and perspectives to your attention, and in this edition I’ve managed to include several pieces by writers from the Global South. Enjoy!
1. What you do after you hear about the Zong massacre and why it still matters by Foluke Ifejola Adebisi
Like many people I’ve heard part of this story. I like this piece because it brings another lens to us, and invites us to consider the continuing legacy of the incident.
“what happened on the Zong was not an aberration but the logical conclusion of a colonial legal knowledge that underwrites living in possession and domination. A colonial legal knowledge which still makes the modern world, consigning and discarding lives deemed not human enough to the open seas, to fire, to hunger, to war. Caring about the Zong also means that we care about which stories are told, whose stories are told and how they are told.”
The old ways of philanthropy won’t work in a new era, and they weren’t that fit for purpose anyway, says Shay. Now, they’re downright dangerous for those at the grassroots level and for organisations as a whole.
“Every organization that succumbs to lack of funding means a loss of trained organizers and institutional memory of struggle in this country. These organizations—my own and others—hold deep stores of racial and class analysis, and every time one of us falls, it is a loss to the movement as a whole. Especially as it becomes clear that the type of organizing we saw happen in the 2010s on social media is a thing of the past, given that we now live in a culture of surveillance.”
3. Anti-Blackness In The US: Call To Build South Asian-Black Community Political Coalitions by Jonah Batambuze
The only way forward is through solidarity and community, says this writer. I tend to agree.
“Anti-Blackness isn’t a side issue in election-year organizing – it’s the structure that determines which coalitions form, whose voices matter and what justice is allowed to look like. When solidarity stops at the border, power doesn’t retreat — it reorganizes.”
This is an older piece, included because it’s a perspective we don’t often get to learn from. It’s about medical racism towards Indigenous peoples in Australia.
“Despite my intellectual labouring in health, often at its margins, the centre remains intact. I guarantee you that there is not one Indigenous health research question drafted anywhere in this place, by an undergraduate, postgraduate student or principal investigator, that doesn’t effectively ask, “So what is wrong with Aboriginal people?”
5. We Asked What Repairing the Harm of Enslavement Would Look Like. This Is What We Found by Ebony Riddell Bamber
Whenever the subject of reparations comes up, some people start getting upset. They don’t want to be accountable or responsible for the ongoing harms caused by their ancestors’ actions. Plus, they ask, as if settling an argument, what would reparations consist of? This article offers some options.
“What I have realised is that repair for transatlantic enslavement is largely about seeing those of us descended from enslaved Africans; how we live, what we value, how we feel. And seeing us as fellow humans”