#Justise4All No. 18 [Viral Video]

⟦On Africa, Anti-Blackness, and Supremacist Colonialism⟧

NOTE: The video below is a TEDx talk given in Berlin by Mallence Bart-Williams, regarding the current state of her country, Sierra Leone, and her groundbreaking art/fashion/outreach initative, FOLORUNSHO. Before reading anything I have to say, please take some time to watch her speech. If you are pressed for time, check out the first eight (8) minutes, as they pertain to this post's subject matter.



To find out more about FOLORUNSHO, CLICK HERE

During my time visiting Dad in Florida while he was preparing to undergo surgery, discussions with certain members his side of the family, themselves staunch Conservatives to the point of Irish-American Libertarianism, expressed their vehement disbelief in my worldviews, particularly regarding economics and worker’s rights. As we talked, the age-old, racially charged discussion about unemployment in the US led to commentary about jobless families in the ghetto, with so-called ‘welfare kids’ having cellphones as a point of debate. I shifted the narrative by asking why we weren’t focusing on how places like China were forcing their telecom employees to work sweatshop hours for pennies on the dollar, with little to no right to collective bargaining for better industry standards or pay. They countered by saying that China “wasn’t our problem” and that there were “probably hundreds of people who would be willing to take their place.”

Per the homie @netic, what we didn’t bring up was the fact that many of the natural resources used in tech like cell phones are exploitatively cultivated from the African continent to the benefit of the Supremacist West, at the expense of the stability of African nations, like Sierra Leone (the home of the beautiful speaker in this video) whose territories house said material. The bloody campaigns waged by corrupt organizations to profit from Coltan exports has cost countless lives, many of whom have been innocent children, and worked to undermine various African Gov’t’s, with little intervention on the part of NATO-based countries, yet we continue to use products like cell phones w/o awareness of this issue.

My point here is that whatever those close to me would like to think about my passion for these problems, systemic racism is real, as is clearly evidenced by this topic, in which a violent form of Anti-Blackness exists on both ends of the problem, with a frightening example of corporate corruption on behalf of an aggressive Government stuck in the middle. From the streets of Sierra Leone's most destitute slums, to the housing projects of New York City, the continued social, political, economic subjugation of People of Color by global forces is something which can neither be denied, nor is there an easy fix. Thus Ms. Williams is hardly speaking in the abstract when talking about Karma and nature finally catching up to White Supremacy, should it fail to rectify its crimes against humanity.

And, therefore, neither am I.