Sacred Black Ecologies

Image credit: Plantain trees (Musa x paradisiaca) growing by a waterfall with two women resting beneath them. Coloured lithograph by J.B.Kidd, c.1840 (Wellcome Collection) ‘Sacred Black Ecologies,’  (a concept I coined), is a transoceanic framework, drawing on community co-production and artistic and scholarly collaboration which positions land, water, and plant life as living archives, temporal…

Witnessing a whitelash: The weaponisation of white Violence

(© Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1979-80) We don’t wear our racism out loud in the UK, we see it as very uncouth, quite crass in fact, because that would make us American, and we are not America. We prefer more covert techniques like quizzing someone from where they are really from, digging…

Reconciliation: A Black Love Song (?)

Interlude Conflict is an act of intimacy It brings people together. Conflict are the loving bonds that didn’t get to meet. Conflict can be generative. Conflict can also be underpinned by the kyriarchy.   Verse One When Black people espouse radical love for one another this becomes a threat to white supremacy, capitalism and cis-hetero…

For the love of bell hooks: A Black Feminist Reflection

I first learned of bell hooks’s passing via twitter. I witnessed a frenzy of tweets devoting praises to a woman whose life was cut too short but yet achieved so much.  ‘Sixty-nine is no age to die,’ I told a friend and she replied, ‘she did not even get to enjoy her retirement.’ We sat…

Where This Flower Blooms

I used to have a beautiful garden. One day I saw a bee flying lazily and dizzyingly, jolting from flower to flower, it flew as if it wanted to be noticed by me. The bee felt my gaze and flew towards me. Hypnotising me with it hum and dancing around my ears, we created a…

DIVERSITY IS A SCAM

Diversity is the palatable version of the ‘other.’ *** Diversity is the language of the oppressor. *** Diversity dictates norm, standards, neutrality and objectivity all off which are oppressive concepts. *** Diversity is a word without a past, present or future. There is no temporality with diversity. It is an empty signifier; it means everything…

when white women get caught: victimhood as racialised violence

I exist in a time where Black Lives do not matter, where the Black psyche is under attack and our spirits are being ritually murdered. It is often in these times where Black voices are the most vocal, direct and unabashed and it is often in these times where white supremacy is its most violent….

Who does the work, whilst white people think about race?

The below piece of writing was originally intended as an email to my academic supervisors, but it is now a reflective essay about the impacts of whiteness within the academic and cultural sector .  Dear _____, _______ and ______, I have now entered the last year of my PhD program and my future beholds! During this…