— By Khury Petersen-Smith

December 1st, 2020

I have a childhood memory of buying sneakers with my father.  As we looked at different kicks, I pointed out a pair that I liked.

My dad shook his head.  “We don’t buy Reeboks,” he said.  “They do business with South Africa.”

I can’t remember the year.  Apartheid had not yet fallen, but it would soon.

Under pressure from the solidarity movement, Reebok actually disputed the notion that they collaborated with Apartheid—going so far as to sponsor an Amnesty International concert in 1987 and donate money to South African activist groups.  

I think a lot about that memory with my father when I think about Black internationalism. My parents were not activists, though they were shaped by the 1960s and 1970s of their childhoods. They did not talk about world politics much at all.  But they talked about one country: South Africa. 

The anti-apartheid campaign touched them, and therefore it touched me. I learned that this place may be far away, but that we shared something with the people there—enough to take small steps of solidarity in our everyday lives. And enough people took those quiet steps—and organized and participated in much louder protests—that a U.S.-based multinational sneaker company was forced to distance itself from a government on another continent.

It was a lesson that, as hard as things are for Black people here, we are part of something greater.  A transnational Black population may live in different places, and speak different languages, but we have powerful things in common: elements of culture, familiar forms of oppression, and yearnings to be free.

This has been true for a long time.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade shackled millions of Africans across vast spaces in a shared nightmare.  It—along with other aspects of colonialism—was the setting for the emergence of what remains a Black population distributed across the globe.  And it linked Black people everywhere in resistance to those systems.

In A History of Negro Revolt, Caribbean Marxist CLR James writes that “the Santo Domingo (Haitian) Revolution and its successes dominated the minds of Negros in the West Indies and America for the next generation.”  

“In America,” he continued, “where the slaves had periodically revolted from the very beginning of slavery, Santo Domingo inspired a series of fresh revolts during the succeeding twenty years.”

This is not coincidental.  Slavery, colonialism, and the birth of capitalism tied together far flung companies and countries.  Some of them amassed untold wealth through the dispossession of Indigenous people and exploitation of people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  And since violence and coercion were central to making these systems work, those who ran it experimented in methods for oppressing people, and shared lessons on what was effective.  So it is unsurprising that systems developed in different countries have similarities.  As is true today, colonial powers did their best to keep colonized peoples isolated and divided.  But the commonalities in oppression, and the channels that colonizers built for trade and communication presented opportunities for rebels throughout the Black Atlantic to connect with and inspire each other.

This remains true today.  There is a global, Black diaspora—the oppression of which is still foundational to global systems of oppression.  The US and Israeli state remind us of this when they arrange trainings between American police and Israeli security forces—who compare notes on oppressing Black folks and Palestinians, though they call it “fighting terrorism.”  And the US state is generous with its military aid, training, and other ways to arm its friends around the world in defense of exploitation and  repression.

Despite the repression, these are times of revolt.  The past two years have seen rolling rebellions against corrupt and repressive governments from Chile, Honduras, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, to Lebanon and Iraq.  Indigenous revolt from Ecuador to Hawai’i.  And uprisings for democratic rights from Hong Kong to Sudan.

So far, these uprisings have been powerful, but largely localized.   But there is an opportunity for a resistance that self-consciously links up and builds across borders.

Amid the revolts around the world, Black revolts have a special power.  The year 2020 asked us to imagine: what if we all moved at the same time?  

We’ve seen glimpses of this.  In a year heavy with unfathomable suffering and death from COVID-19, a U.S. election in which the president campaigned as an open white supremacist, and his thugs on the street—both in and out of uniform—terrorized people, arguably the brightest moments came in the form of waves of revolt against racism.  Black folks in Minneapolis showed the people who run this country that the price for murdering George Floyd is an irrepressible rebellion.  People in the streets refused to allow Breonna Taylor’s story to be buried.  Cheering crowds tore down statues of white supremacists and colonizers.

Because slavery and colonialism transcended borders, those statues honoring their perpetrators dot the Atlantic World.  This was a year of them coming down.  From a euphoric crowd in Bristol, England tearing down the statue of a slave trader and tossing it into the harbor, to activists in Rome covering a statue of a colonial Italian general with red paint and renaming the street where it was located after George Floyd and Bilal Ben Massaud, a migrant who drowned off the coast of Sicily trying to swim to shore.

In fact, Europe had its own wave of Black-led revolt in 2020.  Tens of thousands mobilized in France for weeks in the summer, renewing demands for justice for Adama Traoré, a Black man who French police suffocated to death on his 24th birthday in 2016.  Dublin, Berlin and places in between had protests against racism, and not just anti-Black racism per se.  In France and Germany, activists called attention to racist state violence directed to Black folks and Arabs.  And, as in the US, Europe saw protests led by Black people, but that were multi-racial.  Taking inspiration from rebellions in American cities, but driven by homegrown struggles for justice, the protest wave became something greater than the sum of its parts.

In Australia, activists in Melbourne and Sydney defied strict COVID-related lockdowns to mobilize, both in solidarity with the protests in the US, and to confront racism against the Indigenous people of Australia, who have long suffered what are called “deaths in custody” of the police. The connection with Black struggle in the U.S. has a rich and inspiring history.  Indigenous people of Australia have long identified as Black.  In 1971, Indigenous militants established the Australian Black Panther Party.  In the same year, Maoris and other Pacific Islanders in New Zealand (whose Maori name is Aotearoa) founded the Polynesian Panthers.

The slogans “Black Power” then, and “Black Lives Matter” today are bridges  that connect oppressed people around the world to  learn what is unique about our struggles, and to share what we have in common, too.

The tendency for Black people to connect in revolt with people who also find themselves marginalized—even if the path to marginalization was different—is as old as colonialism itself.  The first slave revolts of Africans in North America were joint ones with Indigenous people resisting settlement.  Revolts and conspiracies of enslaved people in the early US sought involvement with white laborers when possible, as with Gabriel Prosser’s planned insurrection in 1800 in Richmond, Virginia.

The point of building unity among and beyond Black folks is not to ignore the differences of our circumstances.  When grounded in commitment for our mutual and collective liberation, building movements that are both unified across division and speak to the particularities we struggle against, all make the greater struggle richer. As radical Dominican musician and artist Rita Indiana said in an interview about Black Lives Matter in Latin America, “we have to devise our own movement, our own critique of racial relationships. We can't just bring the Black Lives Matter movement like a Burger King, you know, to Dominican Republic or Haiti or Puerto Rico. We have to devise our own. And I think it's happening.”

“It's happening,” she continued. “And people are--we're engaged in finding ways to react, finding ways to learn about our Afro-Caribbean traditions and embracing the culture and finding the strength in it.”

Some of the most exciting opportunities to move in struggle together globally come from today’s rebellions on the African continent. In Tunisia, for example, Black Tunisians protested under the banner "Black Lives Matter," fighting their marginalization in the country. There are, of course, revolts in Black majority countries on the continent as well. The #EndSARS (SARS being the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigerian police force) uprising against police violence in Nigeria, for example, is inspiring, heartbreaking, and needs our support.  It is also an invitation to elevate our understanding of the state violence that movements like this  confront.  In the U.S., police brutality is tightly linked to anti-Black racism; but in Nigeria, most people are Black and Nigerians still have to combat police violence. This points to a global structure of state violence and repression.  Western companies extract oil from Nigeria, impoverishing the population, and the Nigerian state keeps it flowing through the severe repression of its people by police forces armed and trained by the United States.  

The lessons that can emerge from such understandings are powerful. What if people, internationally, came to understand that the problem is not just our local police, but that the nature and role of the police is about using violence to enforce an unequal order?  Everywhere.  Including in Black countries, like Nigeria.

Maybe there’s something daunting about realizing that our problems are global rather than local.  But there is something explosive about seeing that our struggle is global too. 

Struggle against racism, led by Black folks, is central to the global class struggle.  If there are any doubts of its power, consider the depth of the conversations we had last year once Minneapolis rose up.  Prior to the revolt for George Floyd, the news was dominated by white nationalists demanding that states lift the meager measures they had taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.  The uprisings shifted the national conversation to one about slavery and abolition of the police.

And elsewhere, our comrades have taken things even further.  Sudan, for example, is in the midst of a heroic and far too overlooked revolution.  Lessons of the past two years there abound, and we will all be better off for learning them.  It is a tragedy that for many of us, due to our experience, internationalism has meant solidarity in collective suffering across borders.  But Sudan reminds us that, while when one of us falls we all fall, when one of us rises, we all rise.

This is the promise of a view of struggle with an expansive scope: it not only reveals how deep the problems are, but raises the bar for all of our liberation.  This is especially true for Black struggle.