Steven George Gerrard: A Man Apart
The remarkable thing about Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard’s reserve is that it never prevents him from protecting those whom he leads.
Politics
Dutch elites and blackface
Most elites in the Netherlands are no different than racists when it comes to defending #ZwartePiet.
Who is Dulcie September?
The author stars as the famed South African activist in a new play. Dulcie September was murdered by a conspiracy of South African and French death squads.
An archive for historian Jeff Guy (1940-2014)
“We know… but we don’t know.” These were words that we heard often from Jeff Guy (1940-2014) in discussing the history of KwaZulu-Natal, the region that fascinated us all. In print, these words may look banal. But in Jeff’s dramatic, deliberate cadence, they resonated as a historian’s call to arms: a command to return to […]
The Books of 2014
Christmas is coming, and like the German Bundesliga we’re going to be taking a wee break on AIAC, returning in the early days of 2015. Everyone has their own ways of getting through those long, blogless days of festive family over-eating, and AIAC generally relies on Gin and Tonic, long walks, and English football. But there are also […]
5 Questions for a Filmmaker: Philippe Lacôte
The Ivorian filmmaker wished he had made Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, based on the filmmaker’s own dreams, when the fantastical infiltrates the real.
Explaining Racism to a White South African Liberal
Highlighting spectacular incidents of racial violence is that they overshadow the daily, unrecorded anti-black racist acts.
Black death and revolution
In the days leading up to the grand jury decisions in the separate murders of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, there was a certain tension that I felt brewing walking around New York City. There were a few people speaking in hushed tones here, a couple of Facebook statuses […]
#ICANTBREATHE
One morning last semester at John Jay College in New York City, I asked my students how many of them had ever been stopped by the police. All of them raised their hands, and we fell into a spirited conversation about the constitutionality of “Stop and Frisk” and the fine distinctions between reasonable suspicion and […]
The Fate of la Francophonie
Do we still need an organization of France's former colonies? Whose interests does it actually serve?
The Gambia Gambit
There is a long-standing Norwegian tradition of externalizing racism, so that anti-black racism is always and inevitably located elsewhere.
The A to Z of Kenyan Twitter
“Twitter is going to change Kenya!” I declared in my presentation. We’d just set up a “Twitterfall” behind me, glowing on one of the plasma screens. It scrolled up with a clockwork flow showing the 25-odd attendees their tweets in real-time. Trickling down one after the other it featured the tweets and responses from those […]
Angola’s Flash Mobs
Should the tipping point against the MPLA - in power since independence - arrive in Angola, there are some activists ready to hit the ground, running.
Tony Blair Saves The Children of Africa
Interventionists across the political class in Europe and North America have comprehensively militarized the humanitarian enterprise in recent years. So there was much more dismay than surprise when Save the Children awarded Tony Blair a Global Legacy Award recently. Yes, the same Tony Blair reportedly now worth £10 million who takes Henry Kissinger as his role […]
Remembering Mandela and Other Weekend Specials
Weekend Special is all that stuff we wanted to, but did not get around to writing about or just shared on social media.
Racial Degeneracy and Cowardice
The failure of Americans to have a concerted conversation on racism is not surprising. Too much is at stake for too many people, interests and institutions.
The University as a Place to Think
How we harness knowledge to the ethical injunctions we uphold against marginality, pain or suffering, on a global scale.
Remembering Differently
Slavery, despite its centrality to South Africa's founding, remains on the periphery of popular and institutional memory there.
Between polarization and transition
Brazil, under the Workers' Party, even if it’s still struggling with enormous poverty and social inequality, has managed to improve tremendously.
The guns in the shooting gallery
Mexico has never healed from the state violence that meets student revolts, dating back to 1968.