UK Black History Month: Blackness and the Futures of Race
October is Black History Month in the United Kingdom, where this year’s theme is standing firm in power and pride. To mark the occasion, we are revisiting our time in Brixton, London, where we gathered earlier in the year for the Capstone Convening for the 2024 Cohort.
There, in that veritable melting pot of global Blackness, we had the distinct pleasure of hearing from Paul Gilroy, a towering figure of Black British thought whose work traces the contours, routes and ruptures between race, nation and belonging. Professor Gilroy was in conversation with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, professor of Blackness and director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, and Yale professor of African history and author Dan Magaziner. They were speaking on a panel, an intellectual inquiry titled Blackness and the Futures of Race, chaired by AFRE’s Sebabatso Manoeli-Lesame, who asked questions on the tensions between Blackness and Africanness, the mythologies of race, and the complexities Blackness presents in differing national contexts.
Gilroy reflected on how languages of Blackness travel (or don’t) across space and time—for example, how the Soweto Uprising of July 1976 found its way into chants at the Nottingham Carnival Riots a month later; how many of his recent African students say they do not recognise themselves in US-centric notions of Blackness; and how, even in the US context, the language of Blackness has morphed throughout the last century. “What we’re waiting for,” he said, cautioning against nostagia for racial categories of the past and present, “is a Blackness […] that speaks to the complexity of another order of creolisation.”
In his contribution, Dan Magaziner revisited Steve Biko’s efforts to wrest Blackness from the grip of apartheid’s fictions and rearticulate it as an emancipatory philosophy. In his telling, Biko was less a prophet of destiny and more someone organising for the now. Biko prioritised having an organising principle for change in the present and was reluctant to articulate a full and final vision of the future, Magaziner said. Whether that was or can still be the basis for a durable political project remains to be seen, he added.
Reading across historical constitutions such as Haiti’s from 1805 and South Africa’s from 1996, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi spoke of hearing an unfinished language of equality, a desire to articulate a vision for being human beyond the ethno-class conception of “Man”. Equality cannot be an invitation into an old house; it must mean finding the rapport and repertoire to build anew. “It is about making in the now for the future,” she said, “because the future we want is not guaranteed.”
The panel’s ability to leverage the past to expand our imagination about the future, and to reflect on the strategic choices leaders have made about how to relate to the present moment, seemed fitting for Black History Month. It was a rich and thought-provoking conversation for everyone in the room that day.