this is how we feel, we the black and brown people from the global south, mostly silenced and invisibilized (even by the left) inside and outside of american empire. thank u Shailja Patel for giving us a voice in this discussion.
…
Shailja Patel: Imperial privilege is reducing a vital assessment of Barack Obama’s devastating harm to black and brown peoples outside the US to a personal beef between two African American men.
It’s painful to us, in the global south, to see that American writers that we read assiduously, and take seriously, are not reading us. They are not listening when we say: “Please ask your president to stop killing us.” They appear to simply not see black and brown bodies beyond US borders.
Obama’s bombs took tens of thousands of civilian lives. His military intervention in Libya destroyed the country with the highest standard of living in Africa. To resist a public discussion of these crimes, for fear that our political differences will be deployed against us by racists, exemplifies what writer Mmatshilo Motsei calls “colonial hangover”. Aren’t we full, complex, thinking, sovereign human beings? Didn’t we fight liberation battles, mount civil rights struggles, for the right to engage in public life? Dare we not, still, claim equal space in the forum?
An unrealistic and ahistorical code has been invoked, of global solidarity among people of colour, to silence debate on the actual mass slaughter of black and brown bodies by the first black head of Empire. Gabeba Baderoon, South African professor of gender and African studies at Penn State University, calls this “the imperialism the US engenders, even in its citizens of colour”.
Why should it concern us if Nazis retweet us? White supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, are inherently parasitic. We will never be human within these systems. We’re not here to perform for their gaze. We’re here to be fully human to ourselves, fully accountable to each other. More here.