Carole Boyce Davies in AAIHS:
My sense is that we are on the threshold of a new “conjuncture” in which 42% of millennials in the U.S. say they would vote for a socialist government and the white working class seems bereft of any union or left organizing and have therefore been allowed to remain totally illiterate about their social conditions though with an innate sense of being left behind. Trumpism enters that space of misinformation, illiteracy, inadequacy and absence. And what of Black left thought today? We are still clearly in the looking back mode—a “fifty years after” framings of major events—without theoretical guidance for the future. A Black Lives Matter movement exists but its actions remain sporadic and more responsive than proactive. Elaine Brown former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party is quoted in Spiked as critiquing their tendency to be more pacifist than assertive, still requesting rights instead of assuming them.
A number of questions remain to be engaged. For me, the primary one is this: what kind of theoretical/practical ideas can be generated–given the still tenuous lived reality of black peoples worldwide–that can admit the limitations of past movements (intellectual and/or political) but still move forward with new agendas that refine past agendas and re-define new projects?
More here.
