 Welcome everyone. I think it's about time that we got started. My name is Sophie Shamas. I'm a senior teaching professor for gender studies and I'll be your moderator this evening. So I'm pleased to welcome you all to the third event in the SOAS University of London nearing the conversation series. SOAS will be hosting more virtual in the upcoming weeks so please be on the lookout for them. This event as you can see will be recorded and if you want to discuss or follow the event on social media please use the hashtag SOAS alumni or we are SOAS and they're all written in the chat box. So today's talk is titled global blackness and transnational solidarity and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker my wonderful colleague Dr. Alina O'Ketch also from the Center for Gender Studies at SOAS. Alina is a lecturer at the Center where she was also the chair for the 2019-20 academic year and her teaching and research interests lie in the nexus between gender, sexuality, security, and nation-slash-state-making projects as they occur in conflict and post-conflict societies. Her book Widow, Inheritance, and Contestants Citizenship in Kenya was published by Routledge in 2019 and she's authored numerous book chapters on a variety of topics including transnational feminist solidarity which is a particular relevance to today's talk. She's also the editor of Gender, Protests, and Political Change in Africa which will be published by Pellgrave Macmillan this summer. Prior to her appointment at SOAS, Alina worked in the development sector across various subregions in Africa for over a decade and what she did was this work included supporting women's rights organizations and local movements including capacity for peace. So this work remains central to her scholarship in teaching and this is made evident by her ongoing support for and involvement with feminist social justice movements in Africa and feminist movement building organizations globally. So without further ado I'll hand over to Alina who will speak for about 20 minutes and after that we'll move into a Q&A. Please submit your questions in the chat box and I'll collect them as Alina speaks and with that I turn it over to you Alina. Thank you very, very much Sophie and thank you to all of you for joining us this evening afternoon or morning from wherever you are in the world. As the title suggests I am going to be speaking broadly around the idea of global blackness and transnational solidarity but before I get into the substance of my talk I would like to offer a few framing remarks which are structured in two parts. The first part is a series of invitations to you as listeners and the second part tells you a little bit about who I am and how I enter this conversation. So in terms of my framing remarks and the invitations one of the things that I would like to ask all of us is that as we listen to the conversation this evening and the presentation and our discussions afterwards I would like us to hold the memory of those who have died because of government neglect and because of government orchestrated violence. Now even though I will not be invoking the name of George Floyd throughout this entire presentation we know that it is the deaths of people like him and many others in the United States and other parts of the world due to police brutality and other forms of state orchestrated violence that have catalyzed the kinds of debates that we have seen today through the Black Lives movement global protests which are really a historical revisiting of long term structural inequalities conversations that many of us have had in different forms in different places. The other thing that I'd also like to remind all of us is that we are coming towards the end of Pride Month and this is an opportunity for us to also remember that those who are often set aside as deviance, those whose lives are often seen as not drivable, often women, queer sex workers because they're gender non-conforming. And these deaths are also important for us to remember and hold in this space at this particular moment. Finally I'd also like to offer an invitation for us to centre care as an important part of this conversation because for those of us who are Black, discussions around anti-Blackness, violence and the death of Black people is not an intellectual exercise. We're talking about our lives, we're talking about our material realities. These are the very dynamics that shape how we walk in the streets, how we navigate the world which we live in. So let's think about care. Let's think about how you're caring for yourself, how you're enacting care for people around you, how you're demanding care as a central part of the ways in which institutions and organisations that are now thinking deeply around structural racism and institutional racism need to centre care as an important part of the futures that we imagine. In terms of my second set of framing comments, let me begin by telling you a little bit about who I am. Now in doing this I'm following in a feminist tradition of situating myself, my positionality and being flexible about it. I'm an African, I'm a Kenyan. Kenyan is the home of my back, Kenyan is the land of my ancestors, Kenyan is the place to which I shall return. But home for me is not just about citizenship, home for me is about territory and the ancestry that is connected to it. I also come from a predominantly Black context. I'm an expatriate working and living in the United Kingdom. I know that I have a certain amount of privilege that allows me to pick up my bags and leave and return to that home should I so wish. And that is something that I know many people might not necessarily have access to or have the privilege to be able to do. But I centre this idea of coming from a predominant Black space as an important part of saying that the ways in which I think about racialisation are slightly different from those of you who have always known life in an environment in which you have been constructed as the other, in an environment in which you have always been asked, where are you originally from? Where are you really, really, really from? In environments in which when you say you're Kenyan, you're reminded that, ah, but I do know an Nigerian chap called Elushigun, might you know him. But even in invoking this difference in relation to my Blackness and how I experience racialisation, I am not saying that as a native of the African continent, I do not know, I do not live through the broader logics of white supremacy and the ways in which it interacts with its bedfellows, capitalism and patriarchy. These are a daily part of why I navigate the world. They are a daily part of how my people are read. They are a daily part of how the African continent is constructed in relation to the global group of nations. It is no accident that I repeat times without number that I received all of my education from the African continent. This is as much a statement of fact as it is about speaking back to the idea that the last good thing that came from the African continent was in Mandela or Lupita Nyong'o, depending on where it is seated. So in bringing forward this conversation, in choosing to have a conversation about global Blackness, I am speaking about what I know, I am speaking about what I experience, I am speaking about my material realities. I have a stake in this conversation. It is not an intellectual exercise. Now let me go to the substance of my presentation this evening. Now when I was thinking about this particular topic, I thought I'd structure it around three pillars. I know that I'm going to be able to tackle two of them and we shall see whether we can get to the third during the Q&A. And the three questions are around one, what is the structural basis for a shared Black experience? We should speak to the idea of global Blackness. And the second will be to explore pathways for global Black solidarity, which speaks to the idea of transnational solidarity. And then I would like to get to the idea of non-Black allyship, thinking here much more specifically around people of colour and what it is that you need to be doing in this particular moment when we are centering ideas of anti-Blackness. As I said, we might not necessarily get to the third one in good time, but we can pick that up during the Q&A. In addressing the first question, I would like to enter the idea of a shared Black experience through three moments and through three ideological windows, if you will. And the first is around the idea of Pan-Africanism. The second is around the notion of Black power as it arose during the civil rights movement in the 60s in the U.S. And the third is to look at the structural inequalities or the structural manifestations of the institutional racism that we are speaking about or that is being centred at this particular moment, like we are living it. Now, in speaking to Pan-Africanism, I want to recall four major moments in the history of Pan-Africanism. And when I speak about Pan-Africanism here, I'm invoking the idea of an ideological framework that centres the notion of self-determination for all people of Black descent. Now, one of the first sort of intimations of the idea of Pan-Africanism, the idea of self-determination of peoples of Black descent, came in a meeting in 1900, convened by the Trinidadian barrister, Henry Sylvester Williams, in Westminster here in the U.K. And part of the argument in that particular meeting was a protest against the theft of limes in the colonies, the British colonies, racial discrimination and the importance of dealing with issues that was of interest to Blacks globally. Now, at the end of that meeting, a letter was written to the Queen of the time to call for the political decolonisation of African colonies. In 1919, we see W.E.B. Dubois convening the first Pan-African Congress in Paris, France, demanding yet again the independence of African nations. In 1945, we have the fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, which provided the impetus and the momentum for numerous post-independence movements in the African continent. Indeed, it is in that 1945 conference that we begin to see a large number of African liberation leaders participating in these conversations. So when it comes to 1958, and at that point, Ghana, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Liberia, Morocco and Ethiopia are all independent, Kwame Nkrumah convenes a conference in Accra, Ghana, calling for all African leaders, particularly those of newly independent African nations, to recommit themselves and support the independence for the rest of the African continent. Indeed, Nkrumah is remembered for arguing that you cannot have one independent country if there are multitudes of other African countries that are still under the yoke of colonialism. Now there's a connection here between the ideas of Pan-Africanism and how they're there for manifest in the Black Power movement that I'm about to speak to. So what is the Black Power movement? The Black Power movement emerges out of frustration with the reformist and pacifist civil rights approaches to the civil rights movements in the 1960s in the US. Now the argument that underpinned this frustration was of course that pacifist approaches were not necessarily going to be effective in changing race relations. Now what did the Black Power movement emphasize? Racial pride, economic empowerment, the creation of political, cultural institutions for African-American people in the US. Black Power activists founded bookstores, printing presses, food corporates, farms, media houses, schools, clinics, including ambulance services. Now there's a connection that is made between Black Power activists and Pan-African thought. If you think of people like Stokelka Michael who later renamed himself Kwame Ture, taking the first name of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah and the second name of Seko Ture, the Guinean leader, there's an argument here that connects the notion of both political self-determination and economic freedom, arguing of course that you cannot quite achieve self- determination with an economic model that only views you as wage laborers. Now there's a practical example of these connections between the notions of Black Power, Black Pride, self- determination and Pan-Africanism that I discovered quite recently that I would like to share with you. So in 1968, in a place called East Palo Alto, in the southern end of San Francisco, we see the emergence of a group of African Americans. 80 percent of the area was occupied or majority of the residents of East Palo Alto were African Americans and there's a movement that begins to happen that pushes for the incorporation of East Palo Alto as a city. But they go further than that and begin to argue that the one East Palo Alto to be renamed and the one to be renamed, there are a couple of names that were thrown about, the first was Uhuru which is Kisahili for Frido, the second was Kenyatta taking up to the name of the first president of Kenya, and the name that the fight finally settled on was Nairobi which is the name of the capital city of Kenya. Now of course the move for the incorporation and the move for renaming did not necessarily succeed, but what this example manifests for me or makes clear for me is the ways in which in the 1960s at the height of independence movements in the African continent, we see the connections that are happening between black people across the globe. We begin to see the manifestations even through such a move of seeking to rename a small part of of of Palo Alto Nairobi as an indication of people saying that our destinies are connected, our struggles are connected, and that we should not see ourselves as necessarily as disparate and diverse as we are of course, but to remember that in thinking about the ethos of Pan-Africanism which is about self-determination for all peoples of black descent, that these ideas can indeed be pursued and enacted to a range of different methods. So let me speak a little bit therefore to some of the ways in which structural racism, we can move away from the sort of ideological framings of how global blackness can be perceived or can be visualized if you will. I want to speak about structural racism and I want to return to my base which is currently in the United Kingdom, specifically thinking about higher education, and also speak a little bit about Kenya. In speaking to structural racism what I'm trying to draw your attention to is that the reason why the focus on anti-blackness remains particularly important at this moment is that when we look at the hierarchies of the ways in which racism is constructed in our societies, what becomes evident is that black people still remain at the bottom of that pool and that is why we need to focus on understanding, now of course there's lots of scholarship that allows us to understand the historicization of these racial categories and how they end up manifesting in the way they do. But if we want to think about ways to build transnational solidarity, if we want to think about ways of enhancing solidarity amongst people of color, how do we remain attentive to this idea of anti-blackness whilst acknowledging the reality that of course racism is in our lives in different shapes and forms so long as you are non-white for example. So let me offer a few statistics. I think the statistics often offer a good window not only as a shock factor but also just allowing us to see in real terms that when we talk about institutional racism, when we talk about structural racism, what are the material realities? How do they present themselves in real terms? Now some of the statistics that I have in front of me include for instance the fact that six percent of Black school leavers in the United Kingdom only six percent attended a Russell Group University. Now I saw that a couple of people signing in from the United States so that means six percent of Black school leavers attended an Ivy League college. Now in the Russell Group universities we're talking about 24 research intensive universities. Secondly, another statistic is that we have Black adults with A-levels in the United Kingdom typically get 14.3 percent typically get paid 14.3 percent less than their white counterparts. Black adults are also less likely to be in employment. Black workers with degrees earn 23 percent less than their white counterparts and Black adults were 9.5 times likely to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales in 2018 and 19 and are arrested at three times the rate of their white counterparts. Now let me return to that earlier figure about six percent of Black school leavers attending the Russell Group University. That is in comparison to 12 percent of mixed and Asian school leavers and 11 percent of white school leavers. Now I also want to acknowledge here as a feminist scholar that we're talking about Black adults, we're talking about Black workers. I think that when we begin to dig deeper into those numbers the gendered analysis of those numbers will tell us a much richer story. Let's look now at our teaching, the faculty within our universities. As I said I want to return to the universities where I am located and this is a number that that matters to me in very specific ways because as an academic I'm also on a career path that means that the notions of career progression mean something in my life at this moment. So in 2019 the figures that we have is that in the United Kingdom there are 19,285 professors. Of those 19,285, 12,795 of them are white males, 4,560 are white women, 90 of those are Black men and only 35 so far there might be promotion rounds that might shift that in the next couple of months but only 35 Black women professors exist in the United Kingdom and I believe that there are at least two of them listening to the talk this afternoon. Now for me in sharing these statistics I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that when we see the conversations that are circulating around how serious are the questions of institutional racism, how real is it, what does it mean for people to argue that institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom are racist, are exclusionary, do not create the conditions that allow Black academics, Black students to see those spaces as spaces that they can own these numbers tell us that story. They tell us a perfect story about why it is that despite the fact that you have a population of Black people in this country you only have a very tiny percentage getting access to what are considered the Ivy League universities in this particular context. There is a story to be told there about the wastage that happens when people join universities and drop out. There's a story to be told about faculty who are unable to get the kind of support that is required to enable them to get access to the kinds of promotions that are required at the level of professorship but there's also a fundamental story about the cultures that we create within our institutions that create exclusionary conditions for our students and our academics alike but there's also a gender story that is being told there that we cannot forget about. I want to move to Kenya which is a context I'm deeply familiar with and here is where I want to link the story of security, policing and ideas around state orchestrated and state organized violence. Now the argument that I want to make here is that when we think about the logics that connect the overpolicing of particular groups of people whether they're in the United Kingdom the United States or in a place like Kenya there is an underpinning logic and that underpinning logic is a class logic so you mark out certain categories of the society as people who are poor and therefore criminal and therefore needing to be overpoliced in order to protect them from the others. Those who you're constructing as the others are a class category that is viewed as requiring protection because of their access to financial resources and the accumulation of the means of production that therefore means that they require protection from people who are considered poor and automatically criminal. Now these logics follow and sort of mirror the kinds of policing tactics that we find in other parts of the globe whether you're thinking about the U.S. the U.K. or in the African continent and specifically Kenya but I want to draw attention to the fact that the ideas of overpolicing particular communities must be understood within three within three major or around three major pillars if you will. The first of those pillars is the notion of the legacies of policing that a lot of our African countries have inherited which automatically always take out by the particular groups as needing to be protected from the political elite. So the political elite see themselves as being in fear of the citizens who actually voted them into office. The second logic that was not necessarily rectified at plug independence in Kenya and in a number of other African countries is to reverse the idea of policing from one in which the police see themselves as people who need to exercise power through force and violence but rather see themselves as people who provide a service and that service being security in all its forms and not necessarily one that is engineered around brutality. And the third and most important point is that when we look at the kinds of deaths that you're witnessing in the U.S., in the U.K. and in other parts of the globe they tell a story about structural inequality. They tell a story about the exclusion of particular sections of the society. They tell a story about economic inequality. They tell a story of state neglect. I want to stop here because my timer tells me that my 20 minutes are up and I'd like to provide the opportunity for any questions and I shall return perhaps 10 minutes to the hour to say a little bit more in relation to my closing comments particularly picking up on the idea of transnational solidarity and allyship amongst people of colour. Sophie? Thank you. We know for that powerful talk you've given us a lot to think about and to sit with. Luckily the first question that we've received actually speaks to that aspect of your talk that you didn't have time to get to. And the question is given the anti-blackness that is often found in other communities of colour and the differences in experiences many black people are refusing to fall under the label of people of colour. Do you think this hinders the processes of transnational solidarities? I think, so I'm a feminist organizer and in the African continent one of the things that feminist organizers always insisted on was on the importance of autonomous spaces. Now autonomous spaces means that you need to have space for you as feminists to sit together sort out your issues without necessarily having to explain why it is you're focusing on one issue or another. So I think that solidarity can occur but there's an absolute importance for autonomous spaces and that is spaces for black organizing. Spaces within which we do not have to necessarily continuously explain why it is that that thing that I can clearly identify as a microaggression is a microaggression. Spaces within which my experiences of racism are not going to be negated because somebody else constructs it constructs it as an isolated experience or views it as being a personality difference between people. I argue therefore that in order to think about solidarity amongst people of color which I believe is absolutely essential. I think the question that we are being called upon in this moment is for people of color to think deeply about their own internalized anti-blackness. And as an African I can speak about this. Now we know that at the height of COVID-19 for instance as Kenyans and as other people from the African continent we have seen the renewed manifestations of anti-blackness that are happening in places such as China where all of a sudden black people are being constructed as the people who are bringing COVID-19 and coronavirus into the country. We have seen in places such as Lebanon, Qatar the ways in which domestic workers are treated because they are black. We have seen the slave markets in Libya as a result again of this anti-blackness. So the big question that we are being called upon or you are being called upon with people of color to do is interrogate the anti-blackness that underpins a lot of your societies to think deeply about how we are required to build solidarity without reproducing this anti-blackness but also to not evade the idea of anti-blackness by arguing well we are all in the same pot. No we are not. This moment has actually has absolutely shown us that we are not all in the same pot and that it's important for us to ask those hard questions about the ways in which we also reproduce these ideas of anti-blackness. Thank you Wino and I think that goes that speaks to the idea the difference between performative allyship and solidarity right? Solidarity is difficult and it's uncomfortable and it involves that process of painful excavation and of holding yourself to a count I think. So I think those distinctions are really important and we can't not be having this conversation about anti-blackness in the global south or anti-blackness amongst non-black communities of color in western context. So thank you for that. So our next question goes back to the statistics that you mentioned and asks what do you think are the factors behind there only being 35 black women professors in the entire UK? That is a shocking figure. I want to refer you to the report written by Nicola Rollock. It's available on the United Colleges Union UCU website. Please look up that report because it offers you incisive, qualitative, ethnographic feedback on interviews based with at least 20 of these 35 black women professors that will offer you a much better explanation of the factors that contribute to why we only have 35 black women professors and not much more than that. But I think if I want to make a general point and here I want to draw back to the experiences that we have had right now of COVID-19 the realities that we are faced with is that patriarchy is alive and well and that patriarchy sits very deeply connected with ideas of white supremacy and racism. And so for instance if you think about all of the academics women academics within the universities at the moment who have had to now take care of their children in the home or to take on other care responsibilities what is becoming quite evident that even when there is a shared home responsibility so you have both you know you have a sort of a man and a woman in the house raising their children the care responsibilities did proportionately fall onto the female parents. Now in a highly pressured environment where your success is determined by the amount of publishing that you do. Writing determines and requires that you have the space to think, reflect and do the empirical work that is necessary to produce the kinds of new knowledge that will give you will stake you out as an academic what's their salt within your discipline. You cannot do those things when you have a child on your hip you're taking care of your grandparents you're taking care of ailing relatives. I'm drawing attention here to the gendered ways in which our societies are still constructed and how when we think about academic progression these are things that are never factored into the dynamics that slow female academics much more than their male counterparts. A second important point that I want to draw attention to is the fact that I mean it's scholarship was scholarship by women is still sidelined even within the disciplines within which they're working in. So a study that was done by Peace Maidi and Alice Khan that was looking at the publication records of women in global north journals and here the study was primarily interested in doing an analysis of how many global southern scholars are actually published in these so-called high impact factor journals. So beyond the disparities that you actually had very little representation of women scholars from the global south but there's also the additional dynamic that when they are cited I mean when they are published they're not showing up on reading lists they're not being taught by academics within that discipline and yet these things count when we think about your impact in the field or your impact in the discipline as an academic. So the sort of hard wiring of patriarchy into our institutions alongside racism and class is an important one to keep in mind as intersecting factors but please look up Nicola Roloch's report. We have another question about figures which I think you've pretty much answered we know so the question of our ethnic minorities overrepresented in fixed term precarious positions yes they are and there are plenty of reports about this in the UK context. We also had a question about intersections which I think you've you've addressed throughout your talk. We have a question about BLM protests in the African context so somebody has asked the BLM protests inspired global minority protests worldwide including Aboriginal rights here in Australia but solidarity protests in Africa are very few. Do you think African countries are supporting the global BLM protests well enough not what may be the reason for their hesitance? I think we need to so I want to sort of quote one of my a student union representative at at SOAS. Now SOAS where I teach for those of you in the UK know that this is a university that is renowned for its protests. We are renowned for protesting right. So the direct action is a very important part of how we see our political voice within the academic sphere. Now one of the things that this student has argued to me and she's perhaps a second generation or third generation African students is that there are very specific ways within there are ways that we construct what black protest and solidarity looks like and which means that unless you see masses of black people out in the streets you're assuming that the actions that do not occur behind the street are not valid enough. So the argument that I'm making is that there are deep conversations that have been sparked by the Black Lives Matter movements within the African continent that have resurfaced very serious conversations about police brutality extra judicial killing including the securitization that has accompanied the COVID-19 moment. I think it is also important for us to remember that COVID-19 has just landed in the African continent. So at this particular moment there are very many countries that are under lockdown there are many countries that are dealing with curfews and the economic stress that is accompanying COVID-19. So we cannot expect to see the same forms of activity that we are seeing in other parts of the world. But the important point that I want us to retain is that activism does not need to look the way we know it for it to count. There are various ways in which we can express solidarity including the fact that that death of George Floyd has forced Kenyans to return to the conversation of what about the murders of our human rights defenders. Where is the state accountability for the police brutality that has been wrought on activists in this country? For me that is solidarity. That is a moment for us to think about the things that connect us and this is the ways in which our governments are organized the ways in which security and the power maneuvers within that consistently exclude and marginalize particular communities within our societies. Thank you, Alina. We have a question here from as well as alumnus who says that they have experienced the complicated ways that progressive or seemingly progressive spaces claim solidarity and they ask if you can comment on the ways in which anti-blackness is heavier or more complicated and progressive spaces particularly in feminist spaces. Of course it is by all means. I think that when people consider themselves progressive they think that they don't need to do the work. Right? We think that we have already arrived at a clear analysis particularly if we can cite articles and we are deeply steeped in the sort of critical race theory of pan-Africanist literature. So we assume that we are not the ones that are the target of this work and I think an important part of re-centering or re-organizing progressive spaces is about reminding people that we need to ask ourselves questions again that just because we can eloquently articulate the structural basis of what we are seeing in the works today does not mean that we as individuals and as a group collectively do not need to do the work. So I'm concurring that yes those perhaps are the worst spaces to be in because people think they know people think that the target is also there and it's not there. So we have two questions about global blackness and internationalism that I'm going to try to combine. You've been asked how do you think about theorize and experience pan-African blackness solidarity as a component of global blackness Caribbean South American blackness except for example Columbia and Brazil and how does blackness travel and we had another sort of broader question about third worldism in this particular moment. What would the new foundation for third world solidarity look like in this particular global conjuncture? So I think and this is what I was intimating to in my sort of opening remarks about who I am and how I enter this conversation is that blackness travels differently. So our shared experiences perhaps might be rooted around a very specific structural frame so that we experience inequalities that look different in different ways but the roots of it remain the same. Our pressing concern so even if I link back to this question of why are there no protests in Africa our pressing concerns in particular contexts are shaped by very different set of dynamics even though the roots of those shared concerns look different. So I think without a doubt blackness travels differently which means that we must consistently even amongst black people be thinking about ways to learn about each other. One of the points that I'm going to make around ideas of transnational solidarity is that we cannot think about a revolution without a revolutionary theory and the reason why if you think back to the 1900s 1945 the pan-African congresses that I was thinking of that I was mentioning at the beginning of my talk those were deeply rooted in thinking about revolutionary theories as a basis for corralling people around this idea of self-determination of peoples of black descent. So we must return to that. We must also return to a shared understanding of who we are as black peoples scattered in different parts of the world. Now what we have witnessed in the last 10 or so years are greater connections that are happening particularly amongst academics and researchers for instance researchers from Brazil working quite closely with countries what would construct as Lucifer countries for countries formerly colonized by the Portuguese. We also see greater connections between black scholars in the U.S. quite you know I understand that their entry point would be the South African context because the ideas of race, racism and localization look similar to what it is that they experience in the United States but these connections are becoming much greater. We're also seeing deeper conversations around diaspora Africans in the diaspora as part of a way of thinking through what global blackness and solidarity can look like. But yes blackness does look different it struggles differently. We must get to know each other a little better and we must recognize that a revolutionary theory thinking about our shared concerns and theorizing that collectively I'm not the one who is going to give that to you in this talk today will be a critical part of shaping these futures that we want to imagine. Thanks Alina. So we have two questions that might seem different but I think that they sort of go back to your point about anti-blackness in the global south or among a non-black PC community. So the first is how can we support black solidarity movements in countries with increased anti-blackness for example China or Lebanon. And then the second question is can anti-whiteness an anti-whiteness lens bring black and other non-white people together whilst also not collapsing the specificity of anti-black racism. I feel like the first question complicates the second question which is why I put them together. So I'll deal with the first one and argue in the same way that I would argue when I'm doing my women's rights work and I meet my you know good old governance brothers and I will tell them you need to do the work with your fellow patriots right. It's not me who needs to do the work with your fellow patriots. You need to go into that space and do the work that is necessary. And in asking you to go to that space I'm not asking you for I'm not asking you to speak for me as a woman I'm asking you to unpack the ways in which toxic masculinity manifests itself and reinforces patriarchy within movements for social justice. So how do we deal with the kinds of anti-blackness we see in China? Our colleagues, our friends, our partners who are from China and the region need to do the work with those communities. It's as simple as that we cannot be consistently having these conversations about our experiences of you know for lack of a better word the sort of invasion that we have seen on the African continent through invitation of our African governments of course. And yet our progressive Chinese colleagues are not doing the necessary work within those communities to challenge this very pervasive and deeply troubling ideas about black people that are even creeping into the legislation within China as a country. Now I also want to take responsibility and argue that African governments also need to take a very strong stance. You know when your people are being treated badly then you must make a very clear statement that you will not stand for it. Now of course this is complicated by the power dynamics when you're beholden to somebody through many loans you might think differently about whether you want to stamp your foot at that particular moment but our lives and the dignity of your people must count for something. And we need both of these voices to work together. So for instance you know at the height of COVID-19 there were lots of conversations around xenophobia and how that was manifesting itself as a result of coronavirus. I would like to see a lot of those Chinese scholars speaking now about anti-blackness and the connections between the sort of anti-Asia and anti-Chinese sentiment that was manifesting itself at the time. And the sorts of connections that we need to see at these particular moments because they're not far from each other but it cannot be the case that whenever it is that we're discussing these extremely pervasive forms of racism people then scatter off into their little corners. Thank you, Ueno. We have two more questions that take us back to the space of the academy and of higher ed. The first is can you elaborate on the academy's wider role in upholding the normative society and why eradicating global anti-blackness should be inherently about reframing the academy itself? So maybe I guess the intersections between these two things and the other is a concern about how conversations around decolonizing education are limited to the politics of representations. We have this question around who gets included in the academy and is it the people who already have a certain amount of privilege basically? So there's a wonderful initiative that I'm sure some of you will have seen if you live in the UK a crowdsourcing initiative that is around setting up a black university and this is curated by I can't remember their last name but their first name is Melz. Now the idea between these black universities to create a space that allows people to learn collectively both to curate online events to bring the kinds of community and intellectual resources within one space targeted specifically at lifting up black scholarship, black intellectual capital and black history, art and culture. Really if I if you will linking back to the idea of black power that I was speaking to earlier on racial pride really reigniting that racial pride. For me when I saw that idea I thought to myself that all of the conversations we've been having about decolonizing universities that is it. That is what it means to decolonize a university. Now many of my former students or students who are in this talk we know that I have said this before that we cannot argue that we are decolonizing universities in their current form. Real decolonization means we actually dismantle the very structure that we are sitting in and rebuild anew because you cannot say you want to decolonize dedication because decolonization is about power. It's about rethinking the dynamics between the educator and the person who's being educated. It's rethinking the dynamics about what it means to be at best what it means to come and acquire knowledge what it means to think about knowledge productive. That cannot happen effectively when you're still working into a classroom and I'm giving you an essay that I will mark. That will not happen when you're still demanding for a degree at the end of the day. So there's a real rethinking that needs to happen when we invoke the idea of decolonizing universities because real decolonization is what Melz is proposing with the Black University. And so yes, the university will reproduce these dynamics because the university has historically always been a place for the elite. And now we think of the system we do a range of things to try and broaden the space and that's why it becomes a space of isolation and exclusion to come because they're walking into a space that was never written for them in the first place. The space is just being opened up for them in relation to the elite that have used to historically own the space. Whether you're thinking about it in the African context or whether you're thinking about it in the UK and the US. So and so if we argue that then really colonization means dismantling rethinking the university system rethinking how we claim education or higher education in particular then that is very separate to the idea of the current structure as it functions and operates and the reform that we're doing within it and the notion of representation. Now I will argue to you that representation matches in and of itself and I'm more than happy to stand behind that argument. I'm happy to walk into a room and make the demands for 30 more black women professors and stand by it as a standalone argument because sometimes in order to push the envelope that is where you need to stop it. But we know that representation alone is not going to be the answer that will get us to the place that we need to get because you get 30 more people in an environment in which there are 3,000 more people who do not look like them the dynamics still remain the same. So there's a structural hard wiring that needs to be done that does not start at the university. It starts much earlier on within the education pipeline because you cannot arrive at the university and begin to demand for African scholarship within your undergraduate program. When you've gone to an entire university system or I mean education system where that scholarship has been absent. So we need to begin to build these kinds of processes into the primary secondary school system and that pipeline so it's a pipeline of education and knowledge transfer but it's also a pipeline of people. And so we are doing several things at the same time. We are beginning to rethink our education models. We are beginning to increase the number of black people across the systems of education and that increasing them is not just in terms of students but it also means that you have a pipeline of people who if they choose will then become academics and we don't end up with a paltry figure of 35. Thank you. We know we have a question that takes us back again to the global south. So this commenter says, although I disagree how would Dr. O'Ketch respond to the idea that fighting and ending occupation, invasion, war, poverty, etc. in non-black global south countries and communities may take precedence over the black solidarity movement and therefore the work is deemed as unnecessary until all these issues have been dealt with effectively. So this kind of traditional stageism left to stage as mentality I suppose. I would argue that we cannot approach the world of transformation if really social justice is what we are about by picking struggles, right? Even when you talk about ending occupation, the invasion of other countries, what is underpinning that? Underpinning that is a machinery of war. It's a machinery of global capital. It's a machinery that has set aside particular countries as the arbiters of how other countries govern themselves. It's a machinery of protectionism. So the deaths of the George Floyds in the world are a manifestation of that very system. So you dismantle that system. You're dismantling the need for other countries invading other contexts in order to ostensibly to protect themselves. So when the United Kingdom with the United States provide funding to deal with violent extremism in the African continent, yes, one part of it might be because they care. But an important part of it is about keeping the problem there so that it does not spread to themselves. So they're deeply interconnected and anyone who seeks to see them as separated has actually missed the foundation or logic that connects all of these issues. Those who are living in poverty in one context are not living in poverty out of their own designs and machinations. So for instance, when I talk about, you know, higher education and my own experiences of education within the African continent, or even when I leave that and talk about the experiences of African governments now with COVID-19 and the responses to COVID-19. The difficulties that many African countries are facing at the moment in terms of their health systems is a direct result of the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s that led to a divestment in health sciences. So the global and the local are always deeply connected and can never, we can't begin to pick and choose which struggle and which one we're going to set aside from now in order to deal with another. Thank you, Irina. I'm conscious of time and I want to give you space to share any final thoughts. I also wanted to ask you if you wanted to return to the question of care that you opened up with. I've been thinking a lot about the amount of emotional and intellectual and physical labor that Black people are being called on to do in this particular moment and the pain and trauma that must be in that. So I think you'd mentioned the idea of care and self-care and community care at the beginning and I thought that that might be something you could say a few more things about. So let me close with with two comments and one is a story and I'd like to tell this story because I think it often captures in multiple ways what it means to be so deeply embedded in something that you hardly see until your system is shocked and here I want to speak to notions of allyship and solidarity amongst Black people globally but also just amongst people of color. For those of you who may know at Bishop Desmond Tutu who was an anti-apartheid struggle activist but also a man of the clock and he tells this story of his own contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle and traveling across different parts of the African continent to mobilize resources towards the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid struggle. Now one of the frontline nations as you will know was Nigeria one of those countries that was really at the forefront of supporting the African National Congress. So Bishop Tutu describes him being on a flight from London to Lagos. He's on a flight piloted by a Nigerian pilot let's call him Wale. So pilot Wale is you know shepherding this flight to Lagos. Remember Tutu is coming from a country that at that time the idea of if I want to invoke that idea of Black excellence is one that does not exist. Right? Black people are subjugated the possibilities of seeing Black people occupying different offices or sites of power is nonexistent. So Tutu is excited. He's excited to be in a flight piloted by a Black man and just as they're about to land in Lagos there's turbulence and for those of you experience bad turbulence you know the plane is jumping up and down his heart is in his mouth and he says he shouts to himself we are going to die this Black man is going to kill us. And in that moment when he thought that thought he said to himself this is how deeply apartheid had affected his system. Here it was as a full of Black man not believing that at this particular moment when there was turbulence with a Black pilot that that Black pilot is going to be the one to be able to secure the ship if you will. I use this example I often use it when I'm speaking to people around how patriarchy is so hardwired in us that we hardly think about it when people make comments about women being their own worst enemies. I use this example to think about ideas of allyship and solidarity amongst people of colour and notions of progressive spaces being so woke when they don't think that they need to do the work. That example of Bishop Tutu in that moment in that flight questioning the capabilities of a fellow Black man because of what apartheid had done to his thinking his attitude is the work that we need to do it's deep work and it's long-term work and it's work that is rooted in reading it's rooted in building community it's also rooted in the kinds of difficult uncomfortable conversations that we must have if we are ever going to transform and build the societies that we want to build. The second point is in relation to care as Sophie reminded me to return to now this is something I think about very deeply because if for nothing else this COVID-19 moment has reminded us how important it is to take care of our mental health those who are stuck in houses on their own those who are stuck in houses with many people and they no longer have space to breathe because the opportunity to go to work the opportunity to go to the office is no longer there those who are living in situations of violence that they often had other opportunities to escape from no longer have them because of this lockdown now the social media space is a very important space for catalyzing conversations but it's also the most dangerous and toxic space because of the thing you end up consuming due to ignorance of people around you but also people who by their very sheer design are doing that to harm you as an individual now I think that it is important for us in building solidarity in building the communities that we think matter for us that we are able to hold each other accountable to the ways in which we can also internalize and enact violence for other people that we take the measures that are necessary for us to step away from violence there are hills that you don't need to die on that day somebody else can die on that hill for you on a particular day and you don't always have to be the person who is responding to everyone who is challenging everything sharing all the analysis because you feel that if you don't do it then no one else will do it it is important at this moment to step back as necessary to avoid doing the work that others can do for themselves by simply picking up a book or watching a documentary on the television for instance there is often a part of care which is requiring your colleagues your friends who are non-black to do the work and that's requiring is that sometimes it's also okay to stop answering the question what can we do for you because I think this is also a question that has been asked and answered consistently by very many black people over time in terms of naming the ways in which allies can show up for black people in terms of naming the kinds of spaces that we want to occupy within the institutions that employ us within the organizations that we work for but I think it's also important as part of care to clean your rage when you feel that rage because I think part of the act of trying to discipline yourself to perform particular kinds of being sensible sensitive and sharing ideas yet the very act of sharing those ideas the very act of explaining why this statement does not matter and that really the actions of dealing with racism matters more to me is rage making acknowledge it sit with it and find a community of people that you can speak to about that rage because for me that is the most cathartic way of dealing with some of this situation that we find ourselves with whether it is in this moment or in just in our daily processes of inhabiting this particular world so take care of yourselves step away when you need to choose the hill that you will die on this is a personal belief of mine you don't need to die on all hills and there are certain hills that I will look at and I will say Sophie that's your hill today I'm stepping back you need to do the work for me on this particular matter for those of you who work within institutions we must demand it of our senior white colleagues senior female white colleagues who are sitting in positions of privilege to do the necessary work of sitting in those committees of demanding the necessary policy change of demanding the enactment of those policy change of putting the resources behind the policies that are set up within institutions we can not always be the people who are calling for these kinds of changes allyship means we show up when I can when I can no longer continue to call for this demand thank you thank you Oino for this extremely rich and thought-provoking talk it is obvious that from the the pings on the chat how inspired and stimulated everybody has been by everything that you've shared with us today I'd like to thank everybody for attending and for the interesting and stimulating questions you can continue to follow the series by using the hashtags I mentioned earlier so as us alumni and we are so as and the next event in the series will be with a cultural historian legend and broadcaster basically Hayford OBE on the 28th of July at 8 p.m. so please check the website for tickets and you can email and send to us dot dot uk of any questions about this event or any upcoming events thanks and Oino thank you everybody have a good evening