Global Justice w/in The Time of Unfreedom

AMISOM Photo / Tobin Jones. Original public domain image from Flickr

The Long Emancipation marks the continued “unfreedom” of Black life forms under the current Neo-colonial world. In our free society, inequity continues to grow on both the U.S. and global scale as both cities and countries face predatory policy and devaluation through racialized social and cultural practices. Ronaldo Walcott in The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom juxtaposes the meaning of African independence with the meaning of African American (Black) freedom. Walcott states that in freedom, “Colonial Ghana was structured through forms of segregation, pass laws, and all the other forms of racialization that marked slaveholding in America.” Walcott illustrates how U.S. policies globally impact Black life forms, creating systems of racial caste in countries like Kenya and Brazil.

The Long Emancipation by Rinaldo Walcott

Walcott believes that freedom is an extralegal act meaning that the state can not grant it because freedom exists outside of the conceptions of the state. Freedom for white civil society is unfreedom for Black bodies. This personal freedom and independence have been used to produce relationships of domination for Black communities domestically and abroad.

Similar to freedom, justice remains a contested concept as the Global North promotes oppressive epistemic regimes in Africa and across the Global South. Critically, Professor Dennis Masaka addresses the impossibility of global justice because global justice in the Global North view imposes a dominant epistemological framework and encourages conformity to white standards of society. To give in an example, The UN in 2012 pressured the increase of policing methods in counties across Latin America; furthermore, such as African countries like Venezuela and Eritrea. still have U.S. sanctions preventing the growth of their economies. In his view, global justice is unachievable until both the promotion of dominant knowledge systems, epistemic hegemony, and epistemicide, the destruction of knowledge, end in the Global South. Walcott believes that African independence must come from a global reshaping of relations, and Masaka would be inclined to agree.

Independence, like emancipation, marks continued mental oppression and marks the continued unfreedom for Black lives in the Global South. Both Walcott and Masaka show that concepts of freedom and justice are distorted and can be used to oppress Black communities nationally. Eurocentrism continues to be a dominant ideology and has been used as a way to insight epistemic oppression in the name of justice. Global justice can not follow unless independence is given to African countries without the presence of epistemic domination.

Sources:

Dennis Masaka, “‘Global Justice and Suppressed Epistemologies of the Indigenous People of Africa.

Ronaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom, ch.9