Global Black Lives Matter: An Online Symposium

Time slots (EST)	Presentations
9 am-9:10 am	Bin Xu, Karida Brown, Jean Beaman – Opening Remarks
9:10 am-9:45 am	Li Yao-Tai “Black Self-serve”: The Depreciation of Blackness and Perception of Racial Hierarchy among Taiwanese Netizens
9:45 am-10:20am	Philippe Marlière The Adama Traoré Committee, Black Lives Matter and the challenge to the French Republic
10:20am-10:40am	Short Break
10:40am-11:15am	Bolaji Balogun & Konrad Pedziwiatr “Czarne jest Polskie” (Black is Polish) BLM Antiracist activism in Poland
11:15am-11:50am	Zahi Zalloua Black-Palestinian Solidarity: BLM and the Politics of the Wretched
11:50am – 1:30pm	Lunch Break
1:30pm-2:05pm	Bin Xu, Xueqia Zhang & Lingxiao Chen How to say “Black Lives Matter” in Chinese?: Race, Democracy, and Transnational Public Sphere
2:05pm-2:40pm	Jasmine Kelekay “Even in Sweden”: Reverberations of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Sweden
2:40pm-3pm	Short Break
3pm-3:35pm	Pamela Nwakanma From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives
3:35pm-4:10pm	Nazia Sharmin Solidarity among Black and Dalit lives
4:10pm-5pm	Bin Xu, Karida Brown, Jean Beaman – Concluding Remarks & Open Discussion

Meet Our Presenters

“Black Self-serve”: The Depreciation of Blackness and Perception of Racial Hierarchy among Taiwanese Netizens

Abstract:

While the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was proliferating in the United States, the movement did not gain similar degrees of support in Taiwan. Instead, on social media there is even a term, “Black Self-serve”, that has been popularly used, meaning that Black people always use race as an “excuse” to demand whatever they want. Analyzing 63,293 posts, replies, and comments containing keywords including “Black Self-serve,” “Black people,” “Nigger,” “racist,” and “BLM” collected from the largest bulletin board system in Taiwan—PTT, this paper highlights how and why Taiwanese netizens used the term “Black self-serve” to accuse Black people of fighting for rights. The findings also reflect a racial hierarchy in which Taiwanese/Asians are perceived to situate. Centering cultural processes of racialized vision and division, this paper shows that the depreciation of blackness is in fact deeply connected to Taiwanese conceptions of their own culture, sense of inferiority, colonization experience, cultural alienation, and the image of Black people as accomplices of anti-Asian racism—all are deeply embedded in systemic racism. To deal with racial antagonism, there is a need to establish the relatedness of Black people’s experiences and connect racialized vision/division to the understanding of systemic racism.  

Presenter:

Dr. Yao-Tai Li is a Senior Lecturer of Sociology and Social Policy in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW. His research interests include Race and Ethnicity, Identity, Migration, Work and Labour, Contentious Politics, and Social Media. Prior to joining UNSW, Yao-Tai was an assistant professor of sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University (2017-2021). His Ph.D. dissertation examines under what circumstances and how migrants from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong draw boundaries within the pan-Chinese identity in Australia, as well as the cultural and economic meanings of co-ethnic exploitation in the Australian cash-in-hand labor market, and policy implications.

The Adama Traoré Committee, Black Lives Matter and the challenge to the French Republic

Abstract:

In France, the Black Lives Matter Movement was launched under the impulse of the Adama Traoré committee. The group was named after Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black Frenchman who, according to his family and medical experts, likely died of positional asphyxia by the gendarmes’ restraint method in 2016.

Assa Traoré, Adama’s sister, set up the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, which has been demanding the indictment of the police officers involved in the arrest. On 2nd and 13th June 2020, the Adama Traoré committee respectively gathered together 20,000 and 120,000 people in Paris despite a media blackout. No antiracist movement had ever managed to get off the ground in such spectacular fashion without any money or institutional support. The historic gathering in Place de la République showed that George Floyd’s death had struck a chord with young racialised people. They mostly demanded the prohibition of all the deadly techniques of arrest: the chokehold, strangling or kneeling on people’s backs.

The resurgence of anti-racist demonstrations – something relatively unheard of since the 1980s – was met by incredulous politicians. As ever when it comes to race, the French establishment was in denial. Most reverted to the tired argument that to talk about ‘race’ was ‘racism’. They argued that France had to uphold its ‘republican universal’ values, the best defence against racism and division. In a televised address to the nation, President Macron failed to pay tribute to George Floyd. In a thinly veiled critique of the Adama Traoré committee, he labelled the demonstrators of Place de la République ‘separatist’ and ‘communautaristes’ (a pejorative word which implies that people reject the laws and traditions of the republic and cultivate instead their own ‘community-driven’ values and lifestyles).

In a country which traditionally prides itself for rejecting all forms of ‘Americanisation’, the rise of antiracist activism was portrayed by some as an attempt to import American debates into French society. The use of a new repertoire of concepts to describe forms of racist discrimination was described by some as ‘political correctness gone mad’. Yet, the antiracist camp has been scoring important points: notions such ‘white privilege’, ‘racialised people’, ‘state racism’, ‘decolonial thought’ have lately been gaining traction and recognition in the public debate.

With the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, the fight against racism may be at a turning point in France. Never since the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, antiracism had taken centre stage in French politics. What is more, this new antiracist activism relies on the grassroots of the movement. These activists are young, ethnically diverse and intellectually ready to challenge some of the myths of ‘republican universalism’.

Presenter:

Dr Philippe Marlière is Professor in French and European Politics. Philippe completed his MA degree in Law and an MPhil in Politics and Political Science at the University of Lille in France. Before coming to UCL, he was a Research Fellow at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, 1989-93) and at the European University Institute (Florence, 1991-94), where he was awarded a PhD in Social and Political Science (2000). Philippe Marlière was also awarded the Marcel Liebman Chair in political science by the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 2007.

“Czarne jest Polskie” (Black is Polish) BLM Antiracist activism in Poland

Abstract:

Antiracism activism has featured frequently in Western Europe and largely in North America. This has been enlivened by the upsurge of protests condemning the police killing of George Floyd, an African American, across the United States that triggered antiracist mobilizations elsewhere in the world. Globally, the effect has been registered in places where people, in solidarity with African Americans, protested against long-standing imperial systems of oppression, the need for attentiveness to the global colonial histories whilst calling into question colonial heritage across Europe. Championed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, there is now a demand for further reflection on racial inequalities in European societies. The effect of antiracist mobilizations also reached Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. The proposed paper will shed light on the latest wave of anti-racist mobilization that has concentrated around the grassroot initiative – Czarne jest Polskie (Black is Polish). The paper looks at the implications of antiracism for non-White and White people in Poland. Using the analytical tools of social movements theories, the paper accounts for the cognitive opening, major elements of the mobilization structures and practices of the antiracism movement in contemporary Poland, as reactivated by the recent BLM global protest.

Presenters:

Bolaji Balogun is a Sociologist and a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. He previously held positions at Cracow University of Economics in Poland. Bolaji’s research focuses on Colonisation, Race, and Racialisation in Central and Eastern Europe, with a specific focus on Poland. He is currently working on the first book-length book – Race and the Colour-Line: the Boundaries of Europeanness in Poland – that examines race and racism in Poland, commissioned by Routledge and funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Konrad Pędziwiatr is a professor in the Department of International Affairs at the Cracow University of Economics, researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies of Population and Religion (CASPAR) and coordinator of the Multiculturalism and Migration Observatory (MMO). Associate researcher in the Centre for Migration Research (CMR) at the University of Warsaw. Author of numerous publications on migrations, religion and ethnicity in the processes of migration, migration policy and the politicization of Islam in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa.

Black-Palestinian Solidarity: BLM and the Politics of the Wretched

Abstract:

The spontaneous support of activists in Occupied Palestine for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—along with BLM’s reciprocal gesture—attests to the ways politics can exceed any faction’s immediate goals. This paper explores the Afropessimist challenges to this Black-Palestinian solidarity in the making. Against the Afropessimist warning that Palestinian allies will co-opt and ultimately betray the cause of BLM, I argue that uttering “Palestinian Lives Matter” does not diminish BLM, or steal its energy, but bears witness to its critical inventiveness, reinforces the emancipatory and universalist force of its message. Affirming Palestinian Lives Matter is a universalist chant for racial and economic justice, one that boldly repeats, in solidarity, the revolutionary call of BLM. Staged as the uncompromising desire for social justice against the backdrop of Western liberalism—a refusal to reconcile with the Nakba, with chattel slavery, with the horrors of the past still informing the horizons of the present—Black-Palestinian solidarity enacts a politics of the wretched, nurturing a collective moral feeling, based not on a shared identity but on the unacceptable condition of erasure and dispossession. This renewed Black-Palestinian solidarity disrupts a futurology grounded in narcissistic identity politics and the cynical calculation of self-interest. For the Palestinian cause, not unlike that of BLM, is global or it is not.

Presenter:

Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the co-author, with Ilan Kapoor, of Universal Politics (2021), and the author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017), Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (2014), and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005).

How to say “Black Lives Matter” in Chinese?: Race, Democracy, and Transnational Public Spheres

Abstract:

The existing literature on transnational discourses has yet to fully address three important questions: How is democracy discussed in transnational discourses? How is race discussed? How does the State’s involvement in the global public sphere shape the discourses of democracy and race? This article aims to address these gaps by studying the discourses about the Black Lives Matter movement in the Chinese-speaking, transnational public spheres. We collected over 2,000 texts from traditional and social media. We analyzed patterns of narratives and comments in the texts with two theory-informed methods—the dramatic analysis of narratives and the codes analysis based on the civil sphere theory. We found that, first, the Chinese State’s two modes of involvement—restriction, and intervention—significantly shaped discourses of democracy, and such influence varies across different publics. Second, the discussions of race are mainly influenced by the transnational experience of the participants of discourses, particularly their self-identities as spectators of a remote racial issue or members of the society where the issue happened. Third, two factors in the Chinese horizon of interpretation were translated into consistently pervasive impacts on the transnational discourses: the State’s preference for order and stability, which even permeates the language of those opposing the State; and the racist image of “uncivil Blacks,” which reinforces the preference for order and stability. Our findings suggest that the State remains a powerful entity in transnational discourses of democracy and race. Its influences, however, are subtler and more latent than our conventional wisdom.  

Presenters:

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests are situated in the intersection between politics and culture, broadly defined, with a regional focus on East Asia, especially China, and with a global and comparative perspective. His ultimate intellectual goal is twofold: to develop generalizable knowledge without sacrificing sensitivity to context-specific processes and local knowledge; to address important public issues without losing scientific rigor and intellectual depth. His new book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (Polity) came out in the UK and the US. His second book Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2021 in hardback and e-book. It was awarded by Choice Reviews as one of the five “Outstanding Academic Titles” about China in 2022.

Xueqia Zhang is a second-year sociology Ph.D. student at Emory University. Her current research addresses the ethical dilemma faced by Chinese journalists. She holds a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree in Sociology, awarded by Peking University.

Lingxiao Chen is a second-year sociology Ph.D. student at Emory University, specializing in nationalism and propaganda in authoritarian contexts. Her current research focuses on the impact of Chinese celebrities’ nationalistic actions on their public perception in China. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Hong Kong in 2021.

“Even in Sweden”: Reverberations of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Sweden

Abstract:

While the Black Lives Matter movement has reverberated in globally since the Ferguson uprisings of 2014 brought the movement into the international spotlight, the police murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020 sparked unprecedented protests in Sweden, just as it did across the globe. These mobilizations sparked intensive public debate about the relevance of the BLM movement for Sweden, with conservative and liberal pundits alike claiming it to be irrelevant on the premise that the problem of racialized police brutality is uniquely American. Taking the summer of 2020 as its focus, this paper examines the impact that the global spread of the Black Lives Matter movement has had on local discourses about anti-Black racism, racialized policing, and Black social movements in Sweden. Specifically, I analyze how Swedish public discourses have framed the BLM movement and how Afro-Swedish activists, artists, and public figures have mobilized to assert the relevance of the BLM movement for Sweden. I show that while mainstream media framed the protests during the summer of 2020 as acts of solidarity, at best, and as frivolous, irresponsible, and criminal, at worst, Black activists utilized the momentum of the movement to shed light on local manifestations of anti-Black racism and violence, including the issue of police violence against Black people in Sweden. I argue that the mobilizations under the banner of Black Lives Matter must be understood within the context of the long history of Afro-Swedish organizing, as well as the decades-long social, economic, and political developments that have created the current climate of punitive hyper-policing of communities of color.

Presenter:

Dr. Jasmine Kelekay is an interdisciplinary scholar of the global politics of Blackness, with a focus on Nordic Europe. Attending to the ways in which ideas about Blackness are both circulated transnationally and shaped by local contexts, histories, and material conditions, her research examines the relationship between racialization, criminalization, social control, and community resistance. Situated at the intersection of sociology, critical criminology, African diaspora studies, and cultural studies, her research employs interdisciplinary methods informed by Black/African/Afro feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Her current book project investigates the racialized politics of crime control in the Swedish welfare state by examining how Black communities in Sweden are targeted by, experience, navigate, and resist racialized policing. Her previous work has been published in journals including Annual Review of Sociology, City & Community, and Meridians. As an Afro-Finland-Swedish scholar, Kelekay is dedicated to publicly engagement and working with African diasporic and anti-racist community organizations and activists in both Sweden and Finland.

Currently, Kelekay is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Starting in January 2024, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. Kelekay is also an affiliated scholar at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Sociology with a designated emphasis in Black Studies.

From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives

Abstract:

The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion.

Solidarity among Black and Dalit lives

Abstract:

Originating out of the grief of three queer black women, Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has developed into a social movement on a global scale and inspired to speak for national and transnational social and racial justice. First, this article focuses on how in India BLM movement declared solidarity with the Dalit movement and addressed racial and ethnic injustice toward Dalits who are considered ‘untouchables’ according to Indian caste system. By explaining the history, origin, and social stigma, religious belief, and political agendas of India’s age-old caste system, this study reflects upon how BLM movement shapes the public awareness of racial justice for Dalits. In this empirical study, several previous research papers, reports, and secondary data have been used to analyze how ‘Black Lives Matter’ encouraged ‘Dalit, Minorities and Tribal lives Matter’ campaign in public spheres. The findings include the similarities in terms of oppression and social injustice among African American and Dalits and marginal people in India. This study also shed the light on the message that like USA there are many George Floyds are living in India who can’t breathe and BLM movement creates a global platform to accelerate getting freedom from age-old oppression and injustice.

Presenter:

Nazia Sharmin is a faculty lecturer at BRAC University. She studies women and work, gender equity, and sex and gender based analysis. She received her Master’s degree in sociology from Stockholm University.

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