Racism anywhere is racism everywhere. No matter its form, it is an aberration and should be condemned by everybody. 

Africa has been in trouble since 1441 when the Portuguese sailors, Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão, “threw down rusted anchor” in Cabo Branco on the coast of modern Mauritania, went on land, collared 12 Africans like wild game, decked them down the rotten holes of a pirate ship and chain-ganged them into Portugal as chattel slaves. 

Blacks have a moment to celebrate their achievements around the globe and to leverage the moment, to confront intolerance in all its ramifications, to make black dignity a permanent reality. We should be outraged by intolerance and racism towards children and should remember that in our struggle to achieve equality, we have allies among non-Blacks, too.

Oppressed and humiliated people responding to racism cannot be illegitimate. It is racism that is illegitimate. It is the oppressed who feel the weight of violence on their shoulders and it is them who must decide their own best possible method to escape their dehumanisation. 

We are nearly two decades into the 21st century. African nations are lumped together as “s…hole countries” by the President of the free world. KKK members no longer need the cover of the night or their hoods as they chant “blood and soil” in the main streets of America, laying an exclusive claim to American soil by Aryan blood. 

The crisis facing South Africa and the world today has its roots in: (1) the barbarism and injustices of market supremacism, racial supremacism and patriarchy; (2) the inadequacy of liberal democracy; (3) the excesses of commandist communism and vanguardist Marxism and (4) the failure of the dominant discourse to locate racism and patriarchy as much central to the problems we face as capitalism. The crisis can only be appropriately dealt with by appealing to the radical humanism of Socialism.

Forty years after Steve Biko’s murder in detention, the world we live in has not changed fundamentally for Black people. Regardless of where you reside in the world, how educated you are, religious, progressive or nice you may think you are, if you are Black you are guaranteed the scorn, humiliation, violence and death that Biko and others had to confront.

The judgment has been handed down on Helen Zille, leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance, muzzling her from any party related communications in future. She said that colonialism wasn’t all bad. Her tweet was insensitive but true, the backlash furious and nonsensical. Why? I blame black guilt, which I understand very well, because I’m white.

Since 1994 South Africa has been unable to seriously change the national socio-economic direction in the interest of the majority of the people. The end of apartheid has helped to increase SA’s integration into global capitalism. The benefits and misfortunes of capitalism and racism are mass poverty for the majority and wealth and privileges for the powerful minority, which includes a few blacks.

Is there really no explanation for Khalid Masood’s lone attack on Westminster Palace, as Scotland Yard sleuths say? Masood could not change his “blackness”, nor the reality of racism in England. He could not get over his schoolmates calling him “Black Ade”. He laughed about it, and even as he grew up into manhood he behaved convivially, behaving like a “good boy”, so as not to appear rude.

Black people are quickly labeled racist any time we raise our voice against white supremacy. It is racism fighting back. It is meant to silence us. We should not openly express what we feel and know. As Black people we should not own our experiences and history. No. We are instead supposed to become complicit in our oppression by attributing our suffering to everything else except white supremacy.

My neighbors Anthony and Fenton, brothers aged 7 and 8, and I had a sidewalk conversation about Trump’s victory one evening. The boys were nervous because they had heard that Trump hated Black people; they wanted to know whether this was true. I told them that all evidence indicated it was. They deliberated for a few minutes, and then Anthony said, “Well, our dad is white, and our mom and grandma are Black. So he would hate our family.”

Negotiations with descendants of the Herero and Nama people massacred by Germany in Namibia have been difficult. The government of Chancellor Merkel does not want to pay compensation for the genocide. But at the same time Germany is attempting to reassert its political and economic influence in Africa.

What are the lessons from Cuba in dealing with racism? Denial of racism is clearly not an option. Discouraging public discourse about it can not help either. Greater awareness is needed of the systemic nature, the multiple forms and the seeming invisibility of racism in institutions, social spaces and relations.

For South Africa to dismantle its colonial economic structures it will have to urgently address the knowledge and resources impasse. Through equitable distribution of wealth and resources, free decolonial education should be implemented to cater for the financially excluded Black majority now.

When one Jewish person is attacked because of his identity, the entire Jewish community feels assaulted. They do not forget the holocaust. People of African origins have suffered far more than any ethnic or social group since the beginning of time. But they are yet to develop their version of “never again” frame of mind. They have the most potent weapon to fight racial injustice: moral capital.

My father is a man of principles and a stubborn man. I am terrified that he will take his hunger strike to its end. I do not want him to die.

The current student protests have their antecedents in the youth movements of 40 years ago. These students are fighting for their lives, their dignity and their humanity. Their resistance to white supremacy should provide inspiration to Black girls colonized in the US, Europe and around the world.

I see the idea of walking away from racial injustice head down and shoulder slumped to be beyond comprehension. It is that mentality that has allowed institutional racism in the World Bank to outlast apartheid. As of today, September 8, 2016, I will be on a hunger strike until the Bank fully restores my professional identity, and agrees to redress the irreparable damage it has caused my person and profession.

Where is the Pan-African spirit? The absence of African solidarity with African Americans who are being killed in US cities by state security forces driven by white supremacy is deeply saddening. From all over Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, Black people must rise up to condemn the killing of our sisters and brothers in the US and offer any support we can to the #BlackLivesMatter movement.