My twitter feed is full of expressions of solidarity by Palestinians with the people of Ferguson, but not much the other way around. I wouldn’t expect otherwise; the working class around the world knows more about Ferguson than Furguson knows about the world. A bubble economy is a ghetto economy. A moral and intellectual bubble economy is a moral and intellectual ghetto economy. That applies to Ferguson or Versailles in 1789, or Yale.

Ferguson is a majority black community with a white Republican mayor. The people in Ferguson are fighting their own apathy as much as they’re fighting white racism. Apathy is less of a problem in the West Bank and Gaza.

Another thing that’s been annoying are the claims among angry vanguardists that Ferguson reminds them of OWS. The most productive comparison would be the protests in Wisconsin in 2011. That’s what needs to be built on, from the ground up not the top down or from the vanguard to the rear.

I again want to emphasize that I do not want to cause the kind of pain or objectification or marginalization of. Native people that your comment was right to draw attention to, but I also want to recuperate the value of the shirt/photo and why this Black man was wearing it and we both identified with the sentiment of resistance to US/American state-sponsored White supremacy that the shirt articulates by bringing together the photo with the shirt’s text. The Jacobin article makes this connection, the same one I was thinking about, more explicit, especially in explicitly stating that recent, post-9/11 response to the ‘war on terror’–like the Department of Homeland Security and militarized police response of the kind presently occurring in Ferguson–are not in fact new for Black people (or Native people) because the ‘war on terror’ has always already been here for us. And my parenthetical bracketing of Native people is not to marginalize them yet again, but an admission that the Jacobin article specifically focusing on how the current militarized policing we are seeing is not simply the function of a recent ‘war on terror’, but is the function of policing in this country that arises out of anti-Blackness and post-Civil War slave patrols (a fact most SM readers are probably not aware of, and an ignorance which allows people to make claims about how we can ‘suspend race’ at the times when it should be most analyzed).

You are absolutely right to worry about how Native people and images of them are perceived and used. Absolutely. But in the case of this shirt and why many Black people identify with it, especially now, I also think something else other than marginalization and unfair appropriation is occurring: a deep,embodied understanding of resistance to racism and White supremacy in the Americas that understands that for some of us, in the US/Americas, the ‘war and terror’ did not begin on September 11, 2001, but in 1492.

I think the power, or at least the potential positive and anti-racist power, of this shirt is in understanding how this shirt, and the resistance it visibilizes, is an opportunity for antiracist solidarity–but only if we are honest about the kinds of racial hierarchies that we live with. So, I as a Black person (especially as the daughter of African immigrant parents) have to acknowledge that I am a settler living in not only a racial state but also a settler society that still de facto colonizes Native peoples, even as it claims to be a post-colony. Likewise when we talk about the ‘war on terror’ already have been here in relation to militarized police responses that make onlookers see Ferguson as ‘like Gaza, like Iraq’, we have to be honest about the specific role anti-Blackness plays in this racist social control. This latter admission is not about marginalizing Native peoples, just as acknowledging that Black people are also de facto settlers is not about diminishing the reality and persistence of anti-Blackness. And things become even more complicated, and imbricated, when we start talking about how the categories Black and Native are not mutually exclusive given the history of ‘race mixing’ in the Americas. So yes, this is about a shared history of racialized dispossession and genocide stretching back to 1492, even as there are differences.

What I saw in a Black man wearing the shirt pictured above was the two most brutalizing ways in which the ‘war on terror’ has always been here on American soil, as embodied by the struggles of Native Americans and Black people who were constructed as less-than-fully-human so as to justify killing them with impunity, stealing land, and enslaving human beings who were not seen as such.

First, I hope it is alright that I addressed you by your first name, but please correct me if it’s not. No, I did not feel your comments in any way detracted from my post. Quite the opposite. I am glad you shared your perspective and raised an issue we all need to think about.

Thank you for the feedback!

This article is timely, as I am working on a new book about decolonizing the diet, as practiced through certain black male vegans and vegetarians engaged in hip hop methodologies. I literally am starting the introduction to the book by talking about how one must acknowledge that ‘decolonizing the diet’ must be be understood within the context of systemic violence against Black men. I am writing about about Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and now Michael Brown to give context. But, I also began thinking about how I haven’t really heard this particular focus (i.e. the meaning of these men’s deaths and its influence on critical geographies of food) in my discipline. The focus on alternative food ways and ethical food systems continues to be uncritically informed by post-racialness, for the most part. Peter Singer, J Salatin, and Michael Pollan, for instance, are what I get my mostly white colleagues referring to when they tell me about ethical eating. Read the mainstream bestselling titles and internet sites and you will not come across how the prison industrial complex, racial profiling, anti-black male thinking directly impact ethical food philosophies and practices; and these topics are certainly not central to food studies. I often feel like I am only having a conversation with myself; that one need not be concerned with the significance of my research because it’s ‘too much on the margins’ and has ‘nothing’ to do with the [fantasy] world of white slow food ethical movement that so much of food studies is dedicated to. I am also deeply engaged in vegan and animal rights studies, as related to food culture. I have brought up many times to my mostly white colleagues that the locations of some of the vegan and/or animal rights events give me concern in a way that they don’t have to think about these things. For example, “Hey, I just checked out this event’s location and it’s in what I’d consider a historically sundown down. Should I as a black woman be there?” or “What do we do about the person of color who was trying to get to this event and was racially profiled by the police?” I think the lack of mindfulness around these valid concerns isn’t about being consciously white supremacist. It just really reveals how white people’s relationship to non-racial-violence towards them (hope that makes sense) impacts how they think about food and ethical eating, including where to hold events and what to discuss during this events.

I am not sure why awareness around the issues you bring up are missing from anthro as well as many other disciplines. It’s not just academe; it reflects mainstream USA. I can’t tell you how many times my social science based inquiries into whiteness and ‘fear of blackness’ were conveniently interpreted as me being hostile, or mean, or ‘distracting.’ It didn’t matter if I had a PhD in it, won honors for the work I did, published a lot…. my inquiries were reduced to me being an emotional and angry black woman who is being ‘nasty’ to ‘well-meaning’ white people who are not racist. It is these responses that keep my going with my work.

Thank you for writing your article.

Also, I and the man wearing the shirt had a conversation about the shirt in advance of my taking the picture, which I asked his permission to take. I first said, I appreciate the shirt in light of the protest occurring in Ferguson. We talked about how the shirt was about a larger struggle for resistance against White supremacy and the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the US, which began with stealing land from Native peoples. He commented on how many White people ‘didn’t get’ the shirt, or why he wears it. He both laughed wearily. That’s when I asked to take his picture and decided to comment on Prof. Rivzi’s article, which was quickly written from my phone while waiting for my friend. This is the context for why I wrote what I did, and used the shirt to think about the enduring legacy of colonialism in the Americas. I am now sorry that I was not more explicit about this back story given that I wanted to discuss the shirt as a way of thinking about antiracist solidarity, not to have it be the source of more trauma for Native people, or engage in a rumination on racism in the Americas which erases them.

This week I have also been talking a lot about the racialized dehumanization of Palestinians in Gaza, and how both Israel and the US are settler societies practicing settler colonialism, so your response about erasing Native people is much appreciated, since this is exactly what I do not want to do.

I hope that by having these conversations we can challenge the discourses of subhumanity with which we continue to live and suffer.