Free all a' we
A next note on intersectionality in advocacy
“The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once - and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives. In this way, a second crime is perpetuated: Human beings are reduced to a gruel of misery”1
I think there are several nationalities right now that we can pinpoint are being reduced to ‘a gruel of misery’. This is not intentional at all, but our brains cannot compute these numbers in human lives - no matter how we try to fight that abstraction.
One of the strands of my professional work is involved in reparatory justice in the Caribbean. With my background in history/geography and post/Decolonial studies, this involves regular engagement with archival material, including databases such as the Transatlantic Voyage Database (SVD). This platform presents as complete (and consistently updating) info as possible re the numbers of African populations that were trafficked across the Middle Passage to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. These are huge datasets that I have to handle on a fairly daily basis - and I never know which numbers are those that represent my ancestors, and I don't think I can ever know.
The abstraction of the engineered genocide and erasing of identity for the sake of commodity of individuals, populations, languages, cultures…has long consigned those trafficked in the hold of slave ships to a nameless, abstract oblivion. No matter the continuous work that is done, that we do within reparatory justice movements to remedy these erased histories.
There are significant parallels to be drawn with the advocacy we undertake today, for those of us working in social justice and perhaps not directly concerned by the increasing conflicts and genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haïti…but what I have and will be continuing to explore and further disseminate (beyond the strands of my professional and academic work, so, here) is the lineage and connections between the systemic oppression of certain bodies, the social relationship defined by capital projected onto certain lands and spaces.
The machinery of extraction operating in and profiting from Congo fuels violence in Gaza. The geopolitical connections between forms of repression and terror in Sudan and Congo are connected by a global colonial artery. Even the research I undertake with histories of chattel enslavement in the Caribbean link that wealth stolen and extracted to wealth that fuelled settler colonisation in occupied Palestine. And so plenty more connections that there is so much work being done and already out there that outlines these.
Beyond that, working in social justice means understanding the intersectionality of injustices, and justices. There is a map that could be drawn over the world (yes, bearing in mind Dionne Brand and Katherine McKittrick’s reflections on mapping), tracing the connections between ecocide (everywhere, variably dangerous and toxic), gender-based violence, class-based struggle and more that conduct and lead back to a beating heart of racial capitalism. So mobilising for collective liberation and sustainable futures needs to be intersectional too, conducted through a praxis of solidarity (I'll probably put out what I mean with this discourse, from a previously published article). This involves constant work in solidarity, in accountability, advocacy…cyan remember the last time my brain switched off from what I do and how urgently this is tied in with every part of our experience, realities and the possibility of our futures.
I'm reading plenty bell hooks at the minute (not enough words for how much I recommend engaging with her work, if you aren't already!), especially about love. I continue to learn how my being and experience as a black woman (a light-skin, mix up-mix up one who has varying filters of [un]privilege as we all carry) is situated at the crux of deeply understanding intersectionality in struggle and justice from the position of my experience2 - and yet every day of work (7 whole days, smh) show me that, no matter how many surfaces I keep scratching, plenty more questions and challenges come up (anyone know, do we ever get to an end of what we learn? Is that humanly, neuro-plasticity-wise, possible ?).
Update (22/06/2025) - I penned the following on the 17th of June, channelled from my constant rage, selfish hopelessness, (in)direct complicity, practising internal accountability (and being able to afford to do so) and love that drives my praxis:
I write this as a descendent of enslaved ancestors that I can never trace, yet still carry the intergenerational trauma of, I write this as a descendent of erased families somewhere in Eastern Europe that were almost certainly swallowed by the mass persecution of the Second World War, I write this as a descendent of peasantry in a land that launched a revolution in the name of a self-proclaimed universal equality that in reality went only as far as the eastern shores of the Atlantic and the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
In a world where extracting wealth at the expense of laying waste to natural environments and generations of communities is institutionalised, certain g3n0cides and ecocides are what makes the world run. We cannot compare what is being carried out in Gaza with what has been going on in Congo, in Sudan, in Haiti as the respective repressions and forms of colonial violence effected in Congo and Haiti are - in entirely different ways - what makes the axis of this world turn. [Never mind that, in my cynical opinion, it is very apparent on one side of the triangular Atlantic how much easier it is to garner support and mobilisation in the West/Western-cultured individuals for the lives of lighter-skinned brown and Black people than it is to garner support and mobilisation for darker-skinned brown and Black people]
It isn't even possible to compare what is happening today with what happened to Jewish populations during the Holocaust [as, in Western memory, is the most common frame fo reference for state-wide genocide and cruelty today], because it's not that - horrific, brutal, monstrous that the Nazi terror was - that was exceptional, it's that it was made to be exceptional. European powers stepped in to stop Hitler's war in the region. Upon discovering his concentration camps, Euro-Western powers took steps to ensure the legal persecution of the surviving perpetrators, steps to memorialise and pay tribute to what genuinely was a horrific machinery of mass killing.
This is not the case today. Those of us who were taught the histories of European/World-by-colonial inhabitation World Wars were certainly taught that 'Hitler had to be stopped'. Yes, that individual monster did have to be stopped. So does N*tanyahu. A whole wealth of elites, in government, corporations and many more have and are collaborating to preserve a social order run off of the blood and strangulation of colonially-devised 'wasteland' bodies in Congo and across the African continent. This same wealth - this monster - collaborates to drive the large scale, near century-old genocide of a population trapped in their own land. It is perhaps the greatest irony that Euro-Western powers continue to claim they herald freedom and prosperity, esp with the latest World War, and yet, in historical archives and memory to come3,
let this record note that the same powers that were the 'Allied' party against the Nazis then, are now, and always have been, sourced from the very same evil.
So never mind that French, US powers 'innovated' some of the very methods Hitler later used in his concentration camps, never mind that European modern history walks on the bones and flayed flesh of those they disposed of in order to fuel the wealth of their elites and the development of their nation-states, naaah never mind that.
Palestine is the crucible of indigenous reclamation, of forever resisting systemic colonial inhabitation, and the repression of Palestinians in the Gaza strip is a part of the ideology of extraction and dehumanisation through which the world operates.
Free Palestine means the respect of rights and relationships of indigenous populations with their own environments, across the world. Free Palestine means the eradication of the neo-colonial meddling of certain powers and governance in the rest of the world. Free Palestine means honouring a humanity that is feminist, intersectional, queer and gender-diverse, differently abled... Free Palestine means the practice of human ecosystems as stewards of non-human ecosystems rather than as its masters.
Free Palestine exposes - as Haiti did over 200 years ago - the fallacies that have come to compose this world. So, as Palestine survives, when Palestine is fully free and unoccupied, remember why, in the minds of the framework that twists this world, Palestine had to be crippled.
Update (15/06/2025): I recently remarked that ‘care infrastructure, policy and practice are the foundation of society’, continuing that these were all things being strangled in an unprecedented way in occupied Palestine. This is true. What is also true is that I do not know of any one society (correct me if I’m wrong!) that focuses menstrual health as a key part of medical infrastructure in ways that allow all bodies full, equitable, informed access to healthcare and rights, with little to no detriment. Part of this, is that most care systems are patriarchal by design and definition. Meaning that women (I also mean trans women when I say women, get it right people) marginalised, gender-diverse communities’ bodies and care, the menstrual health of those who menstruate are taken care of in varying degrees of insufficiency to danger. These variables are of course compounded by racial, class-based, able-ist stratification. Forms of gender-based violence are rampant for those of us who are in some way shape or form part of these communities, the most weaponised of harms we are currently witnessing in conflicts and g3nocides in Congo, in Sudan. Gender-based violence has at its roots the institutionalised terrorisation of women and gender-diverse communities, and must be fought through a politics of care.4 This includes (un)learning, having important conversations, creating community and consolidating networks of advocacy. Part of the work I do is with a gender justice organisation in Trinidad and Tobago (if allyuh ent guess yet, I’s Trini/bago [a trini, a trini, a trini, a trini - bumbum trini! Well they love how trini-]), there are more resources there, or here, another org, or here, a next resource…of several!
Point is, returning to Coates’ quote, and the sharing I will be undertaking with the ‘Jumbie come’ series, is that, just because the processes of racial capitalism (and all the forms of brutalisation and selective, institutionalised violence that involves) operate according to degrees of (in)humanity; our advocacy - no matter what it looks like! - cannot afford to operate the same way. We work in solidarity, across communities and fields of justice, with a focus that encompasses the intersections of crises and necessary intersections of the collective mobilisation that gradually builds to sustainable social, ecological…) futures.5
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, The Message, Penguin Books 2024, p. 116
Understanding that this does not speak for any or everyone, nor put me in any position of complete expertise, again, all a consistent practice of (un)learning, exercise, accountability…and all over again…
See Aimé Cesaire's Discours sur le colonialisme
hooks, bell, Feminism is for Everybody: A Passionate Politics, Pluto Press, as well as insight from Angela Davis
Suggested further reading/looking into/listening: Mikaela Loach's It's Not That Radical, bell hooks’…everything really, Françoise Verges’ Decolonial Feminism, Aandaiye's The Point is to Change the World, Joris Lechene's ‘Divesting from Empire’, and plenty more I cyan think of off the top of my head at the moment, but will be citing and listing in posts to come.