Practicing Conviviality to Elude Ethnocentrisms

“An upbeat story of my agency” (xxix) that says I am more than that, I am multiple. Black Man in the Netherlands: An Afro-Antillean Anthropology places Bob Marley and C. L. R. James in conversation with Mai, Lyotard, Peter Tosh, and the dogs and chikkies of the Dutch hood. With the above voices, aggregated with Rastafarian poetics and epistemology, different forms of knowledges emerge. Herein, Francio Guadaloupe seeks to think through a nonracialist frame while considering the liberating possibilities of being, doing so while in the face of global material and structural racial discrimination and injustice.

How might we who make up the Dutch Kingdom avoid Black supremacy? How do we dismantle stringent categories that prevent relationality while facing racism and coloniality without resorting to Black nationalism? Guadeloupe thinks relationally and offers relational ways of living and creating community across differences. In this, he illustrates that Black and White as political concepts must endure the pressure of continuous inquiry and analysis.

Turning to popular culture, especially music and dance and their role in building community across differences, Guadeloupe explores the above questions. Aaron Kamugisha (2013: 52) notes that for C. L. R. James, “popular culture is an opportunity not to raise the consciousness of workers but to understand the instinctive self-governing activity of the masses.” From this Jamesian Caribbean thought tradition, Guadeloupe presents practices of conviviality and politics of pleasure in Dutch sociality to complicate essentialist ways of understanding and questioning Black experiences in the Netherlands. Guadeloupe outlines that “contesting anti-black racism in one's scholarship, politics, and everyday life, taking one's cue from the urban popular culture of Rastafari, is then properly understood as a means to arrive at a place in which nonracialism is the rule rather than the exception” (119).

Guadeloupe departs from a critical engagement with a question posed to him by international scholars: “How [does] it feels to be a racial problem living in the Netherlands?”—a question that Guadeloupe says plays with W. E. B. Du Bois's “How does it feel to be a problem?” (xvii). Such questions culminate in the book's overarching question: “How does it feel to be a black man living in the Netherlands?” (xxxix). Throughout, Guadeloupe is critical of Black nationalism and Afropessimism, which he argues wants to hear a particular story of trauma in response to these questions, which is not his single story. Thus, Guadeloupe gives a different offering, by living and being political in the Netherlands “as though it is a Caribbean isle” (xxix), describing this as a “politics of re/description” (xxx) that illustrates how contestation of second-class citizenship takes place. In so doing he asks, “why not radically rethink geography by analytically presupposing that today the Caribbean ethnically and ethically extends into Europe?” (xxii). Doing analytical work through autobiography and ethnography

speak[s] about my personal experience as a segue into a discussion on anti-black racism in the Netherlands. It is a response based upon my radical, bodily subjectivity born of inter- and intrasubjective encounters in the Netherlands that were shaped by and that retroactively shape my reflections on life in the Dutch Caribbean isles, where I spent most of my childhood. (xxxiv)

In examining the above, the tenets held by the book do away with decolonial romantic notions that there were no conquistadores before western invasion (xxxiii, xxxiv). This offers a more capacious thought of Black and White as political concepts. To give an account of this, we begin with a letter, a eulogized offering that solicits a different critical point of entry into discussions of racism and Blackness. Here the first chapter offers a critique and teaching on perspective and self-possession. Chapter 2 engages the letter to argue for conceptualizing the Netherlands as a Caribbean island where living with and inhabiting differences is not an anomaly. This chapter discusses the othering of newcomers and the discrimination of their Dutch offspring. However, there is an attempt made to not reinforce and inscribe conscripts of division. Through a critical analysis of the eulogy, we are offered another possible framing that refuses to present single beings. Guadeloupe notes that “black activist-intellectuals understand their work as an attempt to unify the multiplicity of brown-skinned people of sub-Saharan descent, with their forever multiplying experiences and desires, to collectively fight for justice” (128). In practice, Guadeloupe offers the Moroccan baker in Helmond who spoke Papiamentu/o, creating relations, making conviviality durable. Guadeloupe conceptually employs conviviality to think through different modes of living together and creating other socialities outside the conscripts of divisions drawn along racialized categories.

He discusses “the dozens” (a game played by wordsmiths who attempt to outshine the other by wielding insults) as a practice of crossing cultural borders and ethnic boundaries that the author argues is a decolonial practice that is part of everyday ordinariness, an ordinariness that embraces multiple beings. Guadeloupe positions this as a decolonial practice because “every day while hanging out on the block, we built a common world through transcultural play that allowed for difference while deconstructing the walls of coloniality that kept us from truly seeing each other” (10).

Presenting the multicultural conviviality that is formed through collective engagement with popular culture and performing the urban, chapter 3 asks what it means to be well versed in the other's cultural register—and to be versed and draw from my own. What does it mean to share in similarities and what does that yield in terms of inaugurating a new sociality whose very fiber is made up of convivial thinking and being? This conviviality occurs through languaging and code-switching; “they become the other while remaining themselves” (13).

Chapter 4 discusses agency and how to not assume, as part of our DNA, the encountered marginalization and, in the face of this, to not feel oneself marginal. It teaches us to source from the embodied knowledge from generational teachings of a grandmother and great-, great-, great-grandma—Mai—that did not allow us to wallow in self-pity in the face of anti-blackness. “I was simply one of those Afro-Antilleans who knew that growing up in a Netherlands that was multiculturalizing and decolonizing meant having to fight race-based ignorance from time to time. Yet racism, everyday and at times blatant, did not marginalize me existentially” (24). And further, “My enduring sense of self was born from moments of enculturation that are not reducible to narrow economics. My grandmother, parents, relatives, and friends weren't simply automatons that reproduced oppressive global dynamics when they engaged with me” (37).

By theorizing Tarzan and the “tropical” being, a critique of the liberal Dutch is presented in chapter 5. This work does not lambast; it gently calls for a reorientation in thinking through race in the Dutch kingdom, a hopeful intervention among some neoliberal activist navel gazing and blaming. So that in chapter 6, we are introduced to Miss Annette and practices of multicultural social mothering or parenting. We are put in relation to the work and lived reality of Oma Bea and how a network of social relations are formed that exceed ethnicity and go beyond biology. This is a call for compassion in seeing and hearing the other during the ongoing multiculturalizing process.

Guadeloupe argues that the Netherlands is a Caribbean island and that anti-Black racism is not as pervasive as in the US. The book recognizes that the multiculturalizing processes in the Netherlands resemble the islands. “Anti-black racism isn't as virulent and violent as it is in the United States, but it still is an enduring and pervasive factor” (71). Further, “I have become a thinker who focuses on the ways urban popular culture and everyday conviviality contribute to and complicate a wider acceptance of the multiculturalizing of the Kingdom of the Netherlands” (73). This leads to a critique of capitalism and a clear assertion that gender and race have always been woven into the fabric of capitalism but also an argument that “the black nationalist projects of the United States were ill-suited to Dutch realities” (122).

A hopeful energy runs as an undercurrent through this book, offering, through popular culture, an analysis of multicultural convivialities and decolonial ways of being in the world. This stands as exemplary for the changing conceptions of how “race” is understood. It is this politics of hope and hopefulness that culminates in a beautiful meditation on time—since time is all we have in moving toward change.

This radical hopefulness is also where my inquiry resides. The relational way of being in the world that Guadeloupe offers through ethnographic research is an exception to the rule, found in some small enclaves of society, and practiced by a fraction. I am critical of how this way of being, on which a hope for a nonracialist world is hinged, can effect material change beyond the rich theorizing this book engages. What happens when the radical hope that courses through the book is not in practice outside the presented pockets? If this hope is founded on relational practices that are moribund, what happens to held divisions and attempts at nonracialist ways of being? I would be interested in a critical discussion on how the tenets of the book hold in the face capitalist pressure and under the real strain of individualism (de Sousa Santos 2015; Escobar 2016).

Charissa Granger

University of the West Indies – St. Augustine

Blackness, Racism, and Racial Capitalism in the Netherlands

Since the emergence of plantation capitalism in the fifteenth century, Blackness has been made the epitome of race: the dangerous specter that has always haunted western societies. Moreover, Blackness has since become the embodiment of racial difference, the most conveying sign of distinctive humanity and the striking symbol of a radical otherness that can be exploited, dehumanized, or debased. Blackness is also a name given to those who routinely experience all sorts of discrimination and prejudices or who are sometimes made “strangers” in their own countries. In the so-called Western world, the Black stands as an iconic figure of the pariah of globalization, and especially what Giorgio Agamben (1998) terms homo sacer. In his analysis of modern biopolitics, the great Italian philosopher and theorist uses this figure of Roman law to describe a sacred yet dispensable subject that can be killed or left to die at any time in total indifference. According to Agamben, in ancient Rome a homo sacer was debased to the point that he could not even be sacrificed in a religious ritual.

However, Francio Guadeloupe's recently published monograph titled Black Man in the Netherlands: An Afro-Antillean Anthropology does not only focus on the experience of anti-Black racism by Dutch Afro-Antillean people; it also deals with the way in which racist prejudices and racialist polities are being challenged or contested through a vibrant urban popular culture that promotes a multicultural, creolized, and racially inclusive and nondiscriminatory society. In this 219-page book, Guadeloupe provides an alternative genealogy of the category of “Blackness” or “Black” that challenges both essentialist and constructionist interpretations of race. More precisely, he offers in his new book an interesting critique of Black nationalism and Afro-pessimism on the one hand and white supremacist and racist ideologies on the other. According to him, both have constructed several myths around race and Black identity.

Guadeloupe formulates his critique through a Marxist interpretation of Blackness. By so doing, he follows the paths of Marxist or Marxist-inclined thinkers such as C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Walter Rodney, Sydney Mintz, and Paul Gilroy who have theorized the link between race and capitalism, which have coalesced to produce what Achille Mbembe (2017) calls a “racial capitalism.” Taking up the argument initially elaborated by James, Guadeloupe contends that the root of racism is capitalism. There is no racism without a trace of capitalism that generates or fosters both racist ideologies and racial discrimination, which are only one of the various modalities through which capitalist exploitation operates at the global level. This suggests that we cannot better understand “black reason” (Mbembe 2017), the fact of Blackness, and the lived experience of many Black people in the Netherlands and beyond without considering what can be called a “reason of Capital.” By this term, we mean the fundamental principles, logics, and rationale that have always guided or informed the capitalist system. Likewise, to have a better understanding of the current anti-Black racism that permeates much of the present-day Dutch society, we should start first by examining the operating mode of the neoliberal capitalist system that maintains Dutch people of African descent to a status of second-class citizens or symbolizes them as “Black”: what Mbembe (2017) has referred to as nouveaux nègres or “new Black.”

This means that contrary to many Black radical intellectuals and antiracist activists, Guadeloupe relates the alienation and dehumanization of Black people to a global capitalist system. Moreover, he defines “Blackness” less in relation to people's skin color and other phenotypical traits of people of African extraction. Instead, he interprets the secondarization of people of African descent in relation to their economic disempowerment. In his Marxist perspective, which establishes a clear distinction between (racial) “blackness” and (economic) “Blackness,” all oppressed and exploited persons are (economically and socially) “Black,” including people who are not racially black. Likewise, all capitalists and economically privileged people are seen as “White” regardless of their racial backgrounds. Guadeloupe's theorization of a transracial Blackness and Whiteness that transcends racial boundaries enables him to counter the argument that some Black radical scholars and activists raised about the so-called white privilege or the alleged Black marginalization. For him, this racialist reading of social inequalities eludes the fact that there are Black folks who are also “White”; similarly, there are underprivileged white persons who have been made “Black.” According to this Marxist reading of anti-Black discrimination, racially defined Black people should be freed not from biological or racial prejudices but from an economic exploitation in which many are now entangled.

Though pertinent, Guadeloupe's Marxist interpretation of race and anti-Black racism presents some weaknesses and contradictions that raise several questions: Can anti-Black racism properly and adequately be engaged in a Marxist theoretical framework? Does it suffice for a Black person to become “White” or economically empowered to be immune from anti-Black racism? How can we acknowledge the power of anti-Black racism and, therefore, the necessity to combat it by all means if, at the same time, we dismiss race as a mere conceptual category or “the powerful effect and fiction created by racism,” as he maintains (4)? Why should racism and anti-Black discrimination matter if race does not?

In many respects, the weakness of such a Marxist approach to racism is that it reduces the superstructure of racism to economic and material conditions of existence some racially discriminated people or groups might experience. More precisely, it condenses anti-Black racism and discrimination to economic exploitation and marginalization of Black people like other racial groups, as if all Black people who occasionally or routinely experience racism and Negrophobia were economically marginalized or disenfranchised. Economic factors alone cannot explain racial stereotypes faced by many brown-skinned persons in the Netherlands and elsewhere, including those not economically “Black.” In other words, a Marxist reading of racism fails to account for the power of prejudices and the philosophy of suspicion that inform much of racist attitudes and behaviors toward Black people.

The author's accounts of racial prejudices that he and many other Dutch Afro-Antilleans faced in their youth indicate that there is not always a link between racial stereotypes faced by members of some racial/ethnic minorities and their social and economic conditions. In many cases, people are discriminated against less because of their lower economic status but instead based on a specific idea of racial and ethnic difference, seen as a threat to a dominant political, social, and economic order. At times, when both cultural and biological racisms are prevailing, there is no need to look at the thickness of your purse or wallet to dehumanize or deny you certain humanity. Instead, the complexion of your skin and your alleged lack of the officially promoted “cultural values” suffices to make you a dangerous racial or ethnic Other. For example, a white security agent of a Dutch university who prevents a Black university lecturer from entering the building after working hours because he suspects him of being a burglar is only reenacting a particular racist ideology that entangles the Black life in a philosophy of suspicion and a power of prejudice. This point is not sufficiently discussed by the author.

Like racist ideologies that produce it, race also has a color or lives on the belief in skin color. This is another way of saying that the foundation of racism and racial prejudices is (skin) color invented and naturalized by a dominant political and ideological system. Thus, dismissing race as a pure fiction will not deter the power of prejudices that reinforce such a belief and attitude. Nor will it prevent racist thoughts from constructing racial differences based on people's phenotypical characteristics. Moreover, given that anti-Black racism is a logical consequence of certain political practices and ideologies that divide citizens along racial and ethnic lines or create racialized citizens, one can't help but wonder how the author's celebrated urban popular culture could effectively help combat the evil of anti-Black racism. In other words, racism is a political matter and not a cultural or economic issue and therefore should be fought with radical political actions, not with cosmetic economic and cultural reforms. Improving the living conditions of brown-skinned persons or promoting an urban popular culture would not suffice to dismantle the superstructure of racism if a white supremacist ideology that permeates the Dutch mainstream society is still prevailing.

The author is right to dream of a multicultural and post-racial Dutch society that is open to racial difference. And I sympathize with his project to forge an anti-racist Dutch identity via urban popular culture. However, given the Dutch failed experience of multiculturalism and politics of ethnic and racial diversity, which are increasingly problematized or contested by many far-right Dutch politicians and conservative intellectual elites (see Duyvendak 2011), I wonder whether Guadeloupe is not trying (despite his will) to reactivate a rear-guard action and old-fashioned ideology that are out of touch with the current political trend of Dutch society. There are many reasons to cast doubt about the effectiveness of such a multiculturalist project. Indeed, since the 1990s, Dutch society has switched from promoting multiculturalism to endorsing a politics of (native) home and rooted identity (see Geschiere 2009). One of the most striking expressions of such a political project is the highly controversial process of “culturalization of citizenship,” which seems to accommodate only certain categories of people among ethnic and racial minority groups: you are a good and civic Dutch citizen as long as you behave according to what has been framed as “Dutch culture”; that is when you are not a religious fundamentalist, a “street terrorist,” or do not reject homosexual rights; then the system can accommodate your racial and religious difference(s). This is to say that the dominant Dutch system only “citizenizes” or make “Dutch civic citizens” Black people who embody the figure of what the author has referred to as “Tarzan”: a modern version of the domesticated and “civilized” savage.

This raises other important questions such as: What does it mean to be a Black man in a Dutch society that is increasingly imagined by dominant and influential groups as a racially and ethnically homogenous society or is caught in the politics of autochthony and racial belonging (see Duyvendak et al. 2016)? How do the Dutch mainstream intellectual and the political and public elites imagine the new Dutch society? What kind of Dutch society do policymakers and theorists dream of? What place does multiculturalism have in their project?

In conclusion, though a Marxist analysis of the current anti-Black racism offers interesting insights into the way racial capitalism operates or deals with its racialized Black “Others” in the present-day Dutch society, this theoretical approach is, however, fraught with limitations and biases. One of the main shortcomings of such an approach is that it reduces a complex political matter to mere economic concerns and inequalities. In other words, it replaces the racially excluded and discriminated Black Dutch people by economically marginalized or exploited Black persons who can be reintegrated in the core of the white mainstream Dutch society through social and cultural integration. In so doing, this Marxist approach somehow reproduces the dominant white discourses that tend to depoliticize anti-Black racism either by down-playing its magnitude and depth or by making it a cultural or social matter, and not a political issue. More importantly, it is epistemologically and methodologically biased to discuss “racial capitalism” without paying a particular attention to the prevailing state racism that provides both a superstructural framework and foundation on which the economic infrastructure of the Dutch society relies or is built. Only a naive understanding of racism can lead to this belief that economic and social reforms can provide a solution to a problem which is a logical consequence of a certain hegemonic biopolitics: white supremacism.

In other respects, a true multiculturalism and politics of conviviality will start only when the core of the so-called liberal Dutch society is also open to racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion. Limiting racial conviviality and openness to people who embody a figure of the “new Black” or to peripheral activities such as art, music, sport, and entertainment can only produce a multicultural society en trompe oeil.

Basile Ndjio

Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies / University of Douala, Cameroon

The Global, the Local, and the Dialectic

Francio Guadeloupe's book Black Man in the Netherlands: An Afro-Antillean Anthropology is informed by the author's situational positioning while negotiating multiple identities—“being black in a Europe that is still decolonizing,” “being of Antillean extraction and being born a Dutch citizen” (xviii), being male and heavily influenced by Marxist scholarship and in particular C. L. R James. My reflections are, in turn, influenced by my multiple identities—being a male of Indo-Trinidadian descent and being in the United States of America, where I have spent the last 30 years of my academic life as a sociologist who is also influenced by Marxist methodology as an approach to understand societal structures and movement. On this basis, this intervention in the book forum will focus on both trying to delineate some broad theoretical underpinnings of this work highlighting specific parts of Guadeloupe's work that can add interesting nuance to debates in the US pertaining to race and Blackness, racism and anti-racism, ideology and action, and the relevance of Marxist informed theory in the understanding of race in the US. As a sociologist, my aim is to tease out theoretical connections between structure and agency. I believe that the overarching goal of Guadeloupe's work is to understand the concepts and the contradictions of Blackness/racism within the context of a space that can be characterized as the center (the Netherlands) with influences that are fed back from the periphery (former colonies) and the modernizing tendencies of contemporary capitalism (the spread of American cultural values and practice).

First and foremost, I think Guadeloupe's book is a triumph of nuance over orthodoxy. The latter suggests that groups in society are completely separate, arranged in a hierarchy of power dynamics such that human agency is almost nonexistent. His use of Paul Gilroy's “cultures of conviviality” allows him to understand the dynamic that emerges in urban life when groups with different cultural backgrounds come together where “these convivial cultures meet and merge and are sometimes taken up by commerce” (xxxv). Guadeloupe notes many instances of this development in urban culture in the Netherlands—the intermingling of cultures from North Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Guadeloupe, in essence, is giving some credence to the line of Caribbean scholarship informed by the notion of creolization, attempting to account for a continuum of multiple forms of domination and subordination within specific societies. This is particularly prominent when he talks about his teenage experience of being hip in urban culture in the Netherlands, where a multiple of cultures resettled in Europe as a result of the colonial experience. He notes, “I was not aware back then that ‘urban’ was becoming a cultural marker that can encompass the various ethnic groups who live on this Caribbean island called the Netherlands” (7)

Guadeloupe also confronts head-on the importance of understanding the role of Marxist methodology and capitalism in making sense of the contradictions of contemporary society, particularly in countries at the center. This holds true in the United States, and Jamesian Marxist influence is particularly important in this respect. Guadeloupe argues that “capitalism figures front and center in the transposition of Blackness from the explicitly political to the cultural” (xxxvii). To unravel this complex reality, he resorts to C. L. R. James's use of the dialectic where political and social structures are created and re-created through struggle. For Guadeloupe, Marxism is not the dogmatic type that is the understanding of many in the United States; instead, he stresses that “proletarianization can be fruitfully conceived as the Marxist understanding of the recurring historical operation of making some human beings Black, regardless of their hue or ethnicity, and therewith exploitable and at times expendable in a capitalist dominated global order (which still privileges the West)” (xix). He parts ways with the Afro-pessimist who argues that the world that colonialism built is inherently white supremacist and anti-Black and cannot be reformed. Indeed, Guadeloupe's entire contestation in the book is to see dominated persons not only as victims to whom oppression is done but also as active, creative beings engaging in developing these cultures of conviviality even as they occupy subordinate power positions in society.

The author's most bold and ambitious theoretical attempt is to theorize on race/Blackness. Discussions of who is Black, who gets to be counted as Black, and the relationship between race and skin color is prevalent wherever there has been a European colonial experience—in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the United States. In many parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, if you have one drop of “white blood” (identified with certain phenotypical traits) you are not Black. According to the US “one-drop rule,” if you had one drop of “black blood” you are not white. Colorism is a key concept that enters the theorization of race in the United States. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s (2022) book Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race is a recent discussion in this area. Guadeloupe notes, “in my Marxist way of thinking, Black and White are concepts I employ to hierarchically categorize a person's station in the capitalist order. Skin complexion is of little relevance here” (xxxii). In fact, he argues that “for me, Blackness is, on the one hand, a concept I employ to designate those who are being treated as waste regardless of their phenotype or ethnicity. And on the other hand, as urban Blackness, Blackness is an emerging commercial identity signifying style, comfort and success for those how can afford it” (129). Referring specifically to urban Blackness as the site where many nonwhite youths create their own realities, he notes:

urban Blacks and Blackness are analytical categories in my work analysis. I use them to critically interrogate how intersectionality is erroneously used by activist-intellectuals to promote an exclusivist “race” plus class plus gender plus religion, and so on, understanding of identity whereby they can lay exclusive claim upon blackness. If Blackness is a structural position of domination, then all intersectional identities including US notions of blackness are subsumed by it. (133)

He contends that though there is a train of thought in the US to embrace the notion of “international black nationalism,” it is not theoretically sound to assume this a universal trend. Not all persons of sub-Saharan African descent contest their subjugation in the same way, since social arrangements are rooted in different societal and institutional arrangements, and the contestation of subjugated positions, particularly when it comes to issues of race, are not binary, as Afro-pessimist theorists suggest. By arguing that urban youth in the Netherlands use hip-hop as an art form to articulate their urban Blackness, he does not necessarily mean they are adopting the same interpretations of Blackness as would be found within the US context. Guadeloupe is essentially trying to thread the needle to recognize human agency and structure on the one hand and the tendency to look at global currents as inherently unifying on the other.

Guadeloupe's approach is an attempt to put human action and agency back into the equation of how people deal with their perceived position of subjugation—negotiating both locally and globally. He identifies human interpretation and action as significant theoretical variables in explaining how people deal with their subordinated roles. His theoretical approach runs counter to the theoretical approach that seek to advance a more universalistic linear movement toward sameness rather than difference. The latter suggests, the forces of globalization make all people who experience that process become more alike. Guadeloupe's use of multicultural convivialities challenges those approaches and allows him to suggest that “urban popular culture is subtly changing the way ‘race’ is understood” (114). Drawing on C. L. R. James, then, he can argue that

this contestation where a more meta-identity can emerge away from previous conceptions of racial difference can allow the major project of creating an antiracist society to begin. Black identity does not naturally unify all the people who look like me. There are many other axes such as difference in wealth and income, education and employment status, citizenship and neighborhood of residence, ethnicity and cultural predilections and specific moment of enunciation and historical relationship. (128)

As such, he chooses a structural understanding of “Blackness on the one hand is a concept I employ to designate those who are being treated as waste regardless of their phenotype or ethnicity” (129).

In sum, Guadeloupe's book is a welcomed entry into the debate on race and Blackness, where the analysis of racism is geared toward creating an anti-racist society. Theoretically, it is ambitious in that it attempts to move away from the purely mechanistic relationship between substructure (economic forces) and superstructure in favor of truly operationalizing the dialectic. Further, this dialectic is not confined to the nation-state; instead, he makes a concerted effort to link the global with the national and the local. Guadeloupe so advances the debate on race/Blackness beyond the Afro-pessimist tradition. It also comes at a time when claims to who can be called Black are contested. With the commercialization of “Blackness” in the forms of speech, dress, and style, charges of cultural appropriation have risen to the foreground. Further, it comes at a moment when any analysis of race seems to increase divisions and rancor rather than move to a space for anti-racist work.

Dave Ramsaran

Susquehanna University

On the Rituals of Anti-racism

I was invited to think alongside and in conversation with Francio Guadeloupe in relation to his newly published book Black Man in the Netherlands. I enjoyed the book and the different avenues through which it engages with identity, race, and politics. The analyses of the conceptual field and cultural space of race are illustrated eloquently through the theoretical and auto-ethnographic interrogation during different parts of his life. This combination gives deeper meaning to the numerous questions that Guadeloupe raises. First, in this intervention to the book forum, I will engage with the overall framing of race and racism that Guadeloupe provides in his book. The insights from the ethnographic material are strengthened by his reflections about the broader themes they encompass. I share my interpretation of his conceptual reference points and put these intellectual baselines in conversation with similar debates.

Second, I take up some of the arguments Guadeloupe makes and discuss the trials and tribulations of contemporary Dutch anti-racism by engaging with the ideological tensions as illustrated in the last (and vital) part of the book. The book represents an important intervention in the manifold perspectives in how to do anti-racism. Black Man in the Netherlands helps decode and understand the flaws of race politics at large. I continue the dialogue by returning to several claims that had deepened the public schism. I discuss why censoring criticism based on color or membership of a certain ethnic group confirms several conceptual traps. Political strategies based on narrow racialized frames miss key steps in the design of resistance and the adoption of “NBPOC/BPOC” logic has allowed commitment to the struggle to be suspicious. In specific, I look into some of the techniques at play and argue that the way anti-racism is increasingly enveloped by certain milieus (academia) and the fact that contemporary anti-racist discourse is often mediated (through digital platforms) along ceremonial gestures (rituals), contributing to the flaws Guadeloupe identifies.

Third, while the ethnographic style has opened up a much more real avenue—one that allows us to understand his arguments in a clearer way—reading them was also stinging since a number of his examples contain my own experiences. While the reflections I share in this essay correspond with the examples offered in the book that concern me personally, they are mainly a critical inquiry into the collision of “race theory” with anti-racism practice. It is important to scrutinize these experiences precisely because they are not just “personal” anecdotes but part of ideological and institutional structures. Another reason to join this forum is that despite all the strengths of the book, one weakness is the lack of engagement with women writers who have made contributions to thinking about race and racism in the Dutch context. Like Guadeloupe, I believe that we should resist the temptation to engage in these values on a mere superficial level, and I argue that solidarity is a key strategy for antiracist resistance. The overall point I make concerns the interaction between theory and praxis in the Dutch anti-racism milieus.

Race: Signifier or Melanin?

Guadeloupe conceptualizes race without shying away from suggesting ways to combat racism in the process of anti-racist knowledge production. I very much share his objective to provide insight “that does not conceptually reintroduce our colonially inherited racial divisions” (46). He adds important insight into processes of racialization in the Netherlands and identifies particular ways to analyze Dutch racism as he traces several intellectual paradigms and delineates numerous intellectual strands as his guiding principles. His points of analysis emerge from a rich collection of inspirations that deserve to be recapped. In alignment with Stuart Hall, Guadeloupe considers race a modality through which capitalist-driven oppression operates. Moreover, citing C. L. R. James that “people who only see black men in general being oppressed by white men in general, and are unable to trace the historical dialectic, do not understand anything” (xx). As with W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, Guadeloupe insists on the multilayered nature of race and resistance (xxxi). This framing sets the stage to take side against both Frank B. Wilderson's Afro-pessimism and Molefi K. Asante's Black nationalism (xx, xxi, 147, 155). This is especially valuable for the Netherlands. Guadeloupe restates Philomena Essed's emphasis that discussing Dutch racism is less to point fingers at who is or isn't a racist and more about the systemic nature of racist injustice (24). Via Gloria Wekker, he reminds us how the colonial imperial enterprise shaped a stubborn Dutch cultural makeup of its “racial imaginations” (26).

Initially, this analytical approach may seem eclectic, but it offers a powerful constant in terms of the ethics and morality of “doing” race as an intellectual praxis throughout the book. This broader framing places racism within a shared category of modern-day capitalist-mediated oppression. This is important for how it takes us toward a social understanding of notions of Black(ness) or White(ness) rather than ethnic or cultural explanations. As Guadeloupe posits, some race scholars may regard his race and class dialectics a form of racial reductionism. This verdict is frequently ascribed to Marxism, especially by Liberals (the descriptions of the Right are not relevant here), but as he puts it, “I do not think this is what I am doing. I am taking race seriously while seeking to avoid treating it as metaphysics”; he follows a conception of race “that does not involve capitalist-mediated imperialism,” as that is “one that falls outside of the scope of my reasoning” (145). He therefore employs Black and White as analytical concepts, “as was the case with ‘all proletariats of the world unite,’ so, too, Black is a call notwithstanding the manifold different experiences” (146). This reading is fruitful as an allegory that differentiates black as ethnicity from Black as a social condition, in his terms, “the human expendables in the capitalist-dominated global order regardless of their ethnicity” (xix). Guadeloupe decompresses the conformist ethnic division and offers a proposition that relies on the formation of shared communities.

Described against the backdrop of urban popular culture, and along several ethnographic junctures, Guadeloupe depicts how his interlocutors fare through this anti-racist Dutch identity. This is not some kind of hollow idealism, for as he adds, “We come to the conclusion that ours is a contested belonging, but a belonging nevertheless” (xix). But while marginalized groups are conditioned by the objective provisions that in turn facilitate a certain racialization toward them, racialization also emerges among themselves. Race as an analytical signifier for socially configured power relations becomes autobiographic and a descriptor of melanin, overturning the which that is in the service of the what. Race and class as foundational baselines of intersectional struggles to undo injustice are deformed into experiential baselines of intersectionality, and that rely on discursive representations to make claims. Guadeloupe explicitly speaks against this inclination in understanding of race at universities, think tanks, and those particular parts of anti-racism that have de-coupled it from economic power and class subjectivity. That kind of racial essentialism is produced by the trends that emphasize skin complexion and phenotype (xxxiii). What he proposes instead is “Black” as a signifier, a nonracist political identity to “combat racism and the economic structures that undergird, by becoming politically Black” (147).

Black as a signifier is related to how race is manifested in particular ways in and by capitalism. Economy as a structural analytical guidance can abstract too much, allowing the way in which much of the mainstream (White) left reduced anything (gender, race, disability, sexuality) to class, and this is something to account for as part of the explanation. The rhetoric attacks of leftist financial geographer Ewald Engelen in the Dutch public sphere helped cultivate the familiar anti-wokeness stick to beat anti-racists with (Aouragh 2018a). But political economy and class are universal points of reference, they are not the ontological ownership of a certain white left. As numerous examples by Guadeloupe show, class absolutely matters in terms of the (shared) spatial politics of multiculturalism. In the examples Guadeloupe sketches, working-class geographies engender particular affinities. Guadeloupe employs political Black as a way to remap race organically linked to class. But it is not accidental that especially this critical reading of identity works like a lightning rod in the Dutch debate. This demonstrates that the algorithms of a spatial politics radically changes when its ethics is determined not by working class neighborhood affinity but by university campus affinity in the cases Guadeloupe critiques. This is visible in the way in which the discourse about “privilege” becomes detached from actual class power. For instance, my opinion was barred by portraying me as “elite,” with discursive callout handles such as Professor and at Oxford. I am neither a professor nor one at Oxford University, but as someone from a working-class and immigrant background I would actually be proud if I were: shame for achievement and status is a rather middle-class reflex. Adhering to Black essentialism and erasing class is more favorable than material analysis because it could otherwise make too visible the dynamics of power and privileges that are just below the surface—my material privilege is insignificant compared to half a dozen upper-middle class international students of color and their allies in the cultural sector that enthusiastically attacked me. Guadeloupe makes visible how (especially in spaces that employs diversity as an important part of its public relations) anecdotal gestures and callout facts about opponents as tactics of claim making, grow in importance (89). These essentialist trends are not random; Guadeloupe is candid about the analytical degeneration regarding race and racism, and the book at large asks us to account for the brazen folding of numerous level differences and diagnostic shortcuts.

“Besides the intellectual disagreement, which I can live with, it is the obligatory ritual that gets under my skin. I find it quite annoying to have to exclusively embody the role of the racially hurt outsider of the Dutch world” (xxi). I wholeheartedly agree with problematizing the role play and compulsive indignations as a substitute of scrutiny. But why is this so tenacious? I think there are two answers; the first is elaborately covered in the last part of the book, activism as the lucrative, business model. Guadeloupe sheds light on how urban cultures and activist expressions are being co-opted and how eventually this particular prism makes legible the similarity between capitalists and Black nationalists (74). He demonstrates these differences on the level of subjectivity in terms of “black activist-intellectuals” as opposed to “urban popular artists” (83). Via Paul Gilroy, he unveils a “politics of fulfilment” not only as the conviviality of resistance that it is often framed as, but through its susceptibility for the kind of marketable activists that “are dependent upon the Dutch government and NGOs, whose funding criteria demands that they present their case and themselves in the habitual ethnoracial categories of governance … often employ forms of essentialist identity politics, using white and black as descriptive categories” (83).

From Transgression to Regression

Guadeloupe provides an analysis in chapters 9 (“Enter Urban Blackness”) and 10 (“Performances of Urban Blackness in the Netherlands”) that helps the reader understand how activism turns into a dependable cog in a larger wheel, one habituated to state funds. This is a crucial observation that regards any activist cause (climate, anti-racism, LGBTQ, etc.); it carries valuable warning far beyond the topic addressed in the book. I regard this a crucial piece of the puzzle, of which the paradoxical outcomes are illustrated clearest in chapters 10, 11, and 12. Guadeloupe discusses the consequences of reifying categories (mostly about “non-Black” people and often conflated with Muslims) and explicit categories that depict marginalized and racialized groups in very biological ways. The way he spells this out in detail through excruciating examples—a farcical binary of Non-Black People of Colour (NBPOC) and Black People of Colour (BPOC) as discursive phenomena that reflect the shift toward competition among oppressed groups—is as necessary as it is enlightening. The pattern emerges; it becomes clear as a process that is inherent to how political economy shapes a given political context. Taking this a little further here, capital engenders competition and is dialectical in the sense that political groups themselves contribute to the paradigms. The use-value of identity has, like any form of capital with an exchange-value, qualitative properties that can engender a self-fulfilling prophesy that works as a negative spiral: it rationalizes (biological) ideologies that maintains the logic racism. The transference of white privilege from the structure of political economy, or the influence of the state to individual responsibility and subjective inhibitions in anti-racist milieus, can take place in this paradox. This of course makes a farce of unity and solidarity as pillars that historically ensured successful struggles. These are weaknesses for the movement itself and need to be spelled out and discussed by movements themselves.

This non-Black classification, or describing groups oppressed based on different ethnicities as “junior partners” to Black people in the struggle against racism, may seem a recent phenomenon but is actually a rerun. Think of the debates led by Black Liberation in the US about collaborations with Chicanos, Asians, Jews, and Indigenous communities and the experiments of the Rainbow Coalition in the Black Panther Party that were ridiculed by those with a more chauvinist approach. It is probably more appealing (and therefore disproportionately louder) in the Netherlands and Belgium, where the small size of political milieus nurtures a politics driven by competition, also knowns as the Oppression Olympics. In the Netherlands, this argument has been vividly dismantled by Wekker; like Guadeloupe, she frames it as part of the popularization of Afro-pessimism as an intellectual strand: this a core source of the BPOC and NBPOC dichotomy. For Wekker, this thinking inside anti-racism spaces not only is a loveless encounter but also became a guilt-trip strategy, to silence critics: “Anyone who does not want to see or take account of this fundamental difference is guilty of anti-Black racism” (2020: 4). Guadeloupe describes how this logic reflects a version of “strategic essentialism” (xxxvii) that become absolutist positions—a reading of colonial history as a clear-cut picture where brown-skinned sub-Saharan Africans are subjugated by pink-skinned Europeans that “produced a Black identity that is not an optional identity for an NBPOC or an ally regardless of the lowly station they may occupy” (128). And if Black identity belongs to sub-Saharan people, then that almost inevitably begets a certain ethnoracial entrepreneurship, as Guadeloupe describes (158).

It's not just about the analysis; there is something very particular about the ceremonial dynamic and the markedly uncomradely behavior, or, as Guadeloupe described it, “Besides the intellectual disagreement, which I can live with, it is the obligatory ritual that gets under my skin” (xxi). This is actually crucial, and I want to take this further: the obligatory rituals have become part of the appeal of instrumentalizing identity as part of activism. Here, identity, or race even, extracts value like a commodity does. Like any commodity in capitalism, this covers both monetary and nonmonetary value: it inhibits both an exchange value and a use value. This means not only that its material value is physical but that its “worth” lies also in the social feature against which its use can be measured. Thus, the exchange value of identity, or race, becomes separate from the property of the “thing.” The ideology of identity, or race, as a utility functions, for instance, by virtue of its proximity to power or to fame or to funds.

I regard this dynamic as part of the process that gradually normalizes the assumption that anti-racists should be representatives. Taken further, it turns anti-racism into subjective delegation rather than an objective to demand or abolish. The rituals come into play precisely, which create the affect and narrative by which make it very clear that without a biographical claim or direct experiences, anti-racists are incapable of understanding the needs and demands of the struggle. Moreover, they are actually unable to commit by virtue of a system that will always favor them and inevitably renders them complicit. It is this culpability, liability, and claim-making through experiential value that explains the rejection of an inclusive radical indicator of “Black.” It does not require much imagination to see it evolve into telling NBPOC who propose a political kinship based on shared struggle that they should not use Black radical sources.

The rituals went into overdrive on Guadeloupe's Facebook wall when I expressed (in a piece that he shared) that a radical politics and class analysis in the Netherlands has little use of generic distinctions between NBPOC (mostly North Africans and Asians) and BPOC (mostly Dutch Caribbean and those from Africa who encapsulate the phenotype black). This brought to light that many Moroccans or Algerians were not considered African enough, that an imaginary Africa proper limited to a selective geography (sub-Saharan/West African) of a particular shade of skin, which is itself a crudely racist invention, had become part of activist discourse. Furthermore, we saw ascribed the idea of white-passing onto North Africans in this view. Anyone doing any activist organizing or research about social exclusion in a post-9/11 Europe and know about the realities of police violence and state surveillance, scratched their head hearing this nonsense. The exchange and use value of identity turns race into a commodity and antiracism into a certain capital, in a ritualized process it changes from a potentially transgressive experience to regressive pontification.

The Political Is Personal

Alas, it is impossible to avoid my own experiences, since these are extensively discussed in the book. After witnessing numerous highly sectarian incidents online and during events, and observing how different oppressed groups were effectively pitted against each other, I called for a race politics that is progressive in its intellectual propositions (Aouragh 2018a). I said that an anti-racism that addresses white privilege, decolonization, and intersectionality merely on the level of one-liners and does not invest in coalition politics is not radical. A fierce social media battle played out on Guadeloupe's Facebook wall after he shared my publication. More than anything, this piece was a critique of the ridiculing of solidarity because this happened at a time when right-wing politics was stronger than ever and far-right parties were gaining one electoral victory after the other. Guadeloupe shared it with agreement, but precisely because he did so as a Black man, the response was vicious.

Thus, arriving at chapter 12 of Guadeloupe's book, which describes this case including how I was targeted, was admittedly a painful reminiscence. “The response by the black activist-intellectuals was devastating. Aouragh was attacked to such a degree that, since then, she has not dared to publish or hold public speeches. It was surreal” (130). Guadeloupe's description is correct; it surely was surreal and the political became the personal. In fact, I had received this kind of nastiness only through right-wing attacks. I have endured threats, insults, and personal hurt throughout my political life before; whether as an organizer against the Bush-Blair imperial wars, the Sharon flattening of Palestinian cities, the emergence of Pim Fortuyn, the backlash of the murder of Theo van Gogh, I always tried to resist the debilitating affect this has on whether I share my opinions. In this case I realized that an attack from one's own is more destructive than an attack from a common enemy. But I did not stop holding public talks or write critical pieces; if anything, it led to me to explain my argument in multiple other occasions (Aouragh 2018b, Aouragh 2019). I prefer to move on and deplore being the focus, but this case study does illustrate the essential arguments Guadeloupe provides for the analyses in the last chapters and make it clear why the same responses tend to resurface.

Guadeloupe quotes several statements about me, some more astounding that others: “Why is it mainly black bodies, black lives, black thinkers, and black warriors who have to be stretched to include the whole spectrum of color to the point of tearing?” and “Black intellectualism seemingly always has to be applicable for all of us, while we do not demand, expect, or interpret the work of non-black thinkers as such”; I should stay in my own (NBPOC) “lane,” was advised to keep with “Eduart [sic] Said, and stay with the unmentioned Fatema [sic] Mernissi” (130–132). As Guadeloupe continues, “Mitchell Esajas went on to write an extensive piece on the Black Archives blog (2018) criticizing the idea of political Blackness … took Miriyam Aouragh to task for not respecting the differences between the Black Radical Tradition and Marxism” (159). Revisiting some of the other attacks in his footnotes is both baffling and fascinating; Guadeloupe describes, for instance, when Hélène Christelle took me to task and “began by questioning why Aouragh felt that she was entitled to use the work of black thinkers to critique black activist-intellectuals like herself. Aouragh's political Blackness was deemed doubly culpable, appropriating black identity and black thought” (131). He then quotes her dramatic ending: “I almost want to say, here you have it. My oh so subjective, oh so negligible blackness. My skin. My blood sweat and tears. My 4c. My sub-Saharan tongue, my hands and feet. Take it, take it all, and put it on. Please tell how it feels and why you so long to have it” (132). Why are Browns stealing her Blackness?

Why not just defer to this black and non-black person of colour divide in who we cite? First, doing so skips the fact we can't put a (supposed) ethnicity or locality of intellectuals before what they wrote. Why would I cite the Moroccan feminist Mernissi in the debates about anti-racism struggles, and at the same time, why wouldn't a Black feminist engage with Mernissi? As I argued, phenotype does not replace ideology, and epistemology transcends place (Aouragh 2019). Second, it also renders who we are to where our parents happened to be born; which geographic borders our oppressors have drawn; or what kind of Islamophobe intellections have become hegemonic. It is beneficial because NBPOC latched onto the concept “white passing”; this shift matters because it can transfer the idea of “accountability” due to white privilege to minorities as uncovered in the claim was that instead of critiquing black chauvinism or Afro-pessimism, I should address anti-Black racism in my own community. And this in turns makes possible to take solidarity away from an anti-racist unity strategy and into a property relation. Browns are stealing Blackness. This erases two important dynamics: a progressive political subjectivity that is invested in transgressive politics is more likely to already be doing other progressive work in their respective communities (anti-Blackness among Moroccans or Islamophobia among Surinamese); the adoption of subjective and skin-based privilege loses key social features in processes of marginalization. But it also sows doubt, makes one guilty by association, divides between Black and brown oppression. It is, above all, a deeply loveless and hopeless politics, as Wekker described it (2020: 93). It expresses the principled difference between a constructive or destructive way we can deal with our ambiguities, fragilities, and contradictions that Lorette Ross (2022) describes as the difference between callout and calling in. Overall, this reflects a weakness that confirms a serious lack of intergenerational awareness. I argued that such weaknesses offer us political subjectivities that feel like the fantasies of Reagan and Thatcher come true. I reminded that in the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas Sankara and Medhi Ben Barka, both African revolutionaries, were not only for all Africans but in fact for all oppressed. I observed that the ease with which these examples are dismissed has to do with the erasure of our radical legacies, of pan-Africanism, Third Worldism, Tricontinentalism, and Third World feminism. Such weaknesses shows that decades of progressive struggles—the context in which Wekker and Ross worked and organized in the 1970s and 1980s—that tried so hard to elevate freedom from identity are ignored.

In this context, it is important that Guadeloupe discusses “political Blackness” through his interpretation of Stuart Hall (Hall 1991 in Guadeloupe in xxv) as an alternative potential. Until about a decade ago, “political Blackness” as activist semantic was external to the Dutch grassroots but not its spirit. This is reminiscent of the Zwarte, Migranten-en Vluchtelingenvrouwen (ZMV—Black, Migrant and Refugee Women) movement—a women of color (WOC) approach elevated through a radical feminist politics from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this historiography, solidarity between different groups of women who identified themselves as (politically) Black, and later as ZMV from the former Dutch East Indies, the Moluccan islands, Surinamese, and so on, was built on an anti-racism strategy. This Dutch ZMV experience is referred to as caleidoscopische visies and is the sister of the WOC experience of intersectionality. It was an approach that understood the basic math of power: solidarity and unity, rather than identity or dissecting who exactly we are, is what will help us.

This is an example of the way kinship based on solidarity and shared practices has been a key area for Black feminists who looked beyond family or social reproduction and toward a more inclusive and empathetic replacement (Aouragh 2018b). This legacy is critical for any coalition-based epistemology, but while the absence of this ZMV genealogy continues, including gender as part and parcel of the race-and-class axis is crucial. Leaving aside that Guadeloupe's book title reflects on a Black male standpoint as part of the auto-ethnographic descriptions, we must think of how Black feminists of the ZMV generation had provided a crucial example in how we align race and class; their gendered standpoint should be an analytical reference. That this is not only figurative, as illustrated by the fact that the controversy at the background of the debates revolved around a seminar to do with the relation between Afro-pessimism and intersectionality, so of course gender should be a key part of the analysis. This is exactly what Wekker (2020) discussed in her reflections on the sectarian turn in Dutch anti-racism as signaled by the problematic way in which said seminar was about bringing together Afro-pessimism and intersectionality.

This intellectual difference helps understand why the responses to my critique were not incidental. Guadeloupe's examples about the reception I received also illuminate how activist rituals work, clarifying that an intellectual opinion is distinguished not by how thoughtful or transformative it is but by how lucrative it can be, even if it is disempowering. To that end, throughout these last chapters Guadeloupe contextualizes the people involved (they all have platforms, organizations, and partners in civil society with [potential] social capital in the sector of race that he illustrates so well). This is when we begin to see that much of the public response and outrage were also meant to discipline other activists and stakeholders. But Guadeloupe rejects the basic idea that a specific Black identity “belongs to sub-Saharan people” on which much is predicated; he critiques the metaphysical understanding of “colonial history by which blood, skin, bone, and genetic ancestry slips in through the back door of their social constructivist avowal of race” (129). “It is theirs and theirs alone[; they] cannot in their estimation choose not to be black. They simply are black,” as he paraphrases one of the commentators on his Facebook post in the book, but he also traces this epistemology back to a peculiar popularization of a US-based Afro-pessimism, which is itself part of a certain popular:

African American racial lore, with its clear-cut division of human beings into black, brown, and white, as part of North American globalization. Some Afro-Dutch seem to wholeheartedly embrace it, while others rework these US ideas about race in ways that would give Afrocentrics a migraine. “How on earth can these black people say that Moroccans are ‘black’ too!” (113)

How are we to understand the hyper-politics? What do the ceremonial mediations—online semantics include gaslighting (distraction), dog whistling (guilt by association), virtue signaling, and strawmanning—obfuscate? For this we need to understand the proximity of digital media and interest-based networks, and how taken together these are part of broader environments. Context is crucial here. Institutional finance is a very important, material reason that Guadeloupe notes. Funding criteria have grown into identity-based apparatuses in the Netherlands, and applicants are increasingly required to present their case and themselves through ethno-racial categories (71). Besides the funding regimes that nurture this tendency, there are other environments to consider. I denote two further areas that help deconstruct this shift: one is the institutional environment, and the other is the digital environment.

Academic Cannibalism and the Unbearable Mildness of Digital Activism

Guadeloupe helps us see a shift in what matters to progressive politics: when protecting political unities and nurturing activist affinities slide into scoring discursive points on social media platforms. This is the exchange-value of political activism mentioned above: it's dependent on trends and is maintained by (semantic) rituals. But why now? Or, put differently, why is the context Guadeloupe describes in chapter 3 (the meaning of Blackness in the working-class context of the places he himself was part of) so different from that in chapter 9 (the meaning of Blackness in the professional contexts he researches)? He suggested a shift toward the business type of politics, Blackness as a cultural identity (stripped of the explicitly political connotations (95). It will make more sense for anti-racism to morph into individual and entrepreneurial engagement (rather than community accountability and collective strategies) in this context. Moreover, this kind of engagement becomes ritualistic. It is, after all, the kind of culture in which competitive reflexes such as the normalization of “appropriating struggles” can thrive even among oppressed communities, thus not how entities such as states or corporations exploit the aesthetics of resistance in their propaganda and advertising, but those resisting said entities. This now illuminates a very interesting commonality in our understanding of the respective contexts; the ecology that makes certain attitudes thrive rather than others can fuel one another, deepen it. It explains why the disagreements discussed by Guadeloupe emerged among campus-based activists and around an academic event. I mean that academia has rubbed off some of its tendencies in this environment and denotes what amounts to academic cannibalism.

The urges to publish, to increase impact factor, and to find local partners have turned social campaigns into currencies and rendered activists valuable in order to account for the “socially responsible” academic “knowledge exchange.” The amalgamation of these, seemingly distinctive, interests go both ways. That these clashes occur in a context and around institutions where the relevance of race, class, and gender is dominated by lip service matters. Whether academic faculties or corporations, the transformation of activist agendas (“equality, diversity, and inclusion” as animated discourse) leaves the structures that reproduces inequality and exclusion intact when these activist personas or activities are co-opted. This specific inter-relational process brings up a double bind because instead of activist tools, these are predominantly conceptual baselines that can be adopted as subjective features. Both dynamics together have further hegemonized the depolitization of anti-racism. One outcome is that activists can offer themselves in academia as exchange value. They lend credibility and social impact, juice up the metrics of our universities, allow research project to gain from “affinity” with “communities.”

Professional academia enables the shift of anti-racism from use value to exchange value, and higher education workshops, publications, and grants turn anti-political Blackness into a reference point. Besides citing Afropessimist mantras, another source that was referenced during the sectarian outbursts that Guadeloupe describes and opponents shared on his Facebook wall was a piece by Kehinde Andrews. His work is popular among those promoting the NBPOC/BPOC dichotomy because Andrews too posits that not all minorities should be represented in one overlapping acronym such as BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic). While the wordplay in his piece titled “I am not your BAME” is supposed to evoke James Baldwin's “I am not your N***o,” it actually does not resonate with the spirit that Baldwin intended with his text. BAME is used as a strawman here and is often interchangeably quoted with POC and political Blackness. You almost forget that BAME is an acronym that already includes Black. But more importantly, by leaving the historical differences between these terms out, and by putting aside the radical origins of the terms that are often pumped into this critique, Andrews can claim that “these are all just different ways to say ‘non-White’ … the ‘non-human’ status that was necessary for slavery and colonialism … It is the denial of your personhood.”

The echoes of the Afro-pessimist ontologies, mixed up with Black nationalist populism, are undeniable; the real problem for Andrews and those in the Netherlands who were eagerly citing him to put me in my place, is that a (Black) racialized or oppressed group is being approximated with another racialized or oppressed group (brown). It is curious how an academic reading of BAME concludes that policy terms represent (internalized) personhood. As if the tactical use of certain political identifiers, be it BAME or POC, mean that our differences (unique, legitimate, real) disappear in the process. As if political strategy can be conflated with policy. I don't see this in our grassroots movements, and in truth, once we scratch the surface, we are offered a deeply inaccurate understanding of the notion political Blackness. These self-presentations and reenactments in academic spaces and sources become ritualistic and are given very particular meanings in the public sphere. This is why Guadeloupe's critiques of the Afro-pessimist and Black nationalist approaches is crucial, as such approaches reject the possibility of Black as a signifier that unites people in a strategy against oppression and, in his amusing wording, can even be “extended to include pinkish people undergoing the same faith” (xxxvi).

It's sometimes made to seem that rituals are spontaneous, natural, or incidental, that they are arranged by virtue of the space in which they operate and repeated according to the pace of the medium through which they are shared. Since digital platforms are prime, the repetitive algorithm is already situated. The rituals of outrage among activists are nourished by repetition, and virtue signaling is common political genre in the activist scenes, which in turn also encourage replicability among users. Now imagine sectarianism as an endless (retweet, share, like) replicated content. It's tragically ironic that the main beneficiaries of this inbuilt quality are Big Tech corporations that own the platforms. Indeed, the cunning of entrepreneurial capitalism lies in how it can instrumentalize discursively radical rituals for reactionary (divide and rule) and practical (profit) ends. Rituals are relevant because they reproduce a given social configuration of power.

Like any other sphere (academia or entrepreneurship), activism has customs, habits, rites, initiations, performances, hierarchies. If there is one function of rituals, one force, it is how they solidify particular beliefs and the meanings ascribed to them. Whereas ritual activities are traditionally maintained and prescribed by the needs (social reproduction) of a community and characterized by its supposedly sacral suggestions (hence their weight in religious praxis), rituals in and of themselves are not free from neoliberalism. In this sense, activist rituals construct negative power because while they do not provide solidarity-based politics that produce activism based on a radical universal horizon of freedom and liberation, they reemphasize its opposite through ceremonial outrage. But besides retaining certain agendas or structuring shaping activist practices, don't rituals also carry meaning in and of themselves? Isn't the message also in the medium? Symbols of rituals have been discussed critically by anthropologists as more than the ephemeral sign they carry. In her famous analysis of rituals and the symbol of flags, Sherry Ortner argues that while they stand for large symbols such as freedom and democracy, they actually do not encourage reflection about these ideas and how they are played out in social actuality, over time and throughout history. This deconstruction of rituals and symbols through their innate meaning strikes me as very befitting the rituals and symbols of neoliberal anti-racism: As Ortner mentions about rituals about flags (1973: 1339), they encourage a sort of all-or-nothing allegiance to the whole package. Following such an anthropological line of inquiry, activist rituals construct power through ceremonial outrage about a “race and class” approach or terms such as POC because it solidifies the self-defeating conceptions of race.

But there is another step missing. Ritual as instances or moments become a rite of passage. This is what the instance of the explosive exchange on social media became, particularly the copious comments on Guadeloupe's Facebook: a ritual that marked the commentors transition from one side of the “disagreement” to another, and through this reading of a passage we can understand how such rituals include and exclude. Put differently, the example of Guadeloupe's Facebook wall became itself evidence in two ways: first, of how publicly discursive spaces owned by Big Tech offering the occasion to become a rite de passage by allowing those not previously tied (closely) to perform loyalty and join the rank of fraternity, and second, in providing the space to share insinuations and visual subtext and insert small ritual flags in the form of GIFs and claims that are subtle but do the actual work of framing. The guilt by association and symbolic strawmanning—stand-ins for racism denial, anti-Blackness, the elite academic silencing students, brown privilege, and so on—are forms of digital dog whistling that alienate activists from one another.

This is not to promote a certain techno-determinist analysis. First and foremost, the ideological differences about the political vision I proposed through the race and class framework (instead of Black nationalism or cultural essentialism) is what made it into such a lightning rod. But the communicative disempowerment of the digital infrastructures that have come to dominate most of contemporary political mediation play an important facilitating role, and this helps explain how reactionary politics is enforced. The numerous disingenuous ritualistic deployments aside, I did argue that despite our differences as people of color or activists, our shared identity as anti-racists can nurture radical kinship. Through our shared actions we can make a different world and have a chance to undo our internal differences and where we learn and unlearn (Aouragh 2019: 22). A radical kinship is a metonym for affinities that are transformative, including how we identify beyond ourselves. Especially during social and political upheavals, we can see transgressions and crossovers that inspire personal transformations. Yes, we are the products of our time; I am aware that neither Guadeloupe's version of Blackness nor mine of kinship have great value in scenes where the lucrative features of anti-racism shape the rules of engagement. After all, a politics constructed from liberal race-based (rather than race- and class-based) analysis, where a radical universal horizon of freedom and liberation is weak, will hardly offer solace for solidarity-based activists. Mainly because this is not the actual objective. This further emphasizes a powerful point made by Ambalavaner Sivanandan that in our actuality—after having said all there is to say—what you do is who you are (Aouragh 2019: 4).

We should remember that despite its damage and drain for movements, public controversy, political tension, and conflict in society are also beneficial. It is lucrative for commercial digital platforms; it provides stories to write about for journalists; and it generates impact that make academic cannibalism thrive. Guadeloupe's book helps us understand the competition over resources because it provides a proposition of the entrepreneur versus the activists and where it so vividly describes the overlap between activism and the structures of funding. It is what he considers the negation of political Blackness in its truest meaning. Instead of radical political independent activism—one that is grounded in unity and works toward universal demands—the cases in this book offer us the ultimate example of political solipsism. But they also provide a key to unlock this riddle, to understand the political agendas of an activism that depend on state support and funding regimes. And as I added in this essay here, that is the space in which hegemonic rites of digital capitalism and shortcut tricks of liberal analyses emerge. Ultimately, despite the radical slogans, political project that is constructed through co-optation and maintained through rituals does not inspire collective struggle and in effect remains unbearably mild. How can we prevent our struggles from ending in the custody of institutions that are not invested in our freedom and our liberation? We could perhaps start by encouraging the mutuality of anti-racism in our collectives and try to keep our campaigns under the ownership of grassroots activists.

Miriyam Aouragh

University of Westminster, London, UK

Relation Not Relationality

I thoroughly enjoyed Charissa Granger's responses, which confirmed to me that she exemplifies the best that twenty-first-century Dutch Caribbean thought has to offer. Here is a thinker that emerged from the Neerlandophone world who is in conversation with the works of Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, Rinaldo Walcott, and Sylvia Wynter. It is this conversation that informs her queries to me. Granger writes at the end of her meditation:

The relational way of being in the world that Guadeloupe offers through ethnographic research is an exception to the rule, found in some small enclaves of society, and practiced by a fraction. I am critical of how this way of being, on which a hope for a nonracialist world is hinged, can effect material change beyond the rich theorizing this book engages. What happens when the radical hope that courses through the book is not in practice outside the presented pockets? If this hope is founded on relational practices that are moribund, what happens to held divisions and attempts at nonracialist ways of being?

To answer such a query is to participate in making relations an option among others. You either do relational practices or you do not. I don't see it that way. For me relation, or as the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant would put in capitalizing the “r,” Relation is a way of prehending the open totality of life that respects no socially imagined and reinforced boundaries between cultures:

Relation does not act upon prime elements that are separable and reducible [cultural ways stemming exclusively from particular cultures]. If this were true, it would itself be reduced to some mechanics capable of being taken apart or reproduced … It is the boundless effort of the world, to become realized in its totality, that is, to evade rest. One does not enter Relation as one might enter a religion. One does not first conceive of it they way we have expected to conceive of Being. (1997: 171–172)

So Granger actually almost gets me right about Relation when she writes, “Guadeloupe thinks relationally and offers relational ways of living and creating community across differences.” I would substitute “offers” for “prehends.” That would be just right.

I consider myself an ethnographic chronicler of the demotic works of ordinary people in their attempts to live ethically despite dominant structures inviting them to do otherwise (Rodríguez 2015). I use the phrase “dwelling in life with decolonial eyes” to convey this. My book moves from presenting these small works (empirical observations), to giving analytical explanations of these transactions (what Granger terms relationality), to tendering an alternative conception of the Netherlands from where my radical hope emerges (Relation). That temporal hope Granger discerns is what I learned from C. L. R. James ([1963] 1993) reading his seminal work Beyond the Boundary.

Two Complementary Roads Out of Babylon

Miriyam Aouragh gave me a different gift, which she relayed through a retelling of an event I discussed in chapter 12 of the book. Aouragh's account is critical and well argued. Young anti-racist activists in the Netherlands are indeed enamored with a liberal-based US style of anti-racist activism—as evinces their adoption of the Black People of Color (BPOC) versus Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) distinction; the latter, in this discourse, must prove that they are true allies of the former. One thing I lament is that the critical articles of Aouragh on the lure of liberal anti-racism in Dutch activist circles are not in the bibliography of the book where they should have been.

As Aouragh writes, there is a real danger of anti-racist activists being absorbed by the political and economic establishment that they seek to contest. The way that happens is not solely through sponsorship, government subsidies, and invitations to speak in parliament or national TV, but also by encouraging the newest generation of anti-racist activists to reinforce the ethno-racialized division of humankind. Aouragh and I seek in complementary ways to counter that tendency. She does so through what she terms a politics of radical kinship among the downpressed. For her, “A radical kinship is a metonym for affinities that are transformative, including how we identify beyond ourselves. Especially during social and political upheavals, we can see transgressions and crossovers that inspire personal transformations.” The “we” Aouragh speaks about are what she terms “people of color” who do anti-racist activism.

Aouragh draws inspiration from the style of Combahee River Collective feminist movements that arose in the 1980s in the Netherlands. Most specifically she refers to the zwarte, migranten-en vluchtelingenvrouwen (Black, migrant, and refugee women—BMR) of Afro-Surinamese, Afro-Antillean, Indonesian, Moluccan, Papuan, Moroccan, and Turkish descent along with those seeking asylum from the Global South. Aouragh champions, like the 1980s BMR did, an intersectional politics of solidarity among people of color.

I can see the power of this position. I would characterize it as a pluralist politics that is integrally solidary. Many young liberal anti-racist activists in the Netherlands (and those in the wider Europe), who are already into the globalizing anti-racist technologies hailing from the US, may find it appealing. Who wouldn't want to be aligned with the Combahee Collective and Angela Davis! What Aouragh offers, in line with Gloria Wekker, is a representation of US anti-racist technologies skillfully undone of the divisions of BPOC and NBPOC.

Political Blackness is the position I take. Admittedly, it is a minor tradition in the Netherlands, but a tradition it is. Some anti-racists in the Netherlands, with ties to what was happening in 1970s and 1980s in the UK and the Caribbean, went the route of an explicit politicization of Blackness. They were following the likes of Walter Rodney's (1969) expansive conception of Blackness in his seminal work The Groundings with My Brothers, corrected and made more inclusive in A History of the Guyanese Working Class (Rodney 1980; Dupuy 1996). Many admired how Rodney (1980) sought to dismantle the colonially orchestrated rule and divide tactic that had led to ethnic agonism and outright animosities between West Indian workers whose ancestors hailed from India and those who hailed from Africa. Rodney was part of the anti-racist discussion and activism in the Netherlands—let us not forget that there was a Walter Rodney bookstore in Amsterdam! Stuart Hall's (1991) and Ambalavaner Sivanandan's (1982) politicization of Blackness in the UK must be mentioned as well.

Many Afro-Antilleans in the Netherlands and the Caribbean share intimate kinship ties with activists in the Anglophone Caribbean, the UK, and France. Some heroes such as Maurice Bishop were even born on Dutch Caribbean islands such as Aruba. What I am trying to convey is the fact that the conceptual reworking of Blackness in the 1970s and 1980s was not an occurrence happening in faraway places. The Caribbean, some forget, is a family of islands.

As was the case in the UK, however, political Blackness had a galvanizing effect beyond the Caribbean Diaspora as in Dutch cities such as Helmond, where Moluccan anti-racist activists donned the Black label too. When I was growing up in that city, these were older people who were veterans in the anti-racist struggle: they were fighting for Maluku's independence from Indonesia, caused by the betrayal of the Dutch government during the decolonial war (Captain 2016). Dutch anti-racists activists of Papuan extraction, such as Nancy Jouwe, a scholar who works very closely with Wekker and others who promote the BMR politics, also calls herself a Black woman. Like Jouwe and Wekker, I share comradery with Aouragh, even if we choose different strategies. As Rastafari say, there are many roads that lead one out of Babylon—the latter being a synecdoche for the hegemonic behaviors, institutions, and mentalities that benefit the global superrich.

Babylon within the Downpressed

What cannot be forgotten or dismissed, however, in our attempt to leave Babylon by seeking to take it down, is the prickly matter that that techne of being resides in hearts of all Dutch citizens. Marleen de Witte in her response to my book seeks to remind me to address this matter through the example of the omission of Dutch youths of mainland West African descent in my analyses of urban popular culture. Their presence hardly features in the book because until the recent past most Ghanaian and Nigerian Dutch were located primarily in the city of Amsterdam, a place I do not devote case studies to. It is de Witte who is the scholar that writes truthfully about this demographic in the Netherlands. I will try to address the matter she raises here.

Until the rise of Azonto and Afrobeat, many Afro-Antillean and Afro-Surinamese youths, as de Witte asserts, did indeed look down on Ghanaian- and Nigerian-Dutch. They supposedly lacked style, finesse, and street smarts and had what many considered an outdated custom, namely, they were deeply Pentecostal and Evangelical. Where Christianity was fast becoming a secularized tradition among most Afro-Antillean and Afro-Surinamese youths—who were best described as “Easter” and “Christmas Christians”—strictly following the faith was part of the daily ritual of living for most West African Dutch. In many ways their Christianity mirrored Islam that is also part of West African Dutch realities. Lord knows Afro-Caribbeans teased West Africans.

Yet a subtle supplement of de Witte is in order. Many parents of the West African youths that were teased for their part scorned all Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Antilleans. They considered them uppity descendants of cane cutters, cotton pickers, and slaves. For them, Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Antilleans had no lineage and were godless. These cane cutters, they smirked, even had public spokespersons such as Glenn Helberg, whose activism against racism was combined with an openly gay lifestyle. Ungodly sodomizer! With Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Antilleans who were deep in the faith, the matter was different; they were their siblings in the faith, but exogamy was still not a live option. No child of theirs, if they had their way, would consider an Afro-Surinamese or Afro-Antillean person. A symbolic wall exists between many West African Dutch and Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Antillean Dutch, with prejudices on both sides, that Azonto is beginning to breach—given that some Ghanaian-Dutch artists such as Frenna, whom I discussed in the book, are becoming heroes in the urban popular culture scene.

A similar reality held, and continues to hold, for Moroccan Dutch. Moroccan Dutch youths are fully part of the urban scene. They share in the culture and have produced many top-ranking artists such as Appa, whom I also discuss in the book. Exogamy with Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Antillean men is still a taboo, even if it sporadically happens. As is the case with Ghanaian Dutch, matters of faith play a pivotal role, as in the Caribbean Diaspora, Islam is a minor tradition—with many Friday Muslims. Besides differences in faith, or investment in the Islamic faith, there is also the matter of anti-Black racism among some Moroccan Dutch.

I take from de Witte's response in this book forum that Aouragh and I must recognize that prejudice is all over. The problematic of the anti-racist activists in unwittingly doing the divide and rule that benefits the wealthy few is a wider affair. Indeed it is.

Race as a Modality of Class

One road that I must explicitly say keeps one trapped in Babylon—again meaning behaviors, institutions, and mentalities that keep inequalities in place—is paradoxically the race and class binary that Basile Ndjio seems to advocate in his response to my book. Ndjio, whom I have known for many years, is a gifted thinker. In his piece he brings in heavy hitters such as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe to pose a set of rhetorical questions to champion his contention of race and class as equally potent powers of downpression. He writes:

Can anti-Black racism properly and adequately be engaged in a Marxist theoretical framework? Does it suffice for a Black person to become “White” or economically empowered to be immune from anti-Black racism? How can we acknowledge the power of anti-Black racism and, therefore, the necessity to combat it by all means if, at the same time, we dismiss race as a mere conceptual category or “the powerful effect and fiction created by racism” … (4)? Why should racism and anti-Black discrimination matter if race does not?

Having set the stage as a true rhetorician, Ndjio then proceeds to answer the questions he posed:

In many respects, the weakness of such a Marxist approach to racism [from Guadeloupe] is that it reduces the superstructure of racism to economic and material conditions of existence. More precisely, it condenses anti-Black racism and discrimination to economic exploitation and marginalization of Black people like other racial groups, as if all Black people who occasionally or routinely experience racism and Negrophobia were economically marginalized or disenfranchised. Economic factors alone cannot explain racial stereotypes faced by many brown-skinned persons in the Netherlands and elsewhere, including those not economically “Black.” In other words, a Marxist reading of racism fails to account for the power of prejudices and the philosophy of suspicion that inform much of racist attitudes and behaviors towards Black people.

Where to begin? There is a set of conceptual short hands in Ndjio's flourish that begs for clarification. Permit me to clarify what I think he is saying, which is not far removed from the position I take in the book, even if he is less friendly to Marxism.

I stand by what I wrote on page 4 of the book: race is for me “the powerful effect and fiction created by racism.” If you ask me what racism is, then my answer is that it is a concept used to denote a plethora of negative actions directed toward a subjugated group of people who are experiencing expropriation and being exploited for profit. Racism was the act of whipping Africans and their descendants in the Americas who refused to work for free on a plantation. The whip was used to make them work harder, to work them to death for profit. Racism was also the policies enabling lesser pay, dilapidated housing, and disenfranchisement of Africans and their descendants after the official abolition of slavery. These policies were put in place to maintain a cheap workforce and legitimate the status quo for profit. And racism was what W. E. B. Dubois called the wages of whiteness. Pink-skinned poor people were treated just a little bit better than their brown-skinned counterparts. The effect was the maintenance of an exploited pink-skinned working class that elites were sure would not easily conceive of creating sturdy bonds of solidarity with the Afro-descended working poor, guaranteeing again the steady flow of profit.

In time, the perpetual iteration of these and many more negative actions produced the fiction of “race,” which led to racecraft: a collective fantasy whereby racialism among all people is taken and treated as a matter of fact (Fields and Fields 2012). Continents, cultures, and creeds are all racialized. In the world we have inherited, color and ethnicity became proxies of positions in the class hierarchy, creating odd situations in Europe whereby, as Ndjio remarks, Black university lecturers may be mistaken for burglars. Brown-skinned security guards can also employ these proxies, as they don't belong to anyone.

What this means is that it is race as a modality of class rather than race and class as clinically separated analytical categories. Anti-racist work to me is undoing the ascriptive ideologies that prevent wide scale solidarities. Knowing Ndjio, I do not believe he argues for race as a separate ontological category. Or that racism can be divorced from class domination. He is too smart a thinker to go down that rabbit hole.

Toward Relation

The person who gets me just right, and unsurprisingly so, for he is one of my mentors, is Dave Ramsaran. He belongs to that group of Caribbean thinkers such as Hilbourne Watson, Anton Allahar, Rhoda Reddock, Alex Dupuy, Linden Lewis, Patricia Muhammed, and Nigel Bolland from whom I learned to appreciate Marxism not as a Eurocentric paradigm but as a universalizing work in progress to which thinkers from across the globe contribute. There is no need to intersectionalize Marxism, for that living tradition in its Caribbean iterations always considered the many modalities in which class domination played itself out. Capitalism, I learned from Ramsaran and the others I mentioned is an exploitative and expropriate way of life that touches all societies. It is as much about production as it is about reproduction, as much about trade as it is about financialization, as much about consumption as about ravenously ingesting our common habitat bringing the destruction of the planet even closer.

Concomitant ideologies legitimate the inequalities and destruction produced by the capitalist way of life. Being socialized to recognize that capitalism is global is what led me to the work of planetary thinkers such as C. L. R. James and from there to relational ontologies proposed by the likes of Édouard Glissant (1997), Maryse Condé (1995), Antonia Benitez-Rojo (1992), and Wilson Harris (1970). I continue to reread these books in an attempt to cultivate a Marxism that is hopeful, even if it is without guarantees. Mine is a nuanced Marxism, as Ramsaran contends. He astutely explains that my latest book is an attempt to

understand the concepts and the contradictions of Blackness/racism within the context of a space that can be characterized as the center (the Netherlands) with influences that are fed back from the periphery (former colonies) and the modernizing tendencies of contemporary capitalism (the spread of American cultural values and practice).

I hope that like Ramsaran, Aouragh, Granger, de Witte, and Ndjio, as well as readers, will take the time and evaluate if my attempt warrants any merit. Thank you.

Francio Guadeloupe

University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies