Tufts Global Education hosted a virtual panel on Wednesday titled “Black Lives Matter Around the World," moderated by Dr. H Adlai Murdoch, professor of Francophone studies and director of Africana studies at Tufts, featuring speakers from academic and activist backgrounds in the United States, Spain, Jamaica and Germany. The panel was co-sponsored by the Africana studies program, the Africana Center and the international relations program.
Charlene Carruthers, a PhD student in the department of African American studies at Northwestern University, has a background in the research of Black feminist political economies and the role of cultural work within the Black radical tradition and has spent more than 15 years community organizing.
Carruthers opened by saying that the importance of amplifying Black voices is not new.
"I believe that the overall topic for our discussion today is always relevant. It's been relevant, frankly, for hundreds of years, and it's absolutely relevant today," Carruthers said.
She said that this particular moment in the fight for Black lives, especially in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others, is part of something larger.
“This is situated within ongoing local, national and transnational movements for Black liberation,” Carruthers said. "This is not new."
In particular, she noted that Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., with large African immigrant populations, demonstrate the interconnectedness of global demands for Black justice, and how this issue has been prominent in Black people's lives long before the Black Lives Matter movement gained traction last summer.
“People haven’t forgotten their people on the continent of Africa, their people in other parts of the world," Carruthers said. "They are involved with struggles globally as well and making those connections and not waiting for conversations like this to help them figure out … they're talking to their cousins, they're talking to their family members."
Dr. Esther Mayoko Ortega Arjonilla, an associate professor of critical race studies at Tufts-in-Madrid, applied Carruthers' points to her experiences in Spain.
She particularly saw the George Floyd protests as an opportunity to amplify the voices of Afro-Spaniards and to examine long-standing issues in the country, saying it marked a “real turning point” for local Black and African activism in Spain.
“In the last five, six, sevenyears in Spain, we have the creation of multiple associations and activist groups … led by collectives of young people, young Black women, and queer and questioning people, and this is new leadership in a movement traditionally led by heterosexual Black men," Mayoko Ortega Arjonilla said.
She reflected specifically on the treatment of African migrants in Spain.
“These African workers in agriculture live in inhuman conditions: no electricity, no clean drinking water, working 10–12 hours a day,” Mayoko Ortega Arjonilla said.
Beyond poor treatment, Mayoko Ortega Arjonilla noted that Spain’s unique position at Europe’s southern border has led to poor treatment of entering immigrants. She pointed to an incident from 2014 when Spanish police shot with rubber bullets and small grenades at a group of Black migrants who were swimming toward Spain. The shooting killed 14 of the migrants.
Yasmin Nasrudin, one of the panelists and the director of the Education USA Advising Center and deputy director of intercultural affairs at the German-American Institute Tübingen, noted that Germany has a lot of similarities with Spain in this realm.
Nasrudin noted that the movement for Black lives in Germany is fairly new, having been especially spurred on in 1980s with the help of Audre Lorde, who was an American writer, feminist and civil rights activist. Lorde lived in Germany in the mid-1980s as a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin.
“She gave the Black women the empowerment and emancipation of creating their own language and giving a new perspective on life in Germany as Black people,” Nasrudin said.
She also delved into the question of language, and explained the recent shift from the term Afro-German to Black German.
Dr. Danielle Roper, assistant professor in Latin American literature at the University of Chicago, spoke to the way the momentum from George Floyd's killing reinforced, rather than created, the need for the work of Black activists.
“I think that when we talk about Black radicalism and Black activism today, we have to think about this moment as continuing the spirit of solidarity and transnationalism that characterized Black radical practices and movements of yesteryear," Roper said.
Roper also emphasized the need to recognize that Black Lives Matter is not a movement limited to the United States nor other Black-minority countries.
“I think it’s important to note this because conversations of anti-Blackness sometimes leave out the fact that anti-Black racism is indeed a phenomenon that organizes predominantly Black countries in the Global South as well, and such is the case in countries like Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere," Roper said.
Murdoch then turned it over to the audience for questions.
