Review -- BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom

[Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdhillahi. BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom. Winnipeg MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2019.]

A short, sharp book exploring what is necessary in Canada, in this era of Black Lives Matter, to transform dominant conceptions of Black personhood – which is to say, dominant denials of Black humanity – and all of the knowledge, imagination, liberal and left political organizing, and fundamental features of social organization that are based on those conceptions. Covers a lot of ground in very few pages, and can feel a bit scant and scattered at moments. However, given that the tendrils of anti-blackness and Black resistance that it follows reach into so many different domains, it makes sense that the book should as well – though, honestly, I wouldn't've minded one bit if the book was two or three times its current length.

Despite its brevity, it includes a range of insightful specifics that were new to me. For example, I knew the basics of the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre in Montreal in 1969, but even though this book deals with it in only a few pages, I feel like it gave me a much better sense of the occupation's events and significance than I'd ever had before. Or to give another example, I had some awareness of the upsurge in Black organizing in Canada in the '80s and '90s, but not particularly of the cultural side of that upsurge (which this book focuses on) and I didn't really appreciate that moment as a high point, which intertwined neoliberalism and anti-blackness have since largely undone. And to give yet another example, the idea that anti-blackness is so woven through the cultural and material bases of modernity that it can only begin to be adequately addressed through radical social transformation was not new to me, but this book adds to the relatively short list I've encountered that explore that idea with Canada specifically in mind.

And yet, despite those learnings and more, and the breadth of ground covered, there is also the sense in the book that the authors are wearily making some basic political points that are more or less variants on things that activists, organizers, writers, and scholars in the Black radical tradition have been saying in Canada for generations. They even open Chapter Two by writing, "We are bored with Canada. We are bored with the ongoing attempts to make Canada right" (49). There is a prodigious capacity in white Canada, when we aren't ignoring white supremacy and anti-blackness entirely, to treat them each time they are forced onto the agenda by Black, Indigenous, and people of colour organizing as somehow novel, a surprise, an unexpected intrusion that we really do need to be given a grace period to adequately understand and respond to. Indeed, the book makes a very important link between this sense of perpetual novelty, including the dominant rhetoric of Blackness and Black people as a late arrival to Canada via the post-Second World War migrations, and the ongoing erasure of the presence of Black people in northern North America since the earliest moments of the colonial encounter. But of course undoing that erasure would make it much harder to avoid the foundational violences upon which Canada is based.

Given all of that, I feel like I should have something insightful to say in response to this book about how it can be taken up in social movement and left contexts, but I'm not sure that I do. Near the end of the book, they talk about what they call the "Black Test," which proposes that before any policy proposal or movement demand is taken up, it must be assessed and found to clearly lead to materially improving the lives of Black people in Canada. Which in a certain sense is a very simple and straightforward suggestion. But if taken seriously, it would require far-reaching changes in dominant ways of doing things in white-dominated liberal, left, and movement circles, and I certainly would not want to underestimate the powerful inertia of "liberals' and the left's banal commitments to white supremacy" in this country (94). We truly do require "a new imaginary structure and logic," and "a transformation of what is imagineable by the liberal and left political logics of our day is urgently necessary" (94). As they write to close the book, "Black intellectuals have been leading us to this new imaginary for a long time, in a sustained fashion since our arrival in the Americas. We are now fully faced with the challenge of how to hear them and institute their knowledges for continued global life" (95). May this book be an opportunity for such listening that many more of us take up and take seriously.