“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” — Assata Shakur

This Black August, we will gather to read and discuss four books that challenge the ways we think about our world, about Blackness, about Hawai‘i, and our places in the midst of all of it.

As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation by Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson (2018)

In the United States, both struggles against oppression and the gains made by various movements for equality have often been led by Black people. Still, though progress has regularly been fueled by radical Black efforts, liberal politics are based on ideas and practices that impede the continued progress of Black America. Building on their original essay, “The Anarchism of Blackness,” Samudzi and Anderson show the centrality of anti-Blackness to the foundational violence of the United States and to the racial structures upon which it is based as a nation. Racism is not, they say, simply a product of capitalism. Rather, we must understand how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that “Blackness” and “citizenship” are exclusive categories. As Black As Resistance makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in relationships to land and community in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself. This book argues against compromise and negotiation with intolerance.

Facilitator: Emily Kandagawa

Emily Kandagawa is Hawaiian national and queer femme of African-Native American descent. Her paternal grandparents are West African, Moorish, and Mississippian/Southeastern Woodland peoples. Their waters are the Mississippi River Delta, their mountains are the Appalachians, and their desert is the Sahara. Her maternal grandparents are from Napoli, Italy; Delarna and Stockholm, Sweden; Donegal and County Cork, Ireland; and Hilo and Kailua-Kona, Hawaiʻi Island, Ke Aupuni o Hawaiʻi. Their mountains are the Appennini, the Scandes, the Derryveagh, Koʻolaupoko, and Mauna a Wākea.

Emily is a popular educator, researcher, and student of ancestral birthwork and medicinal practices. She holds degrees in Political Science from Indian River State College in Anthropology from Hawaiʻi Pacific University and in Land-Based Indigenous Education from the University of Saskatchewan.

$5 suggested donation to help defray the costs of the space