Jamaica,Covid-19 and Black freedom

Introduction

Globally, Black life is under-valued and Black governments are not free from the globalization of anti-blackness, which for the Americas, consolidated under trans-Atlantic slavery, becoming internalized within the Atlantic led capitalist world economy, but acquired a life of its own. Whereas we can view such a reality in demographically white countries as a clear marker of racism, its expression in the Black world ties such undervaluing of Black life to a colonial past (Rodney, 1972; Williams, 1994; Wynter, 2003). Not easily recognizable, racialization in places deemed Black is complicated by the intersections of race, ethnic or nation-identities (as in Africa) or, class, gender and other social features. Yet even in Africa, the place where black skins was colonially forged as an inferior attribute, Jemima Pierre (2013) in The Predicament of Blackness challenges the myth of colonial racelessness. The Covid-19 pandemic shows the glaring reality of these social fissures. At the intersection of race/class, the Black poor, among the super-marginalized of the global poor, bear some of the worst effects of anti-blackness. Exploring what happens to poor Black bodies in postcolonial Black countries where governing rests in the hands of a Black ruling elite allows us to reflect on the complexities of these presences and textures how we apprehend the idea of Blackness and Black freedom in the present.

This essay explores the Caribbean island of Jamaica as a Black space, where anti-blackness still remains seared within the social and political life of the nation-state. I consider how antiblackness expresses in places where it continues to be mediated by other social divisions, namely, social class. It is particularly poignant to view how race/class is lived, engaged and resisted, especially in the context of the crisis of Covid-19 and the lessons it offers for thinking about Black freedom. As much of the observations made on the Global North and South attest, and as many of the contributors in this volume assert, Covid-19 exposes and even compounds such inequalities and suffering of those bodies already dispossessed. It does so, not merely by its widespread circulation and intensification within the spaces where poverty mainly of Blacks, Browns and other minorities occupy, but because it demands immobility or put more aptly, restrained movement as a solution to its prevention.

When considering the historical struggles of Black people to move unbound as a condition of their notion of freedom, one thinks about Black freedom in terms of fugitivity-the desire for escape from the reach of authorities who gain their sovereignty through violent acts designed to keep the marginalized in place. Exploring these constructions allows us to understand how it is that the movement for Black Lives in the US, resonates in a country whose history has unfolded differentially. Perhaps, we might paraphrase Stuart Hall to ask, what are the differences that seem similar here in Jamaica, not only to the US condition, but the condition of Black people living as so-called minorities in White Spaces, globally? As we have seen, the recent explosion of protests in Nigeria against the special branch of the security forces called SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) was led by Nigerians against the Nigerian State. How is it one may ask, that the Nigerian State still operates like a colonial state in its declared violence against its citizens, no longer subjects of a now defunct British Empire? How is it that such violence continues to be part of its governing practices? I raise these questions but given the scope and meditative quality of the essay, cannot tackle them here. This is the sort of question that arises in thinking about the sameness that is sutured into difference in the global economy of Blackness and shall we say, Whiteness.

Spaces of the Jamaican Social

Jamaica is seen by the world as a Black nation within which resides a people brimming with self-confidence. Undoubtedly, the global reach of the country has like the rest of the Caribbean region, extended beyond its size. The phrase, “we likkle but we tallawah,” (we’re small but we’re powerful) resonates with this consciousness. Jamaicans are valued for their world circulation of cultural and political ideas of Blackness and struggle. Liberationist ideas pervade the movement of Garveyism, an ideology which gained popularity through the world-wide movement of its leader, Marcus Garvey, Rastafarianism, with its signature hairstyle, called dreadlocks, signifying black roots, and reggae music. Though 92% of the population identifies as Black; like other Caribbean countries, the nation also sees itself through a multiracial lens. Minority groups have been embraced and magnified within its collective self-identity captured in the national motto: “Out of Many, One People.” Further, within the contours of Blackness, color matters and mixed-race people, Browns (6%) are generally perceived as privileged.

On June 6, 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and at the height of anti-racist protest in the US, a small group of Jamaicans held a Black Lives Matter (BLM) solidarity protest outside the US embassy. Though they were motivated by US-based protests, they highlighted Jamaica’s own racial/class dilemmas, as one protester made clear that the “reason we are here is not just for BLM”. According to that protestor (Jamaican) people experienced, discrimination based on class and color, and not racism declaring “believe it or not colorism exists.” ¹ In Jamaica, as in many other postcolonies, colorism is seen as distinct from racism, but recognized as one of its species, since it operates within the racial hierarchy where white skins are valued higher than black or brown ones. In the Jamaican context however, I argue that brownness has displaced the value of whiteness but like in other Black countries, there is a sense in which darker skin color is devalued (Thame, 2017).

Jamaica’s claim to harmonious multiracialism emphasizes nationality over race but negative stereotypes about Jamaicans as violent, tricksters, freeloaders and unruly do not generally refer to non-Blacks. It is dark-skinned people who carry the weight of stigmatization and especially the Black poor who embody systemic lacks. Shared understandings about the value of Blackness internal to Jamaica, normalizes unequal experiences of high rates of violence, limited access to resources, alienation and demeaning social contexts. Popular discourse often contends with a seeming lack of value for human life among killers from the lower income groups, but this disregard is wide-spread and its consequences are not experienced by all bodies equally. Consequences are most felt by Blacks at the bottom who live in ghettos and find themselves in conflicts and confrontations with each other, and with the State over police killings, lack of water, roads or opportunities. As such, a poor Black person’s intimacy with violence is not limited to her/his experiences of physical violence. As analysts posit, any form of objectification is a form of violence since such a condition deprives a person of life’s potentiality. And one can certainly argue that such deprivation associated with dispossession and marginalization is the lot of poor Black Jamaicans.

Though often considered separately, my contention is that the phenomenon of racialization cannot be extricated from social class in much of the Caribbean or even the Americas. Social class is a mediatory relation that ebbs and flows in its articulation with forms of racialization. Both tendencies parallel, overlap, yet somewhat maintain their singularities. It is the signature of the region’s social structure. Yet class-based inequality reproduces and also reflects a particular variant of anti-blackness given the over-representation of Blacks at the bottom and the associations made between their conditions and the meaning of Blackness. It is a postcolonial paradox as it were, or one may argue for the sheer impossibility of it being otherwise in a world where such hierarchies of race hold. In a country that boasts a harmonious multiracialism, the socio-economic structure favors ethnic minorities. With the exception of the descendants of indentured Indians, there is no significant representation of racial groups other than Black people in Jamaica’s ghettos, or among the rural poor. How could it not be so, where postcolonial states have been incapable or unwilling to imagine life outside of the coloniality of governing structures? Poor Black Jamaicans proliferate in informal spaces – as squatters, as self-employed “higglers” and in the precarious living arrangements of “inner-cities”. These are the spaces specifically impacted by Covid-19 and targeted for their alleged laxity toward the pandemic.

On violence and its different similarities

With these complexities of how race/class is lived, one can point to the fundamental ways in which the Black Lives Matter movement which was at the center of one of the most powerful modern protest movements in the US refracts within the social and political spaces of Jamaica. At the June 6 protest in Jamaica, a placard announced: “we may not have racism in Jamaica, but we have a serious problem of black on black crime that cannot be fixed.” ² Protesters called the names of victims of State violence in Jamaica, ³ who have all been killed in various confrontations between communities and the police. One of these victims, Mario Dean died after being beaten while in police custody after he had been held for possession of ganja (marijuana) in 2014, before its decriminalization in 2015. Ganja though important for religious practice among Rastafarians, had long been the basis for the criminalization of the poor and Rastafari, a fact rendering it popular in the protest song of Jamaican reggae artists. Protestors referenced the “Tivoli massacre,” where at least 73 people were killed in a joint military and police operation to apprehended alleged drug “don” and community leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who was wanted for extradition by the US government. Community residents saw the operation as normal given earlier operations in the community, but they had not anticipated the scope and scale of this particular assault. Criminologist, Anthony Harriot points to the disruptiveness of such spectacular performances of law and order on such communities. In these cases, he states, “police attention is not just fixed on criminally suspect behavior of individuals but to attributes, places and events. These attributes and the routines that lead to encounters with police are often shared by whole and even the majority of some subpopulations, such as young innercity males” (Harriot, 2000: 83). The group is the Black poor who are aware that police have “no love for ‘ghetto people’, no respect or ‘feelings’ for their lives.” (Levy and Chevannes 2001: 40).

Thomas (2011) holds that Mbembe’s argument made in the context of Africa, that colonial and postcolonial “‘miniaturization’ of violence, the arbitrary and everyday forms of ‘micro-actions’ were designed to socialize the population into a constant state of fear and vulnerability, resonates for the Jamaican condition” (p. 12). Following the work of Gray (2004) she posits that, “predatory, violent and illegal forms of rule are the legacies of colonial and plantation-based extraction [sic] foundational to post-colonial state formation in Jamaica” (p. 13). The postcolonial State’s participation in the routinization of violence is a consequence of a racial capitalism that heightened the devaluation of Black bodies. Whereas Black and Brown people can be incarcerated and labor for low wages in the carceral US state, in the Caribbean context, States currently participate in the cheapening of their labor through the rebirth of export processing zones that were an early feature of the expansion of markets in neoliberalism. But of course, this is hardly the fate only of Black people or Jamaicans, generally, one sees the cheapening of Asians by Asian postcolonial States for instance, through widespread practices of outsourcing or call centers. The shift from dependence on agriculture to services, particularly tourism have added another twist to the devaluation of the poor and dispossessed.

The devaluation of life in the postcolony is shown by the incapacity of capitalism to create “decent work”. But capitalism’s fullest expression in postcolonies, might well be the production of unemployed, “unusable” and disposable laboring peoples who must fend for themselves in the neoliberal global market where their labor is not cheap enough to be competitive or might be considered too unruly to be disciplined. When they create work in illicit economies, such as drug trading and “lottery scamming” (“scammers” source information on potential “customers” from call centers), the State is forced to contend with containing the outgrowth of violence embedded in such economies. And just as capitalism’s expression in the region generally and in Jamaica specifically, somewhat paradoxically lies in the overproduction of the unemployed, unemployable, and exponential growth of an informal sector, one may argue that the Jamaican State has been simultaneously producing the conditions for the flourishing of violence, its normalization and the responses to that violence, in the countless deployment of States of Emergencies. ⁴ Indeed, the killing of poor Black people at astounding rates both by agents of the State and criminal gangs (though the two are not always distinct) is part of the overarching devaluation of Black lives. ⁵

Though quite common, police killings are typically protested by communities; rarely do they produce a national outcry or are perceived through racial lens. More often than not, they are viewed through a social class lens. This is partly the case because such killings usually occur in historically criminalized spaces of inner cities and as I have mentioned before the idea of race is mainly lived through class. Jamaica as a Black space leads to the general assumption that such violence has nothing to do with race, especially when killings are done by other Blacks in high crime contexts. The high homicide rate protested in the June 6 protest was against seemingly intractable crime, its interpretation framed within characteristic stereotypes of the places and people from whence killers and victims originate. And so there is no urgency coincident with a consciousness of the devaluation of Black or poor peoples’ lives. Or so it seems. Instead the response has led to the militarization of social spaces, State and non-State alike. As is the pattern in much of the world, which witnesses the militarization of the State as well as neighborhoods themselves, (neighborhood watches, private security, etc.) multiracial privileged Jamaicans, Blacks, Browns and Whites, those who can afford them, hire security guards and/or they live behind high walls with electronic gates. Those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, are increasingly marooned in violent spaces where the State operates as the principal force that keeps them there, through the use of States of Emergencies (SOE) and curfews. ⁶

Agamben (2005) expounds on the State of Exception (“the suspension of law itself” as expressed in States of Emergencies) as a paradigm of sovereignty or a “transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government” (p. 1). Of the Third Reich, he argues that:

modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones (Agamben, 2005: 3).

For post-slavery, post-colonial societies like those in the Caribbean, we might think about how these States of Exception have been used since political independence of 1962, to respond to notions of “unruliness” of populations that have been resisting rule over them since slavery. This is consistent with Harriot’s (2000) argument that it is the group and not necessarily individuals that are targeted by the police. States of Emergency have been used in response to political disorder and crime, particularly in lower income communities, as an alternative to raw violence or in conjunction with it. With the cover of legality, governments have been able to abrogate the rights of some citizens. The governing Jamaica Labor Party’s (JLP) response to crime and violence has been to establish and expand SOEs, first established in January 2018 and extended through 2020. ⁷ In response to the petitions of five men who had been detained without charge for between 177 and 431 days under the SOEs, the Supreme Court ruled that the detentions were unlawful and an overreach of executive powers (Scott, 2020). The government signaled its intention to appeal the judgment even as management of Covid-19 by curfews and lockdowns, already had militarized surveillance of communities without the enactment SOEs. In defense of the use of SOEs, National Security Minister Horace Chang argued that “[i]n any civilized society that is [in] a crisis [sic] what the states of emergency give to the security team is almost double the strength to [sic] the police force immediately,” “the army can get directly involved in territorial security” (Loop News, 2020). The government’s increased reliance on the military for imposing control, points to the overall militarization of the State that has grown steadily since the country’s independence in 1962 with escalating violence from the mid-1970s. The JLP has also relied on the establishment of the Zones of Special Operation (ZOSO) featuring military and police occupation of communities that are deemed “high crime”. ZOSOs are also meant to have social intervention components but critics routinely report that attention to that dimension is woefully inadequate. ⁸

Resistance in the time of Covid-19

When the deadly virus, Covid-19 spread to Jamaica, the government announced a lockdown of borders and the closure of schools, businesses and parts of the public sector. Lockdowns exacerbated the economic informality and poverty of already poor peoples’ lives. As in other parts of the Global South, and the Souths of the Global North, many low-income people intentionally or unintentionally defied curfews and continued their economic activities in urban centers where they are mostly concentrated. A television report aired on March 30, 2020 on observance of Covid-19 protocols, exposed the contradictions of Jamaica’s, poor Black experience. In what was interpreted as a lack of value for life, one report disclosed the absence of social distancing in the crammed vending area of downtown Kingston. People there said that they had no other choice, because “they had to hustle” for a living. ⁹ One vendor reported that only the rich could “keep their distance,” while the poor had to “mix and mingle,” since “ghetto people have to look our own” (they are on their own and must fend for themselves). A shopper indicated she would be worried if the government announced a full lockdown because “people have to live” and some people “live hand to mouth”. Though handwashing was everywhere promoted as a preventative measure, public bathrooms remained closed in the area, leading to the sale of such necessary services.

Conducting business in the informal commercial sector of downtown Kingston mirrors life in overcrowded, dilapidated and sometimes unsanitary conditions of the inner-city. It represents conditions of lack and neglect that lower income people face normally. Covid-19 highlighted not just inequality per se, but the risky business of being Black and poor, a catch 22 situation, where living requires the risk of dying or prospects of dying to live. Further, the deepening effects of deprivation was reflected on the pandemic’s impact on education. Championed as the main route out of poverty, the technological divide between “haves and have-nots” was stark. At the start of the delayed school year in October, only 32% of children in primary schools were able to log on to online school sessions (Gleaner, 2020b). Children were impacted by access to electronic devices and internet as well as to quiet space for learning.

Added to the difficulties and impositions of lockdowns on the poor, is the heavy policing of urban common space. Across the island Jamaicans would also defy curfews by continuing to hold dances. Dancehall spaces in Jamaica, are important spaces of social living, enjoyment and escape from the vagaries of degraded lives. ¹⁰ Those spaces have also historically been spaces of confrontation between the State and the poor. ¹¹ At one event where police officers were assaulted for shutting down the dance, and patrons detained; the latter pointed to the contradiction that some “uptown” people (upper/middle class) had the freedom to party without fear of police interference. A patron told the Gleaner, “Imagine, [track star] Usain Bolt had a party, and nobody got locked up, but when poor people do the same, the police draw down and throw people inna jail.” He continued, “the police should go look for [real] criminals. Party affi keep” (parties are essential) (my emphasis) (Gleaner, 2020a).

During the period of lockdown up to October, murders declined negligibly, while police killings increased (Gleaner, 2020d). Police blamed this increased violence on increased brazenness of criminals (Gleaner, 2020c). High violence has normalized and rationalized the use of SOEs and its curtailing of freedoms. Public opposition to SOEs is not strong – 71% of respondents in a newspaper poll believed that SOEs were effective in fighting crime and 67% felt that they should be continued (Scott, 2020). Unlike the cries by activists to defund the police in the US, in Jamaica’s poor communities, women in particular, expressed support for the military occupation of their communities even while anti-police sentiment is strong across the nation. At the rollout of ZOSOs, a group of mothers in Salt Spring in tourism dependent St James, a community considered high crime, appealed to the State to establish a ZOSO there. They said they were tired of seeing their sons die, that they were desperate for help and that their distrust of police, made preferable a military operation. They wanted the State to deploy “plenty” of drones and metal detectors (Gleaner, 2017). The women used their vulnerability to call for the protection of the State, while on other occasions they demanded accountability when security forces violated rights in their communities. Women are often on the front lines, grieving publicly before their children are taken away by the police, and after their children are killed. They demand to be heard, calling for empathy, recognition, and justice. Men are rarely dominant in such protests. Prior to the “Tivoli massacre” for instance, the women of the community took to the streets in front of the House of Parliament – dressed in white – (as the madres de la plaza in Argentina and female protesters in Cuba), appealing for peace, bearing signs that read: “leave ‘Dudus’ alone please”. ¹² Thus, in Jamaica, though men are mostly the victims of homicide and State violence, the burden seems to fall on women who are the principal mourners.

The Covid-19 lockdowns followed on the 2.5 year-long SOEs and offered the potential to silence debates around the value of freedom. As the high rate of homicides diminish opposition to SOEs as crime fighting measures, so too does the Covid-19 pandemic diminish potential opposition to the State. The risk to the community of the spread of Covid-19 assuages concern over loss of freedom due to curfews and lockdowns. These security and safety measures hide the realities of dislocation since people’s suffering is hidden from public view given the constrictions on movement. Shared suffering also has increasingly less opportunity for public expression, and for solidarity building and organizing.

To these conditions one can add the decline in the social welfarist state, little critique of structures of inequality in the neoliberal age and the rise of a post-truth world. For countries like Jamaica, the World Bank and IMF message of good governance and self-responsibilization had long replaced the critique of the global political economy and its marginalization of the world’s poor. Greg A Graham points out that the language of taking responsibility has been key to holding up the legitimacy of the Jamaican neoliberal state in recent times. He cites where Jamaica’s Health Minister’s 2018 Sectoral Presentation entitled “Taking Responsibility,” “saw it fit to stress the important role that personal responsibility had to play in the stability and growth of the health sector”. “[W]e must get to the fundamentals of good health and wellness, by firstly taking personal responsibility” (Graham, 2020: 631). The government’s message of personal responsibility in the management of Covid-19 (Smith, 2020), was consistent with, as many analysts have pointed out, the delinking of the State’s responsibility to the public and to tackle the social inequality emerging from neoliberal policies (see also Joseph, 2011; Meeks, 2014; Watson, 2004).

On Black freedom

Of relevance in the time of Covid-19 is the question of Black freedom. Graham notes that: “The ethic of responsibility and the network of obligations it generated was even more pronounced in the Prime Minister’s 2018 Independence message. ‘Freedom is not free,’ he admonished, ‘the cost of freedom and independence is responsibility.’” (Graham, 2020). That type of discourse raises the question of State legitimacy, given its failings and the premises of transferring “responsibility” back on to the individual. For a population with an unforgettable history of racial slavery, what does it mean that freedom is not free? Justifications for slavery and colonialism generated and deployed the trope of the lazy Black who had been rescued from inertia and backwardness in Africa and came to enjoy the pleasures of being cared for by Whites in the “New World” (see Benn, 2004; Lewis, 1983; Wynter, 1995). Further, Europe’s civilizing mission hypocritically underscored its intent to civilize Black people into self-responsibility that could potentially prepare them for self-governing (Lindsay, 1981). On the matter of responsibilized freedom, Scott (2001) writes in the case of post-emancipation Jamaica, that the institutional spaces upon which the freedom was to depend, obliged the enslaved to perform their freedom not as they chose but in “appropriate,” modern ways (p. 444). The continued emphasis on the relationship between freedom and responsibility for a supposedly free people is to suggest that they are failing to take responsibility. This contrasts with the ways in which the White world has historically been able to assume freedom (as free) and Whites as ultimately responsible humans. That racist assumption represents its own kind of violence and assault upon the idea of free, autonomous and unencumbered Black being in the world.

A critique of Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness offered by a young man from the ghetto turned the lens on the Prime Minister’s (the State’s) own responsibility and failing during the pandemic. Mitchell appeared with other men (breaking the curfew) on a video circulated on social media on March 30 decrying the government’s lockdown and questioning the Prime Minister’s authority to impose it. Phrased in patriarchal and misogynist terms, (a language not uncommon to State-speak), he stated that the Prime Minister should turn his attention to controlling his wife before demanding that other men stay inside. Mitchell was decrying what he saw as the disproportionate subjugation of working class men. In defiance, and invoking popular inner-city identity constructs, Mitchell advised that he and his friends would not be held indoors since “wi unruly,” (we are unruly). In response, the government deployed the police to find and detain Mitchell. On April 3, Mitchell appeared on Jamaican Television apologizing to, “the honorable Andrew Holness” and the Jamaica Constabulary Force, humbly cautioning the nation to treat Covid-19 seriously. Public approval for Mitchell’s detention missed the significance of the Holness administration’s willingness to use the resources of the State to muzzle opposition and abuse the power of the Prime Minister’s office. It was also an attempt to reinscribe the masculinity and status of the Prime Minister who had been upbraided (in Jamaican terms “dissed”) by a nobody from the inner city, the type of nobody especially targeted by State violence.

Can or should Diasporic Black freedom be thought outside of the context of Black peoples’ enduring history of unfreedoms and without any gesture to how capital and markets have propelled, prolonged and reproduced various constraints of abjection? The evolution of racial capitalism along with the practices of governing in postcolonies and elsewhere for that matter, suggest, not. As Trouillot (1995) so astutely noted in his formidable book, Silencing the Past, the past can only be authentically apprehended or should be through its activity in the present. For African Americans the legacy of slavery is not embedded in a past that is passed but steeped in the present, where it actively continues to position the former as the inferior other of White Americans. ¹³

Slavery produced notions of freedom attached to physical and mental unbounding – removing chains from the body and ostensibly from the mind. In Jamaica, freedom has been theorized beyond freedom from slavery, to repatriation among Rastafari, Garveyite mental emancipation (Campbell, 1987) and decolonization beyond independence (Lindsay, 1975), all of which involved the lifeways of the collective. The Jamaican political scientist Rupert Lewis contends that in the Caribbean, “we have had mostly to theorize about the radical tradition of freedom within the contradictory framework of European enslavement and its adjunct plantation systems, colonial rule and white minority rule” but the Caribbean radical tradition is “framed as an answer to the existential question of what it means to be human.” “For people who have been defined as anything other than human requires more than philosophy, it involves praxis.” (McCalpin, 2018: 64).

Though Covid-19 has not expressed itself in mass death in Jamaica, it has produced and exposed declining prospects for living. Living, facilitated by access to food and water, gainful employment, mobility, escape to the dancehall and to worship or shared communal space, has become increasingly unviable. Living also raises the question of the human. Can it emerge within the context of the State’s commitment to global neoliberalism, and its particular uses of Black, Brown and poor bodies in capitalism? Neoliberalism has presented opportunities within the informal sector including its illicit economies which capaciously fuel violence by the poor usually directed against their neighbors. When the State shifts responsibility for these livelihoods and social services to those who have little means to effectuate their own upward social mobility, the result as we have seen is accelerated poverty and violence. Such processes reinforce the disposability of lives of the poor and Black people. Can the State retreat from neoliberalism and engage its vulnerable populations, through a flexible practice of popular co-cooperation? The flux and uncertainty that the pandemic guarantees can well be apprehended as a veritable opportunity for the Caribbean’s people, to make freedom from Caribbean history meaningful because it refocuses our attention on the consequences of inequality. The global call to respect Black life emerging in the US offers an alternative to the silencing and post-truths that Covid-19 exacerbates. Even as the pandemic threatens further decline of life and livelihoods for the marginalized of the Global Souths it is also as Roy (2020) suggests, a portal to seize the opportunities for reconstitution, and the reconfiguration of life on planet earth. For the expansion of rights must include the right to a satisfying, fun and productive re-existence, one where Black Life Matters.