A Whole New World 

Season 2, Episode 7

Hey, friends! In this episode, our big idea is Black nationalism! What would life in the U.S. look like today if Black folks, post-emancipation (1865), had received forty acres and a mule—or any form of reparations for that matter? What if they had been granted the opportunity to build a sovereign nation within the territorial United States? What if their efforts to systematically and structurally reimagine the parameters of citizenship as a dispossessed people on native land had not been violently suppressed?

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In a time when the nation is asking, Why do it gotta be like this? Kohar and I go back 100ish years to one of the many moments when Black thinkers reimagined and organized toward a different vision of life within the U.S. We’re talking about Harry Haywood’s 1928 Black Belt Thesis, which demanded that the geographic region of the Black Belt (stretching from Washington, D.C. to eastern Texas) be given to the descendants of enslaved people to create their own independent nation, to be known as the Black Belt Republic. How did he plan to do it? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out more about Haywood’s vision for an independent Black nation.

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When we talk about Black nationalism as a movement, philosophy, and way of life, are we talking about the same thing as run-of-the-mill White nationalism? For an answer, we turn to Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire. Spoiler alert: the answer is no! Getachew defines Black nationalism on its own terms, as the process of Black worldmaking—not empire-building.

As always, we close out with our half-baked thoughts—the segment where we share ideas that we haven’t fully fleshed out but stand fully behind. You’ll just have to listen to the episode to hear those.

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