Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.

Radical Ethics and Black Lives Matter: Pan-Caribbean Perspectives on Capitalism, Imperialism, State Violence, and anti-blackness.

In this conversation Drs. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Sandy Plácido offer an internationalist and pan-Caribbean perspective on the radical ethics of Black Lives Matter through an analysis of capitalism, imperialism, state violence, and anti-blackness.

From the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rashard Brooks in the United States to the intensification of far-right anti-Haitian violence in the Dominican Republic to the contested elections in Guyana, profound questions are being raised about the relationship of Blackness to both domination and liberation.

The antagonism between Black life and “law and order,” of which the brutality and dehumanisation of policing is only one manifestation, provides insight into repression as a means of contending with a constitutive lack emanating from histories of (neo-)colonialism and imperialism, capitalist exploitation and neoliberal austerity, and their rootedness in processes of racialisation and regimes of anti-blackness.

Plácido and Burden-Stelly consider how this current iteration of uprisings and demands on the state require a disaggregation of “mass mobilisation,” which is coming from both the left and the right; an interrogation of the peculiar appeal of fascist-like nationalism to populations historically subjected to imperial and colonial domination; and a consideration of the benefits and limitations of “popular front”—that is, ideologically heterogenous—demands for equality and justice. Additionally, the Professors take up the radical ethics of Black lives matter as a heuristic to interrogate state power as a function of ruling class interests, on the one hand, and the potential for people’s power to enact meaningful change, on the other hand.

Register here