Trump, Zuma, Brexit: anti-Black racism and the truth of the world

Abstract

“Trump, Zuma, Brexit” aims to articulate a new theory of the “world historical” reversing the relationship of north and south–of “universal knowledge” and “raw fact”–instead establishing a theoretical ground from the southern hemisphere and toward the north. The echoes and parallels of the current political, economic, and social moment across the distinct national geographies of South Africa, the US, and the UK, suggest two things: one, that white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and extreme inequality are foundational to the current world order; and two, that South Africa offers a very particular perspective. The paradox of anti-Black racism in South Africa–the fact that Black people remain the primary extractive targets of racial capitalism despite the country’s democratic transition–begins to show how intractable the problem of racial capitalism is both in its geographical extent and given its historical reach from the moment of the rise of Atlantic capitalism into the present.