Frantz Fanon remains urgently relevant to occupied Chicago—and to the United States today—because he understood power not as rhetoric but as lived pressure on the body, the neighborhood, and the psyche. Fanon wrote about societies where law speaks the language of order while daily life is governed by force, surveillance, and managed abandonment—conditions that echo in Chicago’s over-policed Black neighborhoods, its zones of extraction and neglect, and its widening carceral logic. His insight was not simply that violence exists, but that it becomes normalized, bureaucratized, and internalized, reshaping how people see themselves and what they believe is possible. In a moment when democracy is hollowed out by administrative power, policing is framed as governance, and inequality is enforced through policy rather than exception, Fanon helps us name what we are living through: not a crisis of values, but a system working as designed. To read Fanon now is to recognize that the question is no longer whether the United States resembles a colonial formation—but how long we will pretend not to hear it when the structure speaks through Chicago’s streets.
This essay is a critical reading of a recent Van Jones Substack post, examining how calls for empathy and balance can quietly mask asymmetries of power. Using history, structure, and recent events, it argues that moral symmetry cannot substitute for accountability—and that we’ve seen this movie before.
Across time, grief has been turned into myth, and myth into division. From Berlin to Moscow to our own streets, martyrdom has been used to escalate violence. Let us resist history’s cycle now.
/p/in-the-shadow-of-tragedy-we-must?r=c40a
This is online Tuesday night, April 1st.
Register here:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/VITB-rPgTqyEMJ0G2I42YA?mc_cid=43dd8e85e4&mc_eid=UNIQID
We will be discussing the cultural film aesthetics of Souleymane Cisse’s film Yeelen (Brightness). The film will be screened in person at Logan Center today, Sunday 4/29 at 1:00pm.
Join us today at Connect Gallery, 1451 E 53rd St, in “Beautiful Downtown Hyde Park” at 3-6:30pm
Black Culture, Soft Power, and the Machinery of Imperialism
By Floyd Webb, Blacknuss Network/blacknuss.tv
African American culture has long been one of the most powerful forces in shaping global perceptions of the United States. From music and literature to sports and cinema, Black artistic and intellectual contributions have defined what the world recognizes as American culture. Yet, while Black creativity has been celebrated abroad, it has been systematically exploited, censored, and appropriated at home. Worse still, it has been weaponized by the U.S. government to serve imperialist interests, using Black art as propaganda to mask the brutal realities of white supremacy, economic oppression, and global domination.
It’s been hard for me to write this, there are folk you just have a great appreciation for. You look at thier ceaseless consistency and resilience. They as always inspiring. Laser focused on mission or as the pop zeitgeist says, “”standing on business.”
In 1980, at Yaounde Olu’s Oshun Gallery, I met Turtel Onli—a man whose creative spirit was as boundless as the cosmos he so often envisioned. Alongside Yaounde, Turtel was immersed in the vibrant currents of African-based speculative and spiritual expression, a movement we now celebrate as Afrofuturism. Together, they wove dreams into art, bridging the ancestral and the futuristic, the earthly and the divine.
Turtel was a trailblazer, a Chicago artist who carved out his own space in a world that often overlooked the brilliance of Black creators. As a painter and comic book publisher, he gave life to the “Black Age of Comics, a groundbreaking platform that redefined representation and storytelling. He was the Father of the Black Age of Comics. Turtel’s artwork combined afrofuturism with art education. He defined it as “a genre of graphic novels that feature creators and products derived from the black, urbane, indie, African or cosmic experience.”
His work was more than art; it was a revolution, a declaration that Black voices belonged in every dimension of imagination.
Turtel’s legacy is etched in the hearts of those who knew him and in the countless lives he inspired through his vision and passion. He will be missed tremendously, but his spirit lives on in the worlds he created, the stories he told, and the future he helped shape.
Rest in power, my brother. Your light continues to guide me and all of us.
