Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on this day in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”
- Walter Rodney
I hope you nerds have a great March. 
Remember no crackers
As you may know by me mentioning it quite a lot lately, the subject of interracial dating has been on my mind a lot, particularly because of how lacking the discourse around it seems.
One thing I find very weird is the glaring contradiction of how some people who’d normally deem themselves “woke” and “conscious,” all of a sudden, stop adhering to “the personal is political” the moment the conversation is about interracial relationships.
Everyone wants to talk about how racism shows up in the workplace, education, housing, policing, etc., but the moment you dare even suggest that we should have a nuanced conversation on how interracial relationships are not inherently progressive and how they actually often serve as a hotbed for problematic, harmful, and toxic racist tendencies, then all of a sudden, you get thought-terminating cliches like, “Why do you care so much?”, “Respect people’s personal choices!”, and “People are allowed to date who they wanna date!”
Every time I attempt to discuss this subject, I gotta invoke a billion and one disclaimers about how I am not necessarily opposed to interracial relationships as a whole, but if people are so stubborn that they don’t want to practice even the most miniscule amount of discernment and acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between two people of different races genuinely being in love and a relationship being predicated on fetishization and self-hate, then I truly believe that an overwhelming majority of people are not responsible enough to engage in interracial relationships in a healthy, productive way. But, honestly, to be fair, that’s because most people don’t have a healthy, productive view of race in general, let alone in this particular context.
The gender aspect on het(white man, racialized woman) relationships have become more noticeable to me where the push is to reject the barbaric, misogynist, racialized man and go for the enlightened white man because they’re “better.”
It’s not technically my business since I’m not het, but hearing the racialized woman berrate the men in their own race in favor of a white man needs some attention. I can’t take interracial dating seriously if that’s not addressed nor the point you brought up.
Oh, yeah, I hate divestors a ton.
Yeah it’s always a little iffy when coming across “woke” poc who are all about fighting racism and prejudice with their dating history being entirely white or never dating their own race.
They get so defensive because they feel called out most of the time. A lot of interracial relationships, especially in the west, are often a product of fetishization and it’s not always just from dating whites either.
Biggest pet peeve is when their partner or their partners friends/family make racist comments and their partner does nothing about it. Yet the victim of these insults defends them because they’re “different” and “not like that”