This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn