Hazel V. Carby

In one​ of the glass cabinets in the central rotunda of the fourth floor of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC is a wooden canoe seat on which is carved a spider sitting in the middle of a web. Anansi, a spider of boundless ingenuity, is celebrated in the folklore of African-descended communities across the Americas for his ability to outwit his...

The​ city of Minneapolis, in which George Floyd lived and died, has been plagued not only by Covid-19 but also by an epidemic of police violence. As Mike Griffin, a community organiser, put it, he was ‘just as likely to die from a cop as from Covid’. Major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, seemed astonished at the scale of structural and...