Message From The Grassroots: Exploring Black liberation in grassroots economic practice and planning in the Americas

Abstract

Building from theories of underdevelopment and economic warfare on Black peoples (Africans and Afrodescendants) globally, this study brings into the fields of urban planning and local community & economic development the analytic and urgency of the Black Radical Peace Tradition. This involves an exploration of alternatives to traditional paradigms of economic development and planning that might help reclaim and reconstitute “the economy” towards practices and efforts that serve human life and dignity, popular sovereignty, connection to the Earth, and self-determinative capacities of African peoples throughout the Americas. Intent on contributing toward an anti-colonial praxis in this field, the following study is in part an application of the lens of Black political economy to geographic and urban challenges. It is also an exploration of grassroots people-centered efforts, both operating within the spatial-political confines of empire and those revolutionary programs outside of its physical bounds. And finally, it is a reflection on the possible purposes and roles of the “intellectual” and “planner” in supporting the liberation of Black peoples in the Americas, as part of the program of the liberation of all peoples globally.