The 2024-2026 RCHA Seminar, “Black Power and White Supremacy: The Cyclical Dialectics of Power,” interrogates the dialectical relationship between Black power and white supremacy over time and across the globe, considering its manifestations from the fifteenth century to the present and from Africa to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas. Using the concept of cyclicality, we seek to understand patterns in the recurring waves of white supremacy and Black insurgence that have defined global racial politics in the modern era.
This seminar brings Black liberation struggles into dialogue with white supremacy’s power and influence spanning from the era of European/Arab/African contact to the present moment. How has anti-Blackness has manifested and reproduced itself through laws, policies, and even cultural practices designed to assert and maintain white power? And how does white supremacy respond to Black resistance, morphing and shifting to adapt to continued Black liberation struggles? We are equally concerned with the rise, development, expansion and strategies of global Black liberation struggles. How have Black resistance movements confronted and repurposed anti-Black hierarchies to advance the causes of freedom and justice? Is Black freedom and liberation even viable in the
context of white supremacy and racial capitalism? Ultimately, can the cycle be broken?
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