Standing Firm: Black History Month 2025 Reflections

On the 23rd July 2002, the United States Postal Service (USPS) launched a stamp commemorating the life and work of American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. It was valued at 37 cents—a standard, finite denomination of its time.

However, on the 9th September 2025, the USPS launched a stamp celebrating American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. This Buckley stamp is a ‘Forever Stamp’, ensuring it will always retain its first-class mailing value. This difference in issue—a fixed-value tribute to a crucial Black literary and political voice, set against an ever-appreciating monument to a white conservative figure—provides a stark lens through which to view the legacy politics of America.

In promoting the stamps, the USPS rightly highlighted the importance of engaging in dialogue and debate across the political spectrum.

For the past five years, I’ve been working with peace educators, artists, and academics in the UK and the USA on a new ‘Theatre of Peace’ production. The production is inspired by, and commemorates, arguably the most famous debate in the history of the Cambridge Union. The motion for the debate on 18 February 1965 was: “Has the American dream been at the expense of the American Negro?” The speakers for and against the motion were James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., respectively.

My co-author, Craig Green, writer, and New York attorney, and I trained in physical theatre in Japan in 1987. I had originally trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and the shift from traditional Western actor training to the embodied, relational, intuitive, and transrational approach of Eastern theatre was life-changing. Since then, we’ve dedicated ourselves to creating spaces for honest, open, and intelligent dialogue.

Our new play, ‘The Missing Peace,’ uses our ‘Theatre of Peace’ methodology—inspired by Augusto Boal and David Diamond, and built on my ‘Knowledge, Power and Politics’ research from Cambridge—to explore the issues Baldwin and Buckley debated: the nature of knowledge, systems of reality, and the politics of oppression. We use their historic engagement to highlight the necessity of robust argument, critical thinking, and heart-to-heart dialogue to find shared understanding.

While the USPS has rightly honoured both men with individual stamps, it has profoundly missed an opportunity to highlight their shared dialogue and its own contribution to the politics of unequal remembrance.

With the current and growing divide in the United States being expressed in increasing polarisation and violence, launching a ‘Forever Stamp’ solely for Buckley is a potentially politically inflammatory move. May I suggest a compromise and correction?

If the USPS wants to celebrate the importance of debate and honour the robust challenge embodied by Baldwin and Buckley, it should promote the two stamps together and make the Baldwin stamp another ‘Forever Stamp’. Granting them equal, enduring status would correct the implicit inequality of the original issues. It could become a powerful force for peace, love, and understanding in a time of conflict and violence in the history of the United States.

* Image: Used with the permission of the United States Postal Service®. All rights reserved.

Shue-kei Joanna Mok, University of Maryland, College Park

This piece is to express my deepest gratitude to all members, allies, and advocates of the Black community for their generous and emotionally taxing work. I have attended numerous most humbling and inspiring initiatives at my university in the U.S. led by the Black community, all channeling so much compassion, love, and hope that strongly compel me to advance the understanding of racism, colorism, and representation within and beyond the Asian community.

Again, I had one of the shortest yet most powerful artistic experiences a few days ago. Performed by five Black DeafBlind actors in protactile, the language of the DeafBlind community, the experience was inherently direct and personal. During the 15 minutes, I was blindfolded, wholeheartedly touched by touching the lives of nineteenth-century DeafBlind slaves.

I touched their faces. Their hands. Their scars. Their hardships. Their loved ones. I touched chains and whips, and was guided to imitate violence used against them. I heard their heartbreaking moans. I felt their immense pain.

Prioritizing touch, a sense that would otherwise be overshadowed by sight, emphasized a great contrast between the warmth of the actors’ hands, their yearnings of hope and freedom, and the coldbloodedness of the slavery history. It was also the protactile approach and the blindfolding that made me realize, in reality, how easily we could be blinded by injustices and become culprits of oppression unconsciously.

I shed tears as I was imitating and imagining what it would have been like for a DeafBlind female slave to take care of a child. I weeped as I realized I was imitating abuses against fellow human beings. My identity as a woman, an Asian, and a human got shook to the core. In the play, while we as audience could not see the actors and hence their socially-constructed race, we were partially immersed in a racialized experience given the context. Laying the ground with the initial “color blind” portrayal of human suffering made the knowledge of how such suffering was justified by race even more potent and astounding. Here, every audience is equal, surrendering their control to the actors, subsuming into this unknown, raw, material, and emotional connection. Touch by touch, compassion, humility, and solidarity is sowed.

It was a profound moment for me to understand the power of intersectionality, and building alliances and solidarity strategically. By strategic, it is not to intentionally highlight an identity to seek sympathy and calculated collaborations, but rather to share genuine (re)presentations of intertwined, nuanced, and diverse lived experiences, inviting curious souls to learn, feel, and connect. It is not to say that Black history, Black lives, that the racial aspect alone is not significant enough. Rather, the emphasis on intersectionality enriches our understanding and imaginations of Black lives, helping us to build resilience against essentialism and prejudices beyond the Black community more effectively and sustainably.

We often feel urged to keep proving our worth and contribution. Perhaps sometimes, standing firm in being who we are is the most powerful answer.

Kate Matzopoulos, University of Bath

Drawing on Niati and Shah’s (2022) work on Transhiphop pedagogy and epistemic disobedience in Senegal, this blog seeks to create counter-narratives that delink from majoritarian structures and affirm Pan-Africanism and decolonization — not as abstract ideals, but as lived, pedagogical acts. In line with their interpretation of Mignolo’s (2003, 2009) call for epistemic disobedience, I understand decolonization as both physical and epistemic sovereignty: a commitment to reclaiming ways of knowing and being that have been historically marginalized. 

Niati and Shah remind us that a Hip-Hop pedagogy considers the lived experiences of those who share common struggles. It positions cultural expression as a method of resistance, creativity, and collective transformation. Through that lens, this blog is part of an ongoing conversation about ethical collaboration, voice, and visibility — an effort to honour the communities I engage with by reflecting rather than appropriating, amplifying rather than overwriting. 

I also feel a personal connection to Niati’s work, having shared moments with her dancing to hip-hop and other music on the UKFIET conference disco dance floor. Those embodied, joyful moments remind me that theory and movement are never far apart; that solidarity can be rhythm as much as reflection. 

Thinking with Public Enemy 

Today I am thinking with Public Enemy and their song He Got Game. I love how this song seamlessly merges genres and generations — folk rock, hip-hop, and gospel — to deliver a message that is both timeless and urgent: we’ve got game. It reminds us that we, all of us, already contribute, create, and transform society in ways that too often go unrecognised. 

As someone raised by Black women but living in white skin, I am painfully aware of how differently I move through the world compared to those I love most. This awareness has made me fiercely protective and deeply committed to using my “game” to speak back to the larger game — the one that still demands proof of worth and contribution. 

I stand with Sharon Walker in her question: for how long do Black people need to prove their contributions? Black History Month calls us to celebrate, yes, but also to reflect. Solidarity cannot remain quiet or conditional. It must be lived, voiced, and made visible, even if it means becoming a “public enemy” in spaces that prefer silence. 

Public Enemy says, 
It might feel good / It might sound a little somethin’ / But damn the game if it don’t mean nothin’. 

Our task, then, is to use our game — to speak when it matters, to act when it counts, and to show up in ways that refuse to let the world turn its head away. 

References 

Mignolo, W. D. (2003). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (1), 57–96. 

Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (7–8), 159–181. 

Niati, N. B., & Shah, P. P. (2022). Transhiphop pedagogy and epistemic disobedience in Senegal. 

As a decolonial scholar from the Global South, I’m supposed to be immune to the glossy allure of places like Paris. I study the systems of power that create their mythologies. But I’m also human. Years of seeing its beauty through films and books had built a dream, and I was ecstatic to finally be there to present my research. That dream became a lesson in a different kind of power during a visit to the Louvre and the Seine. At the Champs-Élysées Clémenceau metro station, my friend—another Black student studying in Paris—and I were stopped by Navigo officers. What was immediately clear, and what stung the most, was that we were the only ones stopped. A stream of people passed freely, but the officers’ gaze settled on us. The only thing that marked us was our Blackness.

They asked for our travel cards. My friend showed his student pass with a photo. I showed my weekly pass, which didn’t have one. That’s when the confrontation began. I tried to explain, in English and my limited French, that the agent who sold me the ticket a few days earlier never mentioned needing a photo. I explained that the agent at Laplace station also struggled with English, just as I did with French, and could only use basic expressions to guide me. I offered to show my bank receipt since I had paid by card, and I told them I was a student from the UK attending a conference. The officers asked if we spoke French. We said no. Their response was chilling: they accused us of lying, claiming we were pretending not to speak French to escape punishment. We were trapped in a circular argument where our truth didn’t matter. In the end, they fined me €70. Later, I learned the fine was for “impersonation”, they had decided the ticket wasn’t mine. They didn’t see a misunderstanding; they saw deceit. They built that story entirely around the colour of my skin.

The irony was profound. My research focuses on how colonial language policies in African schools are used to punish and silence students. And here I was, in the heart of Europe, being silenced because my language and my body didn’t fit their idea of belonging. It was a brutal, real-life illustration of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) calls the “cultural bomb” of colonialism: the process of making a people disdain their own voice. In that moment, I felt what Frantz Fanon (1952) described in Black Skin, White Masks: the crushing weight of being “overdetermined from the outside.” I wasn’t Mercy, the scholar. I was a stereotype, a problem to be managed. I felt deflated and sad. But as a researcher who believes in justice, I knew silence wasn’t an option. Naming what happened felt vulnerable, like joining a conversation that others might dismiss or misunderstand. But I did it anyway. I named it: racism. I now see that act of naming as a form of activism. It is what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls a testimonio—a personal story that becomes a political act of reclaiming truth. By speaking out, I refused to let their false narrative be the final word. I stood in the tradition of Black resistance that defines Black History Month: the courage to say, “I am here, my experience is real, and I will not be erased.”

This experience taught me that decolonial work isn’t only what we study; it’s how we live. It is the difficult choice to transform a site of pain into a site of power. Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us that we transform the world through reflection and action, and this is my praxis. When I shared what happened with my supervisor and department, they were deeply saddened and wanted to help. But I couldn’t keep retelling the story; it evoked too many emotions. France, once enchanting, became a place I now remember with a quiet ache: a place where, because I was Black, I was already doing something wrong. I told myself I was okay, but months later, I still wake up replaying that moment. What if I had gone out on a different day? What are the chances that this would happen to me: a researcher studying coloniality? Why do I still tear up when I speak about it? I chose to write this blog because naming what happened is part of my praxis. It matters that I continue to share my experience, not only to process it, but so others do not feel alone. For Black History Month, my reflection is this: our resilience is our legacy. Naming racism is not an act of weakness: it is an act of world-building. It is how we declare our dignity, honour our truth, and move toward the reparative future we all deserve.

References

Fanon, F., 1952. Black Skin, White Mask. London: Penguin Books.

Freire, P., 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Smith, L. T., 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Wa Thiong’o, N., 1986. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Curry.