Black and Latinx

The word “Black” is and always has been a banned word, intrinsically. This is not new. “Black” is a word that is perhaps better understood as a feeling, an articulation that comes out of struggle. It is a Herculean attempt to resignify and self-name a group of people who have otherwise been named through historic and ongoing practices of unspeakable violence, super-exploitation, dispossession, and genocide. And while such projects of self-naming always have their limits, even the attempt to do so was still disruptive enough, dangerous enough, to warrant full-scale counter-insurgency efforts, from the moment the architects of the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery and named all citizens, regardless of skin tone, “Noirs,” or “Blacks,” in their 1805 constitution.