Imkaan Statement: Anti-Blackness

Imkaan is a Black feminist organisation and we centre anti racism in everything we do.

Anti Blackness (also known as Afrophobia, Afroscepticism, or Anti-African sentiment) is prejudice, hostility, discrimination, and racism specifically towards people from Africa and the African diaspora.  There is specific prejudice against the communities descended from Africans trafficked to the Caribbean and the Americas during over 400 years of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. At Imkaan, we refer to such racism as Anti Blackness.

Anti Blackness is the result of ongoing notions of white supremacy, which also leads non African-heritage racial and ethnic groups to adopt Anti-Black attitudes, devaluing, minimising and “othering” people of African heritage, denying their historical, cultural, scientific and political achievements, and in that way mirroring the white-racist, speudo-scientific theories created to excuse the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  This also results in colourism, favouring lighter-skinned Black and minoritised people.

Imkaan acknowledges that Black and minoritised communities have been severely disadvantaged as a result of historical and contemporary systemic racism but that those of visibly African origin are additionally impacted by Anti Blackness.

Imkaan will challenge all forms of racism and Anti Blackness, and we give thanks for the pioneering, often-erased activism of people from the African Diaspora, in particular,  in the fight against enslavement, colonialism and racism. This activism ignited the fires of, and continues to light the path towards, global resistance, as it has since the 16th Century.