Black Power in the Pacific

Was there ever a Black power movement in the Pacific? Is there a sizable enough population of African descendants in the Pacific Islands to have started a Black power movement? These are reasonable questions if asked with the presumption that words like “Black,” “aboriginal,” “indigenous,” are immutable, that they are fixed categories to describe people. But they are not. As Barry Glassner, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, puts it, the meanings that people actually hold for words do not “develop outside of social processes.” Indeed, most social scientists “deny claims for the existence of inherent and essential characteristics of phenomena such as race, gender, and sexuality.”  Read more.