Yannick Giovanni Marshall

Publisher’s Description

The End of Supplication contends that Black freedom struggles are anti-colonial movements — not civil rights appeals — and that liberal portrayals of Black people as passive, pleading subjects only reinforce the structures of anti-Black violence.

The book traces how the figure of the “supplicant negro” was invented to disarm Black resistance, and argues that in a time of resurgent white supremacy, this figure must be destroyed to clear the way for real insurgent struggle.

excerpts from op-eds

Publicly accessible essays explore the limits of protest, police violence, and the failures of “critical patriotism” in settler-colonialism and liberal reform. For more see author page at AJE.

Elegy for Jay-z (Current affairs, fall 2025)

“… The full-time hustler is not, as the state and social services describe, “unemployed,” but anti-job. Conscious that they do not want to subject themselves to the half-life of capitalist exploitation—or, worse, the quarter-life of racialized and gendered exploitation in the legacy of a colonial world, where they are told through emails what their foreparents were told by signpost: that they need not apply. If there is only one life to live, the hustler’s philosophy is that it should not be spent in subservience. One should not condemn oneself to the purgatory of the working poor. Especially as having a job-while-Black is job insecurity. A job can be slapped out of your hands. It is where salaries are guaranteed to be unequal. Where your mannerisms and speech must be flat ironed out, and Karens watch through the blinds of their cubicle for any false move…”

Black Liberal, Your Time Is Up (Al Jazeera, June 2020)

“…For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration…”

The Future Is Post-Western (Al Jazeera, May 2022)

“…It must be accepted now that the West, however mythologised, be it American-led “democracy” or classical “Western” political ideas, has proven that it does not have the necessary intellectual or political infrastructure to put down its perpetually rising Nazism. It has proven inadequate to the task of not harming the vast majority of humanity. Its ideas and institutions have proven incapable of destroying and ridding itself of colonial racism – if it is to be accepted that the project of the West is something other than the project of colonial racism….”

The Day Millennials’ Hip Hop Went to the Klan’s Ball (Al Jazeera, Jan 2025)

“…More than that, [Hip Hop] was a mind. It did not merely reflect the conditions of the neighbourhood, it was a conference of thought and clashing debates. We heard encouragement and a critique of intra-class antagonism when Aaliyah told us we “don’t need no Coogi sweater”. We saw visions of escape in Rich Boy’s Throw Some D’s and forced into quiet introspection after watching Pac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby and Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. One hour we were trying to commit to memory the adrenaline-rush poetics of Bizzy Bone’s entire Heaven’z Movie album and the next we were psyching ourselves up to meet the high school or street corner bully with Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones…”

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness (Religious Dispatch, Sept 2020)

“…In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at Appomattox, acolytes of anti-Black torture culture—Southerners as well as Northerners—continued the war to keep their boots on Black necks on the beaches and landing grounds of law and policy…”

An Appeal: Bring the Maroon to the Foreground in Black Intellectual History (Black Perspectives / AAIHS, Oct 2019)

“…Marronage, as a politics, does not hold the state’s feet to the fire — at least not in the hopes that it will be improved. It does not think or hope the state will one day get better. Indeed, Black marronage, is by definition the escape from the central spaces of the white supremacist order, a voting with the feet, is an expression of a fundamental pessimism about the colony’s capacity to improve and to do so in a timely fashion. Maroon politics recognizes the fugitive’s inability to overturn the state of things and so flees to spaces where it is possible to live outside of the reach of racist power. Or, flees and retreats to a better position. ² In fleeing there is also recognition of settler-colonialism’s incapacity to rid itself of its founding ideology: racist violence. This incapacity, of course, is in liberal ideology ³ represented as a series of “failures.” America is perpetually “failing Black communities,” “failing Black patients,” “failing Black voters,” “failing Black students” etc. Representing incapacity as failure implies the possibility of eventual success. It works to encourage Black resistance back onto the hamster wheel. The maroon is Sisyphus escaped…”

A Short Dictionary of Liberal Language on Policing (Al Jazeera, May 2021)

“…‘Both sides‘ announces collusion with power and erasing its victims’ record. It plans to distort representations of scale. It intends injustice. It uses the fallacy of false equivalency to present a historical record of oppression as a battle between equally guilty, irrational and uncompromising children. Here, the liberal occupies the space of the rational arbitrator, a Solomon figure, and says something like, “Black protesters must not believe ACAB and police must not believe all Black people are criminals, not saying that all police do.” Or “we must build trust on both sides” discounting the possibility that, as Justin Hansford has argued, distrust may not be unreasonable for a population historically mistreated and violated by the police institution – but a rational response. The problems between the batoner and the batoned are not always fixed by more trust…”

Universities v. Protest: A Letter from a Lesser Alumnus (Al Jazeera, June 2024)

“…The point of education is not merely to interpret their world but to undo it. To wobble its genocidal foundations and the ease with which “the necessary carpet bombing of the native sector” is swallowed by the everyman. That is, it is to be, what those who colonise would call, “dangerous”…”

“…The point of education is not merely to interpret their world but to undo it. To wobble its genocidal foundations and the ease with which “the necessary carpet bombing of the native sector” is swallowed by the everyman. That is, it is to be, what those who colonise would call, “dangerous”…”

“We’ll Hold the Police Accountable”: The Useful Meaninglessness of Liberal-Speak (Black Perspectives / AAIHS, June 2020)

“…’Hold police accountable.’ It is now expected that this phrase will be proclaimed publicly at a lectern or above jutted out microphones immediately after an instance of anti-Black mob violence is nationally reported. It is not clear when, but at some point in the postbellum era, a life-preserving cynicism was diluted, and it began to be said with a straight face that the “extrajudicial” killings of Black people would one day be halted in the land of sundown towns and Wild Wests. The national crime, now completely recoded by the corporate press as “racially tinged incidents” might one day, it is now thought, have its days numbered. This promise of eventual accountability has now become one of the most useful policing instruments, a rack torture device which stretches resistance until it is more supple and better suited to accept permanent, systematic assault against Black life.

After Their Racial Reckoning: A Black Anticolonial Rousing (Al Jazeera, Feb 2023)

“It bears repeating. There is a direct line between the murder of Tyre Nichols and the banning of African American Studies courses in Florida. Between the spectacle of our public execution and the claim that the study of Black life lacks educational value.

It is the same line that could be drawn from the klan throwing Black people off bridges and Black people being brutalised in the art, ads and scholarship of previous generations. A line, a thread of manufactured Black disposability that if pulled out, would unspool this marathon of a colonial event that terms itself American society…”

“He Was No Angel”: A Rallying Cry for the Lynching Bee (Middle East Eye, June 2020)

“…The men and women who would only a century ago put on their Sunday best to watch a man hang for“incendiarism”, or man the concentration camps, have relocated to social media and white nationalist radio and TV.

But their work remains the same: the desecration of the names and memories of Black people killed by racists. The charge of being a non-angel is meant to dehumanise Black people. But they would lynch angels.

The lynching bee will never disband. The desire to see the Negro burn is its defining characteristic.”

Selected talks

I have delivered invited lectures and conference talks across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Australia, with recent presentations shaped by my political exile, current book project, and critiques of liberal containment and anti-Black suppression.

“The Trojans’ Mule: Black Nativist Anti-Black Immigrant Sentiment and the Struggle against Pan-African Solidarity”
10th European Conference on African Studies, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2025.

“The Racists’ Peace Process: Thinking the ‘Two-State Solution’ in Palestine as a Proposal for Neocolonialism”
Sixth Annual Justice for Palestine Conference, University of Tehran (virtual), February 2025.

“How Not to Be a White Liberal”: Replacing Performative Allyship with Anti-colonial Solidarity
Caring Futures Conference, The American University of Paris, May 2024.

“The Runaway’s Reckoning: Marronage and the Death of Civil Rights”
African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Conference, James Madison University, February 2024.

“The Second Jim: White Abolitionists’ Invention of the Supplicant Negro”
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, November 2023.

“Community, Emotions, New Terror”
Invited Lecture, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, August 2023.

“Mob State: The Police Order and the Threat of White Supremacist Uprising in Colonial Nairobi”
Fridays @ 4 Faculty Lectures, Knox College, April 2022.

“The Deathscape of Colonial Nairobi”
Mapping Deathscapes Book Launch, Macquarie University, April 2022.

“Negrophobic Killings as Sex: Pleasure at the Site of the Injured Black Body”
Invited Talk, Reed College, October 2017.

“Settler, Native, Violence: Reading a Public Flogging in Early Colonial Nairobi”
Major Debates in the Study of Africa Lecture, Columbia University, November 2015.