Antonio Moore; Yvette Carnell; ADOs v.s. The Logic of Sekou Ture

What has Pan-Africanism done for us? 90% of what makes Malcolm X iconic is what he learned once he connected the African struggle in the U.S. to Africa. Shirley Graham DuBois was a central figure in Pan-African work in the 1960s. Living in Ghana and Egypt she was a major connector for work taking place at that time. DuBois and Malcolm's work, unquestionably connected to mother Africa, provides much of the framework that defines our path today.

If you haven't come across them yet, ADOS is short for the so-called American Descendants of Slaves movement.  Taking a dishonest page from the playbook of capitalists Charles and David Koch (the Koch Brothers), Antonio Moore, Yvette Carnell, and other assorted opportunists like Tariq Nasheed and Cornel West, have taken a discredited political position and given it a name that is bound to resonate with Africans here in the U.S. who continue to suffer as a daily ritual.  

By discredited position, we mean ADOSs attempts to claim that Africans born in the U.S. are being exploited by Africans born in other parts of the world.  Therefore, according to their "logic" it is in the interests of Africans born in the U.S. to adopt a xenophobic view of other Africans in order to oppose their presence here in the U.S. because those other Africans are taking economic opportunities away from Africans here in the U.S.  Its discredited because these people, and anyone else, cannot demonstrate any data that confirms their claim about opportunities for Africans in the U.S. being taken away from us by our other African family members, or any other immigrant communities for that matter.  I mentioned the Koch Brothers because they have been instrumental in creating effective political lobbying mechanisms like the so-called "American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  ALEC is the lobbying body in the U.S. that has brought you racist "Stand your Ground" laws along with so-called "Right to Work" laws that have stripped workers in the U.S. of their rights to collectively bargain contracts for greater worker stability.  Slogans like "Right to Work" sound good enough so that the very people who are targeted by Koch Brother policies - the working poor - are very much likely to be people who voted in favor of some form of "Right to Work" legislation.  The same tactical approach is utilized by these ADOS people.  Like the Koch Brothers, ADOS uses the scarcity theory that capitalism doesn't have enough to go around.  Therefore, they argue we must turn towards pointing fingers at immigrants, even those who look like us and are us, instead of growing the courage to challenge the real culprits for our suffering; the capitalist/imperialist classes of elite multi-national corporations who control governments and exploit and oppress the masses of people on earth. 

Scarcity theory, of course, operates based on fear.  There is no intellectual foundation promoted in scarcity theory politics.  For ADOS this looks like telling our people here in the U.S. that we need to take up a position against our other family members.  And, we are supposed to tell our people here this without any evidence of anything beyond some individual subjective examples like "I didn't get hired at this company, but this dude from Nigeria did!"  We are in no way ever limited to subjective individualism.  There is much data we can look to in order to illustrate that our poor economic standing is specifically linked to capitalist exploitation of African human and material resources.  The disparity of opportunities for African people in areas of education and employment that have existed long before African immigration was even a thing (only over the last couple of decades).  We have white supremacist violence directed against us by state institutions and everyday people without impunity.  And, the only people provided a voice to speak to our issues are those who are unquestionably committed to the values and interests of the capitalist system. 

These are just some of the reasons for the conditions we face, not Africans born outside of the U.S., but ADOS, like their political mentors the Koch Brothers and other capitalists, continue to stick to this tactical approach because unfortunately, it continues to work so well with so many of us.  The capitalist system has a vested interests in keeping Africans within the U.S. as ignorant as is humanly possible about the plight of Africans everywhere and only a very small percentage of us do anything to combat this.  The rest of us are happy to be ignorant provided the Warriors games remain televised, we can continue to live vicariously through the lives of Beyonce and Jay Z, and we have social activities available to us to absorb the pain from the suffering we don't know what to do with.  This ignorance fuels the ability for sham analysis coming from people like ADOS to flourish, and we'll give a clear example.

Lately, this Antonio Moore ADOS person allegedly called for Africans born within the U.S. to be classified as "biracial" if they were born with an African parent born outside of the U.S.  This is a typical xenophobic tactic coming straight out of the pages of Nazi Germany after 1933 when the Third Reich came to power.  Using this example, we can easily demonstrate how the foolishness and anti-intellectualism of this ADOS scam flies directly into the face of the materialist based scientific theories articulated by revolutionary Pan-African Giants like Sekou Ture - the former president of Guinea, West Africa, and co-founder of the Democratic Party of Guinea - still one of the many Pan-African political parties struggling to advance Pan-Africanism - the only real solution to our suffering around the world.

In his landmark pieces on "Negritude" and "The History of Class Struggle" Ture clearly lays out how African identity, because of the ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism, can never again be defined based simply on biologically or where one was born.  Being African has to have a primarily political definition that is driven by one's commitment to unity of African people based strictly on our understanding that until Africa is free, no African anywhere can be free.  Ture also pointed out that imperialism will always seek to divide African people because its interests demand that our focus be anywhere except on Africa.  Its like the old babysitting tactic of hiding the treats from the child while playing a game with them designed to get them to focus on something else, anything else, besides the treats you don't want them to know you have.  ADOS is gladly taking on a leadership role in playing this game with the African masses within the U.S.

​We encourage our people to use our own culture and common sense to dispense of the foolishness these people are promoting.  No one can dispute that the European countries committed thousands of slave raids throughout all parts of Africa for hundreds of years.  This meant they rounded up millions of our people.  Only a complete idiot would suggest that during this terrifying process, the enslavers took time to provide lap tops for each captured African with a survey monkey for what ethnic group and/or family that African was stolen from so the colonizers could ensure you were never separated from your family.  You were separated from your family as policy so that means any African from any other part of the world could be your biological relative.  Just from that simple perspective, any talk of classifying us as different people can only be a ploy designed to benefit the interests of those seeking to continue to oppress us because there is not one material benefit to Africans within the U.S. in accepting this absurd logic.  ADOS would tell you that reparations from slavery are most possible from us separating from the rest of the African world, but this is coming from people who have not played one active role in the reparations movement, ever.  Those who have courageously championed that movement have always done so from a clear Pan-African foundation for obvious reasons to anyone seriously studying the reparations question.  And, this goes beyond even discussing how crazy it is for these ADOS people to even suggest that even one dime is coming your way without some form of active and relentless struggle against the system causing our oppression.  In fact, you don't even challenge these people for a comprehensive plan for reparations.  The bar is so low that all they have to do, like every other hustler out here, is feed us a good sounding line, like their Koch Brothers masters, and many of us - without any study and/or investigation - will buy it hook, line, and sinker.  

The problem here, as Ture points out in this class struggle piece, is we must grow in our understanding to a place where we recognize that Ture was correct when he said class struggle is the driving force in human relations.  Class being the interests that represent what's best in your life and how you are willing to fight for those interests.  It is the driving force. Not race, and certainly not where we are born.  Our collective class interests as African people everywhere exploited ruthlessly by capitalism in its quest to develop, consolidate, and control the planet, is the key to finding our salvation.  And, just the fact that these opportunists are maybe better at using social media to the extent that they are even able to claim being any type of "movement" doesn't change anything.  It actually confirms Ture's class analysis.  The masses of African people struggled for more educational opportunities for African people during all of the great social movements we have initiated and sustained in this country's history.  Africans were in the streets fighting for justice.  Most of those who paid that price never reaped any benefits they sacrificed for.  Many of them in this country, from Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Louise Little (the mother of Malcolm X), Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Roberto Clemente, Miariam Makeba, and thousands upon thousands others, were not even born in the U.S., although they made unquestionable contributions to the African struggle within the U.S.  So, clearly, the issue isn't where you were born.  Its what your class interests are.  ADOS people, continuing the strategy of subjective individualism, are always quick to point out that one or two Africans born outside the U.S. who said or did something against the interests of Africans born within the U.S.  Of course they did because like ADOS, they are constantly jockeying for position within the exploitative capitalist system to carve our resources for themselves at the expense of the masses of our people.  So, in essence, these negative petti bourgeoisie Africans born outside the U.S. are competing with the petti bourgeoisie Africans born in the U.S. e.g. ADOS, to gain positioning in the master's courtyard while the masses of us are not even in the real equation for these people.  That my friends is what class struggle looks like.  As my mother used to always tell me; don't allow yourselves to be so easily confused!