Blog Archives

AOC, Spike Lee, Maxine Waters, & Fatigue from Liberal Lies

2/28/2019

0 Comments

I have a huge headache. Its hurting because I'm really tired of this constant quest by so-called liberals within the U.S. to position their cowardly politics as the benchmark of human progress. Possibly, my issue is I have grown up over the last several decades listening to the messages of independent revolutionary organizers who had no alliance with anything connected to imperialism. These courageous and uncompromising souls had only one concern, the universal quest for justice in the world for all of humanity. This list of people is infinite, but for direct influence into my life I'll go with Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Marcus and Amy/Amy Garvey(s), Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Mangaliso Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Winnie Mandela, Sekou Ture, George Padmore, Walter Rodney, etc., etc.

All independent on a political/ideological level. All 100% opposed to capitalist corporate influence. All 100% committed to eliminating this capitalist system and building something better for African people (Pan-Africanism) and all of humanity. All of them dedicated members of organizations at every stage of their political lives. None of them believing just their subjective/individualistic opinions to ever be enough to forge a pathway for justice for our people and everyone else.

That's my ideological and philosophical foundation so I know my headache today rages because somehow, when we fell asleep or something, that strong, courageous, independent model for African thinking, for human thinking, is slowly being replaced by voices that pretend to speak for the masses of people while steadfast sticking to a political bottom line that continues to uphold the capitalist system. And, make absolutely no mistake about it, if you are under the false pretext that its possible to support the zionist occupation of Palestine, the continued exploitation of Africa's resources, the ongoing colonization of the Americas, while also saying you support justice for all of humanity, you are living under an unobtainable fantasy. But, if you believe in those fantasies, than people like Spike Lee, Alexandria Osacio Cortez, Bernie Sanders, etc., these people are heroes for you.

The difference between you and me is I believe in dialectics, meaning I know that - as Kwame Nkrumah articulated - the world is a "phenom of forces in tension." Since I understand this universal principle of change in life, I know these bourgeoisie politicians cannot be viewed in isolation and without context. These people are not the end all. They are simply products of the people's collective growing consciousness around the desire to be free. If you don't believe that, rewind back to the 1980s. No public politician would have dared talk about universal health care within the U.S. No entertainer got up and talked about the exploitation of our ancestors and the theft of Indigenous lands. These things are only happening now because the people's consciousness demands it, but the people expressing the people's desires are not the people who will deliver those desires. They are incapable to doing so and that's not about whether they have honest intentions or not.

I'm sure Osacio-Cortez is an absolutely great young woman. I have absolutely no doubt about that, but even if she, Sanders, Lee, and all of them are complete angels, they still couldn't deliver the justice we need and deserve. Why? Because the bourgeoisie system they are placing all of their faith in is designed to preserve power for the people who control it. That's the entire objective of the Electoral College, the local, county, state, and federal judicial courts. All of the state and federal legislative arms of government in this rotten country. All of it works to protect the capitalist classes. And, if you need evidence of that give us a holler because there is so much data substantiating that claim that you will be reading about it until you are geriatric. And if you are already much older, you will die studying this data.

Look, we are not clueless here. We understand people feel completely beat up by this system. As you should. We understand people feel the need to have some hope in something. We agree. We just think we can and should do so much better than just providing all of our sentiment into system people who speak out of both sides of their mouths. They say they support universal health care, but not scientific socialism. They say they support justice, but not an end to settler colonialism in occupied Palestine, Azania (South Africa), or the Americas. Saying you support justice while also clinging to those hallmark systems of oppression is like saying you are a vegan in public while sneaking to McDonalds for Big Macs every evening. Looks good in lights, but not possible.

Instead of that foolishness, why not figure out how to believe in real justice? Why not dedicate your energies towards moving towards that real justice? A major reason achieving it is taking so long is so many of you keep derailing to pursue pipe dreams and shortcuts. There is no shortcut for the liberation we need and deserve. The moment we all accept that, and stop believing we can have freedom from the system oppressing us while that system remains in tact, we can have freedom overnight. As for me, I'm going to do what I always do. Work through my headache until it goes away. Work through this capitalist system until it goes away, completely.

0 Comments

Spike Lee; Liberals; Oscars; & White Supremacy Winning Again

2/25/2019

0 Comments

Last night, Spike Lee won the Best Screen Play (I believe that's the title of his award) academy award for his 2018 film "Blackkklansman." Some people are taking issue with Lee's demonstrative display of emotion at winning the award, jumping into Samuel L. Jackson's arms like a child at a playground. What I resent is the overall celebration about a movie that uplifts a police agent who infiltrates African organizations fighting for justice for our people. Yes, I've heard the perspectives that the agent - Ron Stallworth - the person who's life the film is based on, was allegedly so moved by the speech Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) gives that he is motivated to stop infiltrating African organizations (again, allegedly) and turns his focus to the ku klux klan.

This film depicts Stallworth attending a speech by Kwame Ture in the early 70s. By definition, this would mean Stallworth's assignment would have been to infiltrate and spy upon the All African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) because as of 1968 forward, that was Kwame Ture's organizational home. As a member of the A-APRP, I'm sure any rational reader can understand my apprehension at hailing this movie and the agent portrayed within it. I cannot be expected to not take this position against the film. Even if the forces defending this film are correct in their analysis, we cannot speak today to the damage Stallworth's work against the A-APRP did to our efforts during that period. We cannot say he was the only agent attempting infiltration. In fact, we know objectively that he was not then, nor would he be today. We don't know what damage his espionage work on behalf of the police did against our movement as a whole. All of this cannot be discounted even if he did experience a complete transformation after hearing Kwame speak. Evidence says otherwise. The fact he remained a police officer, meaning he chose the organization repressing African people, not the organization fighting for us, is telling. In other words, its not like Stallworth responded to Kwame's speech by leaving the police department and joining the A-APRP or some other African liberation organization. So, from a practical perspective, its difficult for me to decipher this "transformation" he supposedly experienced after that speech. Also, despite whatever work he carried out to "bring down" the klan, we all know the klan and all types of white supremacist organizations are flourishing today.

Over and beyond all of these clear as day contradictions is the dysfunctional focus by people like Lee to gain acceptance and recognition from the Hollywood industrial complex when its quite clear that Hollywood is simply the propaganda arm of the capitalist system. And, since Hollywood has always been presumably dominated by liberals, this problem is compounded. In truth, there really is no such thing as "liberals" and "conservatives." This is an illusion created by the capitalist ruling classes to fool the masses of people into believing they have a voice. The reality is the only agenda is the capitalist agenda. The entire "liberal" and "conservative" labels are simply different degrees of support for the capitalist system, period. To say its any different is the same as arguing that the soup you made can have different degrees of salt to be considered an entirely different dish beyond soup? Obviously, that's absurd and working people within the U.S. should wake up and stop playing this ridiculous game because the dominance of this bourgeoisie illusion has led too many people to believe that it is possible to support oppressed people and the capitalist system all at the same time.

Films out of Hollywood like "Blackkklansman, Malcolm X, Selma, Mississippi Burning" and even "Black Panther" all serve the purpose of advancing a bourgeoisie liberal perspective that oppression can be overcome while leaving capitalism in tact. These films take enemies of African people like police, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and portray them as heroes ("Blackkklansman", "Black Panther" , and "Mississippi Burning" respectively) while true champions of African liberation like Malcolm X are portrayed in these movies as problematic ("Selma") or as having made far less of an impact than they actually made ("Malcolm X"). None of this is by accident. Its all a part of the bourgeoisie liberal establishment's program (of which Hollywood is a propaganda arm for) to suggest social change is an individualistic attitude question. Not a question of this system needing to be completely and uncompromisingly overturned.

Spike Lee has made numerous movies. And, as marginal as his "Malcolm X" movie was, the fact he had to coax numerous African celebrities to underwrite that movie (no Hollywood production company would offer a reasonable amount to finance that film) demonstrates Hollywood's unwillingness to even produce anything that represents our struggle for justice with integrity. And, the "Malcolm X" movie was nothing short of an entertainment film. That's why Lee chose to have almost two thirds of the movie centered around Malcolm's pre-Nation of Islam conversion. That film said practically nothing about Malcolm's critical meetings with African revolutionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, etc. Based on the shallowness of that movie, the casual observer would have to wonder what the connection was between the government agents spying on Malcolm and Malcolm's eventual assassination. Lee hasn't had the heart to attempt to make a movie about - say the phenomenal, and movie worthy, work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (of which "Mississippi Burning" brutally mutilated). And, based on the control of the liberal Hollywood industry, I'm not complaining about that.

The point here is Hollywood, and the entire liberal element within this country, are no friends to true African liberation. And, we count Spike Lee among that liberal elite. Any true movie promoting the exact nature of capitalism to the masses of African people and humanity has a better chance of a camel going through the eye of a needle than being fully supported, financed, and awarded by Hollywood. Capitalist police and intelligence agencies cannot be heroes in any depiction of our situation. Only the masses of people make history and anyone, including African film makers like Lee, who don't and/or can't depict that, are only feeding into the dysfunctional and oppressive concept that we can somehow gain freedom without truly disrupting this racist, backward, decadent capitalist system. Another fantasy. Like everything else coming out of Hollywood.

0 Comments

Roberto Clemente Deserves more Respect than Jackie Robinson

2/23/2019

0 Comments

Reiterating Sekou Ture's ill refutable analysis that the role of culture is to inspire and advance the people's struggle for justice and liberation, its important to note that very few entertainers and athletes are worthy of any level of real respect. Most of them cater to capitalism, prioritizing their potential to earn riches over the conditions of the masses of humanity. That's the reason so many of them are radio silent in the face of overwhelming attacks against our people. Some of these entertainers/athletes even adopt and mimic the racist positions articulated by our enemies against us. They do this in the hopes that their shameful sellout will bring rewards of financial benefit.

On the flip side, there have always been African athletes who have decided that financial gain isn't important enough for them to disrespect the dignity and legacy of our people's struggle for justice. We are convinced that contrary to popular belief among Africans within the U.S., Jackie Robinson, the first African to play major league baseball within the U.S., is not among this number of distinguished and courageous athletes of principle. We say this while being very well informed (more so than many of you who support Jackie Robinson) about the challenged he faced. We don't in any way diminish the inhumanities he was forced to experience while integrating baseball within the U.S. In fact, we are so familiar with these challenges that his experiences actually brings into question the healthiness of using his journey as a gauge for how we make progress.

Again, without taking anything away from the disrespect he experienced, Robinson's model during 1947, the year he came up to the Los Angeles Dodgers, was patience and discipline. Patience in the face of blatant, violent, white supremacy and discipline in being able to never react and/or respond to his inhumane treatment under any circumstances. This is a very unhealthy message for African people because the inference is that the engine for our progress is based on the pace in which European racists are willing to move. And, our only recourse is to always be willing to wait on them to accept us. The philosophical basis of thinking is rooted in a belief that powerless people appealing to the consciousness of systems of power will ultimately result in those systems making the necessary moral adjustments to advance their oppressive behaviors against us. The problem with this, as Kwame Ture accurately pointed out, is this philosophy relies on this system having a conscience of which it has certainly demonstrated it doesn't.

Instead, we hold up and advance the notion of Roberto Clemente. An African born in Puerto Rico, who came to mainland U.S. in the late 1950s, benefiting upon the struggles Robinson encountered. By the early 60s, Clemente had established himself as one of the best players in baseball as the right fielder for the Pittsburgh, Penn, U.S. Pirates team. Clemente also established himself as a no nonsense player who would always stand up uncompromisingly for brown athletes. During those years, professional African players were expected to respect Jim Crow segregation laws within the Southern states of the U.S. That meant being the best players on the field who Europeans would pay money to see perform while then being unable to stay at and eat at hotels those same Europeans inhabited. These players were also expected to remain silent on the emerging civil rights movements and most, like Willie Mays, etc., complied. Clemente refused to accept this, regularly mobilizing other players to follow his example and/or staging one man protests on his own. When news outlets would constantly challenge his behavior as militant and disrespectful, Clemente always responded that it was the African and so-called Latino (Indigenous) players who were being disrespected. He was also consistently outspoken and supportive of the African struggle for justice taking place within this country at that time. When Clemente took this position he significantly advanced the struggle Robinson initiated in much the same way Black power movements advanced upon civil rights movements. Robinson's existence was one of slow patient acceptance in the face of indignities while Clemente's was one of defiant and rebellious resistance. Clemente refused to let capitalism separate Africa from the fact he descended from a Caribbean nation. He criticized U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico and he said "Black" people in Puerto Rico were descendants of Africa, just like "Black" people in the U.S.

Some people will read this and say without Robinson's sacrifices's Clemente's existence could not have happened, especially being as Clemente wasn't born in the continental U.S. We staunchly disagree with any logic that makes this type of suggestion. Instead, we build upon our previous assertion that Robinson's approach was harmful because it models acceptance of oppression to our people. Accept anything to fit into this backward system. Then, to compound that, Robinson's most egregious crime is his witting, or unwitting, willingness to serve as capitalism's blunt object against the elements within our struggle that the system sees as a threat. In the 1960s after his retirement from baseball, Robinson became one of capitalism's go to people whenever the system had no answer for militant pronouncements originating within our communities. I'm sure that Robinson was who Malcolm X was thinking of when he told an interviewer in 1963 that when "the white man has no answer for our charges against him, he turns to some negro trumpet player, some court jester, to represent his position against us." Robinson was that court jester accusing Malcolm of being a "thug" and preaching to our people that our only salvation was integration into this capitalist system. When our movement became even more militant after the assassination of Malcolm X, Robinson was one of a number of celebrity African voices who suggested that the advancing militancy of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Action Movement, Republic of New Afrika, etc., was being encouraged by forces beyond the African communities. For those with little knowledge of the cold war era which existed up through the 1980s, these references were to the often repeated accusation that all movements, including the most conservative elements of the U.S. civil rights movement, were directed by communists and socialist parties abroad. The underlining suggestion here is that African people are incapable of spearheading our own movement and must rely on others to do our thinking for us. This is the real harm Robinson did to our movement and our people and this damage is so intense that it really overwhelms any positives gained from his 1947 journey to enter baseball as its initial African.

On a personal level, for the reasons indicated, I never looked at Robinson as a personal hero. The more I read about his right wing beliefs as a young man, this could never be possible. Plus, I was forever motivated by a personal experience with Clemente. In the 1971 baseball playoffs the San Francisco Giants played Clemente's Pirates in the league championship series. I don't remember how, but somehow, I was able to win a ticket to game two. The Giants lost that game, but I caught a foul ball in the stands and that enabled me to be permitted to enter the parking area for the players to get that ball signed. Fortunately for me and my friends, the Pirates bus was having some mechanical issues. So, there I was waiting in front of Clemente with my friends while he talked to some adults. Then he turned to our group of about four and started talking to us. I was only nine years old at the time so I don't remember his exact words, but the context of what he said will never escape me. He told us we were African people and despite his accent we were the same. The concept fascinated me. It made me think of us as a universal people. I wanted more. I remember I asked him something about why it was he talked different than I did if we were the same. He gave a brief explanation that I can't remember, but I do clearly recall his last statement to me. He said "just remember that we are all Africans!" He gave me some baseball socks that I still have almost 50 years later. And, what that exchange meant is I've spent 40 of those 50 years working to bring consciousness to African people about our connection to Africa and the role Africa plays in our future progress. Roberto Clemente, the baseball player from Puerto Rico, stands as the first person to ever call me an African.

Robinson died during the 70s and Clemente actually died that next year, in 1972. He was doing what he always did, fighting for humanity. He died in a plane crash on December 31, 1972, while taking supplies to survivors of the vicious earthquake in Guatemala, Central America.

Since their deaths, both former players were easily, and correctly, voted into the baseball Hall of Fame, but Robinson has been treated as the poster child of human progress within baseball. For our people, the suggestion here is that Clemente better deserves that respect. In recent years, Clemente's family has humbly requested that his jersey be retired. Currently, Robinson's is the only jersey Major League Baseball has bestowed that honor upon. Shamefully, the Robinson family has stood firmly against Clemente's jersey receiving the same honor. This is no surprise. Its actually consistent with the contradictions already indicated.

Look, professional baseball is a capitalist corporation like any other in this society so you will never see a pitch to appeal to these elements for anything on these pages. What this piece represents is a request for African people, particularly those born and living within the U.S., to recognize that many Africans who contribute to our progress here aren't born here. And, being the first isn't always the most important thing. What's much more important isn't when we get there, but how we arrive. Clemente arrived with dignity. With a belief that we deserve that in every encounter we experience and his personal interaction with four little ghetto children in San Francisco in 1971, as well as the extremely honorable way in which he perished, reflected his clear belief that carrying that dignity 24/7 was the most important thing he could pass on to us.

0 Comments

Malcolm was killed 54 Years ago. What Does his Death Mean?

2/20/2019

0 Comments

Malcolm X and Mrs. Shirley Graham DuBois (widow of W.E.B. DuBois) walking in Ghana in 1964. Mrs. DuBois would help arrange for Malcolm to meet President Kwame Nkrumah the same way she helped arrange for Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) to meet Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture four years later.

On Sunday morning, February 21, 1965, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz - Malcolm X - was brutally shot 16 times in front of his wife, daughters, and hundreds of supporters at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem, New York, U.S. We know that two of the three persons convicted for his murder were not even at the Audobon that day. We also know that the only reason the third suspect was caught was because the people captured him at the scene. Its also painfully evident that at least four of the persons responsible for Malcolm's physical disappearance were never captured. And its reported that at least one of those persons still walks around Harlem today. Who was the man known as Malcolm X who was viciously murdered on that stage in 1965? What did he actually stand for? And why did someone, or some people deem it necessary to take his life?

There has been so much speculation about those questions over the last half century that most everyone, including people who couldn't find a book on the subject if their life depended upon it, believe they are well informed on the subject. As these head to pillow theories go, Malcolm believed strongly in the program of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam in when he was killed. According to these people, he was a broken man who was lost without his teacher - Muhammad. And, he was killed because he dared exposed Mr. Muhammad's personal affairs. Other theories concluded Malcolm was killed by the U.S. government, any number of agencies are implicated, because he was about to take the U.S. government to the World Court in Hague to charge it with crimes against humanity for its brutal treatment of Africans within the U.S.

We question specific elements of each of these theories. There is little to no evidence that Malcolm wanted back in the Nation of Islam. The actual evidence indicates he had clearly separated from their program. Even his analysis of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 provided clear proof that his perspective had broadened as his "chickens coming home to roost" analogy was correct, straight to the point, and far and away distinct from the position of the Nation of Islam who issued a condolence statement about the "loss of our president." The belief about Malcolm being killed for exposing Mr. Muhammad's bedroom activities could be partially true from the standpoint of motivating some persons involved to participate, but there is overwhelming evidence that this issue was no more than a tool used to manipulate people into performing the desires of higher powers who wanted to see Malcolm dead. Those higher persons were without question agencies within U.S. intelligence circles. So, that portion of popular theories about Malcolm's death are certainly true, but the reasons they wanted him dead is what's up for dispute.

Today, particularly when the contributions of Pan-Africanist work are being attacked and efforts are underway to attack that glorious work e.g. trying to separate our best warriors from the Pan-Africanist ideals that guided them, its more important than ever to properly portray Malcolm's legacy with the respect and dignity that it deserves.

For anyone who studies Malcolm's development, particularly those last 11 months between when he left the Nation of Islam and he was assassinated, there's actually little drama and question about the direction he was headed. He spent that time studying extensively throughout Africa and the Middle East. Much has been written about his travels in the Middle East and his work to further entrench himself into Islam as a belief structure that would represent him on an individual level. Many people who write about Malcolm's last year from this perspective attempt to suggest this focus on Islam was the driving force behind Malcolm's thinking when Malcolm's own words make it quite clear that this was not the case for him. All one has to do is study two books; "The Final Speeches of Malcolm X" and "The Last Speeches of Malcolm X." The first book is the last 10 speeches Malcolm gave in chronological order while the second book contains speeches he gave over that 11 month period. Both books contain up to 20 speeches by Malcolm during that last year of his life. If one studies his words, particularly the interviews he gave during this period. there's really little doubt of where his head was. He made it clear that he saw his Islamic development as a personal journey that he carefully utilized in his involvement in our struggle for liberation and forward progress. Malcolm spent the majority of his time as lead minister in the Nation of Islam criticizing Africans within the Christian church who permitted colonialist dominated doctrines to control how they interpreted the world. He had no intention of falling into the same trap with Islam. He said repeatedly that your religion is your personal business that should be used to bolster your commitment to freedom, not change and/or dismiss your understanding of it. In fact, you cannot find much behind that of Malcolm even discussing his religious beliefs. You can find plenty in those last speeches and other activities Malcolm was involved in to illustrate his focus on expanding the struggle of African people within the U.S. to the world arena. As Malcolm said often "the safety switch for Africans in the U.S. is Africa and the same safety switch for Africa is us within the U.S.!" Malcolm was so clear about this that one has to assume that anyone who still continues to deny it must be motivated by selfish egotistical desires to make Malcolm who they want him to be instead of who he actually was. One also has to wonder why Malcolm spoke so much about his time in Africa, but never said much of anything about his repeated visits with Kwame Nkrumah, then in Ghana, and Sekou Ture in Guinea. Even within Malcolm's recently released diary, this is still true. Malcolm certainly didn't mince words when stating how much these meetings meant to him. He cited his time with Nkrumah as "the highest honor of my life" in his autobiography. Why would he label his connection with Nkrumah with such honor while saying virtually nothing more about it? And, how was Malcolm paying for his expansive travel throughout Africa? The Middle East proponents for Malcolm's life claim Saudi Arabia was paying for his travels, but its highly unlikely that that right wing government would freely sponsor Malcolm's travels to the most radical areas of Africa at that time.

We believe the key is in what Malcolm was doing. Immediately after leaving the Nation of Islam in March of 1964, Malcolm announced the forming of Muslim Mosque Inc. for those Muslims who wanted a spiritual focus that he believed would be more "authentic" then what he felt was happening within the Nation of Islam, but Malcolm also immediately made it clear that he knew that organization would not address the needs for activism to challenge this racist capitalist system. So, immediately after his extended trip to Africa, he announced in July of that year the forming of the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU). A high school student can deduce that the fact Nkrumah founded the Organization of African Unity (OAU) the previous year, and Malcolm had just met with Nkrumah and Ture before announcing the formation of his new organization, would logically mean that he saw his new organization as an extension of Nkrumah, Ture, and other efforts to bring about Pan-Africanism. In other words, Malcolm saw his efforts as a means to connect Africans within the U.S. to the worldwide struggle for African liberation. Malcolm could have called his organization anything he wanted, but he choose OAAU for a specific reason. And his pronouncements about his growing Pan-Africanist consciousness made such a connection pretty clear. Malcolm saw his mission as building international capacity to fight against the worldwide capitalist system which he understood was the primary source preventing Africans in the U.S. and around the world from ever having freedom and independence.

The final point about why Malcolm was killed is important. This is especially true with confusion circulating today about the relevance of Pan-Africanism in 2019 and beyond. I had one person say to me, in response to an earlier piece written on this blog, that they don't have "the time to wait for Pan-Africanism." Of course, when I asked them what their immediate solution was there was radio silence. That's because there is no immediate solution to our oppression and anyone who suggests there is isn't being honest. Our solution is connected to the power of the organized mass of African people. There is absolutely way to hurry that process up beyond doing the work to build mass consciousness. Anyone involved in the work Malcolm was doing understands that. The only people who don't get it are those who aren't doing the work. Not doing the work equals not understanding what it takes.

For those who claim Pan-Africanism is ill relevant. We argue, successfully, that Malcolm was murdered specifically because of his efforts to build a Pan-Africanist building block within the belly of the capitalist beast. Had he stayed in the Nation of Islam preaching against white devils, I would argue that given good health, he would a 93 year old preacher against white devils today. His murder was linked to the almost one year to the day later illegal overthrow of the Nkrumah government by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Ghana on February 24th, 1966. Of course, our enemies made numerous efforts during that period to also assassinate Nkrumah and Ture, unsuccessfully, but the illegal toppling of Nkrumah's democratically elected government would do just fine. Its telling that one of the first things those international thugs did when stealing Ghana was close down the tire factory in Ghana which produced almost 100,000 tires annually for Ghana and other Africans through socialist development. That factory was immediately provided to Firestone Company when the coup took place. Firestone promptly closed the factory to ensure its socialist production could not continue to compete with Firestone's efforts to bleed Africa dry.

Since that time, imperialism invaded Guinea in 1970 and then assassinated Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973 in an attempt to halt efforts to overcome Portuguese colonialism and build Pan-Africanism. Then our enemies supported an illegal coup in Guinea in 1984 to topple Sekou Ture and the Democratic Party of Guinea's democratically elected government. In 1987, Thomas Sankara was assassinated to prevent clear Pan-Africanist efforts in Burkina Faso and the 2011 destruction of the Libyan Jamihiriya also represents efforts to destabilize Pan-African unity. There are many many more efforts imperialism is making to disrupt Pan-Africanist efforts including the almost 100 U.S. military installations currently operational in Africa. All of that is quite a bit of work and resources to destroy a movement, that according to Pan-Africanism destracters isn't accomplishing much. And since all of those efforts at building were all about creating bases from which to further entrench Pan-African work, including for Africans within the U.S. who have benefited from these efforts probably more than any one group of Africans anywhere, the arguments against Pan-Africanism clearly expose a serious lack of understanding of what true struggle actually looks like.

Malcolm's legacy, a glorious and shining example of Pan-African integrity, continues to shine bright. This is why on this 54th commemoration of his great sacrifice for us, Malcolm rests firmly as the symbol not just of U.S. African resistance to oppression, but worldwide African dignity and self-determination. This is why you will find more monuments and people who know of Malcolm's work throughout the international African community than you will find within the very U.S. where Malcolm was born and did his work. If you truly wish to understand Malcolm's stamp on the world today, think about that for a moment.

0 Comments

Does Kaepernick's Settlement with the NFL Sell Out the Cause?

2/16/2019

0 Comments

In recent days, former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick and current NFL safety Eric Reid settled their collusion lawsuit against the NFL. The collusion suit resulted from Kaepernick and Reid correctly believing that adverse treatment they received from the NFL was retaliation for their leadership in the national anthem protests against police terrorism. Kaepernick and Reid, when both played for the San Francisco 49ers in 2016, initiated the kneeling during the anthem and multiple players from multiple NFL teams began to engage in similar protests during the anthem every week leading through games throughout the 2018 season. During that 2016 season, Kaepernick started most of the 49ers games and performed well enough on a bad team. He completed 60% of his passes with 16 touchdowns and only four interceptions. Those aren't Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers numbers, two quarterbacks considered the best in the game, but Kaepernick's stats were far better than a number of quarterbacks currently on NFL rosters.

After the 2016 season, newly hired San Francisco General Manager John Lynch informed Kaepernick that the 49ers would not pick the last year of Kaepernick's contract, meaning the team intended to release him. Choosing to have some control over his destiny, Kaepernick decided to opt out of his contract. In other words, he quit before he was fired. Then, from March, 2017, through today, no team has offered Kaepernick a contract to play for them. At least two teams, Baltimore and Seattle, invited Kaepernick for workouts and each team expressed interest in Kaepernick playing for them, but each team also wanted assurances from him that he would not continue his national anthem protests. When Kaepernick refused to agree to discontinue the protests, the teams each decided not to offer him a contract citing concerns about "distractions" of having Kaepernick on their roster. Meanwhile, the NFL experienced significant loss in television ratings to which they decided to blame the protests. This position by the NFL was reaffirmed when the person occupying this country's presidency engaged in public criticisms against the NFL protesters, calling them "sons of b - - - - - s!" There were reports that this "president" even met with NFL owners and that an informal agreement was made that no team would sign Kaepernick. To this day, no team has signed Kaepernick despite the clear and ill refutable argument that with his career credentials as a player e.g. 71 touchdowns and only 30 interceptions, and leading his team to within five yards of a Superbowl victory in 2012 and within five yards of another trip to the Superbowl in 2013, are far more impressive than about half the quarterbacks in the NFL today.

Eric Reid's contract with San Francisco expired in 2017 and for several months he also received no offers despite being selected to the Pro Bowl, the designation applied to players who are the best at their positions. Eventually, the Carolina Panthers offered Reid a contract, despite them also questioning him about the protest. He played for them during the 2018 season, but he was subjected to at least seven so-called "random" drug tests. The NFL and the NFL Players Association, the players union, have contract language permitting the random drug tests, but someone would have to be extremely naive to believe seven drug tests during one season for the same player when most players received no drug test request was not an intentional effort to harass Reid.

So, Kaepernick and Reid filed their lawsuit claiming the NFL colluded to keep them out of the league as punishment for their leadership in the protests. By collusion, the players meant the owners of NFL teams had collectively decided to keep Kaepernick out of the league and to harass Reid.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Kapernick and Reid's lawsuit was settled with the NFL meaning a financial settlement was agreed upon to make the lawsuit go away. Its being reported that non-disclosure agreements were signed by everyone, meaning Kaepernick, Reid, their attorneys, the NFL, and anyone in the know about the terms of the settlement cannot talk about it publicly. As usual with something like this, there are going to be people who are aware of the specifics who will leak information to the media without being named. In this case, its being reported that Kaepernick will receive as much as $80 million as a settlement (it hasn't been made clear what amount Reid was offered) and that Kaepernick, because he's still out of the NFL, signed an exclusion agreement, meaning he cannot play for another NFL team ever again.

All of this has raised discussion within activist circles as to whether Kaepernick and Reid, by settling, have sold out their principled position of maintaining the protests. Some are arguing that after the players held their posture despite intense pressure by their employers, the government, and a large segment of the population, particularly the mostly European (white) NFL fan audience, to settle now sends the message that the protest was only about money and once the right dollar amount was provided, the principles of the movement became subordinate to the dollar amount being offered. Others point to the alleged exclusion agreement and non-disclosure agreements. Despite the reality that these types of agreements are standard in U.S. labor dispute lawsuits, the position of those raising the question is that by not being able to continue to talk about the collusion and by not pursuing future employment as an NFL quarterback, the credibility of the NFL protests have been effectively muted.

On the other side, people, particularly those within the African community, are arguing that Kaepernick was denied income by the collusion efforts of NFL owners and so consequently, he had the right to recoup that lost income. Many of these people saw the protests through the vision of Kaepernick getting another job in the NFL. To them, him being able to do that would be a victory, but him winning a financial settlement is equally as victorious.

Since I've written much about this situation since it evolved two years ago and Kaepernick's own site has posted articles I've written here on the subject, I'll weigh in to say the largest issues with all of this are not even being widely discussed. The first issue is those of us in the activist community in general, and the African activist community in particular, must reach a level of political sophistication where we recognize that celebrities, no matter how brilliant, how articulate, and how cute, cannot be the spokespersons for our movements, unless they are a part of organizations working for justice. The reason this is important because people who are not active in social justice organizations e.g. those who are out front primarily because of their celebrity status, not their organizational principles, are much more likely to take varying and inconsistent turns in their "activism." The reason is they are not subject to organizational discipline. An example here is Muhammad Ali. When he took his principled stand against the Vietnam War in the 60s, he was not acting based on his individual celebrity status as the boxing champion of the world. Certainly the celebrity status helps in getting attention, which we want in our movements, but Ali was always acting as a foot soldier in the Nation of Islam. As a result, he had a firm ideological foundation for the position he took. It was never necessary for him to waver in any way. Kaepernick didn't have that same type of organizational foundation so when he first sat during the anthem we had to see him go through the worthless change of kneeling because it shows respect for the military. This is a contradiction in so many ways because the U.S. military performs the same terrorism against citizens of the planet that the police perform against citizens. Both represent the same power structures. Both are committed to upholding the same capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal values and principles. With a strong organizational foundation, like Ali had, Kaepernick may have had the understanding to work through that hiccup. He also may have had the direction to have a strategy for his settlement that would have permitted him and/or the spokespersons of his choice, to continue to use the NFL as the successful platform against these injustices after his settlement. The settlement confirms that the NFL is wrong. Its racist and regardless of how much players are paid, the league's handling of the protests smacks of the old slave/master relationship that is so much a part of the legacy of this country while still being one of the most misunderstood relationships in this country. And, by extension, the federal and state governments, etc., who have played along and/or contributed to harassing Kaepernick and Reid need to continue to be exposed for their behavior. A strong organizational basis could have provided the strategy to ensure these necessary things continue to happen. That foundation could also provide strategic direction on how to frame the settlement so that it doesn't come off as a compromise to the principles of the protests.

Kaepernick has been a professional sports role model with how he used his earned finances, despite being unemployed, to fund worthy movement work everywhere from Black Lives Matter projects in multiple locations to children's schools in Somalia, to Indigenous people's struggles throughout the U.S. I see no reason to believe he won't continue to use his newly acquired resources to continue that good work. Still, at this stage in our struggle, there are countless efforts being made by Kaepernick, LeBron James, Marshawn Lynch, and other professional athletes to address oppression. There are even more similar, and even better efforts made every day by every day people with no resources, only the desire and commitment to see positive change take place. The weakness of this work, of which I have contributed much over the years, is our inability to spread our message to the masses of people in a way that they can understand and claim the work for their own. This is the pathway to mass movements, but this next step requires us to abandon this individualistic celebrity interpretation of how change takes place.

So, I don't believe the settlement on its own is a sell out. I think the shortcoming we have is our inability to understand and recognize that power conceived is the power of the organized masses. There is no individual athlete, singer, rapper, actor, author, who is going to liberate our people. There is no group of these people who can do this. Only the masses of our people can being about our liberation and the pathway to that happening is getting our people involved in organizations. This is even more difficult to accomplish today because social media has made everyone who has access to a computer an instant expert on world affairs.

Our failure, which we can and will correct, is us not recognizing how the changes we desire will actually need to take place and the importance and necessity for everyone of us to play a role in that process.

0 Comments

Debunking the Myth that Africans Outside U.S. Have Not Helped Us

2/14/2019

3 Comments

I wrote/posted an article yesterday challenging the merits of the so-called "American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS)" movement. In response, a sister stated that Africans born outside of the U.S. have never done anything to help Africans within the U.S. Her reference point was petti-bourgeoisie Africans from the continent who come to the U.S. I responded that many Africans born within the U.S. turn their backs on our people also so that is an issue of class struggle within our communities, not a factor based on where we are born.

I do thank her for her point because it illustrates just how uneducated we are about our collective African history. And, as I pointed out in the last piece, this is the engine that drives a miss-information campaign like ADOS. So, in our continuing effort to bring ideological struggle to our people around issues like this, I'm writing this piece to specifically refute the allegation that Africans outside the U.S. have done little to nothing to benefit the struggle for liberation being waged by Africans born within the U.S. My reference point is of course heavily influenced by the last 35 years spent as an organizer for the Pan-Africanist All African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). That's central to this discussion because as a member of this organization I have been recruited by, have recruited, and have worked with Africans born in every part of the world. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azania (South Africa), Zimbabwe, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroons, Somalia, Jamaica, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, you name it. I've shared space, organizing experiences, food, and life with all sectors of our African family. I've also spent those 35 years actively participating in the A-APRP's work study circle process. This experience has permitted me to study our history as African people widely and consistently. It was this process that exposed me to the level of struggle our people have waged, together, to be free, all over the world. That's why I know of many, many, contributions Africans outside of the U.S. have made to advance our struggle even within this country. I write this piece because in this ongoing battle over ideas, I'm hopeful some of the people, like the good and well meaning sister who responded yesterday, can benefit from the type of Pan-African perspectives I would humbly suggest she and those who agree with ADOS are lacking in their tools of analysis.

First, I'd like to say I feel like an entire piece on the various revolts/slave revolts that took place, many successfully, in Africa to prevent us from being kidnapped, should be written (most of you saw the movie Amistad, what do you think that was?), and I think the very next follow up piece to this one will be a specific focus on that much needed research. For this piece, the focus will be on the last 100 years because there is actually so much to say about this that one piece could never do the subject justice.

Let's start with Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Founded in Jamaica in 1915 where he was born , Garvey moved in New York in hopes of connecting with his mentor Booker T. Washington, only to realize Washington had died just before Garvey arrived to the states. By 1924, the UNIA has an estimated three to six million members. Their newspaper, the "Negro World" was printed and distributed in 33 countries in English, French, and Spanish, the primary colonial languages (along with Portuguese) spoken by Africans kidnapped into slavery and colonialism. By 1927, due in large part to the sabotage of the U.S. government, the UNIA was in serious decline, but their influence in the African communities in the U.S. can never be questioned and the major role Africans in the Caribbean played in moving the UNIA program must also be highly noted. In fact, it is fair to say there would be no Nation of Islam within the U.S. without the influence of the UNIA. Most credible historical sources indicate Elijah Muhammad, the patriarch of the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975 was an early member of the UNIA. Anyone who studies our people's histories can see the similarities between the program and ideas of the UNIA and the Nation of Islam. The influence of Caribbean born Africans like Marcus and Amy Jacque Garvey on the African struggle within the U.S. is forever cemented in our legacy of resistance.

Moving to 1945, the landmark 5th Pan-African Congress (5th PAC) meeting occurred in Manchester, England. The convener and organizer for that historic meeting was Kwame Nkrumah, then a young activist/student from Ghana. Nkrumah made W.E.B. DuBois the symbolic head of that historic meeting which constituted more honor for DuBois than he ever received here within the U.S., even from Africans born and raised here, many of whom helped chase DuBois out of the U.S. for good in the late 50s. 5th PAC was attended by African revolutionaries from every corner of the Earth and it produced the definition for Pan-Africanism; one, unified, socialist Africa, as the solution to the problems impacting Africans everywhere. Its important to say here that Pan-Africanism was never about helping neo-colonial countries as the ADOS talking heads often suggest. Pan-Africanism is about destroying imperialism, including all the puppet regimes that serve imperialism in Africa today. It's about creating a worldwide force of Africans everywhere who are committed to liberating Africa as our natural, historical, and correct land base as African people. This of course cannot resonate with anyone who is fixated on fitting into the master's capitalist system which has demonstrated it will never reform enough to address the oppression it metes out against our people daily. As was previously stated, this is a class struggle issue within the African community, not an issue based solely on where we are born.

5th PAC was overwhelming significant because of its call for African liberation movements to produce mass parties to overturn colonialism. This is important because 5th PAC was a major factor in launching the African independence movement and that movement was pivotal in influencing the launching of the African civil rights movement within the U.S. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says so himself after he was invited and attended the 1957 independence celebration in Ghana. It was there that he developed a relationship with Kwame Nkrumah, Ghan'as first president. And, Nkrumah became a quiet mentor to King until the latter's assassination in 1968. Ghana's independence also marked Nkrumah's call for Ghana to become the base for worldwide African liberation. He called for Africans everywhere to come to Ghana to help build and sustain that base and many answered his call. Dr. DuBois and his wife Shirley Graham went and became advisors to Nkrumah. Both are buried there in the DuBois Center today. Another fitting tribute to both Pan-Africanists that has never been equaled here in the U.S. despite DuBois's work to found the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

This groundswell continued into the 60s. The newly independent Guinea, under the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) and Sekou Ture invited a delegation from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to visit Guinea in 1964. When SNCC organizers like Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer came back to the U.S. their communications about what they saw in the newly independent and proud Guinea reverberated with the SNCC activists. This development certainly contributed widely to influencing SNCC's militant push away from integration and towards the call SNCC made for Black power in June of 1966 in Mississippi. The person who made that call was Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, the then chair of SNCC. Ture became the poster child for the U.S. Black power movement e.g. its chief voice. Of course, Ture himself wasn't even born within the U.S. He immigrated here at 10 years old from Trinidad in the Caribbean. He followed a long list of Trinidad born activists who played significant roles in the U.S. African movement, either directly or through ideological contributions. Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, to name a few.

The Black power movement in the U.S. of course made major inroads to opening up the struggle to women's liberation, LGBTQ, and able body challenged movements. Clearly, Africans from outside of the U.S. played major roles in this struggle. This cannot be questioned by anyone. This is especially true because it can be easily argued that the African civil rights and Black power movements would have looked drastically different, if they would have happened at all, without the heavy influence of the African independence movements. The Land and Freedom Movement (better known as the Mau Mau) in Kenya, heavily influenced armed defense advocates within the U.S. like Robert Williams and Malcolm X. And Kwame Nkrumah's essay on "The Spector of Black Power" written in 1968 at the height of urban resistance within U.S. cities was considered a blueprint by African activists within the U.S. at that time. Another clear example of this can be seen just by looking at SNCC and Kwame Ture's contributions. That delegation trip to Guinea was organized by Caribbean born entertainer Harry Belafonte. Belafonte, along with Caribbean born Sidney Poitier, did much to contribute to our movements here in the U.S. Poitier and his first wife Juanita even provided housing for Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and their six daughters after Malcolm's assassination. As for Kwame Ture, this Caribbean born African went to prison dozens of times in the U.S. Almost 30 times, fighting for African liberation in the Southern U.S. As was already stated, the contributions of him and others are directly responsible for many of the gains enjoyed today by people who would deny his contributions. Many of these people probably wouldn't risk a moment in jail for our people while Brother Ture, at the tender age of 24, permitted himself to become the national spokesperson for the movement and people of a country he was not even born in.

During those same 1960s, Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, was declaring that African blood runs through the veins of every Cuban. Today, we know Cuba is roughly about 70% African or Black. Our people are the primary benefactors of the gains of the Cuban Revolution of which there are many. And Cuba, understanding its links to Africans everywhere as Castro declared, has always seen its role as that of providing support to the African liberation movement. That included Cuba sending almost half a million troops to Southern Africa in the 80s to stop the attempt by the same U.S. government many Africans today wish to integrate into, to support the racist apartheid regime's efforts to expand its racist policies throughout all of Southern Africa. Cuba also provided refuge for many Africans fighting in the U.S. First, it was Robert Williams, fleeing from illegal charges being leveled against him when he was president of the Monroe, North Carolina, U.S. chapter of the NAACP in 1957. Then, it was Eldridge Cleaver, the troubled Black Panther Party leader who sought refuge in Cuba. Then, the equally troubled Huey Newton for three years in the 70s. Assata Shakur, the legendary Black Panther and Black Liberation Army leader was fortunately able to escape a U.S. prison and has been free in Cuba for over 30 years. Nehanda Abodin, another U.S. African freedom fighter, just recently made her physical transition while living in peace in Cuba. There are many, many others there as well. If one thinks about this, its really an embarrassment that despite all the resources that have been won for African people in the U.S. directly because of the struggles these people named have waged, the African community within the U.S. is not even remotely organized to provide support for these warriors while the African national income in the U.S. rivals that of Cuba's entire gross national product. Yet, this small island nation has done more for our freedom fighters than any of us here in the U.S. screaming about our rights.

In 1985, Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader from North Africa, was invited to speak to the Nation of Islam's annual Savior's Day commemoration in Chicago, Ill, U.S., via closed circuit television. Qaddafi calmly and resolutely urged all Africans in the U.S. serving in the U.S. military to immediately abandon their posts. He advised that his government would provide training and arms to U.S. Africans to permit them to overthrow this backward government. Whether you believe his offer to be possible or insane is not the point. What is relevant is its hard for me to imagine any greater example of commitment and dedication to helping our struggle than the offer Qaddafi made that was viewed by millions of people around the world.

Today, many Africans within the U.S. rely on the writings and speeches of freedom fighters like Malcolm and the Black Panther Party. There's no argument that much of what all of those strugglers learned was picked up from Africans not born in this country. Nkrumah, Ture, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and many, many others like Cheikh Anta Diop and Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, all of whom were born in other countries, have provided much of the ideological foundation for liberation seekers of African descent within the U.S.

Even the Black Lives Matter movement owes much of its initial thrust to an African not born within the U.S. Opal Tometi, one of the three African women who gave this movement its life, has Nigerian roots from West Africa and thank goodness she does. Maybe she was able to contribute to a much needed international perspective on police terrorism that the Black Lives Matter movement has always been able to articulate. Police terrorism is a thing for African people not just in the U.S., but all throughout Europe - Britain, France, Germany, etc. Also in Australia, and in occupied Palestine, better known as Israel. The question people genuinely concerned about our people's progress have to ask themselves is why is this state terrorism against us an international phenomenon? The answer will help you understand why our struggles are organically and historically linked in a way no fly by night movement will ever be able to disrupt.

And correct education requires that we immediately challenge this often repeated missive from the ADOS camp that the Pan-African movement has relied on Africans from the U.S. to do all of the work. There's no question, and plenty of examples have been provided just in this piece, to illustrate that the Pan-Africanist movement for one unified socialist Africa has had clear and unquestionable leadership from Africa as it should be. I've been able to grow as a Pan-Africanist activist myself based on the wisdom and support I've received from comrades all over the African world. Anyone who says Africans outside of Africa don't work for Pan-Africanism need to study up on the great work being done for Pan-Africanism by organizations like the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), Pan-African Union of Sierra Leone (PANAFU), Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO), Amilcar Cabral Ideological Institute of Nigeria, etc. These organizations are in the forefront of the best Pan-Africanist work taking place in the world today. I know this because I have interacted with those comrades on the ground for years, in Africa and within the U.S. I would encourage people to investigate this work because its central to what the A-APRP is doing for Pan-Africanism, but that's another article at another time. What's important for now is that we take every opportunity to challenge this notion that Africans within the U.S. are a separate breed of struggle than the rest of our African family. This approach is dangerous because it does the work of our enemies by dividing us when every indication confirms that our best opportunity for justice is unity for African people everywhere. But then, maybe the issue here with ADOS is the liberation examples I gave in this piece (of which I can provide many, many, more) are all connected to our independent struggle to gain self-determination e.g. destroying capitalism and bringing about revolutionary change for our people. Nothing about what ADOS is talking about suggests they wish to travel down this road. And, that gets us back to my initial point that this issue is one of class struggle, not where we as Africans are born. The real gauge we need to be looking at is what these people want for our people. What they want for themselves. This struggle isn't one of where our people come from. We have provided ample proof that our people struggle for the same freedom everywhere we are meaning if Africans come here they do the same thing here. The disconnect must be what we are fighting for, not where the fighters came from. ADOS wants inclusion into the capitalist system here in the U.S. And, they feel our other outside U.S. African families, many of who helped break down barriers for us here, somehow represent competition with us born here for resources. This is the same scarcity argument capitalism has used for centuries to keep people divided and unfocused on the source of all our problems - capitalism. We are not disillusioned about what direction we need to go in and we will continue to point out these types of contradictions from those who apparently are.

Finally, to end on an extremely positive note, we point to the many tributes to Africans in the U.S. that exist throughout Africa. And here, I'm only talking about the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's the aforementioned DuBois Center in central Accra, Ghana, where W.E.B. DuBois's actual library of work is housed. Such a fitting tribute to Dr. DuBois, and his wife Shirley Graham. There are also other tributes to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X throughout Ghana. In Cape Coast, Ghana, there are two slave dungeons. The Cape Coast dungeons and Elmira. In Senegal, there's the Goree Island slave dungeons. These horrible places all have tributes to us Africans lost in the middle passage. These tributes have been honored by continental Africans for decades, but it was U.S. born Africans who attempted to disrespect these sacred places. Essence Magazine, believe it or not, actually planned a jazz festival at Elmira before someone got sense enough to mobilize a campaign to halt that from happening. In Sierra Leone, a youth center/school in Freetown is named after U.S. born Pan-Africanist and long time A-APRP organizer (and All African Women's Revolutionary Union leader) Mawina Kouyate. Sister Mawina made Manhattan in New York City her organizing base for many years, but you won't find any tribute to her there. Instead, besides the youth center in Freetown, there is the wonderful gravesite for Sister Mawina that shines bright in Gambia, just outside the capitol city of Banjul. And then all throughout Africa you can see everyday tributes to Africans born within the U.S. In Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and Accra, Ghana, I've seen barbershops galore adorned with the likenesses of U.S. Africans public figures like hip/hop moguls P Diddy, Jay Z, and Ice Cube. Basketball players Michael Jordan, Grant Hill, etc. On beauty shops in those same places there are huge images of Jennifer Hudson and Rhianna. In Dakar, Senegal, posters of Beyonce can be found everywhere. You can see most of those images in the slideshow on the first page of this site. On the flipside, most Africans within the U.S. would be challenged to name a single celebrity in Africa if you take hip/hop star Akon out of the mix.

All of these examples of Africans outside of Africa who have not only struggled for our liberation here in the U.S., but honor us everyday in every way possible are available for all to see when most of us don't even know they exist. If you are a believer in any of this ADOS nonsense, you owe your people at least an honest effort to address the severe knowledge gap that exists with their talking points. Africans in the U.S. are not a separate tribe of Africans. We are the result of the savage slave trade and colonial domination of Africa. Our culture is still African culture which guides us in seeking our dignity. And, the same reality exists for other Africans throughout the diaspora as well as those on the continent. The evidence of all of this is ill refutable. So, those who follow ADOS, please stop using your random individualistic encounters with the most backward Africans from the continent to justify your dysfunctional and uninformed interpretation of what our people from other parts of the world are doing. Please stop that. You know as well as any of us that there are positive Africans in the U.S. and there are negative ones. You come across each variety every day like each and every one of us. So, clearly you can deduce that the same reality exists with Africans everywhere else. The problem is most of us in the U.S. know we don't know much of anything about the world outside of our individual experiences. And, this is by design. Its not your fault, but now that you know there is a deficiency, it is your responsibility to correct it. Please get to work! As for the leaders of ADOS, that last message is doubtfully for you. There's absolutely no way anyone talking about this stuff as long as you have is confused about the points raised in this and the previous piece. Your position is crafted to misinform. That's a crime against our people and humanity, but we will confront you at every turn and we have complete faith in our people to eventually figure out this sham for themselves.

3 Comments

Yvette Carnell, "Black Nativists; African Intelligentsia is to Blame

2/13/2019

3 Comments

Back in 2007, FOX News (for folks in Africa, etc., its a U.S. right wing propaganda news channel) show "Hannity and Colmes" aired a segment featuring someone identified as Ted Hayes. This person was presented as a "right wing street activist in Los Angeles, California, U.S." with a group called "Choose Black America." On that show, Hayes presented his group as a foremost organization in African political thought throughout the U.S. as it relates to their position against Indigenous (or what you probably call Latino) immigration into this country. Of course, FOX News in general, and their Sean Hannity in particular, couldn't identify the truth if it slapped them across the face. So, it shouldn't surprise anyone in the know that this show went on to lift this person and his group up as a legitimate voice in national discourse around immigration in this country. The truth is this so-called "Choose Black America" was really a front group formed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a European dominated and led organization that has pushed against immigration for brown people for years.

Fast forward to 2019 where FOX News persons like Ann Coulter, another individual who couldn't spell the word truth correctly if doing so would win her $20 billion, are endorsing a new and improved version of "Choose Black America." These individuals known as Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore have emerged as the spokespersons for groups like "Descendants of American Slaves" or ADOS. These people have plenty of videos and commentary on platforms like youtube if you are not familiar and/or want to further investigate. Their basic premise is that we as African people born within the U.S., are not really African. We have no real connection to Africa in a political sense. Their position is that our best bet for salvation is to rally our wagons around America e.g. protecting this country from foreign invasion, particularly from the worldwide masses of brown people (primarily Indigenous peoples from Central, South America, and the Caribbean) who are attempting (in their thinking) to take over this country. Their belief is these people are a threat to our ability as African people within the U.S. to have access to resources that are due to us and so it is within our interests to adopt the xenophobic immigration point of view of the right wing in this country. The other even more absurd position from these people is that we Africans within the U.S. should also separate ourselves from other Africans, not just within Africa, but within the Western Hemisphere. They believe that we have no concrete connection to our African family members in the Caribbean, Central, South America, Canada, etc. Instead, they advance a position that the concept of uniting all African people e.g. Pan-Africanism, is a utopia concept not based in reality. They see us wrapping ourselves in the American flag and pledging our commitment to uplifting this U.S. country as the key to our salvation. To them, we are not Africans. We are American blacks. American citizens. They believe we have more in common with racist white trump voters than our own African family members born outside the U.S.

The insanity of the positions ADOS and others are articulating is beyond comprehension. First, its absolutely impossible to separate Africans born in the U.S. from Africans in other places. Due to the nature of the transatlantic slave trade, the people who kidnapped our ancestors grabbed Africans by the boatloads and shipped us over to the Western Hemisphere. This process caused Ibo to instantly link with Wolof, Mandinka, Fulani, Akan, Hausa, Yoruba, Mende, etc. The many, many slave revolts that occurred from the African interior to the shores of Africa to the slave ships to the Western hemisphere are full of evidence of Africans uniting across tribal lines to fight our oppression. This is proven from slave revolts in Angola, Ghana, to slave ship rebellions like Amistad to the highly successful Maroon rebellions within the Western Hemisphere. Even for Africans within the U.S. today, the proof of this is in the pudding. You don't even know what tribe you come from because we have been forced to unite and blend together. The point is its historically ill-refutable from a scientific standpoint for us to know if we are biologically related to Africans in the Caribbean, Central, South America, etc. Slave masters took mothers on ships headed for the Caribbean. Fathers on ships headed for South America. And children on ships headed for North America. Even the slightest study of our history confirms this. So, just from a simply philosophical standpoint, arguing that we are not the same people based solely on the plantation the slave master took us to is incredibly naive and absurd, not to mention the height of white supremacy. Then, from a political standpoint, that position doesn't hold any weight. Since our enemies weakened us by separating us as they have done, common sense would tell us that the best way to solve our problems are for us to unite. Our separation has weakened Africa. It has forced us to become the labor that has developed and sustained the entire Western Hemisphere, including the U.S. Our existence in these Western lands has done nothing to develop our position as a people because that's not the reason we were brought here. And, since the entire economy of the U.S. has been built and sustained on exploiting Africa, any effort by Africans within the U.S. to attempt to build on the U.S. wealth model, which is what these people are suggesting we focus our attention on doing, only contributes to the oppression of Africans everywhere. Here is an example of that. Currently, a large block of those so-called "immigrants" attempting to gain political asylum within the U.S. are people from the Central American country of Honduras. Unknown to most Africans within the U.S., there are Africans in Honduras, just like there Africans in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Panama, etc. Those Africans got to those countries the same way Africans in the U.S. got here, by being dropped off in chains on slave ships. People within the U.S., including now many of us Africans, react emotionally to this immigration question without having any comprehensive study on the question e.g. what is it that's making folks from countries like Honduras feel like they have to come to the U.S.? Why is their country unstable? You could accept the racist notion that their instability results from their inability to govern themselves, or you could look deeper. If you do, you will find that the current basis of their instability results from efforts the U.S. made to destabilize Honduras. In 2009, the U.S. directed/assisted in the coup d'etat of the government of Manuel Zelaya by forcing the Honduran military to oust him. Zelaya was in the process of leading the effort to have a referendum on the Honduran constitution. The Honduran elite, led by U.S. imperialism, wanted nothing to do with this effort to potentially open up Honduran politics to the input of the masses of Honduran people, so they drove Zelaya out of the country which created a whirlwind of instability and repression against people. As a result, people sought to leave and seek out safety for their families which is exactly what you would do if you were in their same position. The point here is these ADOS people, by virtue of taking a position against these people from Honduras, many of whom are descendants of slavery like us in the U.S., are participating in the further oppression of our family members from that country. Think about how insane all of this is. Honduras is in Central America which means if you accept the strange identity of "African American" that makes Africans from Honduras as much "African Americans" as anyone in the U.S. In other words, they are as much "American Descendants of Slavery" as the Africans advocating for our separation from them. Mind boggling.

Another point is these ADOS people reject Pan-Africanism because they claim Pan-Africanism hasn't done anything concrete to advance our people. Pure ignorance and I would challenge these people to tell us one book they have read on Pan-Africanism. The U.S. government has a 500+ year history of systematically destroying African people all over the world, especially within the U.S. At no point of our existence in this backward country has this government done anything except terrorize and disrespect us. Even a complete idiot should be able to see that the fact there are billions of Africans living and existing outside of the U.S. is a core reason why these terrorists haven't attempted to completely wipe those of us here out by now. Malcolm X's work exposing the racist nature of the U.S. government to the international community is solid proof of that. Bolstered and completely supported and encouraged by his mentors e.g. Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, etc., Malcolm stormed throughout Africa doing the work of African unity. The results of his work were the confident voices of newly independent African countries and organizations who boldly asserted their dissatisfaction against the racist treatment of Africans within the U.S. by this government. Declassified Central Intelligence Agency files clearly demonstrate how concerned state department official were here about this. The wealth of this country is completely reliant on cheap African mineral resources and labor. This government was paying close attention when Malcolm influences came to bear at United Nations sessions just as they were strongly taken aback when the delegation of the Democratic Party of Guinea, led by Sekou Ture, raised racism within the U.S. during their state visit to the U.S. in 1959 soon after becoming an independent country. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the racist Johnson presidential administration each acknowledged the environment of African liberation around the world as a key factor in influencing the advancement of the 1964 civil rights law within the U.S.

We are actively involved in Pan-Africanist work so we can go on and on giving strong examples of how the work for African unity has helped our people everywhere, and we are really just getting started with that work. The problem is most people, especially our African people, know nothing of this critical movement and that is a problem that has opened the door for political opportunists like ADOS to step through. And, the blame for this sits squarely on the shoulders of the African intelligentsia within the U.S. It was only a very short time ago that we had basically no intelligentsia. Education was not available to us. Our movements within this country have always centered education as a central component of what we are fighting for. And the masses of our people getting their heads busted in, getting arrested, getting shot and killed, for our liberation had no inclination of gaining education themselves. They made the sacrifices they made because they knew we as a people needed education. Fast forward to 2019 and the vast majority of our people who have benefited from that struggle have completely missed the point. They see their educational achievements, won for them by our people, not their individual academic skills, as their individualistic passport to fame and fortune. They completely reject the reality that people fought for them to have access so they could get education and use those educational skills to provide resources for the masses of our people to liberate us from this capitalist hell we have experienced for 500+ years. And, since our movement is weak, we haven't had the ability to hold our people accountable to us. As a result, instead of using these communication, technology, historical, linguistic, journalistic, economic, social science, hard science, skills for our people's advancement, these skills are focused on individual advancement. In fact, for most folks, the entire world is viewed through the capitalist lense of individualistic advancement. Meanwhile, the lack of intellectual discourse, created by this vacuum of our intelligentsia using their intellect to challenge the anti-Africa(n) basis of this society, opens up spaces for backward thinking like that imposed by the ADOS forces, to creep in and take hold.

Franz Fanon has the often repeated quote about each generation having a mission that they will either carry out or reject. I always think of the African intelligentsia in the U.S. when I hear that quote. The failure of this group to carry out our historic mission has created a reality where most of our people rely on individualistic perceptions and emotional reaction to form our "analysis" on the day's events. This sad reality has created a firestorm of opportunity for these reactionary elements to come in talking about how we have to save ourselves and embrace the rich wealth of uncle sam in order to do it. The fact our people don't know history creates anger at our conditions. So, when these opportunists come in and tell our people that much of their suffering is due to our family members from other countries, not the capitalists who steal everything from us, many of us are not equipped to defray this backward "analysis."

Here is a call for us to correct this injustice. African people are a people of courage, honesty, and integrity. This decadent society has taken everything from us, but our strength - that thing that makes so many people want to be like us - has been our ability to hold onto those values despite the terror being inflicted against us. We can't let this system use remote controlled negroes as a means to steal our very cultural integrity away from us. This is a call for the African intelligentsia to fulfill your mission. Make the correct decision to reject capitalism and all its traps and start using your vast skills to provide analysis for our people. We are Africans. No matter where we are on Earth this is true. And, no matter where we are, the strengthening, liberation, and unification of Africa under one continental socialist government is the prize for our people everywhere. Anyone advocating that we unite with the enemies of humanity to uphold the immorality of U.S. capitalism is actually wanting to create a place holder for their individualistic advancement within the capitalist system. Every African on Earth is a part of one movement we have as a people to gain freedom and liberation for our people. And, anyone suggesting we take any positions against the Indigenous people's of the Western Hemisphere in any way, is either the enemy or unwittingly doing their work for them. And by Indigenous we mean Native, Mexican, Honduran, El Salvador, etc. Regardless of whatever individual experiences you think you may have with those people, common sense should tell you they have the same enemies that we do so guess what? It makes sense that we unite.

Youtube and these other platforms are full of African con people who prey on the desperation of our people. And at the end of their pitch there's no relief from our suffering. Only opportunities for them as individuals. I mentioned earlier that these people do the work of white supremacy. What I meant is if you think about the position they are advancing, they really believe we are incapable of overcoming capitalism. They believe we can't win against the capitalist so they surmise if we can't beat them, we should join them. Only a people who accept white supremacy's analysis of us could accept this position. Only someone who has no faith in our people. Any proud African can never speak such defeatist language against the spirit of our ancestors who didn't possess the cowardice of these people.

We definitely need more discourse around these issues. We need as many people as possible to raise this discussion in every corner of the African world. I'm confident that our people, once exposed to the truths within these discussions will decide on their own to accept the truth of our Pan-African reality. Our job is to stir the pot. This is a call to do this. We have to raise the bar and stop making things so easy for career opportunists like this Carnell and Moore persons to exploit the suffering of our people.

3 Comments

Using Anti-Africa Scarcity to Manipulate Us in Favor of Capitalism

2/9/2019

0 Comments

The advent of the internet and social media is indeed a wonderful thing. We can communicate with anyone around the world in real time. We can share information and experiences at a rate that would have taken us weeks to accomplish just 50 years ago. There are also real shortcomings with this technology. Part of the problem isn't the fault of the technology itself. Western capitalist societies place priority on profit. Get money. Get it anyway you can at all times. Make getting money your most important mission in life. The constant propagation of this primitive concept has done a lot to stunt the intellectual capacity of people and this phenomenon has created challenges with social media. Information today comes at us at an unprecedented rate. Since this technological advancement is fueled by the most individualistic philosophical foundation, the type of political sophistication that can only come from collective nurturing and development doesn't exist most of the time. Consequently, this mass barrage of information overwhelms society. Most of us have absolutely no analytical tools at our disposal. We cannot decipher the difference between a well researched and balanced piece of analysis from something someone jumped on the toilet to write. The only assessment tool so many people are working with is how things make them feel. Analysis has become defined by everyone's subjective individualistic experiences. This problem has become so pronounced that most of the time, nobody is even calling for analytical information to challenge most of the points being bandied about as analysis today.

The above reality complimented by an African people in the Western Hemisphere who suffer from the overwhelming trauma of a historical experience where we were violently divorced from our material reality and historical/cultural circumstances. We find ourselves in these foreign societies, speaking foreign languages (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), worshiping Europeanized versions of the spiritual foundations our culture created. Our entire existence is dehumanized within this reality. We are taught 24/7 that we are flawed and inferior. We have been bombarded with propaganda that says Africa is a wasteland with no development or potential. With this experience impacting us, no one should wonder why Africans in the Caribbean clamor to separate themselves from Africa. It should be no surprise that some Africans would find it necessary within the U.S. to work overtime to create a mythical caricature of our history.

Those things are understandable and certainly, as time marches on and our people continue to gain consciousness about who we actually are (Africans) what has happened to us, and, contrary to the lies imperialism tells us, we always fought back. Once we overcome their nonsense we will undoubtedly come to a collective place of understanding what needs to happen in order to ensure our future salvation as a people e.g Pan-Africanism. So, we will march forward beyond these problems.

What constitutes the most disgraceful and heinous parts of this confusion are the roles played by class and nation traitors of African liberation who use our suffering and confusion to position themselves to capitalize - financially - on our suffering and disorganization. I'm talking about the myriad of internet hustlers and con people who have created these false movements. The so-called American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS - come on, any movement endorsed by the likes of that slimy Ann Coulter cannot possibly be good for African people) movement who claim our salvation isn't in any way connected to Africa. Or some of the others who are talking about we never came from Africa. These "we have been here thousands of years and have no actual connection to Africa and other Africans people". I'm talking about "the best chance African people in the U.S. have to survive is to fend for ourselves" disregarding the historical necessity that we unite wherever African people are with clear focus on liberating our mother - Africa - as a central element of any movements we build. For this element, our people are simply a means to an end. The end being money in their pockets. They don't like Africa because they see Africa as the loser and the capitalist countries, led of course by uncle sam, as the winners. These losers want nothing more than to identify with their winners so Africa to them is off the table and capitalism is the unquestionable solution to their upmost objectives.

These people are offering our people tall containers of confusion. The way they do it is very similar to how the capitalist/imperialist class does it. The similarities in approach shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. These sellout hustler Africans have everything in common with the international bourgeoisie. In fact, they secretly aspire to become integrated into the power bases of the enemies of humanity.

The shaky foundation of their argument is that we should reject looking at Africa as a part of any solution affecting us because of Africa's current state of oppression and suffering. To these people, the concept of us defeating the forces oppressing us is "unrealistic." These people see things this way because they secretly have no faith in our people's ability to overcome the obstacles derailing us. Since they have no faith in Africa, which means they can never have any faith in Africans, their solution is we instead focus our attention on attempting to wrest free a small portion of the power structure for our usage. This insane philosophy is steeped in the defeatist ideology that Africa doesn't have the capacity to liberate us and that the only viable solution to any problem we have is always going to be going back to the same capitalist system that is responsible for all our suffering. And, since this entire "analysis" is rooted in this mythical scarcity theory regarding Africa, these folks engage in zero study of our history and they rely on you doing the same.

Here's an example of the deception they use. I watched a youtube video recently where one of these two bit card game hustlers was arguing that the late Dr. Ivan Van Sertima was arguing in his classic book "They Came before Columbus" that African people were in the Western Hemisphere in mass numbers thousands of years ago. Millions of us were here this idiot was claiming. I watched as long as I could, but before I logged off I noticed the passion in the comments section agreeing with this absolute nonsense. People received that ridiculous video as some sort of reckoning. The head shaking element about this is there are plenty of actual videos also on youtube of Dr. Van Sertima himself talking about his position on the matter in clear terms. His presentations, as well as his books, make it quite clear that his main thesis in all his work was that we are African people who descend from Africa. Some of us descend more recently due to colonialism and neo-colonialism conditions. Others a little less recently due to the slave trade. Some of us thousands of years ago due to geographical migration e.g. the Aboriginals in Australia or the Dalat in India. Regardless, Van Sertima is unwavering clear about this. Another example are these pseudo intellectual negros running around here scaring our people with nonsense about the need for us to solidify our connection to the capitalist system, regardless of how much us doing so steps on the freedom and aspiration of the rest of our people outside of the U.S. (and the masses of us within the U.S) and the rest of humanity. These savages make the argument that if you are in a burning building you have every right and responsibility to save yourself and say to hell with whomever else is going to die, despite the fact you were well positioned to save people. Carve out your piece of capitalism and get on board with the master's system. That's the best these scum can come up with.

As has been stated, proven, and substantiated so many times throughout this blog's history, capitalism evolved from the exploitation of Africa and African people, among others. Its the system that established such an exploitative machinery that there's absolutely no way any reasonable person can effectively argue that the salvation for any of us can be found in the horrible system. Every car we drive is built on exploiting Africa. Every chocolate bar we eat. Every piece of diamond and gold jewelry we wear. Every cell phone, lap top, and flat screen we use. Every dollar we invest in these capitalist banks, which were built on seed money from slavery, builds up capitalism at our expense. Every payment we send our insurance companies, which were also created on the slavery system model that exploited our ancestors, builds up this system that keeps us down.

The best these hucksters can offer you is a chance to individualize your approach by taking a "to hell with them" position and working to advance yourself in this capitalist system despite the damage the system does to our people. They won't tell you that up front. They make it sound like its a collective solution, but we challenge you to demonstrate one plausible way that approach e.g. integrating into capitalism, can prove beneficial, even just for Africans within the U.S. That approach does explain why these people make every effort to separate us from the rest of our international African family. In order for us to buy into their scam, its necessary to dehumanize Africans we are not familiar with. That way, we can more easily turn our backs on morality and humanity. That's the sad plan these fools are pushing and I challenge anyone, anywhere, to demonstrate how any of what I'm saying here isn't correct.

These tricks and scams continue to gain traction with our poor suffering people because we desire so much to be free of the wretched oppression we experience that any two bit hustler with the ability to deliver a message can rise above us and win some of us over. The promise of prosperity has always been an easy way to do this. Just go to any church on a Sunday morning to see that model in action. Its an easy sell, but we have hundreds of years of misery to demonstrate to us that con games will never free us. On the opposite end of the spectrum, convincing our people to dedicate our lives to building the Pan-African reality we need will always require much more effort. Much more energy. Much more dedication and work. That's true because we aren't just selling our people a line that sounds good. This grounded in real life solution requires an extensive level of work. Work many of us are not in the mental and/or physical space to objectively commit to carry out. As a result, many of us float towards what seems like the easier route, despite the fact we know there has never been any time in any of our lives where trying to take the shortcut around necessary hard work has delivered the fruits we were looking for.

For the architects of this treachery, it makes sense for/to them to preach their gospels because they have absolutely no intention or desire of building a movement of liberation for African people. The way you know that is none of these people have any actual movements in place. Movement being defined as two or more people working and organizing for a specific objective. Most of these criminals don't even belong to organizations. Its just them, preaching nonsense and convincing our people to buy their nonsense CDs, books, and other materials that are providing them income, and often wealth, at the expense of our suffering masses. We Pan-Africanists can easily make that analysis because the we carry out the necessary work while pouring resources into it, and receiving not even a penny in exchange, all of that is easily documented. As I write this, I'm flying across the country, on my own personal dime, to organize. This is how I, and those I respect, approach our work. Good luck finding any of those so-called "leaders" who will even offer you their saliva without a fee. Yes, our standard is high. Very high, for those who claim to care about our people's suffering and your standard needs to become higher also.

We beg our people and all peace loving people to stop and take note of these efforts to derail you from doing what a whole lot of you know needs to happen. Most of us, when pressed, know that no bourgeoisie politician, no matter how millenial and smart they are, is ever going to be able to do more than symbolic work to advance humanity. Most of us Africans know in our spirit of spirit that anyone trying to tell us we aren't Africans is selling us snake oil. This is easily demonstrated because the people pushing this line can never tell you even the slightest thing about Africa. That informs me that even if they sincerely believe this nonsense, its only because they have a deep-seated shame about their African identity that white supremacy (capitalism) has imposed upon them. The lie is a way for them to escape that shame, or so they believe - subconsciously. And, when Africa becomes free, united, and socialist, I guarantee you that the beast breathes its final breath on that day. Until then, our struggle continues. We will challenge this confusion at every turn. Our future depends upon it.

0 Comments

The Role Parliament-Funkadelic Played in Saving Me

2/7/2019

0 Comments

I have spent the last 40 years understanding that my spiritual father was Malcolm X. It was reading about him at age 17 that initially helped me understand the problems I'd experienced in my short life at that time. In those early years I saw the courageous warriors of the Black Panther Party, who evolved just minutes from where I myself grew up, as my older siblings. Women like Ms. Shirley Graham DuBois and Amy Garvey(s) were my mothers and from those associations I eventually began to appreciate the massive contributions of people like Kwame Nkrumah, Seku Ture, Amilcar Cabral, etc. Thus, my decision to dedicate my life to helping build capacity for those ideas to come into practical reality.

On a separate level all to itself, there were other people who played a major role in my early development as a human being. And, although those people were certainly far and away different in making their contribution than the people I named in the first paragraph, their contribution to my life was and is no less significant.

George Clinton and the 60+ musicians who make up the collective band Parliament-Funkadelic are those other people. And, for the last 44 years, that musical group has played a varying role in helping wake me up and keep me balanced. For some people familiar with this group, that may sound strange. Parliament-Funkadelic in general, and George Clinton in particular, are known in many circles as being on the strange end of African soul/funk music. In fact, during my teen years, they were the cultural equivalent of how gangsta rap is viewed by many people with more "conservative" tastes. They were the outlaws of popular music in the 70s and that was of course the reason they appealed so strongly to me.

I, like many youth (especially Africans) at that time, having missed the culturally vibrant 1960s, growing up in the balancing out decade of the 70s, into the individualistic period of the 1980s, felt alienated on every level growing up. Before I could appreciate the uplifting messages of people like Malcolm, I needed something that would connect to my emotional need to feel validated as a human being. The semi-serious messages of Parliament-Funkadelic, or PFunk as we affectionately call them, made that contribution into my life. Their drug induced visual presence didn't bother this never touched a drug in my life person because I saw them as rebels and I've always been one of those. The diapers (guitarist Gary Shider wore a diaper on albums and in concert, prompting PFunk loyalists to label him "diaper man), far out costumes, and unique and unusual stage shows established PFunk as a group that was unwilling to conform to the uniform standards of the generational groups during those years like the Temptations, Commodores, Isley Brothers, and even the Jackson 5. Still, it was much more than their visual appearance that appealed to me. It was that semi-serious stuff. As a young African searching for pride and respect in a society that was determined to convince me I wasn't worth receiving those things, PFunk's insistence that "we are coming to reclaim the pyramids! ("Mothership Connection"), "Think it Ain't Illegal Yet (Lunchmeataphobia), "Everybody has a little light under the sun" (Flashlight), etc., spoke directly to me. While other people may have seen "One Nation Under Groove" as a funky dance song, I saw it as a call to action for African people everywhere to do our own thing, regardless of what this backward society was demanding of us. "Here's our chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions." I felt like PFunk was talking directly to me in code language and I drank it all up. And, the fact no adults seemed to understand or respect their music made them all the more attractive to me.

Another element that was extremely gripping for me was PFunk's innovative ability to play extremely popular dance music (Parliament) and grooving lead guitar rock infused music (Funkadelic), using the same people to form two groups with different names on different record labels, was another important signal to me that these Africans refused to play by the system's rules. The impact this had on me can never be underestimated. And, the fact PFunk was the first commercial entity that used the African red, black, and green flag on their album covers while always featuring artwork of African women, was a major impact as well. Especially on 1978's "One Nation" Funkadelic album where the entire cover was filled with insults against Mick Jaggar for his song "Some Girls" which PFunk interpreted as disrespectful to African women. I loved it. I needed it.

I'm forever thankful to PFunk for helping me learn how to unleash my creative African spirit. I was able to vibe to them in a way that was personal. For example, when they released the fifteen minute and twenty-one second "Not Just Knee Deep" in the summer/fall of 1979 it was medicine for me. I had just moved out of my parents house. I had my first real job and was attending community college. I was full of self doubt and really had absolutely no one to talk to about all the insecurities that dominated my life at that time. Racist and inhuman treatment was so common I thought that those experiences were my destiny. I played that song thousands of times. In truth, I spent a large portion of my financial aide and wages from my restaurant job to buy a car stereo system with Pioneer speakers, just so I could hear that song in its best presentation. You may have listened to that song and heard "when she did the freak with me", but I heard the anger in Mike Hampton's guitar licks during that legendary solo in the middle of that long song. An anger that to me meant we were sick and tired of being abused by this society as a people. No one had to say it in the lyrics. I know that's what that guitar was communicating and I felt it as clearly as I felt my mother speaking me while I was in her womb. Forty years later, and twelve times and counting that I've heard Hampton play that solo electronically and in person (as recently as last year) and I still feel exactly the same. Hearing it inspires me to believe there is absolutely nothing I cannot do. That song permitted me to channel my anger and energy in the direction of forward progress. I still listen to it when I need a boost, especially that guitar solo portion.

The point here is African people have had to spend the last 500+ years learning a myriad of ways to articulate our frustration and anger at the conditions we have been faced to endure. I'm forever thankful for George Clinton and PFunk. George, Hampton, Bernie Worrell, Junie Morrison, Shider, Eddie Hazel, Lynn Mabry, Maceo and Fred, etc. Thank you to all of them. To many people, what they did musically may just seem like the mindless ramblings of a bunch of acid inducing addicts. To me, it was the language of a people struggling to find their freedom and dignity. But then, weren't most of our slave communications designed to sound one way on the outside while having a completely different message for those who were intended to understand it?

0 Comments

The Unknown History how the 60s Black Power Movement Started

2/3/2019

2 Comments

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Mukassa Dada (Willie Ricks) during the "March against Fear" in Mississippi in 1966. It was this march where the "Black power" theme was first articulated on a mass level.

Understanding this critical history has never been more important than it is in 2019 and beyond. Today, those who are genuinely concerned about the future of this planet (in every healthy way possible) are faced with unprecedented challenges. Any elementary study of human progress reveals that the most efficient way to defeat any challenge is to understand the history of how the challenge came about. The U.S. Black power movement of the 1960s and 70s generated significant victories that most of the population is still benefiting from today. Before the civil rights and Black power movements, the status quo for everything in this society was rich European (white) men. They were the only face in business, education, labor, politics, and popular culture. Everyone else was simply a caricature for their usage and pleasure. This is objective history that no one can factually dispute. And, this is at least part of the reason so many white men are so angry and frustrated today. The overwhelming majority of them are much to spineless and intellectually lazy to comprehend that the (very real) oppression they experience results from the capitalist system, not the people who are much more subjugated by the system than they are. For most of them, the only way they can wrap their minds around what's happening now is by seeing things within the narrow and subjective vision that something they earned is being taken away from them. What's actually happening is the civil rights and Black power movements simply opened up opportunities for people who previously had no options. Since the capitalist system functions all the time based on the perception of scarcity e.g. there's not enough (this is how they convince people to compete against each other instead of them), the limited opportunities that exist within this backward society for people to advance has been forced by these movements to open up some and this has led to a few less chances for white men who previously enjoyed full and unchallenged access, at least compared to everyone else in society.

And, the Black power movement didn't just create openings for African people. This movement helped set the stage for many other social justice movements. This happened because the entire premise of the Black power movement was we as African people have the right to define our existence in the way we see fit. Within a society like this one where the forces of oppression depend upon complete dominance over the way people think to maintain control, it is impossible to overstate the significance of this focus by the Black power movement. By taking this position, the movement ushered in a new and healthy way for African people to define ourselves. For the first time, we began to question the European beauty standards that we routinely applied to ourselves. We began to challenge institutional racism which was unquestioned policy throughout this country. We began to bring in important questions such as the role Africa should play in our lives in the Western Hemisphere. These ideas, like African cultural consciousness have always been around. In fact, they never left us even though we left Africa, but the Black power movement made those ideas mass in character and it can certainly be argued that this had never previously happened within the U.S. This revolutionary thinking and action created the conditions that led to the women's liberation movement, the (then labeled) gay liberation movement, the ablest movement, etc. And, it doesn't matter in the least whether European LGBTQ and/or women, etc., acknowledge this fact, it cannot be be scientifically disputed. So, any true students of history e.g. people genuinely concerned about figuring out how we move forward in advancing our struggle(s) for justice and forward progress, have to respect, study, and acknowledge the contributions of the civil rights movement and especially, the Black power movement. I say especially the Black power movement because although the capitalist system works overtime to confuse people about the objectives of the reformist civil rights movement, because the Black power movement had this important component of African self-determination, the system saw this movement as a much greater threat than the civil rights movement. All one has to do is study the pronouncements of elected leaders like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s counter intelligence program focused on destroying the Black power movement to confirm this reality. So, understanding the Black power movement, from the perspective of those African activists and organizers who did so much incredible work for that movement, is essential. And, the best way to understand that movement is to understand the forces and events that shaped its development.

Like everything else related to African people, the series of events that launched the Black power movement are shrouded in mystery and miss-information. Since history within this capitalist system is taught from the standpoint that individuals make history, a clear and unquestionable lie, history here is always taught from an individualistic perspective. This means that most people probably learned that the Black power movement resulted as a spontaneous event when Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael), the chairperson of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) stood on top of that trailer/bus in Greenwood, Mississippi in July of 1966. The way the capitalists tell the history, Ture, just released from being arrested for the 26th time in five years for his work in the Southern U.S., was angry when he jumped on top of that trailer and made the famous (or infamous, depending upon your level of humanity) "Black power" speech that is credited with launching the movement. The suggestion here is that that speech was a spontaneous individual act. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

That march in question where the Black power slogan was articulated was the result of the primary civil rights movement organizations agreeing to take up the "March against Fear" that was initiated by James Meredith. Meredith was the first African to break Mississippi's educational segregation when he attended the state's university. He wanted to stage a one person march, centered around him, to advance the notion that Africans shouldn't be afraid of violent racists in Mississippi. True to their barbaric form, one of those Mississippi racists gunned down Meredith on the second day of his march. As he recovered in the hospital, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Floyd McKissick, representing the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the then Stokely Carmichael, representing SNCC, convened a press conference in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., to announce their intentions to continue Meredith's march. During that press conference, King explained that the focus of the march would be to forward the civil rights movements dominant theme of "freedom now", but SNCC and CORE had other ideas.

What's not commonly discussed is how different SNCC and CORE were to SCLC philosophically, strategically, and tactically. As its name indicates, SCLC was an organization led by Southern U.S. religious leaders. Its foundation was rooted in Southern U.S. Christian values practiced, at least by Africans, certainly not Europeans, of tolerance and forgiveness. It was these themes that shaped SCLC's work throughout the civil rights movement. In comparison, SNCC and CORE were organizations made up primarily of young people, many who were not even from the Southern U.S. The other major difference that is very miss-understood today is SCLC was an organization dedicated to tactics of mobilization. What is meant by this is SCLC's approach consisted of going to areas that were hot and staging big events to bring attention to the situation. This is what defined SCLC, and Dr. King's, work in historical confrontations like the marches and sit ins in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S., with Sheriff Bull Conner, and the confrontation on the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Alabama. SCLC would come in, have rallies, marches, press conferences, etc., and then be on to the next event. Their organization wasn't structured to engage in long term organizing work. In contrast, SNCC and CORE's work was defined by long campaigns in the same area. Work that was outside the media's attention and always extremely dangerous. Even the early work of these two organizations for the lunch counter sit ins and freedom rides were carried out using this model. Since they had experienced that naked terrorism against them, SNCC and CORE activists were not anywhere as committed to the non-violence model that SCLC was. That is not to say SCLC wasn't also exposed to violence because they certainly were. Anyone standing up for dignity for African people was in danger. Its just that the nature of SNCC and CORE's longer range work with projects like the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer) in 1964 and the Loundes County Freedom Organization (the original Black Panther Party) in Alabama in 1965, permitted them to have longer and closer access to the day to day realities of the Africans living in these environments. This exposure allowed them to observe that these local Africans, accustomed to the limitless boundaries of these white terrorists, were seldom committed to non-violence because to be so was a certain death warrant. So, these experiences radicalized the young militants in SNCC and CORE. And this push towards the left led both organizations to reject the SCLC leaning philosophies of John Lewis as Chairperson of SNCC (now a U.S. congressperson) and James Farmer as leader of CORE. This move to the left brought in the leadership of Carmichael in SNCC and Mckissick in CORE. These much more militant organizations had no intention of continuing the "freedom now" format which they believed reflected a basis in asking racist whites to accept the humanity of African people and to suffer endlessly until this happened. The new position of these organizations was best articulated by Ture (Carmichael) when he said "non-violence is nice because it appeals to the humanity of your enemies. The problem is America has no conscience! It has no humanity!"

With this different focus in approaching the Mississippi march, the differences emerged almost immediately. SNCC and CORE wanted the militant Deacons for Defense organization to be a part of the march. The Deacons were made up of African World War II veterans who formed in Louisiana in 1964 to protect civil rights workers. They were armed, organized, and prepared to defend African people. SNCC, CORE, and the local people, many who were either Deacons or had Deacons known to them, wanted the organization to participate, but Roy Wilkins, as leader of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and Whitney Young, leader of the National Urban League (two national civil rights organizations with a much more conservative approach) wanted no part of the Deacons. The refusal of SNCC and CORE to relent on having the Deacons participate caused the two larger civil rights organizations to back away from actively supporting the march and they used all the resources at their disposal to pressure SCLC to do the same, but Dr. King, the principled man that he was, refused. Dr. King stood firm even after Deacons leader Ernest Thomas stood in front of a group of locals, civil rights workers, and antagonist whites heckling them, to announce on the microphone that if any of the whites attempted violence against the Africans they would be met with retaliation.

Meanwhile, SNCC was having strategy meetings to discuss how they could inject a different flavor into the march. Feeling that they had a firm pulse on the sentiment of the masses of Africans in the region, and feeling confident they had the support of CORE activists, SNCC wanted to figure out how to make the march African focused in character. They reasoned that the values of these civil rights marches were too heavily dominated by that of the white Northern liberal establishment. They wanted the voice of the African people directly impacted by white supremacy to be the decisive factor in which direction the movement would head.

After several strategy sessions around this question, SNCC decided that the "freedom now" theme needed to be dropped. They decided that it should be replaced with "Black power." They reasoned that "Black power" was a theme that personified African self-determination and control of our destiny. They wanted to articulate that African people were going to assert our dignity in the Southern U.S., and everywhere else by - quoting Malcolm X - any means necessary!" It was less than a year earlier that SNCC had shown clear signs of its advancing militancy by inviting Malcolm X to speak at a rally in Alabama. It was there that Malcolm gave his famous "house slave, field slave" narrative. These lessons were not lost on the young SNCC militants. They just had to figure out the correct strategic and tactical way to roll out the new militant theme?

It was decided that the approach would be to send out a small handful of SNCC militants days ahead of the march. The role of these people would be to talk to the African laborers, church goers, sharecroppers, in town where the march was headed and engage these folks with ideological struggle around the new "Black power" theme. Since the organizers would have to carry out this work individually, it was probably one of the most dangerous acts carried out in the entire civil rights movement. One of the main organizers who carried out this work was Mukassa Dada, then known as Willie Ricks. Along with young Carmichael, Cleve Sellers, Ruby Doris Robinson, and others, the young Willie Ricks represented the most militant leadership within SNCC. This courageous African, still alive and extremely active in the Pan-African movement, still discusses in clear and inspirational detail, how he went into those quiet towns and spent time with so many people talking to them about the efforts SNCC was engaging in to bring self-determination to the African masses. What Dada and SNCC discovered from his work was that the majority of Africans were fed up with the repression of white institutions in Mississippi. Most people were prepared to immediately align themselves with SNCC's echoing of Malcolm's call for freedom "by any means necessary!"

Once Dada and others informed SNCC of this advance intelligence from their work, there was struggle within SNCC about the reliability of this assessment. Kwame Ture was always extremely honest about admitting that he had a very difficult time accepting Dada's assessment, believing that the masses were not quite ready for the "Black power" theme to be dropped upon them. So, once the young Carmichael was released from prison that dusty day in July, he was indeed bitterly angry, but the decision for him to launch the "Black power" theme from that trailer was a collective one, agreed upon by SNCC's on the ground leadership in Mississippi. In fact, the young Carmichael had to be prodded by the young Ricks and others to use the theme in that speech. Understanding and respecting organizational discipline, the young Carmichael, against his own judgment, prepared to make his speech from that trailer. The marchers listened to speeches that night from Carmichael, Dr. King, and others. The masses were angered after days of mistreatment and disrespect by local politicians, police, and national guards-people. During one tense moment earlier, King had to physically restrain the angered Carmichael when the young man attempted to charge a national guardsman who had roughly pushed Dr. King backwards. All of these emotions were on display as the marchers waited in front of that trailer in Greenwood that night in July, 1966. The police and guard stood by ready to attack the marchers. Masses of racist whites stood by shouting insults and threats. The marchers were well aware that the focus of the so-called "authorities" was 100% on controlling them, not lifting a finger to do anything about the violence prone whites who were the only threat to anything that night. All of these factors created an unbelievable energy when Carmichael prepared to give his speech. Continuously spurned on by the young Ricks and others, Carmichael painted a vivid picture of the centuries old disrespect and oppression white capitalist society had reaped upon the African masses. In his description, he explained that appealing to the white power structure for justice was a tactic who's time had passed. He made it clear that now was the time that African people began to take our destiny into our own hands, no matter what the cost. He expressed how we had to make this decision for survival and that we had to have the courage to do this for the future of our people. The container for this process, he articulated, was that we needed "Black power." The response of the people was immediately and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. It was so favorable that it admittedly took the young Carmichael by surprise. He was able to quickly adapt and he began having the assembled masses chant the theme over and over; "Black power! Black power! Black power!" At this moment, the civil rights movement would never be the same.

For those who have not truly studied history, its going to be very difficult for you to properly understand how significant that moment was. Up to that point, the overwhelmingly dominant narrative for African people in the U.S. was that we must do any and everything we can to fit into this racist U.S. society. Of course, we realize this thinking is still very prevalent, but back at this time there was no Kemitic movement. There was no Black Lives Matter movement. No African centered thinking being discussed on any mass level. The point is although none of those things are where we want them to be, they are platforms for us to build what we need to be free. In other words, they are without question steps in the right direction and none of those steps would even exist without the "Black power" movement. Every movement speaking through an independent African, Black mindset, whatever you wish to call it, was spawned by the "Black power" movement and those like minded organizations and individuals like the Nation of Islam and Universal Negro Improvement Association, that existed before this movement, were bolstered by its existence. No one can dispute this.

The "March against Fear" was the last major civil rights march and the reasons for this are clear. The call for "Black power" expanded and captured the imagination of Africans everywhere, not just in the Southern U.S. The emerging "Black power" movement moved the focus beyond integration and into one that explored the impacts of class oppression by the capitalist system. Its not a debate about whether we understand these components yet or not. The point is this movement helped develop the conditions where the discussion is even able to take place today. And, the conversation is taking place. People have always distorted the "Black power" message to fit their aspirations to find a niche within the capitalist system. Some have attempted to define it as black capitalism. These people use "Black power" politics as a cover for their exploitation of African people for financial gain using a black nationalist message to couch their thievery. All one has to do is search youtube to find any number of these hucksters who attempt to deceive our people in the name of African liberation. And, of course, there is absolutely no shortage of racist whites, pretending to be friends to African people, who do everything they can to disrupt our ability to have self-determination because they understand that the capitalist system is based on keeping us oppressed. They know their comfort is tied to our oppression. They realize our liberation from that system automatically means a change to their lives and they don't want that. So, they work overtime to convey the message that an individualist neo-colonial politician like Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, or Kamala Harris, is "Black power."

The only accurate definition for "Black power" in 2019 and beyond is the same definition that the young Stokely Carmichael articulated from that trailer in 1966. As he often articulated throughout his life, "Black power" properly defined is the "power of the organized masses of African people." This can never happen through individual politicians operating within the capitalist system. Even if some of these politicians have the best intentions, which most of them do not, at best, this approach means the masses of people placing their complete faith in these individuals, and this system, to solve our problems. We clearly have an extensive collection of evidence to demonstrate this approach is worthless to the masses of African people. And, whomever still acts confused about the contradictions with that in 2019 is either unaware of history or they purposely want that confusion to exist to shield their individualistic objectives to use our struggle for their personal power and advancement.

Some of those people present at that 1966 rally continued to live their lives with integrity. They gave us a glimpse into what real "Black power" should look like today. Kwame Ture, who changed his name to that in 1977 to pay respect to Kwame Nkrumah and Seku Ture, clearly addressed this often when he said "the highest expression of Black power is Pan-Africanism." And, Mukassa Dada, the former Willie Ricks, is a clear example of Kwame's words as Dada is a tireless champion for Pan-Africanism today. He travels the African world helping organize for Pan-Africanism much the same way he traveled those lonely roads in 1966 in Mississippi. Other SNCC veterans like Seku Neblitt, who today lives in Ghana, and organizes for Pan-Africanism, continue to carry this torch. Bob Brown is another such example and there are many others.

If you leave this piece with any other thought, please let it be that collective, disciplined study and work is what's needed to alleviate our suffering. Individual actions won't solve the problem. If they could, with all the rampant individualists active, we would have been free a long, long, time ago. What's still missing, as Kwame Ture clearly told us many times, is the power of the organized masses. There's no shortcut. No easy way. No quick desktop icon. Only the consistent and dedicated work to organize the masses of our people is the solution. Despite the efforts of imperialism to keep us confused, this was the clear message articulated by SNCC 50+ years ago in Mississippi and our ancestors all over the African world today wait patiently for us to finally and decisively figure that out in order to make it happen once and for all.

2 Comments

AOC, Spike Lee, Maxine Waters, & Fatigue from Liberal Lies

Spike Lee; Liberals; Oscars; & White Supremacy Winning Again

Roberto Clemente Deserves more Respect than Jackie Robinson

Malcolm was killed 54 Years ago. What Does his Death Mean?

Does Kaepernick's Settlement with the NFL Sell Out the Cause?

Debunking the Myth that Africans Outside U.S. Have Not Helped Us

Yvette Carnell, "Black Nativists; African Intelligentsia is to Blame

Using Anti-Africa Scarcity to Manipulate Us in Favor of Capitalism

The Role Parliament-Funkadelic Played in Saving Me

The Unknown History how the 60s Black Power Movement Started

Author

Archives

Categories