Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford was buried August 7 in Lumpkin, Georgia. That land in the Southern Black Belt, located within the settler-colonial space known as the United States of America, produced for him—like so many before him—a clear sense of the intersection of class, white supremacy and the National Question.
In the African tradition, our ancestors may leave the physical world, but they never leave us. That is why we evoke them. When we do so and allow their presence to infuse our consciousness and vision, they become a material force through us.
Nothing quite demonstrates the arrogance and white supremacy of the U.S. empire like its relationship to Africans and other colonized people.
On Thursday, the Biden administration slapped new sanctions on Cuban government officials. We ask those who have raised racism in Cuba as a nuance worthy of interrogation: Why not question the white supremacy inherent in U.S. policies that disproportionately impact African/Black peoples throughout the region?
The Cuban people have spoken and they have said, yes, they have internal contradictions, like any country born within the context of colonial conquest and genocide. But they also have said what would make the most difference to Cubans in Cuba is an end to the cruel medieval-style blockade that has prevented vital food, medicine and other items needed to help the Cuban people.
We say when a people are at war with an oppressor, it is our obligation inside the United States to stand with them against the empire without engaging in the ego-inflating exercise of raising their internal contradictions at those critical moments. Either you support national liberation and self-determination or you don’t.
U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats have been playing the "Black Lives Matter" tune on their fiddle. Biden even raised the issue of Black Lives Matter during his presidential campaign. But, just days after Biden was sworn into office, his administration lent support for the Haitian dictator, Jovenel Moïse, who stayed in office past his term to the dismay of the Haitian people, who flooded the streets in protest.
Now, Moïse is dead and the United Nations has decided who will be the new president of Haiti. We see the racist irony. The people of Haiti have not been allowed to weigh in. The white rulers have made their decision, as the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) stated in its July 9 press release.
And while the director of Colombia's National Intelligence Agency and the director of its national police's Intelligence Division are in Haiti to investigate the role of Colombia in the assassination, those agencies have not launched investigations into police forces and paramilitary elements involved in the recent killings of peaceful protesters in Colombia, a client state of the United States.
We dedicate this newsletter to our dear brother and Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member, Abdusshahid "Baba" Luqman (pictured below), who suddenly passed away on June 15. He and his partner, Jacqueline, hosted independent talk show "Luqman Nation" on Blog Talk Radio starting in 2014, and later on Facebook, YouTube and on Black Power Media. Baba's devotion to his people inspires us to keep going. Rise in power, brother.
Fear of a rising China has gripped the supposedly “global elites” of the world. G7 member states agreed on Saturday that all wifi connections be dismantled around the room they convened in because they worried China would eavesdrop, part of a years-long narrative that China’s private tech companies are conducting surveillance on its behalf.
At the meeting, U.S. President Joe Biden pitched to G7 member states an alternative project to contend with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an 8-year-old program involving the construction of railways, ports and roads, along with cultural exchange. Already, dozens of countries have signed onto it.
But G7 leaders didn’t seem enthused as talks ended Saturday. Countries like Germany and Italy are heavily invested in the Chinese supply chain. In fact, Volkswagen and BMW cars are top sellers in China. Even though Italy pulled out of the BRI, its officials remember China's generosity when it provided personal protective equipment and medical professionals during the height of Italy's COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. The rift within the Pan-European colonial-capitalist project is obvious.
Saturday morning, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) got word the neoliberal, right-wing Colombian state was deploying its military into the predominantly Afro-Colombian city of Calí. To top it off, the internet was not working. That prompted us to put out an alert on Twitter.
Later in the day, we heard from our folks that the internet appeared to be up and running again. But we remain vigilant because the national government had deployed the military to Calí and other cities after issuing a decree on Friday forcing governors and mayors to cooperate with the militarized response to the national strike.
This move came after a month of unrest and severe state repression sparked by opposition to the government’s attempt to impose an austerity plan that would have transferred the economic crisis created by neoliberalism onto the backs of the working class.
"The managers of the colonial/capitalist world understand the terms of struggle, and so should we. It must be clear to us that for the survival of collective humanity and the planet we cannot allow uncontested power to remain in the hands of the global 1%. The painful truth for some is that if global humanity is to live, the Pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist project must die." -Ajamu Baraka, Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer
Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the Palestinian people demand a life of dignity, sovereignty and self-determination.
What prevents Palestinian national self-expression is the constructed state of Israel. The United Kingdom helped settle the first Zionists in Palestine in 1922 after the Balfour Declaration. Later, a brutal Nakba took place when the U.K. aided the newly created state of Israel's settler-colonization. Meanwhile, the United States has armed and funded Israel for years. But lately, that support has come at a cost of $3.8 billion per year, plus an additional $8 billion in loan guarantees.
U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats pretended to support an increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour and a stimulus payment of $2,000 per person. They also claimed to be outraged by former President Donald Trump's moves to dismiss the result of the 2020 election and remain in office no matter what. Then last week, with full support from the corporate media, Biden released “The American Jobs Plan" and "The American Families Plan,” both meant to revive the so-called “American dream” by bringing Keynesianism back from the dead, along with FDR!
Once in office, though, Biden, who was put in place by neoliberal finance and corporate transnational capital, dutifully began the process of scaling back on his “progressive” stances. The $15/hour minimum wage proposal was scrapped using a shady parliamentary device that gave cover to Democratic Party backtracking. Then the $2,000 check became $1,400. Plus, although Democrats loudly condemned Trump's anti-democratic moves, the Biden-Harris administration gave the green light to its puppet in Haiti to ignore the requirement to leave office February 7. This came despite thousands of Haitians marching in the streets in opposition.
The ruling class has long deployed propaganda meant to obscure the rule of capital and normalize capitalist interests as the general interest of society. But lately, the liberal Western intelligentsia has elevated that deployment to a science.
The concept of humanitarian intervention and its logical derivative, the Responsibility to Protect, have proven to be one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced. By combining normalized assumptions of white Western civilizational superiority and the liberal anti-authoritarianism encoded in the DNA of the liberal project, imperialism has been able to win broad support for everything from direct military interventions and drone warfare to punitive sanctions against whole societies. These actions are framed as defending human rights, and even as “democracy.”
War was the primary instrument used to establish the U.S. settler state and expand U.S. hegemonic global power after the end of the Second World War. War has become so normalized that the U.S. state's two-century-long horrific war of conquest against the Indigenous peoples of the landmass that eventually became known as the United States, as well as the war with North Korea that technically has not ended, have been erased from the U.S. public's awareness.
The two-decade war on Afghanistan, therefore, is the second longest continuous war. That fact increasingly is being lost because of the corporate press's lack of coverage, resulting in vast swaths of the U.S. public being completely unaware of the peace process initiated in 2020 and the Biden-Harris administration's subsequent moves to undermine or completely gut that process.
That is why the Black Alliance for Peace is once again attempting to bring attention to this issue. We are organizing an International Day of Action on Afghanistan on April 8 to demand the Biden-Harris administration adhere to the agreement and withdraw U.S. troops from the country by the May 1 deadline. Find out how to get involved.
The reactionary character of U.S. politics is on full display as the corporate media—in alignment with the military-industrial complex—the lunatic elements of the foreign policy community and right-wing neoliberal Democrats seem committed to conditioning the public to accept yet another insane military confrontation. This time, with a real opponent—China!
What makes this situation even more absurd is the public voted for Biden and the Democrats because they were led to believe the United States and the world would be a safer place with them in charge. This comes even though the historical evidence has always demonstrated the opposite. Outside the disastrous decision by the Bush administration to attempt to wage imperialist war in two theaters, almost every other major and minor conflict that the United States engaged in since the end of the Second World War took place during a Democrat Party administration.
International Working Women’s Day is being celebrated today in various parts of the world to bring attention to the plight of non-men. But very few of these commemorations address the relationship between women, war and imperialism, particularly how non-European, colonized and working-class women are impacted.
Therefore, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organizations are using this day to remind the world that—in the spirit of the original International Working Women’s Day actions, where women took to the streets of Saint Petersburg, Russia, calling for “Bread and Peace”—this day must center the fight against war and imperialism.
Erica Caines, member of BAP-Baltimore and BAP’s Coordinating Committee, organized a webinar last year that highlighted how militarized policing domestically and U.S. global military aggression conspires to limit and degrade the fundamental human rights of African and colonized women. According to Caines, “In the last 10 years, as U.S. imperialism expanded—coinciding with the increase of police repression backed by Department of Defense programs—there has been a deliberate attack on internationalism. That makes it harder for colonized people in the United States to understand why and how what happens abroad directly affects us here—especially working-class Black women in the binds of triple oppression."
It is the white rulers who spent millions building prisons in Haiti and funding and training the Haitian police and military. It is the white rulers who have turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Moïse administration. It is the white rulers who have condoned the lack of parliamentary elections, the ruling of the country by decree, and the rewriting of the Haitian constitution. Most importantly, it is the white rulers who have affirmed Moïse’s illegal extension of his ruling mandate. —Jemima Pierre, “Haiti: Black Despots and White Rulers”
After the “anti-democratic” Trump forces were defeated, the Biden-Harris administration assured it would re-commit to neoliberal orthodoxy in both domestic and foreign policy with its slogan, “Build Back Better.” That promised a return to the “traditional” U.S. values of decency, democracy and human rights.
Yet, the Biden-Harris administration, as well as most U.S. policymakers and political representatives, employ a double standard: While expressing concern for oppressed people and rhetorically supporting “democratic” processes and human rights in their domestic and foreign policies, they inflict harm on millions of people around the world through their wars, subversions and sanctions.
The picture had started to form in Biden’s first 48 hours, but now it is crystal clear: The Biden-Harris administration intends to pick up exactly where the Obama-Biden administration left off in 2016, with an aggressive assertion of U.S. military power to offset its declining global economic, political and moral position.
All signals appear to be heading in that direction. The Atlantic Council, a right-wing structure that is a mouthpiece for NATO and the Western alliance, issued a 26,000 word screed against China, arguing for eventual war if regime change and other “containment” polices fail to coax China into surrendering to the United States. This is utter madness.
But it continues. In another highly publicized comment, Admiral Charles A. Richard warned, “There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons.”
Every year, we fight a battle on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On one side is the U.S. state. Forced to offer a concession to the middle-class elements of the Black civil-rights movement in the form of a birthday observance for Dr. King, the state has suspended Dr. King from the movement that produced him and reduced his legacy to banal statements made by Black misleaders like Barack Obama, which only reinforce the fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism.
On the other side is the Black resistance movement. We counter with a Dr. King in transition, one who was being influenced by the analysis and politics of the radical Black Liberation Movement that was grounded in the realities of the urban and rural working classes and poor.
Two Januarys ago, an obscure politician from a minor political party named Juan Guaido assumed a one-month chairmanship of the Venezuelan National Assembly. Then he promptly declared himself the interim president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The bizarre declaration had no legal standing. But that did not stop the Trump administration and later, the European Union, from recognizing this fictional presidency.
For most in the world, this was yet another in a series of illegal U.S. efforts to control the politics of countries in the global South. Supporting dictators, overthrowing governments with violence and destroying nations have been at the center of each of the U.S. global policies since the United States became the leader of the colonial/capitalist Western alliance in 1945.
But as Malcolm X once said, “The chickens have come home to roost.”
The global economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism—exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has exposed the ethical, moral and political contradictions of the liberal interpretation of human rights that contends these rights can be viewed separately from the political economy, global structures and power relationships. Operating from the false premise that human rights are objective and politically neutral, neoliberals began weaponizing the framework in the 1990s as an instrument that rationalized naked imperialist interventions. Humanitarian interventionism and the “responsibility to protect” became the contemporary white-supremacist expression of the “white man’s burden” that involved “saving” natives in the global South from their autocratic rulers.
It had escaped most people that the rulers to be deposed usually were in nations that attempted to resist U.S. domination with the help of European allies. From Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran to North Korea and Venezuela, subversion, direct military interventions, proxy wars, and sanctions were all deployed to “save” the people from their oppressive rulers. It did not matter that hundreds of thousands would die in the process, even being denied medicine amid COVID-19. The white West had determined in capitals thousands of miles away that these losses were acceptable collateral damage to preserve “democracy” and “human rights.”
“… Somebody must say to America, America if you have contempt for life, if you exploit human beings by seeing them as less than human, if you will treat human beings as a means to an end, you thingafy those human beings. And if you will thingafy persons, you will exploit them economically. And if you will exploit persons economically, you will abuse your military power to protect your economic investments and your economic exploitations.” —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967)
In the United States, a liberal or a self-identified radical can rationalize supporting a candidate who throws Palestinians under the bus in order to get elected to the U.S. Senate. These same people can remain silent on murderous U.S. economic sanctions. They also can avoid any comment on U.S. imperialist aggression. They can do all of these things and their “progressive” or “radical” credentials would not be questioned.
That is why Joe Biden can 1) fill his cabinet with neoliberal war hawks, 2) signal obscene spending on the U.S. military will continue, and 3) tell the rulers they can rest assured knowing he is committed to the imperialist agenda of “Full Spectrum Dominance” that has been the U.S. state’s bipartisan-supported national security policy for the last two decades—and what amounts to “the left” shrugs its shoulders.
It is becoming more and more evident that despite the strengthening calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and more recent actions to ‘End Sars,’ internationalism will again become a backburner issue. How will Africans in the US combat this and re-establish the anti-war internationalism politics that cemented the Black Radical Tradition and politics of the past? —Erica Caines, Hood Communist
Like most political formations in the United States, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) members and supporters represent different tendencies. For BAP members, however, elections have always presented a strategic question. That is, the intent is to understand how the election might facilitate or impede our organizing and power building processes.
That is how we have avoided much of the emotionalism and irrationality that seems to infect so many in the United States. For our alliance, a question that helped us maintain a sober perspective was considering the impact of the election of any candidate on the lives of colonized peoples and nations in the global South.
No matter which party wins the White House on November 3, one thing is certain: The objective crisis of the system will force the winning political party to be guided by a logic that concludes domestic repression and warmongering abroad are necessary.
From occupied Philadelphia to occupied Palestine, the people in the colonized spaces of empire will find it hard to discern a difference between how Democratic and Republican oppressors treat them. In Philadelphia, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors borrowed a page from the Obama administration’s DOJ playbook. If folks recall, after the Baltimore uprisings in 2015, Obama’s DOJ slapped federal charges on the resisters Obama had referred to as “thugs and criminals.” Just last week, the Trump DOJ swept into Philly and nationalized a local law enforcement by arresting and slapping federal felony charges against four African activists.
