Principles of Unity
RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE
BAP is not a pacifist movement. While committed to peace, we understand there can be no peace without justice, and we will stand in solidarity with all peoples (and nations) who strive to liberate themselves from oppression.
SELF-DETERMINATION
BAP supports people’s struggles for national liberation and self-determination, with a special focus on the struggles of Black peoples and nation-states in the “Americas.”
ANTI-IMPERIALISM
BAP takes a resolute anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position that links the international role of the U.S. empire to the domestic war against poor people and working-class Black people in the United States.
WORKING-CLASS FOUNDATION
BAP identifies the Black working class as the main social force of any reconstituted Black Liberation project.
INTERSECTIONALITY
"People(s)-centered human rights" as defined as emanating from bottom-up mass struggle and informed by a Black, revolutionary, feminist intersectional framework is the basis for analysis and actions.
ANTI-PATRIARCHY
All members, on an organizational and individual level, must be committed to ending patriarchy and all forms of gender-based domination in both internal organizational practice and external/public political positions. BAP understands patriarchy as a system and as a set of social relations fundamental to imperialism that enacts violence based on sexuality, gender and gender identity. BAP understands that patriarchy – with heightened effect on African/Black people – oppresses cisgender heterosexual women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, non-binary, and queer people. In addition, we recognize that patriarchy harms cisgender heterosexual men in different ways.
DECOLONIZATION
Members of this Alliance see the U.S. state as the ongoing institutional expression of settler-colonialism and are committed to an authentic process of decolonization in every sense of that term.
PRISONER SUPPORT
BAP is committed to working against all forms of state and domestic repression, including the issues of political prisoners and prisoners of war in the United States.
BLACK UNITY
BAP sees itself as one aspect of the effort to revitalize the broader Black Liberation Movement.
SOUTHERN ROOTS
The South is the base of U.S. military infrastructure. It’s also where 55 percent of Black people happen to live. BAP identifies this region as a priority for collective learning, organizing, and mobilizing the power and influence of Black workers and the poor to oppose militarism, war and imperialism.
ANTI-CAPITALISM
BAP believes that capitalism as a mode of production is inherently exploitative and oppressive. Therefore, it is incompatible with human freedom and fundamental People(s)-Centered Human rights and must be opposed.
BLACK RADICAL PEACE TRADITION
Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
If these principles reflect your values, you belong in the Black Alliance for Peace.