Category: BLACK AMERICA - The Greanville Post

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Teddy Ostrow

Editor's Note: The Nation just ran a most interesting piece, describing a welcome development in US politics, the sprouting of an anti-capitalist movement among Black and Brown people (and white sympathisers, of course). We are certain that the sordid Deep State tentacles are already busy tracking and infiltrating this yioung movement, with the usual aim of disrupting and neutralising it—at any cost. Real democracy is an illusion in the US, and has been since the nation's inception. Let's hope that wider publicity afford them more safety in their quest.

Z, the co-founder of BSA, talks with The Nation about building alternatives to capitalism.

Z co-founded Black Socialists of America in 2017. (Photo: Adam Kargenian)

As Z and Sean watched the leftist ecosystem expand in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, they noticed something still missing: There was no broad socialist organizing grounded in the black radical tradition. And so, in 2017, they founded Black Socialists of America, and declared it internationalist, eco-socialist, democratic, intersectional, nonsectarian, anti-war, and revolutionary. It quickly earned the endorsement of Noam Chomsky, who wrote that it was “particularly encouraging” that BSA was attempting to create “the germs of a future and better society within the deeply flawed existing one.”

As its 26-year-old national coordinator, Z conceived of the collective’s most ambitious project yet: the Dual Power Map, which seeks to plot every worker co-op, small-business development center, community land trust, and “dual power” project in the United States. Along with a snappy Twitter feed and a wealth of radical knowledge, BSA seeks to inspire and aid an international rainbow coalition, which Z insists will be one day realized. (Z and Sean requested that their government names not be used to protect their privacy.) To discuss the organization and “dual power,” The Nation spoke by phone with Z.

—Teddy Ostrow

Teddy Ostrow: What is Black Socialists of America, and what are you hoping to achieve with it?

Z: Black Socialists of America is a network of anti-capitalist black Americans who are not just interested in building up a platform for black American leftists or getting the ideas of black American leftists out into popular dialogue; we’re also trying to push mass education in poor and working-class black and brown communities to dismantle capitalist relations and the capitalist state.

We’re not advocating for a black nation state, but we believe that black people need to be able to build in self-determination—in coalitions with people from other communities—to ensure that our particular needs and interests are met and that we have space to implement the various ideas, organizational structures, and approaches that we know best fit our communities.

TO: What does Black Socialists of America do on a day-to-day basis? What are the main activities and operations?

Z: What we want BSA to be as time goes on is essentially a national collective and network for black leftists who are trying to build on what we’re calling “dual power projects” and Cooperation Jackson. Some of their members are a part of our organization, and we’re formally partnered up with them. Their project—a federation of predominantly black-owned worker cooperatives based out of Jackson, Mississippi—is utilizing the tools of what we call the “solidarity economy movement” in order to build on this idea of economic democracy and community control. They’re doing it under an explicitly eco-socialist, anti-capitalist politics.

And so we want to catalyze the development of Cooperation Jacksons throughout the country, and we want to be able to support and connect these various initiatives.

TO: Why do you think poor and working-class communities of color need to mobilize with socialism as a guiding philosophy?

Z: There’s a lot of ways I can answer that question, but I want to start by quoting one of the first black socialists of America, who was a preacher by the name of George W. Woodbey. He has a quote, and mind you, he said this in 1909: “Negroes…are yet under the impression that the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few Negroes will solve this problem…notwithstanding the fact that a few white men have all the wealth and the rest of their brothers are getting poorer everyday.”

First and foremost we have to understand that we—poor and working-class black people—are in the position that we’re in because of capitalist relations and a capitalist logic in tandem with white supremacy and various other systems of oppression that we’ve been dealing with since chattel slavery. You can’t use exploitative methods to transcend a system of exploitation.

TO: I want to get more into those weeds in a little bit. But first, tell me a bit about yourself. When did you come to be a socialist, and how did you come up with the idea for this organization?

Z: I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. For the first 17, 18 years of my life, everything was oriented around Jesus Christ and the types of values that came along with that. There are figures throughout the black radical tradition who had a similar upbringing. I don’t believe in any organized religion at this point in my life, but I do think that might’ve played a role in shaping my values and in how I perceive the world around me, perceive people in my community, and perceive struggle—what that means and what that is.

But I really didn’t come around to socialism explicitly until sometime after university. Throughout that entire period, I took a deeper dive into left history and theory and heterodox economics, which is still something that I’m learning. But in December of 2017—it was actually after Cornel West put out that piece in The Guardian critiquing Ta-Nehisi Coates—the response he got infuriated me. Black petit bourgeois academics calling him a hater, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that he’s washed up, all these different things. I was like OK, there needs to be some sort of platform for black leftists in the United States.

So in December of 2017, I started Black Socialists of America as a social media platform to let people know that not only are black anti-capitalists here in numbers, but also black socialists have been here for well over a century—well over a century. Black people have been using mutual aid and cooperative economics since chattel slavery. We had black American socialists back when Karl Marx himself was still alive. Peter H. Clark, for example, who we identify as the first black socialist of America, was writing about socialism in the 1870s.

Through this platform I curated that history from the 1870s to today, covering the Black Panther Party and various individuals and movements throughout history—sharing pictures, quotes, videos, articles. And after a certain amount of time, I started sharing more of my views. Doing threads on various dynamics got a lot of traction. Within six or seven months, in the middle of 2018, we partnered up with Cooperation Jackson formally.

It went from being “black American leftists need a platform” to we have a chance here to present to people a concrete practical strategy and model that can allow us to start building counter power and counter institutions against capitalist relations.

TO: What does BSA offer to black leftists that other organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, do not?

Z: I mean, where do I start? I just want to preface my response here by saying that I have comrades in DSA, and they’ve been supportive of us for a long time. Before Black Socialists of America, there was no all-encompassing organization that represented us and our history. There are black anti-capitalist organizations that have been here for a long time, but if you googled “black socialists,” you weren’t going to get a lot of results.

As black people, we have perspectives that these predominantly white organizations just aren’t going to have. Also, the economic programs and strategies we’re advocating for are not reflected in the programs of the larger, predominantly white left organizations in the US. We’re talking about white supremacy, and we’re talking about patriarchy, and we’re talking about all the social systems of domination in addition to capitalist exploitation.

The left is still largely class reductionist today, and you have neoliberal organizations, and media and figures who are race reductionists. We’re starting in poor and working-class black communities because, to put it as simply as possible, white people don’t listen.

TO: BSA has made calls for the foundation of other potentially allied socialist organizations, such as Latinx Socialists of America. I believe an Asian Socialists of America is in development. Why has BSA called for their establishment?

Z: We are going to know our issues better than anyone else. Human beings are heterogeneous. It doesn’t make sense for us to file under organizational structures that homogenize us and force us to assimilate into an organization whose perspectives ultimately don’t reflect our understanding. It makes more sense for us to build where we’re at, with people who understand our struggles, and then to build coalitions with folks from other communities who know their own struggles and dynamics.

TO: On the BSA website, if you leave the webpage open long enough, there are these pop-ups of influential leftist figures like James Baldwin that appear with quotes. And your social media is flooded with threads, excerpts, and pictures of leftists of color. How do you see Black Socialists of America fitting within the black radical tradition?

Z: If you study the black radical tradition and black figures on the left in our history, the one common thread between all of them is that they were trying to grab onto whatever framework, whatever insights they could in order to help black people liberate themselves and find freedom.

Our history is, as poor and working-class black people in the United States, various forms and variations of enslavement—some much more brutal and extreme than others. And Black Socialists of America is another stage within the black radical tradition that nests the fight for freedom within a global fight for freedom and utilizes whatever analytical frameworks to push and develop tools for liberation.

The quote that I actually like to bring up on this question is from David Hilliard from the Black Panther Party. He was the chief of staff and said, “We are not Maoists. We are not Marxists. We are black people from Africa, who [have] a scientific approach to our world. Our philosophy is that everything in the world is always changing. Which means that you always have to adapt your thinking.” That basically sums up Black Socialists of America.

TO: We talked about “dual power” earlier. How do you define dual power?

Z: In the “Mumbo Jumbo” section of our website, we define dual power as “two powers, one proletarian (democratic) and one capitalist, coexist and compete for legitimacy during the transition away from Capitalism.” A lot of people, by the way, associate dual power with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, because he came up with that term, but the concept predates Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 by over half a century. It goes back to the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who describes it as essentially a parallel sector of an economy—autonomous, decentralized—germinating under cooperative relations and an alternative logic.

TO: Why did you create this Dual Power Map, and what are you trying to do with it?

Z: We created the Dual Power Map, because it’s one thing to sit and talk to people about the solidarity economy movement, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, and how great they are. And then it’s another thing to give people an interactive resource that allows them to engage with and support these institutions in the real world and in real time—something that we can update as time goes on.

In addition to that, we get to showcase Cooperation Jackson within this greater map in order to give people a distinction between something like what we’re trying to build on—dual power projects—and something like the cooperative and solidarity economy movements in general.

ABOVE: BSA's Dual Power Map blacksocialists.us

People can see very clearly that one is just kind of messy, and while it’s better at the micro level than the default capitalist alternative, they’re weaker in the sense that they’re not united. They’re fragmented. The hope is that as time goes on, we’re not just going to see cooperatives sprout up sporadically. We want to see explicitly political dual power projects and build out ecosystems of economic democracy that can reinforce other ecosystems of democracy throughout the country.

Ultimately, we want to build out on this Dual Power Map into what we call the Dual Power App, an iOS-Android application that would allow folks to engage and start building on their own projects in a much more comprehensive, accessible, and streamlined way.

TO: I think that the Dual Power Map for a lot of leftists was very exciting. And dual power is a household term for many socialists. On your website, there is a section of glossary terms, that includes common phrases used by leftists, different leftist sects, and there’s also a resource page with introductory readings, longer reads, and other literature. What is the importance of becoming familiar with the literature, the theory, and the real nitty-gritty of socialism?

Z: I actually think we have a lot more work to do on this front, in terms of making these concepts, ideas, and materials accessible to poor and working-class people. We have to do the work of simplifying without oversimplifying for people who are unfamiliar and who might be interested or curious.

I also want to give us some credit. I do think that with the resources that we have, we’ve been doing a decent job on this front. Through our reach with social media, we’ve been interfacing with popular culture. We’ve been outward-facing. We haven’t just been dealing with internal politics and sectarianism in an insular fashion. We’ve been sharing quotes from Tupac Shakur, Serj Tankian, Kurt Cobain, and Albert Einstein—people who a lot of folks don’t know were socialists and who were very well-known outside of the left.

I think hopefully we’ll be able to have our own production studio to create video content—video essays, and we’re definitely going to have different podcasts, maybe even an online TV series where we have certain guests on and host certain conversations to allow people to grasp some of these questions, concerns, and ideas in different ways.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teddy Ostrow is an editorial intern at The Nation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Black Agenda Report

Scholars continue to debate what, exactly, happened to Emmett Till, but a poor Black town is betting its future on one version of the story.

“Who gets to decide what, exactly, happened?”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n August of 1955, Emmett Till was lynched in the Mississippi Delta . The 14-year-old African American reportedly whistled at a white woman, violating the racial norms of the Jim Crow South. For this supposed infraction, he was abducted, tortured, shot and dropped in a river with a cotton gin fan tied to his neck.

Since then, however, the region has witnessed an unprecedented “memory boom.” More than US$4 million has been invested in dozens of roadside markers, a museum, two restored buildings, an interpretive center, a walking park and a community building. Yet for 49 years and 11 months, his murder was all but forgotten in the Delta – the first memorial to Till wasn’t dedicated until July 1, 2005.

But many details of what happened to Till on that fateful night remain murky, and the abrupt investment in his memory raises a series of questions. Who gets to tell this racially charged story? Who gets to decide what, exactly, happened? And what’s motivating the construction of these memorials?

“For 49 years and 11 months, his murder was all but forgotten in the Delta.”

My just-published book, “Remembering Emmett Till ,” addresses these questions head on. It suggests that as Till’s story has been passed down through the generations and taken up by a range of memorials, its plot has been shaped by forces like poverty as much as by fidelity to historical fact.

This is nowhere more conspicuous than in the village of Glendora, a small community 150 miles south of Memphis, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Beset by poverty, the village clings desperately to a version of Till’s story that few others seem to believe.

A community mired in poverty

Glendora is saturated with memorials. The tiny town of five streets boasts 18 signs dedicated to the memory of Emmett Till’s 1955 murder. In addition, Glendora is also home to the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center , a Till-themed park and the Black Bayou Bridge – a long-decommissioned bridge recently explored in a New York Times article as the site from which Till’s body may have been dropped in the water.

Glendora is also marked by breathtaking poverty. In an application for federal assistance, town officials noted that the Glendora median household income is 70% below the state average, 68% of families live below the poverty line, and just 18% of the adults have earned a high school education. According to numbers published by Glendora Mayor Johnny B. Thomas in 2017 , 86% of children in the village live below the poverty line. Partners in Development, a nonprofit committed to helping the poorest of the poor, has chosen to focus on Haiti, Guatemala and Glendora, Mississippi .

“Glendora is marked by breathtaking poverty.”

The Glendora version of Till’s story is unique on two counts.

Emmett's mother insisted on showing what they had done to her child. That meant an open casket.

First, while virtually every 20th-century history of Till’s murder suggests that the murderers dropped the body in the Tallahatchie River, the commemorative work in Glendora suggests that Till was dropped into a tributary known as the Black Bayou from a bridge on the south side of Glendora. According to this account, the bayou then carried Till’s body for three miles to the Tallahatchie River, where it was recovered.

Second, while no historian has been able to say with certainty where the murderers obtained the fan they used to weigh down Till’s corpse, the Glendora museum claims that the fan was stolen from the Glendora Cotton Gin, presumably by Elmer Kimbell, a gin employee and the next-door neighbor of confessed murderer J. W. Milam .

Disputed details

While these variations on the finer points of Till’s story may seem like minutiae, to Glendora residents they are matters so weighty that it sometimes seems as if the very future of the town hinges on where Till’s body was dropped in the water and what fan weighed it down.

In 2010, the Mississippi Development Authority sent a team of economic development experts to Glendora. Their charge was to devise a plan to rescue the town from poverty – a tall order.

The team struggled to find solutions. Aside from the unrealistic suggestion that the town turn the snake-infested land along the bayou into “riverfront property,” the development authority’s only other proposal was that Glendora capitalize on its connection to the Till murder. More commemoration, they said, would bring tourists; tourism would beget economic development.

The viability of this suggestion, of course, turned on a version of Till’s story that maximized the relevance of Glendora. None of this was news to Mayor Thomas . Since at least 2005, he had been promoting a Glendora-centric narrative of the murder in which Till’s body was dropped in the Black Bayou tied with a fan from the local gin.

While plausible, these claims are difficult to prove. One key authority has refuted them: the Mississippi Department of Archives and History .

“Tourism would beget economic development..”

The state agency has invested more funds into Till’s commemoration than any other organization.

It restored the Tallahatchie County Courthouse , the site of the Till trial, and even invested $200,000 in the controversial restoration of Ben Roy’s Service Station in Money, Mississippi. Although the service station sits just 67 feet south of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, the site of Till’s alleged whistle, it played no role in the Till murder, aside from unverified claims that customers discussed the murder from the porch.

The agency, however, is not convinced that Till’s body was dropped from the Black Bayou Bridge. Nor does the organization believe that the fan was stolen from the local gin.

In fact, the agency has, in its files, a five-page “Summary of Research ” that’s dedicated to the contested veracity of these two claims. The document finds neither claim verifiable and has thus rejected every grant application the town has ever submitted.

Mayor Thomas has one state agency telling him to lean hard into Till’s story and another rejecting his every attempt to do so.

The mayor gets creative

Without the backing of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Thomas has nonetheless been able to erect tributes to Till’s legacy.

The work began on Sept. 27, 2005. On that day, the United States Department of Agriculture awarded a Community Connect Broadband Grant to Glendora. Funded at $325,405 , the grant was intended to bring broadband connectivity to Glendora.

After obtaining the grant, Thomas used the USDA money to convert the old cotton gin into a community computer lab with internet access. But he also used some of the funds to construct the world’s first Emmett Till museum – the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center – which was also located in the gin. Although the USDA approved the expenses, it is unclear whether they knew that their money was being used to build a museum. In the 647 pages of records preserved by the USDA – including the application, labor contracts, invoices and correspondence – Emmett Till isn’t mentioned once.

After the grant ran out, Glendora couldn’t pay the bills and internet service was discontinued. It has not resumed. The museum, on the other hand, is still in operation and visitors do occasionally stop in, though the majority of tourists go to Sumner , a town 12 miles north of Glendora and the site of the trial.

“It is unclear whether they knew that their money was being used to build a museum.”

While the museum was initially funded by the USDA, it is maintained on a day-to-day basis by the Glendora Economic and Community Development Corporation, a 501(c)3 founded by Thomas. The town has assigned most, if not all, public business to the nonprofit. Glendora’s development corporation pays city workers, operates 24 Section 8 apartments and operates the Till museum. According to public records , the public housing funnels about $100,000 a year of federal HUD money into the nonprofit. With this money, the nonprofit maintains the apartments, pays city workers and, critically, subsidizes the Till museum.

Yet the questions remain unanswered: Was Emmett Till actually dropped from the Black Bayou Bridge? Was the fan stolen from the local gin? Was Elmer Kimbell involved?

Perhaps. But it is impossible to separate the veracity of these claims from the poverty of the townspeople. Thomas has been able to leverage the town’s poverty to support the museum; the museum, in turn, supports Glendora’s plausible-but-unverifiable theories of Till’s murder. Had Glendora been wealthy, there’d be little incentive to stick so adamantly to this version of the story. The Black Bayou Bridge would be lost to memory and Elmer Kimbell would rarely appear in the stories of Till’s final night.

But Glendora is not wealthy. Instead, sustained by the poverty of the town, stories about Kimbell, the Glendora Cotton Gin and the Black Bayou Bridge continue to circulate – sometimes from the highest echelons of media .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

This essay is part of a series on cultural, scientific and esoteric matters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Tell is a professor of communication at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on issues of race, memory, and place. Since 2014, he has focused on the legacy of the murder of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta. His 2019 book Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press) tells the complete story of Emmett Till’s commemoration in the Mississippi Delta.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Brain Food

A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos.

Tupac Shakur: he lived life defiantly and boldly, but set off too many lethal wires.

This material was first published on December 12, 2015 / Original source is RapRehab

John Potash is the author of The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders. Published in 2007, it is just now beginning to circulate among a new generation of Black millennial artists and activists. Based on 12 years of intense research, it includes over 1,000 endnotes, an assortment of FBI documents and over 100 interviews. Potash’s most recent book Drugs As Weapons Against Us was published earlier this year in May 2015. This interview was conducted by telephone and transcribed verbatim.

[Lamont Lilly]: John, thanks for sitting down to talk with me. When Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in 1996 I was a sophomore in high school who knew the rapper, but not the man. What inspired you to write about Tupac. You explore his life with such depth?

[John Potash]: I was introduced to Hip Hop as a senior in high school. It was around 1982/83 when a friend I wrestled with turned me on to Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. A few years later I got into Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest. I was interested in a lot of different kinds of music, but when I got into political rap, I was paying more attention. It was right after college and I was working as a drug counselor. I was counseling someone who said that their father was a Black Panther killed by the police.

As I started to research the Black Panther Party I came across an article in 1994 in the Washington Post about Tupac Shakur being shot in the Quad Recording Studios. The reporter of the article stated that in another strange twist, the same police officer that showed up at the sexual assault scene a year earlier was the first one to arrive at the scene of the Quad Recording shooting near Time Square.

So, I researched more of what happened at the Quad Recording Studio and contacted Tupac’s trial lawyer who was representing him in the sexual assault case, which was happening at this same time. I asked him do you think the FBI is targeting Tupac like they targeted his parents with the Counter Intelligence Program . Michael Warren who was his lawyer at the time, said yes, and no one is writing about it.

I wrote a piece on what I had found and solicited several left wing magazines, but no national magazine would publish it. However, a small local press did. I was published in leftist media on other topics, but they kept rejecting the Tupac Shakur article and the fact of a new Counter Intelligence Program working against him. But in 1998, Covert Action Quarterly (which was started by CIA whistleblower, Philip Agee accepted the article. I had about 50 endnotes for the article which included my sources.

After that, some people who were close to Tupac opened up to me in a big way. They said you have to turn this into a book. From 1998 to 2007, I worked hard outside my regular job to complete the research. That’s how The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders came together.

[LL]: In your book you highlight the family legacy of the Shakurs and their long-time work within the Black Liberation Movement, dating back to Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. You clearly illustrate how Tupac was a direct descendant of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. In bringing this together, how did you connect with Pam Africa, Kathleen Cleaver and Mutulu Shakur, people whose contributions were obviously instrumental?

[JP]: I think the key is that these individuals are often shut out of mainstream media. I don’t know why more independent and left wing journalists did not try to cover this issue better. But I also don’t know why all the left wing national magazines, which are all owned by whites, couldn’t see through the propaganda on Tupac. However, Covert Action Quarterly was so respected. When I first met Kathleen Cleaver at the Black Panther Film Festival, she gave a hug and said that she had read my article on Tupac. She mentioned Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother. Kathleen was explaining to me how this repression at the hands of COINTELPRO was intergenerational.

Pam Africa read the article because the cover of that particular issue was of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was also himself a target of the counter intelligence program. Once Pam Africa saw my article on Tupac, she asked how she could help me get the article out more. Pam told the editor of Covert Action Quarterly how important she thought the article was. Pam and Kathleen were a big help.

Once I met them, the information opened up. They provided additional interviews and more people who could speak on different aspects of how the counter intelligence program against Tupac and his family related to Mumia. Kathleen even shared what happened to her and husband, Eldridge Cleaver (who was also a member of the Black Panther Party).

In regards to Mutulu Shakur, he believed in the theory of my article, but Mutulu was shut off from the media. They put him in the most maximum security prison in the country. The only way that he could get his ideas out was through his website. That first article connected me to all of these individuals. Shortly after, journalist, Connie Bruck did a very good article on Tupac for the New Yorker.

In the article, she discussed the strange circumstances surrounding Tupac’s death. She interviewed Tupac’s attorney, Michael Warren for several hours, yet none of his content made the article. Connie’s editors at the New Yorker had cut every mention of Michael Warren. They cut everything he said. That’s what we’re dealing with, an incredible censorship over mainstream media. A lot of left wing writers and activists have been shut out.

[LL]: Speaking of censorship, your book really illustrates the wide grasp that Time Warner has over the Hip Hop industry. I was completely unaware that they had censored so much of Tupac’s material, excluding full songs from albums, and chopping lyrics. Has anyone recovered this material in its original form?

[JP]: I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to talk with his mother, Afeni Shakur on that. Afeni tried to get all of his songs from Death Row, but Death Row apparently, at one point only gave her half the songs Tupac had produced. He was so prolific – amazing at how many songs he produced by the age of 25. Afeni did get a few hundred songs from Death Row, but from what I read there were still more songs Death Row was keeping from her. So, I don’t know whether that was material that had been cut out or not. I don’t know, sorry to say.

"That is the amazing power of mainstream media censorship. It just goes to show you how far their tentacles reach. What happens is that even among left wing media, foundations are often supplying them grants to causes they’re sympathetic to. When independent of left wing media sources get grants from these foundations, which they need to stay alive, it becomes very difficult because those grants come with censorship..."

[LL]: You cover at great length, the details of Hip Hop’s “East Coast vs. West Coast” feud. I remember as a Hip Hop kid in the mid 90’s, that feud was huge. As youth, we were led to believe that we had to choose between New York or Cali – Biggie or Tupac. How was this divide manufactured from the perspective of U.S. intelligence, particularly in connection to the “East Coast vs. West Coast” Black Panther beef just one generation prior? It’s so clear that the two generations are connected, both targeted by state surveillance, political repression and media censorship.

[JP]: There’s a book called The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. In it, Ben shows how literally 95% of mainstream media has increasingly been controlled by a smaller and smaller amount of companies. And he kept revising that book, so it went from about 24 companies down to a dozen, and finally down to about 6 companies controlling a vast majority of our information, and the information that we can find.

In the book, Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, they outline how the Pentagon owns and publishes well over 1,300 magazines, and we don’t know what those magazines are. It’s all classified. We can guess that most of them are the magazines in your typical Barnes & Nobles. The Pentagon is by far the biggest magazine publisher in the world.

[LL]: The Pentagon? Really?

[JP]: Yes, the Pentagon. And this comes from military journals, as Chomsky and Herman both site. Military journals admitted this. In the 1970’s, Carl Bernstein covered the senate church committee hearings on COINTELPRO and U.S. intelligence. Bernstein wrote an article about one of those hearings that covered the media in particular. At that time the CIA director admitted that well over 400 members of the media were living dual lives and were actually working for the CIA. Bernstein named who some of these people were, which included the heads of virtually all of the mainstream media organizations – the head of Time Incorporated, the head of ABC, the head of NBC and CBS, etc. These people were working for the CIA living dual lives.

Time Warner in particular, had a vice president named Charles Douglas Jackson who went back and forth being CIA architect and head of psychological warfare under different presidents to being VP of Time Incorporated. There are documents and evidence showing that C.D. Jackson was running psychological warfare operations through his media assets like Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and all the other magazines that Time Incorporated owns. That’s how they do it, by controlling so much of the media and our sources of information. They manufacture these fake articles, and censor others, to control how we think about things.

Operation Chaos, which worked with the FBI’s counterintelligence program to target the Black Panthers and other left wing activists, is one example. We only found out about these programs because some activists broke-in to an FBI office in 1971 and confiscated these documents, and tried to get the word out as much as possible. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even know what they were doing to us.

Unfortunately, even with finding out about these documents, they still control mainstream media. The word is still getting out. A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos. These are the things I’m trying to uncover and inform people about.

With the Black Panthers, they tried to create divisions and manufacture murderous rivalries – for example, between Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. They sent fake letters back and forth between the two of them. Stokely Carmichael , who was at one time head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was also an honorary Black Panther until the FBI began sending fake letters back and forth between Stokely and Huey Newton.

This was done to split them up and create divisions. Undercover agents would infiltrate the Black Panthers and feed false information and fake letters. I argue that in some cases, agents killed and murdered comrades and associates, to make it look like a real war. In reality, it was a “manufactured” war! And there’s more tactics they used.

In my next book, Drugs As Weapons Against Us I show how they used drugs to undermine Huey P. Newton’s competence by getting him caught up in cocaine to hurt his functioning. I show how these tactics that were used against the Black Panthers were also evident against Tupac and Biggie Smalls, and other rappers.

In prison, Tupac was getting these anonymous letters saying it was Biggie and Puffie (Sean Combs) who set up his shooting at Quad Studios in New York. Prison guards and inmates were telling him the same thing, total strangers. Tupac didn’t know what to believe. He didn’t really know what was going on at the time.

The reason U.S. intelligence was doing this was because Tupac Shakur was already a national Black leader. He was head of the New African Panthers at the age of 17 and 18 years old. That group was active in 8 cities nationwide. They were replicating what the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was doing. His mother, Afeni Shakur was a Harlem Panther leader.

[LL]: All of this history about Tupac the revolutionary – his ties to the Black Liberation Movement. Why do so many of us not know about this side of Tupac? Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Chokwe Lumumba, Huey P. Newton – Tupac was around all of them. He was learning from real-life field generals. These people are grassroots legends!!

[JP]: That is the amazing power of mainstream media censorship. It just goes to show you how far their tentacles reach. What happens is that even among left wing media, foundations are often supplying them grants to causes they’re sympathetic to. When independent of left wing media sources get grants from these foundations, which they need to stay alive, it becomes very difficult because those grants come with censorship. And this censorship is spread all over.

In regards to Tupac’s activism, the New Afrikan Panthers were the young adult organization within the New Afrikan People’s Organization – youth from the ages of 13 to 28, which was close to the age of the Black Panthers when they first started. Mumia Abu-Jamal was about 14/15 years old when he joined the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.

[LL]: That is correct, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, all teenagers.

[JP]: Yeah, that’s right. So when Tupac at the age of 18 became national chairman, they were watching him very closely. As soon as he got a solo record deal with 2Pacalypse Now, within several days of his first video “Trapped,” which was an MTV worldwide video release, the Oakland Police allegedly stopped him for jaywalking. Yet, they proceeded to choke him unconsciously and bang his head against the curb. He was targeted immediately.

Another thing that Tupac was doing as an activist was appealing to the gangs to politicize http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.29135/title.tupac-says-quad-shooting-sexual-assault-case-were-all-connected-in-previously-unheard-phone-call them. This was a part of the plan to get the Bloods and Crips to call a peace truce between each other and become leftist activists. And it was working!

It was happening all across California, first in Los Angeles right after the riots that protested the beating of Rodney King, and the cops being acquitted. The peace truces began to spread, not only among the Bloods and Crips, but across the country, to the point where the Latin Kings stopped selling drugs and turned onto left wing activism. The Young Lords, the Latino version of the Black Panthers, helped that to happen.

Tupac was actually a very serious activist http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-death-of-the-code-of-thug-life/article4228053/; people just didn’t realize it. He was somewhat hiding it because he didn’t want U.S. intelligence to know about it. Nonetheless, that’s why he was being targeted, and censored.

[LL]: That’s the same thing Fred Hampton was doing in Chicago, bringing groups together, bringing the gangs together with the community activists, politicizing this marginalized demographic, raising consciousness among the oppressed.

[JP]: And that’s why they were targeted. That’s much more important than what I can even say right now. I get into the importance of that in my next book, but the fact that Tupac could do that – the fact that Fred Hampton http://www.frso.org/about/statements/2008/fredhampton.htm could do that, even people like Lumumba Shakur, was seen as dangerous to U.S. intelligence. People like Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, the Los Angeles Black Panther leaders who were some of the first to be murdered http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21382-1969-the-year-the-black-panther-party-was-to-be-annihilated, were particularly dangerous not only to U.S. intelligence but to the oligarchy as well, to those who control this country.

[LL]: During slavery, it was common practice for slave masters to outlaw any use or presence of African drums on the plantation. They were very aware of the drum’s power, mystique and many uses. In hindsight, they were afraid of Black music’s ability to empower and mobilize people. This is the same reason artists like Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrick, Bob Marley and Sam Cooke have always been closely monitored, even targeted. This is public information now, supported by official documents. So, why is nothing being done about this?

[JP]: The oligarchy has too much power. I didn’t know about the outlawing of drums on plantations, but that makes sense. It’s all in line with what is going on today. U.S. intelligence, the ruling elite and the CIA have always wanted to control our hearts and minds. Much of this mentality and these practices come from the Nazis who “specialized” in controlling hearts and minds. It’s not always about controlling people physically. It’s also about controlling people mentally, so that they control themselves.

The key is that the biggest opponent to the CIA’s ability to control people’s minds is the presence of politically and socially conscious musicians. These types of artists can get to people’s hearts with their music, and get to people’s minds with their lyrics. These types of artists can affect people’s opinions and stimulate ideas. It comes from the passion within their music. Musicians are some of the biggest threats to the CIA. Leftist musicians are in opposition to the oligarchy and their entire apparatus, the CIA, the FBI, U.S. intelligence, all of them.

This is something we have to look at more closely. We don’t have control over the music industry, so we have to keep these artists alive. In my next book, I’ll be talking about a few white musicians as well like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain.

[LL]: Exactly! That’s right!

[JP]: Exactly, because they had the same political passions as Tupac, and Jimi Hendrix did, too. During the last year or two of his life, Jimi Hendrix became very political. He was deeply disturbed about Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, which eventually led him to dedicate his last album to the Black Panther Party.

Jimi Hendrix was talking about the Black Panthers in live interviews. He would say things like “Hey, if you want to oppose these warmongers, you got to get your Black Panthers together to help with this.” Jimi was getting very political. He had even asked Bob Dylan to join a political organization that he wanted to start for peace. Jimi Hendrix was getting very active the last year of his life, before they killed him. Corporate media doesn’t share these things with the public, which is why not much is being done to stop it.

[LL]: Speaking of controlling minds, from 1987 to 1993/94 was a period now known as Hip Hop’s “Golden Age.” It was a time when artists like Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-One, Brand Nubian and the early Tupac were raising a lot of consciousness, particularly among Black youth. In a matter of a few brief years, however, we somehow went from “Fight the Power” to “Fuck Bitches, Get Money.” The 5 elements of Hip Hop were abandoned for the “Bling Era.” Are you saying that this shift was manufactured as well?

[JP]: I believe it was. I think it’s pretty clear. In the very beginning nobody would sign Tupac to a solo deal except Interscope Records, and the only reason Interscope signed him was because they were an up-start label at that time. Ted Field, co-founder of Interscope was an outcast among the major labels. After he signed Tupac, it only took one year and one record (2Pacalypse Now, Tupac’s most political album) before Time Warner came in and bought up a controlling interest of something like 52% or 53%.

This is when Time Warner came in and proceeded with the censorship, their industry control and their reworking of people’s albums. They also bought up at least a half dozen of other Rap labels. A number of the major conglomerates also bought up labels, virtually all of the Rap labels. They also bought out the white Rock labels.

Interestingly, Quincy Jones founded Vibe Magazine in 1993, but Time Warner had a controlling interest in that, too. At the same time, corporate sponsors were controlling the content of The Source and other magazines. Corporations were reshaping how and what we thought about Hip Hop, and actively began promoting the Rappers that weren’t political. As soon as they saw how big Hip Hop was becoming, they bought out as much as they possibly could, and started controlling who could make it in the Rap Industry and who could not.

This really began happening right before Tupac’s second album, “Strictly 4 My Niggaz” which was supposed to come out in 1992, but they delayed it for a year until 1993. They didn’t want it to come out until after the 1992 presidential elections because Tupac was speaking out against George Bush on that album. This is the seriousness of what we’re talking about here, the power of artistry.

[LL]: In chapter 39, you discuss the mysterious death of Reggae legend, Bob Marley. Bob officially died from “malignant melanoma” (a brain tumor), which derived from a very rare and dangerous type of cancer first found in the big toe of his right foot. In connection with Bob’s death, you interviewed filmmaker and former Black Panther, Lee Lew-Lee . Can you briefly describe the circumstances surrounding Bob’s death?

[JP]: The CIA’s MK Ultra Program was a huge program investigating all different kinds of drugs that were to be used as weapons against both foreign and domestic opposition, particularly leftist opposition. Part of their program was to figure out what substances could be the quickest and most effective at causing cancer. These substances were intended to get into the body of people they wanted to assassinate.

Bob Marley had already survived one attempt on his life in 1976. He was certainly their opposition, not only due to his music, but he was also close friends with the socialist Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. The CIA supported Manley’s opponent, Edward Seaga.

Because Marley was so influential throughout Jamaica, much less the entire the world, they knew he could easily tip the election for Manley. First, they tried with bullets. Hired gunmen associated with the opposition party, who were paid by the CIA, fired tons of bullets at Bob Marley’s house.

They hit Bob. They hit his wife, Rita Marley. They hit his manager, Don Taylor. So, Prime Minister Manley invited Marley to his secure compound manned with armed guards in order to protect him. However, they let in the film crew who was filming Marley’s upcoming concert and documentary. What they didn’t realize was that the then director of the CIA, William Colby, had his son (Carl Colby) to infiltrate the film crew. During a filming session they gave Bob Marley a gift, a pair of shoes.

They knew it was customary for a Rasta to try on a gift as soon as you get it. Bob Marley tried those shoes on immediately. As soon as he tried them on, he felt a stab in his toe. He took his foot out and it was a small metal object. No one thought anything of it at the time.

It wasn’t until a few months later that he was playing soccer and crushed his toe. Doctors revealed that his toe was full of cancer. About a year later, the cancer had spread throughout his whole body, and eventually killed him in 1981. Sam Cooke, Jimi, Tupac, Bob…these aren’t just coincidences.

[LL]: I’ve come across several books in my lifetime that have really pushed me to think more critically. I have to say this particular book has definitely been one of them. It was almost like learning about Tupac and the Hip Hop industry all over again. Have other young people asked about this book? There’s a new wave of consciousness, and Black millennial activists are leading it. This kind of reading is the perfect eye-opener.

[JP]: Well, the feedback has been mostly positive. Most people have at least been open to the ideas I’ve laid out here, except mainstream media. They just generally won’t touch it. Radio sources are a bit more receptive; not much, but enough to get it out. I’ve done several radio programs in Los Angeles and New York….and Chicago and Philadelphia. But these sources aren’t really “mainstream.” They’re alternative sources with mass followings, like Pacifica Radio, which is a left wing network.

In regards to young people, I have had the privilege of appearing at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and several other historically Black colleges. There has been some acceptance of my work, but even those spaces have still been difficult. People are worried about keeping their jobs and their positions.

For example, Bowie State University brought me in to speak through an association with a professor there. However, when one of his colleagues tried to support my work too, and expressed interest in being a PR representative for my book, he ended up getting accosted by the police at a protest and fired from his job. We would send packages back and forth through the mail, and our packages would already be opened upon receiving them. Campus police said he brutalized them. This was nothing but censorship, against a Black professor.

Unfortunately, Black radical thought is not always welcomed, even in the spaces one would think that it should be. Oddly, I heard that someone in Durham, North Carolina mentioned my book in a newspaper editorial, but I haven’t seen it.

[LL]: Lol…unfortunately, it wasn’t me, but I’m not surprised to hear that. There’s a heavy Hip Hop influence here throughout the Raleigh/Durham area. There’s also a rich legacy here of Black resistance, Black culture and Black art. A few months I ran into your book at an Anarchist book fair in Chapel Hill. Young artists and activists are finding it for the first time, almost 10 years later. Thank you so much John for getting this out. And thank you for sitting down with me.

[JP]: Thank you, Lamont. It’s good to know the book is still moving around. I’m really glad Sister Pam Africa was able to connect us. She’s so amazing; Pam wrote the foreword. Great interview, thanks for talking with me. Let’s stay in touch. ■

NC-based activist, Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press and organizer with Workers World Party. He has recently served as field staff in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, Boston and Philadelphia. In February 2015, he traveled to both Syria and Lebanon with Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney. Follow him on Twitter @LamontLilly.

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[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hicago’s movement against official lawlessness has found they have no choice but to challenge virtually the whole Black Democratic establishment for collaborating with police murder and impunity.

“So long as we allow police tyranny and terror to exist in our communities, for that period of time we will not be able to effectively organize the Black Liberation Movement.”

Chicago plans to show the nation how to combine grassroots militancy and strategic electoral campaigns in the fight against police tyranny and impunity. It is a struggle that requires direct confrontation with an entrenched and infinitely corrupt Black Misleadership Class that, in Chicago as elsewhere in Black America, has shamelessly collaborated with the Mass Black Incarceration State.

Black activists and their allies aim to channel the momentum of their stunning success in gaining a second-degree murder conviction against the cop that killed 17-year old Laquan McDonald , into a renewed campaign for community control of the police. At present, only one member of the 50-person Chicago board of alderman -- Carlos Ramirez-Rosa – supports creation of C-PAC, an entirely Civilian Police Accountability Council to be elected by the people of the city’s 25 police districts. But, rather than despair at the Black and Latino Caucus’s betrayal, the mass movement is launching a campaign to eject them from office in next year’s elections. “We’re gonna change that city council,” said Frank Chapman, head of the Chicago branch of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “They are so entrenched, they are so corrupted by the system, that they don’t believe it can be changed. They’ve been completely won over by the ruling class in this city. The only way to wake them up is by defeating them,” Chapman told Black Agenda Radio.

“Rather than despair at the Black and Latino Caucus’s betrayal, the mass movement is launching a campaign to eject them from office.”

Chapman’s Alliance and its allies in Black Lives Matter and other grassroots mobilizers believe the time is ripe to throw out the collaborators and to “take the power from the police and put that power in the hands of the community.” Officer Jason Van Dyke’s October 5 conviction for pumping 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald “gives the people hope,” said Chapman. “In the history of Chicago this is the first time that a white police officer has been charged and convicted for murdering a Black person, while on duty…. It lets people know that we can bring about a change in the power relationships in the system between the oppressor and the oppressed, if those of us who are oppressed get together, get united and fight. We needed a victory like this to give some encouragement and hope, so we can keep this motion going on.”

The C-PAC legislation would empower the elected police district representatives to:

* Re-writing the police ‘rulebook’ deciding what Chicago police can do on the streets.

* Appoint the Superintendent of Police

*Investigate ALL complaints, including all police shootings, all allegations of police misconduct and violations of the U.S. Constitution and Human Rights Law.

* Refer cases to U.S. Federal Grand Jury and U.S. Attorney seeking indictments of cops for the crimes they commit, circumventing the closed loop of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Chicago Police Department.

* Decide the rules of investigations and change the way police crime victims and family members are treated, increasing speed and transparency.

“The time is ripe to throw out the collaborators and to ‘take the power from the police and put that power in the hands of the community.’”

Most of the board of aldermen’s 18-member Black Caucus and all but one member of the 11-member Latino Caucus have, instead, backed proposals that cobbled together various “reforms” borrowed from other cities to give the appearance of police accountability – but provide no real people-power to hire, fire, fund or defund, or shape the nature of policing. Therefore, says Chapman, these misleaders have go -- all of them.

“As of right now we have over a dozen candidates for city council that are running as C-PAC candidates. We believe that by January we can have this number up to 70. There are 200 candidates running, all told. We think we can get 70 of them to support C-PAC.”

The Chicago Teachers Union “is one of our big supporters.” Said Chapman. “They endorse our campaign for C-PAC, and we endorse their campaign for community control of the board of education.” The United Electrical Workers and SEIU Local 73 “have been behind us,” but “there’s a lot of others that are on the fence. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is behind us in words. I wish they would do more in terms of actually putting some pressure on the aldermen.”

In general, Big Labor has been a disappointment to the Black movement. “In spite of what [AFL-CIO president Richard L.] Trumka said during the Ferguson uprising, about how the unions should be supportive of the Black Liberation Movement, we haven’t seen any evidence of that here in Chicago with the Chicago Federation of Labor,” said Chapman. “They haven’t come out in support of us because the Fraternal Order of Police.is part of that federation, and they’re using that union card to paralyze the rest of the trade union movement from supporting us.”

“The teachers union endorses our campaign for C-PAC, and we endorse their campaign for community control of the board of education.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Black grassroots movement takes credit for discouraging Mayor Rahm Emanuel from seeking another term in office. For 400 days, Emanuel hid the existence of video tapes that ultimately convinced the jury that Officer Van Dyke deserved to be convicted of murder. Chapman blames the bulk of the board of aldermen for collaborating in the mayor’s cover-up. “We have one of the most corrupt city councils in this nation, and the Black aldermen are included,” he said.

““There are 34 alderpeople who were all part of the conspiracy to hide the video,” Black Lives Matter activist Aislinn Pulley told Black Agenda Radio. Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter is committed to the electoral campaign. Some other Black Lives Matter chapters across the country have not joined with similar efforts to create community-empowering bodies to assert control over the police, instead advocating de-funding and abolition of the police. Chapman has a response to that position. "I'm a communist," he says, "so I believe in the abolition of the state. But that's not gonna happen right now, but they're killing us right now. And so, we can share the vision with them of abolition. But they need to share the struggle with us, right now, to shift the power relationship between the police and our communities, by demanding community control of the police. That's a democratic demand, and we can't put it off until the future. We've got to fight for it right now."

What Chapman and Pulley did not say, but is central to the dilemma, is that all of these collaborators and allies of the police are Democrats. The Black Mass Incarceration State, erected as the ruling class answer to the Black Liberation Movement’s self-determinationist demands, has been relentlessly reinforced by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats. In the cities where most Black people live, it is largely Black Democratic administrations that have enforced the mass Black incarceration regime for two generations, as documented by James Forman Jr’s indispensable book, Locking Up Our Own. In 2014, just weeks before Mike Brown was murdered by a Ferguson, Missouri, cop, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus -- all Democrats – voted to continue the Pentagon’s infamous 1033 program that has funneled billions of dollars in battle-grade weapons and military gear to local police departments. Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, increased the Pentagon’s militarization of local police 24-fold between 2008 and 2014.

“It is largely Black Democratic administrations that have enforced the mass Black incarceration regime for two generations.”

The advent of the Black Lives Matter movement had no meaningful effect on the Black Caucus in the U.S. House. In May of this year, 75 percent of the Black lawmakers voted for the Protect and Serve Act of 2018 , a “Blue Lives Matter” bill that makes cops a “protected class” and defines assaults on police as “hate crimes” carrying additional prison time.

Donald Trump has branded himself the “law and order” president, but clearly, there can be no reversal of the mass Black incarceration regime -- a human rights abomination that has created the world’s biggest police state and mangled social relationships beyond measure in Black America – without an all-out struggle against the enemy within the Black community. And they are all Democrats. If electoral strategies are to have any usefulness to the Black Liberation Movement, it must be understood that the white corporate ruling class has thoroughly infiltrated Black politics through the mechanisms of the Democratic Party, which has annexes in Black civic associations, fraternities and sororities, and the churches. You can’t fight The Man or his police unless you neutralize and defeat his Black henchmen and women.

Frank Chapman gets it. If virtually the entire Chicago board of aldermen is in league with the enemy, then they all have to go. Liberation is an ambitious goal. The alternative is continued police impunity and community powerlessness. “So long as we allow police tyranny and terror to exist in our communities, for that period of time we will not be able to effectively organize the Black Liberation Movement. All we’ll be doing is participating in nostalgia about how great it was yesterday.” said Chapman. “If we don’t stop this, it’s gonna choke us out.”

About the Author

Leading public intellectual

Glen Ford is a founding editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR), where he serves as executive editor. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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Originally published: Black Agenda Report (October. 31, 2018)

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ascism is always a danger under capitalism, with its frequent crises and endemic white supremacy, but the phony “resistance” is only concerned about electing Democrats.With last weekend’s election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, white men’s parties now lead governments that preside over the two largest concentrations of Black people outside Africa. Both Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are widely described as fascists–which is correct. But it does not follow that everyone who calls such men “fascists” is a friend of Black and other oppressed people and, therefore, worthy allies in a “united front” of “resistance.”Who are the fascists, and where do they come from? More precisely, what are they defending?It is generally understood among the Left that fascists are the political products of capitalism in crisis, reactionaries that promise to restore order by purging the society of unwanted peoples and ideologies. Their targets depend on the particularities of the society in crisis: in Germany, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks, enemies that Hitler conflated as one and the same. In the post-Reconstruction southern region of the United States, whites imposed the world’s first totally racially regimented society, one that would serve as a model and inspiration for emerging fascists for generations to come. The Jim Crow order was heralded as a new day for the white working man, who would no longer have to compete with Black labor–enslaved or free–but instead join in the profits (and priceless white social and political privilege) from Black people’s super-exploitation.

In Latin America, a native-born white elite lorded it over the surviving descendants of the original inhabitants and the millions of slaves imported to the “New World”, by European colonialists–especially to the colossus, Brazil. Although the post-slavery racial order was never as regimented as in the U.S.–indeed, racial ambiguity was encouraged among the dark lower classes, to keep them divided–the people at the top always knew they were “white” (Portuguese), and defended the racial hierarchy with horrific force, when necessary.

The New World and the old were united by globalizing capital as most of the planet was divided between the western European powers, with the fiercely racist U.S. unilaterally declaring a kind of sovereignty (Monroe Doctrine) over the south of the hemisphere, a region where the racial pedigrees of even the elites were suspect to North American eyes–“mongrels,” the white southern politicians called them.

BLACK MISLEADERS New Jersey's Cory Booker—Another corporatist Democrat on the way up. The party produces many false populists, and Booker is being primed for a possible extension of the "Obama" brand.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 the industrial capitalist powers divided the world among themselves, with their respective colonial empires reserved for the “home” country’s super-exploitation–globalization made formal. The newly unified German state stepped forward to claim its rightful portion of the spoils–its White Right. In 1898, the United States, which had been represented in Berlin, seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to become a full-fledged imperial power. Not long afterward, President Teddy Roosevelt sailed his “Great White Fleet” around the world to show that the U.S. was not only a great power, but a major defender of white “civilization.”

The U.S. claimed to be late to the colonial game, but had in fact been catapulted to major economic power status on the backs of its super-exploited internal colony of slaves, whose bodies were mortgaged to securities traded throughout the developed capitalist world, as were the deeds to the fields they toiled.

Brazil was the last Latin American country to abolish slavery, in 1888. The elite tried to overwhelm the freed men and women with white immigrants, importing between 70,000 and 80,000 newcomers each year from 1870 to 1930, mainly Portuguese and Italians. Much of the same attempts at whitening the population occurred elsewhere in Latin America, as elites tried frantically to certify their membership in the global white club.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an arch racist who segregated the federal civil service and praised the Klan-loving film “Birth of a Nation” as “writing history with lightning,” sought to perfect the post-World War One international order by backing formation of a League of Nations. But Wilson’s rhetoric on people’s rights to “self-determination” was meant for white people only. Wilson gave no encouragement to the colonized people of Africa, Asia and the Americas; instead, he invaded and occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic–as was his right, as leader of a Great White Nation.

This global white ruling structure was built on a doctrine of white supremacy–or, as Marxists correctly maintain, the ideology of white supremacy evolved to justify the crimes of the western European colonizers and settlers against the rest of the world. Either way, that ideology was supreme on the planet–a mature world system–when fascists started calling themselves by that name, most notably in post-World War One Italy and Germany. Mussolini and Hitler wanted nothing less for their nations than what Britain and France had long enjoyed: a free hand in subjugating the “lesser races” of the world–a white privilege that the U.S. had arrogated to itself, internally, and against its neighbors, at whim.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n a sense, the western Europeans and their settler states had forged an ideology of white “exceptionalism” over the centuries since the piratical European breakout of 1492. The Haitian Revolution of 1804 was a challenge to the white world order of a magnitude that would not be exceeded until 1917, with the Russian revolutionary declaration of the rights of all peoples to “free self-determination, including secession and formation of a separate state.” The Soviet stance was seen as a declaration of war, not just on capitalism, but on white people’s “exceptional” right to supremacy over darker peoples–a revolutionary idea whose time would not come for most of the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean for two generations.

Fascism would consume Europe, as Hitler pursued his super-white Aryan nation dream, a genocidal ambition derived directly from the centuries-long planetary colonization project of Britain, France, the Dutch, Spain, Portugal and other globe-trotting thieves.

White supremacy is deeply embedded in Euro-settler culture. It provides an implicit, if not explicit, explanation for Euro-American dominance in the world, and an excuse for the tens of millions slaughtered in reaching that zenith. The histories of Euro-American world conquest and capitalism are entwined–that is, the history of capitalism begins in the holds of slave ships. It is impossible to separate these historical developments.

It is also near impossible to isolate “fascists” as if they are some peculiar and discreet strain of “ism.” They are able to garner mass followings when the prevailing order is threatened–and in the Euro-American world (including, of course, Latin America), that order is inherently white supremacist and capitalist.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ascists always win power with the assent of strong sections of the ruling class, since those are the social forces that have the biggest stake in the old order. Such was the case with Hitler, Mussolini and, yes, Trump and Bolsonaro. Therefore, the question is not, What do we do about the miscreants Trump and Bolsonaro, but, How do we defeat this system–the rule of capital, buttressed and justified by white supremacy–and those elements of the ruling class and their minions that have empowered these ugly fascists? That means Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. and a host of political parties and business enterprises in Brazil. It means indicting the oligarchs at the top of late stage global capitalism and their protector, U.S. imperialism, which confronts growing resistance, worldwide.

Washington began intervening to get rid of the Workers Party government in Brazil, years ago. In other words, the U.S. government was fomenting fascism in Brazil (again) long before Trump got his hands on the levers of power. Bolsonaro and Trump did not march into their capital cities at the head of goose-stepping mobs, overrunning the old order. They came to save the old order–or, at least, to salvage the white supremacist aspects of it, which is what their grassroots followers care about. The entire ruling class was rewarded with trillions in tax breaks and deregulation, once Trump was in office. All of the capitalist vultures in Brazil can expect the same–while the nation’s Black population braces for a reign of police and military terror, with leftists pushed underground or disappeared.

I have no problem labeling Trump a fascist, and Bolsonaro appears to have no problem being called one. My problem is with a phony “resistance” that defines fascism so narrowly that it applies, domestically, only to Donald Trump and his most crazed followers. For Democrats, the fascist label is mere political epithet, a demon-word hurled for election purposes. Even self-styled “progressive” Democrats will not break with a lawless U.S. “exceptionalism” that has killed upwards of 15 million people around the globe since World War Two–six million in the Congo, alone, which makes Uncle Sam (Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump) a bipartisan mass genocidal murderer on a par with Belgian King Leopold. Except that Leopold confined his genocides mainly to the Congo, while the U.S. superpower lays waste to non-white peoples worldwide.

During the whole colonial period, most of the Left in Europe treated Black, brown and yellow lives as if they didn’t matter, all the while claiming to be the vanguard of humanity’s struggle for dignity. Then the mass murdering monster that had been marauding the darker world for centuries, fattening Europe, turned inward to eat Europe alive. Fascism was perceived as a new and singular evil, rather than the logical outcome of capitalism+white supremacy.

In the wake of World War Two, Aimé Césaire, the poet and politician from Martinique, explained that Europe had incubated fascism in its colonies, where millions perished and whole cultures vanished for the sake of capital accumulation. He argued “that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”

In the postwar U.S., white people couldn’t recognize a fascist without his uniform–which is understandable, since much of the white population were themselves fascist, in that they endorsed a police state and enforced political and social subordination for Black people at home, and supported wars to suppress non-whites’ right to self-determination, abroad. The Black liberation movement of the Sixties provoked a fascist white general response: Black mass incarceration, a system that “oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack,” enmeshing millions of whites in the carceral state as collateral damage in the unceasing war on Blacks. The biggest incarceration state in the world must be, by definition, the world’s biggest police state. If there is a fascist regime on the planet, this must be it–otherwise, the only conclusion is that Black Americans are congenitally criminal, and deserve to be the most imprisoned people on earth.

(In fact, Native Americans, Maoris in New Zealand, and Roma in eastern Europe are locked up in proportions that rival Black U.S. incarceration–as are Blacks in the UK, it has been argued. But this only confirms that white supremacy is an incubator of fascism, worldwide.)

So, where have all the anti-fascists been hiding, the last 50 years, as Black America was methodically tortured, destabilized and dismembered by the State? Did they cry “fascist” when Barack Obama broke all records in deporting undocumented people? Of course not–no fascism there. They denounce Trump’s anti-Muslim tirades, but did they mobilize an anti-war movement to halt Obama’s proxy jihadist war against Syria that has left half a million dead? No, instead they applaud Trump when he bombs Syria and condemn Russia for defending a sovereign state from unprovoked attack by the U.S. and its allies. Do they care about international law? Never heard of it. They are not upset that the U.S. spent $5 billion to overthrow an elected government and install actual Nazis in power in Ukraine–after which Hillary Clinton had the nerve to call Putin “Hitler.” No, the “resistance” is mad at the Russians for…everything.

Is it disturbing to the “resistance” that Colombia, a CIA-nurtured narco-regime that is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union or peasant organizer, and where millions of Black and indigenous people have been displaced to fatten the profits of U.S. corporations, is about to join NATO? Truth be told, are they really angry about Bolsonaro getting elected in Brazil, except as a talking point to hammer Trump?

Any real resistance to fascism would defend freedom of speech and seek to broaden, rather than further restrict, popular access to media of all kinds. But much of the “resistance” cheers Facebook and Google censorship of material that might “sow division” in U.S. society–including Black Agenda Report–as if conformity with imperialism and institutional white supremacy is a bulwark against fascism.

We at BAR are always ready to join with genuine anti-fascists. But, outside of Black America, which endured the world’s first fascist regime in the Jim Crow South, and continues to suffer under fascism’s second, mass Black carceral incarnation, real anti-fascists are hard to find in the United States. The historical Black consensus on peace and social justice is constantly undermined by the pervasive presence in our communities of the Democratic Party, acting as an agent of its corporate masters. Under the Party’s money-drenched influence, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in 2014 to continue the infamous 1033 Pentagon program that funnels military weaponry, gear and training to local police. And earlier this year, three quarters of the Black lawmakers in the U.S. House supported a bill that made police a protected class. Attacks on cops are to be treated as hate crimes.

Self-determination and socialism are the antidotes to fascism, a social pathology born in the bowels of white supremacist capitalism–the only kind of capitalism that exists in the “West.” (We’ll find out what those Chinese capitalist-roaders are cooking up, in time, but U.S. imperialism is the main danger to humanity in this epoch.) These two topics are always on the agenda at the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, which holds its annual march on the White House and national conference, this weekend.

About the Author

Leading public intellectual

Glen Ford is a founding editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR), where he serves as executive editor. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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Black Socialists of America Is Putting Anti-Capitalism on the Map

Teddy Ostrow

Z, the co-founder of BSA, talks with The Nation about building alternatives to capitalism.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

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Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.

And before you leave

How Poverty is Reshaping the Story of Emmett Till’s Murder

Black Agenda Report

The FBI-CIA War on Tupac and Socially Conscious Artists

A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos.

An Electoral Strategy to Defeat Police Oppression—and Its Black Allies—in Chicago

Fascism is real, but the “resistance” is mostly fake

Black Socialists of America Is Putting Anti-Capitalism on the Map

Teddy Ostrow

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site. Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.

And before you leave

How Poverty is Reshaping the Story of Emmett Till’s Murder

Black Agenda Report

The FBI-CIA War on Tupac and Socially Conscious Artists

A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos.

An Electoral Strategy to Defeat Police Oppression—and Its Black Allies—in Chicago

Fascism is real, but the “resistance” is mostly fake

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site.
Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.