BLACK AMERICA

MARGARET KIMBERLEY—A mere 6% of Portland’s population is black. Yet the killing of George Floyd inspired a nearly all white cohort in that city to take to the streets. This seeming contradiction is proof of a nation in the depths of a great crisis. Police violence against black people is not the sole motivator for every protester and that is all to the good.

The crisis is caused by unrelenting neo-liberal policies which have negatively impacted the lives of millions of people. The COVID-19 pandemic drew back the curtain and further exposed a system that is not meant to serve human needs.

For decades, Lewis has been a pillar of the establishment. Black Agenda Report’s senior columnist, Margaret Kimberley, a leading black intellectual and a person of integrity, is unsurprisingly not impressed with his resume: “John Lewis has parlayed his 1965 beating at the hands of Alabama police into a phony sainthood, and “now exemplifies everything that is wrong with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Democratic Party and the black misleadership class.” He “parrots every word” of the CIA in blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. There are many reasons to boycott Donald Trump’s inauguration, but “Russia” is the only one mentioned by Lewis, the party hack.” Kimberley continues:

AJAMU BARAKA—The motivation for launching the Alliance was based on the fact that on April 4th, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King reconnected with the radical black tradition by adding his voice of opposition to the murderous US war machine unleashed on the people of Vietnam. For Dr. King his silence on the war in Vietnam had become an irreconcilable moral contradiction. 

From its inception, the medical industrial complex has been in service of white supremacy and capitalism. In Frantz Fanon’s essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” he writes, “The colonial situation does not only vitiate the relations between doctor and patient. We have shown that the doctor always appears as a link in the colonialist network, as a spokesman for the occupying power.” The ruling class continues to claim that biomedicine is simply abused occasionally for evil purposes, which purposefully detracts from addressing that it has always been a child of slavery and European colonialism. 

GLEN FORD—Community control of the police is a project in democracy and Black self-determination, while defunding the police – inevitably, in practice – is an immersion in Democratic Party budgetary dickering that legitimizes the imposition of the police upon the people. It will suck the righteous energy out of the movement, while failing to transform any power relationships of importance.