11 November 2015 — Black Agenda Report
This Ain’t Your Grandfather’s Civil Rights Movement
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Shaun King and others like to compare today’s incipient movement to the civil rights era. But that’s a mistake. Today’s youth confront “a profoundly post-civil rights phenomenon”: the Mass Black Incarceration State, a national project that was created as a response to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Black folks in the early Sixties appealed to the feds for protection. Today, the feds are the ones who will take you out.
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
After bringing the University of Missouri to its knees, Black students wanted some privacy in a “black space,” away from the peering eyes and suspect motives of the media. Media does, however, have its privileges. When Black activists and their allies challenged media privilege, their heroic struggle against racism was instantly downgraded to the actions of a “mob.”
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The newest wave of so-called movement activists have lots to say about institutional racism, but as Glen Ford has pointed out, they have few concrete demands beyond their own inclusion in the pantheon of recognized black leadership. With 3 of every 8 black children in the US live in poverty, black family wealth a tenth what it was a decade ago, isn’t it time to confront the corporate power, the government, the state?
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Like its corporate media cousins, the New York Times uses the global refugee crisis to spread propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government, which created the crisis in the first place. TheTimes scrupulously omits the facts of U.S. complicity in destroying the displaced people’s homelands, while pretending to empathize with the refugee’s plight. It is journalism in service of Power, not Truth.
by Danny Haiphong
Malcolm X’s call for Black self-determination remains widely misunderstood in the United States, including among Black activists. Some even hold that Barack Obama’s election was an expression of Black self-determination. But self-determination is about people’s power, not voter turnout in an electoral system controlled by rich white rulers. It’s about taking power “by any means necessary.”
by Issa Shivji
Africa’s comprador ruling classes and educated middle class are so compromised by imperialism that they are incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership required for the continent’s true liberation. The only possible alternative is that of the working people. They need an ideology, organization and leadership to constitute an alternative political bloc.
by Ann Garrison
In the current era, states do not “fail” – they are targeted and destroyed. The tiny central African nation of Burundi appears to be next on the West’s list. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, a close ally of Hillary Clinton, is leading the destabilization strategy, which aims to seize Burundi’s national resources for multinational corporations.
A Movement in Need of Vision and Ideology
Hundreds of activists will converge on Philadelphia’s Temple University, January 8-10, under the banner “Reclaiming Our Future: The Black Radical Tradition in Our Time.” Conference keynoters include Angela Davis, Cornel West, Alicia Garza and Robin D.G. Kelly. “We’re in the throes of an emerging and intensifying movement,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, one of the conference organizers. “The most visible part of the movement is anti-police state violence, but it includes the struggle for schools, for jobs, the struggles against gentrification. So we have this proliferating set of movements without yet a clear vision or ideology. What we hope to do is help develop a vision of the future, about what the fight is, and where to target the fight.”
U.S. Slavocracy vs. Haitian Revolution
The triumph of George Washington and his white settler rebels “was, in many ways, a triumph of the slave trade,” which “tipped the demographic balance against the European settlers in Haiti,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, the prolific professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. The Black Republic defeated the militaries of Britain Spain and France, causing the latter to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States. For several generations, U.S. slaveholders feared the Haitian example would inspire rebellion among slaves in Dixie – and they were right.
Food and Self-Determination
There’s a lot more to food sovereignty than just having enough to eat, said Beverly Bell, co-director of Other Worlds, part of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance. “Food sovereignty looks at global systems of food, and considers the right to eat, the right of farmers to produce, the right of people to live on their land, and the right to control the riches of nature, including the water they need to irrigate,” she said. The 2015 winners of the Food Sovereignty Prize are the U.S.-based Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras.
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