January 14
GUEST: Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture, long time radical feminist, revolutionary Pan-Africanist and church sista, who has been active in Al-Awda: Right of Return, the African Anti Zionist Front in solidarity with the people of Palestine, Black Alliance for Peace and the Green Party, talks about her role in fighting racism and injustice in the American empire.
The Black Alliance for Peace
War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad
Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
Asantewaa talks a lot about Black History. It's always interesting as well as troubling, because much of it is involves stories that most of us really didn't know. There are a slew of books to help our nation reconsider race, like Caste, White Fragility, The New Jim Crow, The Kidnaping Club, and The Color of Law. Black Lives Matter and more leftist organizations like Black Alliance for Peace have opened the door for white activists brave enough to follow.
And racism is not just in the past, of course. We have known about our police departments for years an years. The larger forces that patrol our major cities are little more than officially condoned racist clubs that write their own rules when it comes to beating and killing Black people. These organizations haven't changed much, as The Kidnaping Club reveals. Prior to the Civil War, the NYPD was kidnapping African Americans and selling them back to the South.
What is new, however, is the emergence of Black Shirt type organizations like the Proud Boys, eager to physically intimidate anyone advocating for an end to racism. Not only have these groups grown exponentially, but they have thrived on the immense gap between the rich and poor in this country. The Proud Boys are mostly impoverished, uneducated white men, eager to reassert their white privilege in the face of increased Black power. The Proud Boys are as tied to neoliberal capitalism as the Brown Shirts in Germany were tied to the Nazi Party and the hatred of all Jews. And like the German industrialists of 1928, our nation's billionaires have contributed millions to these current hate groups. In fact, it is our system of unrelenting greed at the top that has produced this white nationalism at the bottom of our class society.
