February 9
GUEST: Penny Hess, long time
activist, organizer and chairperson of the African People’s
Solidarity Committee, talks about how whites can support the
struggles for national liberation being waged by African and
other oppressed peoples.
Burning Spear
- African People's Socialist Party
Did you ever wonder why abolitionists always get a bad name? In the racist movie "Birth of a Nation," the KKK are the heroes and abolitionists the villains. And in the much more recent movie "Amistad" by Steven Spielberg, the abolitionists are almost as evil.
In high school we learned that some abolitionists were just crazy (John Brown), and some were in it for the money. I remember a picture from one of my textbooks: the cartoon of a sneaky looking white man carrying a large "carpet" bag. We learned that abolitionists became carpetbaggers, who went to the South after the war and robbed white people.
Some of this racism has always been with us. As a young man, I remember digging ditches on my father's farm, along with a Black man whose name was "Silent Bill." He simply didn't talk and I never knew why. That afternoon after the sun went down, my father took us both to a local bar. I ordered a drink for Bill, and he acknowledged the beer with a smile and a one fingered salute.
Beside me was a very old white women, nursing her drink. She smiled at me and then leaned over to tell me something. Pulling herself close to my ear, she whispered "N... lover."
Has the disease of enslavement always been part of our national psyche? We don't think about abolitionists as the heroes they really were. We don't revere the Freedom Riders who risks there lives to end segregation in the Deep South. We are suspicious of Blacks who talk about US imperialism in Africa and in other parts of the world. Can America be an empire without the racism that justifies exploitation and oppression?
So Ron DeSantis doesn't want us poking about in our history of ethnic cleansing and slavery. But if we want a country that we all can be proud of, that's exactly what we should be doing. We shall overcome...
