There is, indeed, in this historic moment, a specter, an evil spirit and pernicious presence haunting, hunting and wreaking havoc on the world. And it is not communism, peoples of color, the Haitian, Somali and other immigrants and the people who rise up to protect and support them. Nor is it the Muslims or the Palestinian people and their resistance movement, or Venezuela, Sudan, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Yemen or even Canada and Greenland. As Haji Malcolm taught, it is the victimizer perversely claiming to be the victim, the criminal criminalizing and murdering the victim under the color and camouflage of law when convenient and dismissing the law when it’s not, using brute and murderous police and military force and violence instead.
And it is the imperialists pretending peace while making war, claiming commitment to freedom while practicing oppression and as Nana Frantz Fanon taught, are always talking about abstract men and women, yet murder real men and women everywhere they find them, “at the corner of every one of their own streets and in all the corners of the globe”. This threat and reality apply especially to those who embrace a radical refusal to be defeated and dare to be free, regardless. And it is these noble witnesses of truth, freedom, justice and other shared goods in the world who offer their life and death to the liberation struggle, and thus become our models and mirrors, models to emulate and mirrors by which we measure ourselves.
We speak here of the oppressive forces united in an unholy alliance to wage war on the world, of countries, corporations, militaries and militias collaborating to facilitate and establish fascism and white supremacy, to cower and cultivate active and supportive complicity within their populations, and to conquer and control other countries, seize their resources and carve out spheres of domination they can lay claim to. And they use all means: race and religion; targeting and terrorism; a palliative patriotism of hatred and hostility toward others; piracy; kidnapping; assassinations; invasions; and even genocide and ecocide to achieve their anti-human and anti-earth goals.
Surely, there is something repulsive, vulgar and nauseating about Trump’s and Netanyahu’s cheap, fake and feigned concern for Iranians’ human rights given their genocidal war and occupation in Palestine; their destructive attacks on Iran and the Iranian people; their agreement on Trump’s kidnapping and assault in Venezuela; their agreement to weaponize false claims of antisemitism to suppress free speech and assembly, academic freedom and criticism of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people and support of their liberation struggle; and their shared imperial ambitions and collaborations with Stephen Miller as henchman, hatchet man and middle man all in one, and their deep addiction to force and violence against the rights and lives of others, not only abroad but in their own countries. Such rank hypocrisy by these two oppressive regimes profoundly offends any sense of the moral, shamelessly attempts to appropriate a peoples legitimate struggle for freedom, and undermines their agency and will to free themselves without the aid of their enemies and the enemies of human freedom.
We are all aware that Minnesota is a central focal point for resistance now, but we must not forget or give less attention to the other parallel and related struggles in this country and around the world that are going on and that precede Minneapolis and other struggles which will emerge in righteous resistance to oppression. For these struggles reflect and represent what can be called an iron law of history, i.e., where there is oppression, there is also resistance, and the point is always and everywhere to unite these forms of resistance, to build coalitions and alliances to achieve the critical mass of strength indispensable to deep and enduring liberative and uplifting change.
The recent vicious murder of Keith Porter in LA is rooted in a long history of racist police and systemic violence against Black men and Black people whether also ICE agents or national guards. But it is also linked to the racist police and systemic violence against immigrants of color in general, including Haitians, Somali and other Black immigrants. And this police and systemic violence in turn is linked to the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis and the general ICE violence against all those others who dare to challenge it and resist it as well as those simply caught in the brutal crossfire and cruel practices of the ICE rampage. Thus, we must welcome the rise in consciousness and action around the brutal murder of Renee Goode, but we must not minimize or marginalize our struggle for justice for Keith Porter and all the others of our community injured and killed mercilessly and continuously.
Indeed, we must ask ourselves how these struggles against the brutal and murderous acts of ICE agents are related to patterns and practices of the system as a whole and this regime’s increasing militarization of civic life, its public gloating over and boasting and posting of “precision killing” and “blitzkriegs”, and its allocation of trillions, not only to build and buy new weapons of war, but also to recruit racist thugs on the homefront. And we must understand that these killers-on-call and a host of compliant and complicit hirelings and handmaidens are employed and deployed to implement this regime’s fantasies of empire and Orwellian unfreedom posing as freedom; vicious power against the vulnerable as necessary demonstrations of strength; lying as a way of life and a national interest narrative, a malignant mendacity against which Nana Fannie Lou Hamer warned us and struggled valiantly to resist and expose. And added to this, we are confronted with an immoral and amoral attempt to palm off corruption, conquest, control, greed and other moral grotesqueries as evidence and affirmation of American greatness.
But as we always see and say, our duty is to continue the struggle, keep the faith and hold the line, regardless. And we speak here of a righteous and relentless struggle for a shared and inclusive good in the world and for the world and all in it. And all over the country, people are rising up against the oppressive and murderous patterns and practices of the Trump regime with its constantly demonstrated depraved disregard for human life and the well-being of the world. The moral and political need is to continue and expand our own struggle, build coalitions and alliances, maintain demonstrations of solidarity and support of the immigrant communities, continue documenting the assaults, arrests and other practices, sustain the legal challenges, engage in selective interventions where possible, and always refuse to cooperate with evil injustice or oppression in any of its many and hydra-headed forms.
Let me close as we do in our weekly Soul Sessions, engaging the critical issues confronting us and the world, saying what follows. This then is our duty: to know our past and honor it; to engage our present and improve it; and to imagine a whole new future and forge it in the most ethical, effective and expansive ways. And this too our honored ancestors teach us. Continue the struggle. Keep the faith. Hold the line. Love and respect our people and each other. Practice the Nguzo Saba. Seek and speak truth. Do and demand justice. Be constantly concerned with the well-being of the world and all in it. And dare help rebuild the overarching movement that prefigures and makes possible the good world we all want and deserve to live in, and leave as a legacy worthy of the name and history African.
