On November 3 and 4th the Black
is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is sponsoring a
rally, march and conference in Washington, D.C. to break the silence surrounding
the escalation of the historical oppression of our people in the U.S. and
throughout the world.
At the time when the U.S. is
declaring an end to its wars against the peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, our
people are enduring oppressive conditions that can only be likened to a state of
warfare in every community where we are located within the
U.S.
We are being violently attacked
by state-imposed poverty and joblessness intensified by the mass incarceration
of our young people that takes away potential breadwinners through imprisonment
and the subsequent denial of work because of past
convictions.
We suffer an economic embargo as
intensive as those imposed on declared enemies of the U.S. government that leads
to economic sanctions that deny bank loans and trade opportunities - such as we
have seen imposed on Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran and
Syria.
Our children are forced to endure
brutally mind-numbing indoctrination that is euphemistically referred to as
education. They are stuffed into institutions that crush their spirits and
punish their curiosity with the support of police agencies that normally push
the students into the cavernous jaws of a U.S. prison system that is the largest
in the world, half of whose inhabitants are black.
This is the same prison system
that has swallowed up some of our best men and women who have voluntarily put
their lives on the line to struggle for the freedom of our people during some of
our darkest days of oppression. These are political prisoners, the existence of
which is denied by a U.S. government that postures on the world stage as a
messenger of freedom and democracy, sometimes as justification for attacking and
occupying other countries and peoples.
“Our children are forced to
endure brutally mind-numbing indoctrination that is euphemistically referred to
as education.”
We must break the silence
surrounding the fallacious idea of a “post-racial” America that is used to
muffle the cries of the dispossessed from Hurricane Katrina, of the mothers and
loved-ones of black men shot down every 36 hours by the police, of thousands of
our young people brutalized in children’s prisons, of the millions unjustly
stopped and frisked and the thousands sentenced to life without parole while
criminal bankers walk free.
We must protest the dispossession
from the foreclosures caused by the subprime mortgage fraud created by
prestigious financial institutions and supported by the U.S. government with the
explicit intent of looting the meager resources of already impoverished black
and Latino communities.
Our voices must be
heard!
We must break the silence! We
must rally and march and plan a future that will revoke the current trend of
religious and national persecution of Muslims and Arabs who are thrown into
prisons in the U.S. and elsewhere to prevent their voices being heard in protest
of U.S. foreign policy objectives resulting in rapacious wars and
occupation.
We must challenge the retroactive
sanctity of U.S. borders that are used to prevent entry by many of the people
who remain impoverished and oppressed from the moment they were robbed of their
land by European interlopers who have now designated others as aliens, illegals
and undesirables.
We protest the continuing deadly
oppression of the indigenous people upon whose land European invaders
established a parasitic economy based on slave labor and an inherently unjust
State to defend its insatiable appetite for conquest. We will demonstrate our
disgust and opposition to the existence of the life-sucking concentration camps
that are hidden by the convenient euphemism of Indian
reservations.
“We must rally and march and plan
a future that will revoke the current trend of religious and national
persecution of Muslims and Arabs.”
Our voices must be heard in
protest of the brutal continuation of centuries of exploitation of Africa,
something that was begun with our capture, dispersal and enslavement in the U.S.
and throughout the world.
We must declare loudly that
Africa is for Africans! Those at home and those abroad! We oppose the
continuation of the historical looting of Africa that leaves our people on that
continent, perhaps the richest in the world in natural and human resources,
barely existing from hand to mouth while fattening the bellies and bank accounts
of predators that benefit from the misery of our
people.
We must vociferously oppose the
U.S. created Africa Command or AFRICOM that has been tasked with the
responsibility of keeping Africa and Africans impoverished and keeping the
resources of Africa for the U.S. at the expense of Africans and other
imperialist competitors.
Let us break the silence
surrounding the plight of our brothers and sisters in Haiti who continue to be
punished for having the audacity to win the first slave and worker’s revolution
in history and opening its doors to the enslaved of the world during the heyday
of slavery in the early 19th Century.
We will not be silent as the U.S.
government continues to support the white nationalist settler state of Israel
that stands on the throats of the Palestinian
people.
We refuse to be a party to the
U.S.-led war on Libya and the lynching of its President Muamar Ghaddafi, an
advocate of the unification of Africa and an opponent of the U.S. military
outpost state of Israel.
“Let us break the silence
surrounding the plight of our brothers and sisters in
Haiti.”
No attempts by the white ruling
class media can confuse us about the U.S. threats against Iran, that secured its
freedom from a U.S.-imposed, U.S.-armed and U.S.-supported tyrant in 1979. We
are clear that the U.S., with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world and the
only country to have ever used atomic weapons in human history, has no moral
grounds to stand on as it threatens war against Iran for an unsupported claim
that Iran is developing nuclear weapon capacity.
And, while most of the
traditional peace and anti-war movement has been shamefully silent in the face
of the imperialist aggression now being suffered by Syria, with the U.S. playing
a primary role, we will not be silent.
Black is
back.
After the brutal murders of our
leaders in the 1960s successfully decapitated our movement, after the
assassinations of Dedan Kimathi, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Lawrence Mann, more than 30 members of the Black Panther
Party and untold numbers of other black leaders in the U.S. and abroad, black is
back!
“We are providing our movement
with its greatest potential for unity since the magnificent worldwide revolution
of the 1960s.”
We are here and we are becoming
better organized each day. We are providing our movement with its greatest
potential for unity since the magnificent worldwide revolution of the
1960s.
On November 3rd we rally in
Malcolm X Park in Washington, D.C., from every community in the U.S. Here we
will make our united voices heard; here we will declare our united will to join
with the peoples of the world to change the course of history that has enslaved
and impoverished the majority for the benefit of the parasitic
few.
We will bring the issues that
plague our communities and the Earth to public view. We will loudly proclaim our
right to live healthy, informed lives without violence, poverty, early death,
prison and fear.
We will disavow the charlatans,
poseurs and sycophants who have been chosen by our oppressors as our
leaders.
On November 4th we will hold a
conference to organize and plan. We will collectively decide what to do to tell
our own story and to place our own aspirations, values and plans on the agenda
for human progress and the conquest of social justice, peace and
reparations.
AHT/ARA