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January 2 - January 12, 2025
So I think that the Black radical tradition has to embrace the struggles against anti-Muslim racism, which is perhaps the most virulent form of racism today.
think that security is a main issue, but not the kind of security that is based on policing and incarceration. Perhaps transformative justice provides a framework for imagining a very different kind of security in the future.
It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.
I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification.
As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today.
it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch
the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid.
the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement
G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples. G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.
G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel.
G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—
In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers.
to offer guns and target practice to teachers.
G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank,
the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation.
Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola.
Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes,
Revolting
Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison.
As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned.
Boycott G4S! Support BDS! Palestine will be free!
they say freedom is a constant dying/we’ve died so long we must be free.
It may not be so widely known that the success of the Birmingham campaign was possible because vast numbers of schoolchildren—girls and boys—at the beginning of May, in 1963, faced police dogs and high-power hoses.
What I fear about many of these observances is that they tend to enact historical closures.
attempt to represent freedom struggles as unfinished and for at least attempting to focus on continuities rather than closures.
During the era of the twentieth-century Black freedom movement, the human beings whose predicament most approximated that of slaves, that of the slaves from whom they were descended, were Black women domestic workers.
As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers.
I have thought that perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated.
Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion.
In the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history. And that is the period of Radical Reconstruction.
the Ku Klux Klan
was produced not during slavery, but rather in an attempt to manage free Black people who would have otherwise been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.
of course the most advanced abolitionists in the nineteenth century recognized that slavery could not be ended by simply negatively abolishing slavery but rather that institutions had to be produced that would incorporate former slaves into a new and developing democracy.
but I made the Ten Most Wanted criminal
Terrorism, which is represented as external, as outside, is very much a domestic phenomenon.
So much blindness to something thats knocking on our doors, acting as our violent neighbor
More than three decades ago Assata Shakur was granted political asylum by Cuba, where she has since lived, studied, and worked as a productive member of society. Assata was falsely charged on numerous occasions in the United States during the early 1970s and vilified by the media.
But it was not until George W. Bush proclaimed a global war on terror in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, that terrorists came to represent the universal enemy of Western “democracy.”
Let me share a story about the global resonances of your perseverance.
They interpreted the actions of the protesters in Ferguson as a blow for freedom all over the planet, including freedom for the Cuban Five.
such great power that Ferguson has become synonymous with progressive protest from Palestine to South Africa, from Syria to Germany, and Brazil to Australia.
racism is indeed alive and well fifteen years into the twenty-first century.
But we focused somewhat too sharply on George Zimmerman, the individual perpetrator, to be able to identify the structures of racist violence and specifically the links between vigilante violence and state violence.
When various public figures asked, “Where are the leaders?” the movement said we are not a leaderless movement, we are a leader-full movement.
leadership is not a male prerogative. Women have always done the work of organizing Black radical movements,
Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.
those who counter the slogan “Black Lives Matter” with what they assume is a more all-embracing slogan, “All Lives Matter,” are often embracing a strategy that glosses over the particular reasons why it is important to insist quite specifically on an end to racist violence.
More often than not universal categories have been clandestinely racialized.
For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color.
If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
There are those who believe that we have definitively triumphed in the struggle for civil rights. However, vast numbers of Black people are still deprived of the right to vote—especially if they are in prison or former felons.
