Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 1, 2015 | Black Agenda Report

Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 1, 2015

02 Jun 2015

🖨️ Print Article

A Global System of Oppression

Black Americans’ problems with the police are part of a global conflict, said Phillip Agnew, of the Dream Defenders, the youthful activist organization that emerged after Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012. “They’re all connected to one system: a system of injustice, a system of exploitation, a system of oppression that governs and controls us, nationally and internationally,” he said. “The same thing that is happening in Jacksonville, Florida, is happening in Palestine. The system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly how it was designed to work in order to oppress people around the world.”

Rulers Face Crisis of Legitimacy

Voter turnout in Philadelphia in last month’s local elections was the lowest in generations, especially in poor Black districts. This does not bode well for Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton, according to scholar and activist Dr. Anthony Monteiro. Unless something happens to dramatically energize Blacks, “Hillary Clinton cannot win the state of Pennsylvania, and if she cannot win Pennsylvania, she cannot become President of the United States.” Monteiro believes “we have entered a period where there is a crisis of legitimacy, where those who govern no longer have the legitimate support of the people they govern,” he said. “The question is, How will they govern without the support of the people and call it a democracy?”

Taking Measure of the “Ferguson-Baltimore Moment”

Black resistance confronts “a financialized, monopoly capitalism, with its repressive apparatus – the police and so forth – combined with the ideological apparatus of the educational system and the entertainment system,” said Dr. Cornel West, of Union Theological Seminary, on a Real News Network special program on “Building a Mass Movement.” “When folks are able to see through” the system’s ideological apparatus and “keep track of the suffering, and provide better, more liberating conceptions of what it means to be in the world, then I think we’re in a new day. I think we’re approaching that new day with what I call ‘the Ferguson-Baltimore moment,’” said West.

Marshall “Eddie” Conway, a former Black Panther Party member who spent 44 years as a political prisoner, said poor communities in cities like Baltimore have been “driven so far down, they can only go up.” Activists must help build “institutions that will sustain these communities.” The government and vested economic interests will then respond with attacks on such people’s institutions, but the community will learn that the system “doesn’t work in their interest.”

The current historical moment is marked by young people’s “rejection of traditional leadership, the outright disdain for those leaders who have served to temper the social movement,” said Rev. Osagyefu Sekou, of the Fellowship for Reconciliation. “Internal work” in Black communities will be key. “What are the ways that Black communities are going to self-organize, outside of the specter of the State, through cooperatives and feeding programs, cop-watches, self-patrols, those kinds of things where folks feel that they have a buy-in in the geography they occupy?”

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.

listen

http://blackagendaradio.podbean.com/mf/web/xb6suf/BAR_060115.mp3

More Stories

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
A People’s Orientation to the Praxis of People(s)-Centered Human Rights: Proposed Approach and Application
17 Dec 2025
The West's concept of human rights has always justified imperialism. The People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework offers a radical alternative—a practical tool for oppressed people to define their…
Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team
BAP Backgrounder: U.S. Racist Immigration Policy Toward Haiti Reinforces Imperialism and Weakens Popular Sovereignty
17 Dec 2025
U.S. immigration policy is the domestic arm of its foreign policy. The attack on Haitian migrants is a direct consequence of Washington's ongoing war on Haiti's sovereignty, making their defense a…
Djibo Sobukwe
Five Reasons Black/ African People Should Be in Solidarity with Venezuela
17 Dec 2025
Venezuela's revolution is a project of Afro-descendant empowerment and a force against imperialism that has long exploited the African diaspora and the Global South.
C.J. Atkins
‘We should determine our own future’: Interview with Sudanese Communist Party
17 Dec 2025
Foreign powers are responsible for Sudan's destruction. Real peace can only come when the right of self-determination for the Sudanese people is respected.
Prince Kapone
Southern Spear: The American Pole and the Recolonization of the Hemisphere
17 Dec 2025
Operation Southern Spear is not a drug war—it is the first open military strike of a new U.S. doctrine: puncture the Caribbean, penetrate the continent, and weld the Americas into a captive bloc of…