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

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Obama's War in Syria Led to Trump’s War in Syria
21 Oct 2019
Democrats pretend that the bloodshed in Syria is Donald Trump’s legacy, but Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka says, “We have to remind people
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Duboisian Scholar to Address BAR Gathering on “Building a Black Left”
21 Oct 2019
“Decades ago, much of the Black Left “turned its back on Black working people in the interest of aligning with the liberal establishment that controls the Democratic Party,” said Dr An
Jemima Pierre
Haiti and the Convenience of Imperial Amnesia
16 Oct 2019
The ongoing protests in Haiti are ultimately directed against the “Core Group” – US imperialism and its junior partners, who have teamed up to gang-bang the wounded and bleeding Black republic.
The Real News Network
Black Activists Targeted -- by FBI and Killers Unknown: Glen Ford on the Real News
16 Oct 2019
TRNN correspondent Jacqueline Luqman and Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford discuss the murders of Botham Jean and Joshua Brown in Dallas, Texas, the deaths of Black activists in F
Margaret Kimberley , BAR editor and senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Trump, Obama and Syria
16 Oct 2019
Whether by mistake or design, Donald Trump is presiding over the – agonizing slow – demise of Barack Obama’s illegal and immoral scheme to overthrow the government of Syria using jihadist terror ar