If no video is visible above, click here. Was the election of the nation's First Black President a victory for our people in the long struggle against racism and empire? Or does it simply mark a change in establishment tactics that will make it even more difficult to press the case for economic justice, and an end to militarism and racism? Professor Anthnoy Monteiro, Distinguished Lecturer in African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University tells us the answer is easy to see, but hard to swallow.
In this brief talk at a Harlem event commemorating the life of Hubert Harrison, one of the pre-eminent black activists of the early 20th century, Monteiro expertly discerns the wreckage of our political landscape, and divines the difference between popular myth and facts on the ground. “
Obama's victory, he suggests, was the transient and temporary victory of marketing, symbolizing neither a new acceptance of black America's strivings on behalf of white America and her establishment, nor of rising black power. Go to the prisons in this country and tell us we have transcended race...” Monteiro demands. And while the black turnout in last November's presidential election was unprecedentedly high, turnout in the mayoral elections of Detroit and Philly, majority black cities for the better part of two generations, was well under 20%. So while black people were sold on Barack Obama, they have yet to be sold on the overall legitimacy of the American political system.
Corporate media require American identity politics which contradict African authenticity.
Palestinians have the right to defend themselves under international law and they exercised it in the town of Tell on the West Bank.
The House voted to permanently merge the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Israel has some control over the U.S. war machine, and Washington locks in a forward base in West Asia.
From the United States to the Dominican Republic to the Bahamas, the violence, collective scapegoating, and mass deportation of Haitians lay bare a particular kind of anti-Blackness. Anti-Haitianism…
Baba Akili and Thandiwe Abdullah returned from Havana with an eyewitness account of empty streets, failing hospitals and a people enduring the latest chapter of a long U.S. campaign against Caribbean…
