Rage is a natural human emotion that is denied to Black people. Black rage is dangerous and is washed away, laundered, as if it were an ill-gotten gain. Too Black explains in the second part of a two-part essay. (See Part 1)
"The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet..."[1] - Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
"Black is a classification of domination, and Black is a response to being dominated."[2] - Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us
The specter of Black Rage pervades inside the colony like the calamitous ambitions of the runaway slave who eagerly plots their return to the plantation by raiding it of its human property and jarring it into a can of ashes. Black Rage is a grand marronage spreading the remains of oppression about as the wheezing flames wave goodbye to its blood shaving whips. Haunted by this specter, white capital hides behind the laundering body of the State as it attempts to transform the rebellious nature of Black Rage into submissive capital.
Incubation
The State provokes Black Rage by engineering the inhumane conditions that place it in motion. As Black Rage incubates, so do the guardrails to keep it from swarming to an unmanageable scale. This dialectic defines the laundering process.
In Avengers of the New World, historian Laurent Dubois chronicles how prior to the Haitian revolution,[3] noticing the potential for small slave uprisings to balloon larger, the French crown instituted various reforms (1685 Code Noir, 1780s royal decrees) to curb the barbarism of plantation managers in the colony of Saint Domingue. The reforms provided the enslaved with off days, food and shelter, and limitations on the beatings they could receive. Reforms proved ineffective as French colonists in Saint-Domingue rejected them in favor of more bloodthirsty cruelty. Apparently, as historian C.L.R. James documented in Black Jacobins, pouring burning wax on enslaved bodies and roasting them on slow fires was seen as the best means of social control.[4] These tactics inflamed Black Rage, leading to the defeat of the most profitable colony in the Caribbean and the establishment of the first Black republic.
The colonial world took notice. Historian Gerald Horne documented the fear of the U.S. via Vice President of the time, Thomas Jefferson in Confronting Black Jacobins: "If something is not done, and soon done,” he advised darkly, “we shall be the murderers of our own children,” as “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us.”[5] Thomas’s fears proved real as a revolutionary storm of Black Rage via slave uprisings incubated worldwide, particularly in the U.S. post-1804.
To manage this colonial pandemic and “foster a new image” of power, white capitalist empires slowly began transitioning their rule from the iron fist of hard power to the unseen hand of soft power, as Mowatt describes “for the sake of capitalism.”[6] Mowatt also comments: “While the capabilities of hard power (force, coercion, and warfare) were always ready, the use of soft power (culture, values, and ideals) had become the preferred method of moving forward.”[7]
White capital embarked on the mission of stabilizing territories for smoother laundering. Among a few examples is the Congress of Vienna from 1814-1815 which balanced territory among warring European States,[8] the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which declared U.S. hegemony over the Americas landmass,[9] the U.S. Civil War from 1861-1865 which settled slavery and westward expansion,[10] and the “Scramble for Africa” via the Berlin Conference[11] from 1884-1885 in which white capital met “on long tables during catered meals” where, as Mowatt notes, “the continent of Africa was carefully carved up and re-designed for the purposes of extraction…”[12] Following these mobster-like parlays was an inflation of State power that better absorbed the opposition.
State-fabricated society expanded through now conquered territories, centralized in cities. The city builds the fronts—law, schools, media, religion, government, business, etc.—for the State of white capital that reaches to the countryside. The capitalist State, through the indoctrination of its fronts, becomes what Italian Marxist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci described as the hegemonic “educator,"[13] thereby establishing the norms that govern the ambitions of the people. Correspondingly, State fronts also collectively act as the “organizer,”[14] performing as pre-existing institutions of consent disciplining the will of Black Rage over time. Fronts may serve legitimate human needs but their entanglement with the State jeopardizes any liberatory outcome.
Accordingly, when U.S Black liberal organizations of the 1940s and 50s colluded with the government to purge their organizations of alleged communists it later weakened the potential radicalism of the civil rights movement.[15] Similarly, when elite philanthropic foundations created African Studies fronts throughout Nigeria and west Africa to induce pro-western sentiments, subsequent anti-colonial struggles were compromised.[16] Thus, when Black Rage is structured by State fronts the primary frustrations may not always be with the rule of white capital but with exclusion from rule, the limited crumbs received underneath rule, or internal disputes over which group of Black folk deserves more crumbs leftover from rule.
Nevertheless, workers employed by State fronts or those with ambitions of managing one do not need to morally align with the interests of white capital to serve them. To feed ourselves we all must participate in the maintenance of the State to a degree because it controls the resources we require to attend to our material needs such as housing and food. Political theorist, Dr. Joy James astutely reminds us of this contradiction when speaking on the captive maternal,[17] "as you stabilize your family, you are also stabilizing this predatory structure." [18]
These contradictions effectively reduce everyone to launderers for the predatory State. Our pursuit to stabilize nourishes the State-fabricated society with our labor. We become socialized to launder simply by living our lives surviving the day-to-day mundanity of capitalism.
Bribes become a precondition for stability. That is to say, the more we stabilize the more susceptible we are to the bribes of the State. Bribes as wages. Bribes as property. Bribes as wealth. White capital shares these crumbs of theft to help stabilize the laundering.
Our pursuit of stability conditions us to greedily accumulate and hoard like white capital. We hope to accumulate enough bribes that eventually we can become the bribers i.e., capitalists. Predictably, this aimless lottery to achieve stability rarely involves jackpots for the conquered as the betting odds are not in our favor. The State is the house, and as they say in gambling, the house always wins.
Ultimately, the State cannot bribe everyone effectively with profit as the motive. To remain kicking capitalism requires the super-exploitation of cheap labor while it increasingly cranks out a global surplus labor population whom receive absolutely no bribes.[19] With this being the case, certain populations will never sniff stability which inevitably requires the State to still rely upon hard power methods of social control, such as police and military, as unstable populations jostle for basic needs. Recognizing it is their unbridled rage that could radically sunder the entire flow of capital, violence work stands as a stalwart for policing the crisis.[20] Constituted as an all-suffocating monopoly, white capital comes to own both the wealth we produce and our visceral response to their hoarding of it.
Labor
Similar to how workers do not own their labor, Black people do not own our rage. After white capital seized the means of production—land, technology, raw materials, and labor power—conquest did not neatly bleed to an end. Instead, by monopolizing these productive forces, white capital not only controlled the material resources for economic creation but also mutated to possess the domains in which the self-actualization of our rage is naturally expressed.
In this sense, Black Rage is labor that can either be exploited or liberated. Nonetheless, at the moment that Black people collectively respond to oppression—no matter the form—labor is exercised. Labor was exercised when Afro-Cubans led the revolution against the Spanish,[21] it dawned on the British as the Mau Mau rebels of Kenya attacked settler-colonialism,[22] it occupied Ferguson, Missouri by relentlessly protesting throughout the blood-stained streets after the police killing of Mike Brown.[23] Labor is exercised anywhere Black people rage against our oppression.
Problem is that this type of revolutionary labor is also illegal. Yet, while the State outlaws the explicit practice, it still exploits our labor to fuel its conquest economy like a Black-market drug that funds a "legitimate" business. Herein lies the laundering. To break our labor, the State funnels our rage through their fronts, pacifying it with bribes and crushing it with repression. The internal contradictions the State-fabricated society creates serve as perfect fodder for this process to occur.
Although Black Rage universally burns throughout the diaspora, the motivations and actions that arise from the debris when an uprising occurs tend to be shaped by class interests. The Black masses (unemployed, proletarian poor and working class), receiving minimal to no bribes while experiencing the constant exhaustion of instability are the most likely to unleash their rage against the State like prisoners at their wits’ end taking hostages and occupying the prison. The Black elite (petit-capitalists, upper-level professionals, and middle-class aspirants), the most bribed and stabilized by the State are the most likely to repress their rage and/or sell it for more enhanced bribes and stability like jailhouse snitches copping to a plea.
bell hooks, the late Black feminist author and cultural critic, lamented a similar observation in her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She describes two distinct forms of rage: militant rage and narcissistic rage. She defines the militant rage of the Black masses as, "the rage of the downtrodden and oppressed that could be mobilized to mount militant resistance to white supremacy." She juxtaposes it with the narcissistic rage of the Black elite as, "not interested in fundamentally challenging and changing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply want equal access to privilege within the existing structure."[24] This critique of the Black elite echoes Malcolm X's condemnation of this class, "These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation."[25]
The Black Elite function as double agents with dual access to contradictory classes. They function as a professionalized buffer for white capital, and as it follows the unelected leaders of the Black masses. Their shared racial identity with the masses lends them legitimacy. When the labor of Black Rage produces social capital for any type of change, they become the benefactors. It is this social capital that grants them dual access and makes them valuable to the State.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, defines capital as "accumulated labor" that allows "groups of agents" to "appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor."[26] He later defines social capital as the "aggregate" that "provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a 'credential' which entitles them to credit..." In the case of Black Rage, the "accumulated labor" of it creates a "credential" that credits Black people to its fruits.
Bourdieu goes on to discuss the implications of representation "when the group is large and its members weak" their social capital "contain the seeds of an embezzlement or misappropriation of the capital which they assemble." Therefore, the Black elite is a "subgroup" existing as a "nobility" that "may speak on behalf of the whole group, represent the whole group, and exercise authority in the name of the whole group."[27] Per their nobility, the Black elite possesses the capacity to embezzle the social capital of the masses.
By owning the means of this embezzlement, State fronts utilize shared Black social capital by layering the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the militant rage—the "dirty" money—of the Black masses to conceal the transfer of wealth. Thus, when the masses perform the bulk of the labor—organizing, rioting, revolting, rebelling,[28] thereby igniting the fear of God in the State—the Black elite inherit the chunkiest crumbs of the surplus value. They arrive at the scene of the fire, like scab labor reps, flaunting their State-sponsored credentials. Next comes the bribes in the form of token jobs, flag independence, loans, investments, donations, grants, sponsorships, property rights, and sometimes even semi-protection from the rabid right-wing who will punish the masses for their dignifying audacity.
The Black Elite shriek at the fate of the rebellious slaves, the western-backed coups and assassinations of Black leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Malcolm X, but still recognize the need to project a similar militancy for popular appeal. They are incentivized to crave freedom without sacrifice, so they legitimize their bribes as Black liberation. To maintain the delusional front, this labor aristocracy bullishly appeals to racial kinship.[29]
As the fallen soldier, Jonathan Jackson wrote to his brother and political prisoner, George Jackson in Blood in My Eye, "what better way is there for them to sell themselves to us than to scream Black, Black, Black, Black." Observing the laundering of Kenyan independence,[30] Jackson warned how vague appeals to Blackness can shield State collusion: "Like Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.I.A. was to redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing more compatible with the interests of Western Businessmen."[31] Perhaps, this type of State-sponsored embezzlement is why years prior the Mau Mau did not limit their rage to the British but extended it to the African British loyalists as well.[32] Racial kinship is useless when the proclaimed "kinfolk" is colluding with the enemy.
For laundering to be most effective, Black Rage must be flattened to reflect the class interests of narcissistic rage while cosplaying as militant rage. When labor is strong, flattening fails. When the French tried to offer equal rights to free people of color in Haiti to control the rebellious slaves, it backfired immensely.[33] The rebels were too organized to succumb to any flattening other than the total demolition of slavery. But when labor is weak and engulfed in contradictions incubated by conquest, Black Rage is flattened, its militancy demolished with its ashes valorized into commodity form.[34]
Commodification
Now that the labor of Black Rage is broken its only exit valve is in the marketplace. This commodification occurs due to the initial colonial act that inspired Black Rage—conquest. Returning to the means of production, white capital holds a monopoly on the use of force necessary to overthrow them (weapons, police, military) and the resources necessary to build independence beyond them (land, machinery, raw materials,). If labor is unable to wrestle away a sufficient share of these resources, it has no immediate option other than to sell itself back to capital for material subsistence.
Following an uprising, the State either constructs or upgrades outlets for the people to exercise their rage. To avoid war during slavery in the Caribbean, occasionally colonial administrators granted amnesty to hand-picked maroon camps—communities of runaway slaves—in exchange for them capturing fresh runaways for the colony.[35] Thus, when the enslaved exercised their rage by escaping the plantation, certain maroon camps became fronts for their recapture.
Fronts for recapture (State fronts) are essential to understanding the conversion from rage to commodity. It demonstrates how the rage ignited by the knee of the State compressed ten minutes on a poor Black man's neck transformed into corporate pledges for diversity and consumerist slogans to "buy black" almost immediately.[36] Of course, not too dissimilar from runaway slaves, some Black people naively ran towards these fronts to exercise our rage. Unfortunately, the narcissistic rage of the Black elite was already waiting on the other side with iron collars and keys to recapture our rage and hand us back to politicians, corporations, and nonprofits.
Fronts for recapture go by another name too—reform. Reform is when the boot tells the neck that oxygen is on the way. Reform is also when the neck is forced to believe it. George Jackson named the necessity of the facade: "Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses."[37] Thus, when the neck begins to remove the boot, the boot may loan the neck oxygen to recapture its foothold, but if the boot slips the floodgates of rage pour into the colony.
As a red sea of Black Rage grew to an almost insurmountable threat—colonial dams bursting at the seams, Black revolution drowning empires, social movements sinking racial apartheid—neocolonialism emerged as the fundamental front to withstand the tidal waves of Black Rage.[38] Post World War II, White finance capital gradually began conceding puppet control to Black elites in the form of political and corporate representation while still maintaining control over the resources that govern the institutions Black elites purportedly represent. In Africa, the bribe of flag independence absorbed Black Rage while International Monetary Funds and World Bank loans flowed through the client-states of the continent and out-flowed commodities to power phones and drill oil.[39] In the US, Black Rage was squeezed by token integration as the State poured brain drain funds into Black communities and out-flowed neo-colonial "First Blacks"[40] as human commodities selling consumptive commodities of Blackness in media and entertainment. Civil rights activist and current political prisoner, Jamil Al-Amin formerly known as H. Rap Brown, said it best: "White folks will co-opt dog sh*t if it's to their advantage!" [41]
Once Black Rage is recaptured and the commodities are produced, they become ideological tools i.e., propaganda for incubating against the next uprising. The more white capital can use these commodities to convince the masses there's hope in the imperial State and/or that it is simply too powerful to overcome, the less likely the masses to destroy it when Black Rage inevitably boils over again. Each cycle differs in character depending on the historical conditions, but conquest remains the end result.
Conclusion
At the root, Black Rage is the logical response to being conquered. All other targets of rage—discrimination, inequality, bigotry, bias, poverty—emerge from the initial colonial act of conquest. Laundering throws Black Rage off the scent. The red herrings of this State-fabricated society either obscure that conquest ever occurred or imply reconciliation through the same apparatus that set conquest in motion. No matter, the source cannot be redeemed.
Laundering is unsustainable. The State-fabricated society cannot continue to legitimize its death-marching actions without collapsing on itself and crushing the rest of us beneath it. The growing multi-polarity, creeping techno-feualism and looming climate chaos guarantee so. Hence, notable ancestors prophetically warned against integrating into a burning house. [42] They understood there was no reasoning with firefighting arsonists.
By continuing to reason, the Black elite of today is more subdued by elite capture than prior generations.[43] They are tranquilly bribed to confuse arson for firefighting. Thus, they peddle racial patriotism amidst white nationalists’ reawakening, Black luxury amidst financial collapse, and escapist Black joy amidst mass suffering and death. Their only redemption comes by vacating their narrow class interests and locking up arms with the masses they are otherwise bribed to propagandize.[44]
The struggle for Black Rage is an exercise in class warfare. White capital is not some mythical force oppressing us from the heavens but a ruthless ruling class that perpetuates itself via the State. As Mowatt remarked, "(State) Power repeats itself, not history."[45] Unlike the mythmaking of history, State power can be seized and forged to wither away towards a post-western world. As Black studies scholar, Dr. Yannick Marshall argues: "We need the rage we feel after looking out at the charred remains of our earth under centuries of Western rule to mature into an act. The act of putting the West aside."[46]
To put the west aside we must reverse launder what it has stolen. That is to flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures it so religiously outlaws. The instructions for such acts lie beyond the mission statement of a white liberal non-profit front or the "decolonizing" syllabus of a bromidic academic. We cannot formalize what is illegal. The answers rest in our collective Black Rage, the conspiring rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all towards a life-affirming post-western communist world. Anything less is a reconstruction of fronts.
[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 54.
[2] Rasul A. Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us (New York: Routledge, 2022), 46.
[3] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London; Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University, 2004), 61-63
[4] C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 12.
[5] Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 79.
[6] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 130.
[7] Ibid
[8] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 (New York: Grove, 2001).
[9] James Monroe, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” National Archives and Records Administration, accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine#:~:text=The%20Monroe%20Doctrine%20is%20the,further%20colonization%20or%20puppet%20monarchs.
[10] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1st ed., vol. 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[11] Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law 3, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): pp. 31-59, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrv002.
[12] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 122.
[13] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Dehli: Aakar Books, 2018), 260.
[14] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall and his co-authors rebuke overly simplistic explanations of the capitalist State that reduce it to the ‘executive committee of the ruling class.' For them this proved too conspiratorial and obscured the independence of competing capitals under capitalism. Thus, for Hall and his co-authors the State functions as the organizer of capital by mediating the conditions for capital to succeed. The capitalist state governs the masses through popular consent with the looming threat of coercion. The State universalizes the interests of capital as the interests of all through economic, legal, social, ideological, and political hegemony, thereby building consensus. For more see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: Red Globe Press, 2013), 202-203.
[15] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s,” International Journal of Africana Studies 19, no. 2 (2018), 77-112.
[16] Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 266.
[17] Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal,” Challenging the Punitive Society: Prison Notebooks 12 (2016): pp. 253-296, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf.
[18] Joy James, "We Are Not Our Ancestors' PT. 3 w/ Joy James," August 26th 2020, Black Myths Podcast, produced by Black Myths Pod, MP3 Audio, 10:27, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-our-ancestors-pt-3-w-joy-james/id1504205689?i=1000489212555.
[19] Homi Kharas, Kristofer Hamel, and Martin Hofer, “The Start of a New Poverty Narrative,” Brookings (Brookings Institute, March 9, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/06/19/the-start-of-a-new-poverty-narrative/.
[20] For police as a counterinsurgency force see Micol Seigel, Violence Work State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke Universities Press, 2018).
[21] Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
[22] David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).
[23] Associated Press, “Ferguson Protests Erupt in Violence as People Lob Molotov Cocktails, Police Use Tear Gas (Slideshow) (Video),” Cleveland, August 14, 2014, https://www.cleveland.com/nation/2014/08/ferguson_protests_erupt_in_vio.html.
[24] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 27-29.
[25] Malcolm X, “Message to Grassroots,” Teaching American History, transcript of speech delivered at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, November 10, 1963, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/message-to-grassroots/.
[26] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241-258
[27] Ibid
[28] Joshua Clover notes how the riot is “the other of incarceration.” A response to the “othering” of racialized surplus populations, Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2019), 162. For a scientific comprehension on rioting see; For scientific distinctions between rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and coup d'etat see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
[29] During an outtake conversation on the web show The Last Dope Intellectual Africana studies professor, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly referred to the Black elite as a “labor aristocracy” and in further correspondence through messages with author. Charisse Burden-Stelly, text message to author, July 15th, 2022.
[30] Gerald Horne , “Barack Obama's Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to ‘Recolonize’ Africa during Early Days of the Cold War,” MR Online, February 10, 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/02/10/barack-obamas-father-identified-as-cia-asset-in-u-s-drive-to-recolonize-africa-during-early-days-of-the-cold-war/
[31] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 37.
[32] Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 200
[33] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 89.
[34] Borrowing from Karl Marx description of the valorization of labor in chapter 7 of Capital Vol. 1. For Marx the laborer transforms nature and them self through work. The capitalist intervenes in this process and extracts the surplus value of the labor by valorizing it into a commodity. This is exactly what happens to Black Rage. White capital extracts it’s value to serve as a commodity and then sells it back to us to be consumed for their interests. Here Black Rage is transformed from labor to the commodity of labor power. Marx, Capital: Volume 1. 283-305.
[35] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 54.
[36] In the summer of 2020 and 2021 the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre was used as a front to promote “Black wealth” and buying Black despite the actual community of Greenwood having little to no wealth in 1921. For more see Too Black, “From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism,” Hood Communist, June 3, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/06/03/from-black-wall-street-to-black-capitalism/.
[37] Jackson, Blood In Eye. 118.
[38] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1984).
[39] York W. Huang. Intensifying Global Dependency.
[40] Too Black, “‘The First Black,’” Hood Communist, February 25, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/02/25/the-first-black/.
[41] Jamil Al-Amin, Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 132.
[42] In his memoir, Harry Belafonte said Dr. Martin Luther King believed Black people in America were “integrating into a burning house.” In response on what to do he said “I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.” Malcolm X had been warning about the volcanic nature of America years prior. Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), Epub, 806.
[43] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., “Identity Politics and Elite Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/.
[44] For analysis on class suicide see Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Marxist.org, January 1966, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm.
[45] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 64.
[46] Yannick Giovanni Marshall, “The Future Is Post-Western,” Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, May 20, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/20/the-future-is-post-western.
Too Black is a poet, host of the Black Myths Podcast, member of Black Alliance For Peace, and communications coordinator for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2. He is based in Indianapolis, IN and can be reached at [email protected] or @too_black_ on Twitter.
In this week’s segment we talk about jails and prisons in New York City and State and the end of city control of the infamous Rikers Island jail. But first a Washington DC activist analyzes how the…
Afeni is an activist and lead organizer with Herb and Temple in Washington, DC. She joins us from Oakland to discuss politics in the U.S. and how the people can fight the fascism produced by the…
Our guest is Melanie Dominguez, Organizing Director, New York with the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice. She joins us from New York City to discuss the federal takeover of Rikers Island…
The late Charles Rangel served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus for more than 40 years. But the goals of Black politics and electoral politics are not necessarily the same.
“In theory and in practice, then, Zionism is a degraded repetition of European imperialism.”
