A call to white people: Organizing for Reparations to African people is more urgent now than ever!
There is no going back to “normal.” The world has changed. A system built on slavery, genocide, and colonialism is being brought down. African, Indigenous and colonized peoples are rising up, fighting to reclaim power over their lives and resources.
White people: Will we answer the call to join the rising struggle of African and oppressed peoples to build a new world where no human being profits at the expense of another? Will we take on our responsibility to pay reparations to African people and stand in solidarity with their movement for liberation?
Then we must be organized – under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party!
This is the call at the heart of the upcoming Uhuru Solidarity Movement National Convention, “Unity through Reparations, Reparations through Organization,” to be held virtually on March 18-20, 2022.
The USM Convention takes place in the context of the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the African People’s Socialist Party. For more than half a century Chairman Omali Yeshitela, the founder and leader of the Uhuru Movement, has fought to keep the liberation struggle alive after the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
Under the Chairman’s leadership, the African People’s Socialist Party has fought for fifty years to organize and unite Africans on every continent into one revolutionary movement for black power and African self-government.
Two years since the Minneapolis uprisings, the struggle is not over
Two years have passed since the rebellions shook the world after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it is more urgent than ever that white people step up, go beyond protest and join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of white solidarity with Black Power under the leadership of the APSP.
The police continue to terrorize the African community unabated, gunning down Africans every single day. Just look at Minneapolis. Last week, the police brutally murdered yet another African, 22-year-old Amir Locke, in his home.
The colonial Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the already devastating conditions of poverty, mass incarceration, food deserts, gentrification, homelessness, unemployment and starvation faced by millions of African people in the U.S. and around the world.
Meanwhile the richest one percent saw their wealth increase by a whopping 1.8 trillion over the past two years. This is the inevitable outcome of what Chairman Omali Yeshitela calls “the colonial mode of production”: white wealth is built on African poverty.
Many white people are seeking ways to channel our disgust at this social system. But without the leadership of the oppressed, the ones who have borne the brunt of this vicious system for centuries, we as white people will always try to solve our problems by making things better for ourselves at the expense of the rest of the world.
It is time to abandon the opportunism, pessimism, individualism and complicity that has kept us isolated from the rest of the peoples of the world for so long. It is time to reject our false, corrupt leadership – whether it’s Biden, Trump or Bernie – and embrace the true leadership of the African working class, who are leading all of humanity towards a future of freedom, justice and peace.
What to expect at the USM Convention
The USM Convention will feature keynote presentations from Chairman Omali Yeshitela, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess, APSP Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela and other leaders of the African Liberation Movement.
Workshops will teach you how to build a branch of USM in your city, how to build a mass movement of volunteers and members, build support for the Black Power Blueprint and the campaign to organize white people with access to wealth to pay reparations to the anti-colonial African liberation struggle.
The convention will kick off with a major, bold political action at the so-called “Gateway Arch” in St. Louis, Missouri. The “Rally for Reparations” will occur on Friday, March 18th at 12PM at the base of the Arch, an infamous monument symbolizing the colonial genocide of the Indigenous people, built through the demolition of an African community over fifty years ago.
Registration for the USM Convention is open at uhurusolidarity.org/register and registration for the Rally at the Arch is open at reparationsrally.eventbrite.com.