This article was originally published in the Burning Spear Newspaper online version June 4, 2018. The Burning Spear Newspaper is the official organ of the African People’s Socialist Party and the longest running Black Power newspaper in publication. Penny Hess is the Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, created by APSP in 1976. The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is the mass organization of the APSC, working directly under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party to win white people to #Reparations and building a culture of reparations in our white communities.
APSC and USM stand in solidarity with Black is Back Coalition, Chairman Omali Yeshitela at press conference in St. Louis, to express opposition to war on Syria.
As a white person, I would not expect to be assassinated for struggling for freedom or targeted as a domestic terrorist for building economic and political power.
For African people in this country, that would be the norm.
Last October, a highly redacted FBI report was leaked to the press with outrageous charges targeting African people as “domestic terrorists,” based on a manufactured movement of “Black Identity Extremists.”
The 12-page document prepared by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorist Analysis Unit states: “it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.
“…it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement.
“The FBI assesses it is very likely some BIE’s are influenced by a mix of anti-authoritarian, Moorish sovereign citizen ideology, and BIE ideology.
Appendix A of the FBI document continues laying out the attack on African people by defining “black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.
“This desire for physical or psychological separation is typically based on either a religious or political belief system, which is sometimes formed around or includes a belief in racial superiority or supremacy.”
In other words, African people who struggle against and resist the 500-year colonial reality summed up in the FBI’s phrase “perceived racism,” in this country, who were outraged at yet another police murder of an African person, this time in the form of 18 year-old Mike Brown, who was gunned down by killer cop and genuine terrorist Darren Wilson in Brown’s own neighborhood and whose body was left to bleed out in the hot August sun for four hours are now domestic terrorists.
The resistance of African people did not begin on August 9, 2014. It began the very first time a white person set foot on the continent of Africa and with extreme violence forced an African woman or man to do something against their will.
From day one, there has always been the resistance of African people in this country and around the world to the colonial system whose state power wields the power of life and death over African people for the benefit of white power and the entire white population.
Like the Party and the movement of Marcus Garvey before them, African people have always struggled to be free and self-determining, uniting with the mandate articulated by Malcolm X to win freedom by any means necessary.
According to the FBI, African people with an ideology seeking freedom and happiness as African or even “black” people are domestic terrorists.
According to this government attack, projects for African economic and political self-determination, creating jobs and a black-workers controlled economy such as the Black Power Blueprint and self-reliance institutions built by the Party in St. Louis in the wake of the murder of Mike Brown would be acts domestic terrorism!
This is happening in a country where every African person is a colonial subject. Thirty one percent of African children in the U.S. grow up in severe poverty.
With 2.3 million people in U.S. colonial prisons, half of whom are African, an African man on any given day is more likely to be in jail than working and one out of every eight prisoners in the world today is an African in the U.S.
According to a study by the Malcolm X Grassroots organization, African people are gunned down by police every 18 hours in this country and in Boston, for example, African people have an average of $8 in assets compared to white people who have $244,000.
The current FBI attack comes at a time when African resistance and consciousness are on the rise again for the first time since the 1960s when black revolution was part of the main revolutionary trend in the world.
In response to the Black Revolution of the ‘60s, many agencies of the U.S. government joined with the FBI in what was then called COINTELPRO, the Counterinsurgency Program which unleashed a reign of terror against the movement, assassinating beloved leaders such as Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton; arresting scores of activists, some of whom are still in prison today and slandering and disrupting the movement of black people struggling for freedom in a movement that was the moral compass of the whole world.
The Black identity Extremist program is a continuation of COINTELPRO
In the 1960s, in the face of the terror coming down against the African liberation movement, white people quickly and opportunistically removed ourselves from the movement and jumped back on to the pedestal on the backs of the oppression of black people.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela explained, “white people took baths and went back to college,” while the movement of African people known all over the world for its struggle for justice and freedom was crushed by war against the black community carried out by the white power colonial State.
The Uhuru Solidarity Movement and APSC are calling on white people to recognize that every dream and aspiration that we have comes at the expense of African people and that we have always fought for our own rights and prosperity by joining in the government attacks on African people.
We call on white people to be part of overturning that history. Stand for reparations to African people. Stand as a buffer between the U.S. government and the attacks on the righteous movement of African people for freedom and liberation.
Take the Reparations Challenge to raise resources for the Black Power Blueprint. Join the campaign to Build the Days in Solidarity with African People. Join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement today and stand in solidarity with the emergent African liberation movement!