Seeking Autonomous POC to Make Something New Are you interested in founding an organization of people of color united around anti-authoritarian politics? Over time, many collectives self-identified with APOC (Anarchist People Of Color) have come and gone. New autonomous people of color are getting involved. Interest in seeing something more consistent is a common refrain. What could be needed is an organization that helps strengthen and build collectives, supports activists and puts out a coherent vision for the present and future as autonomous people of color.

“Forging a Black Liberation Agenda for the 21st Century” Black Radical Congress, June 20-22, 2008, St. Louis, Missouri With the launch of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) in 1998, a current of optimism rippled through the social justice movement. In the tradition of other black political gatherings such as the National Negro Congress, the National Black Political Convention and other more recent ones, the BRC set out on a mammoth challenge to build unity within the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) and consensus around the Freedom Agenda.

Four updates from Illvox.org:

Here is my own offer for ending the conflict (originally written almost 3 months ago, right after shmanapolis): Fellow Leftists...

Walter Rodney Lives!

Peoples Power No Dictator!

Wazir Mohamed

[A reflection on Walter Rodney’s continuing relevance 27 years after his assassination in Guyana on June 13, 1980, by the Wazir Mohamad, former Co-Leader of the Working Peoples’ Alliance of Guyana, now
PhD Candidate in Sociology-Binghamton University, New York.]

Part 1

The Stalled Rodney Inquiry and the Racial Dimension of Guyana

I think it necessary that this pertinent question is asked: What happened to Walter Rodney, why was he assassinated, and who was responsible? After years of stops, starts, and inaction on this issue, in 2005 it seemed as though an international inquiry into Rodney’s assassination was finally on the cards.

The Guyanese Parliament on June 29 2005 passed a unanimous resolution authorizing the creation of a commission of inquiry, whose terms of reference were to be ironed out among representatives of the Government, the Rodney family, and others. This year as we mark 27 years since his passing we ask, what has happened to this decision for the inquiry?

It is now 27 years since Walter Rodney “the prophet of self-emancipation” was murdered in a dark corner, at a dark moment of Guyana’s history. That day in June 1980 is arguably the saddest of modern Guyana. I was 22 years old at that time, but my life was already enmeshed in the struggle which Walter Rodney defined in terms of a battle for “peoples’ power – no dictator”. Dictatorial rule was the hallmark of the Burnham presidency which ruled Guyana for more than two decades. Yet, for many years until his death in 1985 Burnham was revered in the corridors of power in the region, in Cuba, the Soviet Union, and all the Eastern Bloc Countries.

Bristol Radical History Group presents

SLAVERY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY

March 2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. While political reformers like William Wilberforce are traditionally celebrated, less is known about the mass movements which forced the hand of Parliament.

Bristol Radical History Group has planned a program of events to celebrate the real history of abolition. In a series of public lectures, films, and social events entitled 'SLAVERY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY' we will highlight the links between Bristol industry and the slave trade, the radical black abolitionists, the slaves who abolished slavery, and throughout we will question why this history has been hidden.

· Sun March 4th history walk: Black and Blue: Social History of Bristol Glass

· Tue March 6th exhibition : Opening the Archives: The Abolition Movement in Bristol

· Tue March 6th film: "La Ultima Cena"

· Wed March 7th talk: Scandal! The Slave Profiteers

· Thurs March 8th talk: Invisible Abolitionists/ Slaves Who Abolished Slavery adam hochschild & richard hart!

· Fri March 9th pub night: Bristol Abolitionist Pub Night/ SKA LECTURE

· Wed March 14th talk: Caribbean Struggles After Abolition richard hart!

· Thurs March 15th talk: Black Radical Abolitionists

Kuwasi at 60

Kazembe Balagun

On December 16, 2006 over 75 people gathered at LAVA in West Philadelphia. The crowd was a mix of Black liberation movement veterans (young and old), anarchist punks and white queer activists from ACT UP. They came together to pay homage to the late Kuwasi Balagoon, who would have turned 60 years old this year. Balagoon is not an immediately recognizable name in the pantheon of revolutionaries, yet he has developed into an underground hero 20 years after his death. This is due in large part to the maze of contradictions that constructed Balagoon’s life.

As a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he was the quintessential outlaw, escaping prison twice and leading units in the expropriation of banks, including the infamous Nyack armored car heist in 1983 (an incident that served as a basis for the film Dead Presidents). Balagoon was also a humanist, who enjoyed painting, writing poetry and baking for his fellow inmates. However, it was Kuwasi’s identification as a queer anarchist that has sparked renewed interest in his life. “He was an anarchist in a black nationalist movement, he was queer in a straight dominated movement, he was a guerrilla fighter after it was “chic,” and he never backed down from his ideals, his beliefs, the struggle or him self. And he demanded to be seen not as a revolutionary icon, but as a person, beautiful and flawed,” said Walidah Imarisha, poet and one of the presenters at the Balagoon memorial.

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

Africans: Eat Dog Food!

Sifelani Tsiko

From Black Star News

A New Zealand dog food manufacturer, Christine Drummond, has offered to send dog food to help starving Kenyans. She apparently can’t distinguish the difference between an African child and a puppy—she offered 42 tons of the dog food. Drummond is still locked in the colonial-era arrogance that sees Africans as animals and can be treated in any way the “big bwana” sees fit.

Drummond, founder of Mighty Mix dog food, said she wanted to send the first shipment to Kenya in March. She said the relief food she intended to send, NZ's Raw Dry Nourish, used the same ingredients as Mighty Mix dog food biscuits. “The first plan was to send dog biscuits and change the vitamins,” Drummond said, but she changed plans when she realized there were too many starving children in Kenya. Instead, she added, she produced a powder that she says just needs water added to form a sustainable meal.

Drummond said she came up with the aid idea to send dog food for hungry Kenyan children after she spoke with a New Zealand woman whose daughter had just returned from a village in Kenya. Her plan was to distribute the food through the Mercy Mission charity, based in Kenya, and promote it as a "nutritional supplement" rather than dog food. New Zealand doctors supposedly said it was okay, accordingly to a published account.

Mighty Mix dog food agent Gaynor Siviter, told a New Zealand reporter: “The dogs thrive on it. They have energy, put on weight. It's bizarre but if it's edible and it works for these people then it's a brilliant idea. It beats eating rice.”