The moment we are willing to sacrifice our relatives for the crumbs thrown at our feet by the white elite, we have abandoned any hope of liberation and adopted the moral filth of the violent status quo.
Indeed, by playing into the manufactured racial divisions of white colonial ideology, we have assimilated into their power structures and internalized colonialism.
As we prepare for a renewed and evermore oppressive Trump regime, we must adopt an unshakeable sense of radical community solidarity if we hope to triumph over the onslaught of violence that he and every other blood-thirsty, sold-out politician promises to enact upon our communities.
Manufactured Divisions and Their Historical Context
U.S. corporate media continues to relentlessly force-feed the people propaganda in a concerted effort to pit us against each other.
Infighting within our own radical organizing spaces works at the behest of the colonial U.S. regime, and is created to kill off political dissent and revolutionary fervor before the masses have any chance to adopt the liberatory ideologies of Black and Brown Power organizations.
Two examples include; the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance initiative employed to dismantle Black power organizations in the 60’s, or even the FBI’s recent designation of “Black Identity Extremist,” a label which is a catch-all phrase to criminalize and revolutionary Black ideology. More recently, we’ve seen the “nonprofit killer bill” that was passed by the House of Representatives, which plans to target any non-profit supportive of the Palestinian liberation cause by deeming them supportive of “terrorism.”
Such efforts at manufactured division are not only pushed by the government itself, but also by the racist corporate media. We are all aware of the talking heads who pushed divisive analysis in the aftermath of the election.
For instance, election exit poll data touted by the mainstream white liberal media vehemently blamed Latinos (particularly men) for Trump’s election. This is another systematic attempt to scapegoat minoritized groups and migrant populations in order to garner widespread support for the mass deportations Trump plans to enact. Effectively, this narrative fostered conflict between communities, with some now normalizing Trump’s fascist deportation policies by implying that “we voted for it.”
While it is true that more Latino men voted for Trump in this election, and we ourselves must break out of the shallow identity politics that either party offers us, Latino men and Latinos at large did not vote red.
White voters and the Democrats’ lack of substantive policy, coupled with their abandonment of the working class, is what got him re-elected.
We must recognize that Black and brown communities have a shared history of colonization and oppression that has always been a method of control used to subjugate our people.
From the genocide of the transatlantic slave trade and the ethnocentric slaughter of the encomienda and hacienda systems that enslaved the Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala, to the Africans who were brought here after the Natives were murdered en masse, our ancestors faced a mutual enemy. The grotesque history of racial terrorism through the Black lynchings in the South is inherently linked to the lynchings of Indigenous Mexicans in Texas/Southwest before, during and after the land seizure of the Mexican-American War.
The same is true for the U.S’s imperialist allies, including israel’s U.S.-backed illegal occupation of Palestine for the last 76 years. This empire we live in has occupied several sovereign nations as colonies since the late 1800s, including Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.
Activists and organizers have made these connections clear, showing how hundreds of police departments nationwide, the same ones that brutalize and lynch Black people, are trained by the genocidal israel Occupation Force (IOF). Or, occupying police forces in the U.S., such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), are armed by and learned the tactics they use to kill unarmed Black and Brown people from the Zionist terror state of israel.
These are only a select few of the various interlocking systems and entities deployed against our communities, and that we must be in solidarity to effectively destroy.
Cross-Cultural Revolutionary Solidarity: Lessons from the Past
The Black Panther Party understood the importance of internationalist solidarity for collective liberation, as evidenced by BPP Founder, Huey P. Newton’s meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the BPP’s anti-imperialist stances.
Ultimately, we must recognize that radical solidarity is rooted in the ideology of revolutionary love, and is antithetical to everything about the capitalist system’s individualist, isolationist ideologies.
One lesson of this comes from the fact that it wasn’t until revolutionary martyr Fred Hampton united the Chicago Black Panther Party with Puerto Rican radicals, the Young Lords and a group of working-class white people called the Young Patriots, forming the Rainbow Coalition, that he became too dangerous, and was then assassinated by the FBI.
This intersectional solidarity showed that when the people reject manufactured divisions, and instead unite to fight our common capitalist oppressors, it shakes the hegemonic chokehold they have on our system by threatening their narrative of division and total control.
While Hampton’s revelation of the necessity of such coalitions is precisely what led to his vicious murder only months after the Rainbow Coalition’s formation in April of 1969, his radical legacy and teachings live on through the generations of revolutionaries he inspired around the world.
Exposing the Illusion of Liberation Through Politics
“The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it,” Malcolm X once said. “They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling.”
Malcolm’s words and analysis ring as true today as they did the day he spoke them. But today, it is not only white liberals we must be weary of, but liberals of any color.
Let us not forget that “Deporter in Chief” Barack Obama ran his campaign on radical immigration reform, then built the ICE concentration camps that now incarcerate almost 40,000 migrants and deported more people than any other president in history.
Following in the footsteps of Obama’s xenophobia, the Biden-Harris regime has deported more people to date than Trump in his last term, continued funding the wall, utilized Trump-era policies to turn more than 2.8 million migrants away during the COVID-19 pandemic, sent CBP officers on horseback to round up Haitian migrants at the border and recently passed an asylum ban that Harris, who was endorsed by hundreds of law enforcement officials, said she would have strengthened had she been elected.
The fact is this: politicians will never liberate us with their campaign trail lies and empty promises that tug on our heartstrings with lofty promises and no substantive policy initiatives. And if we continue to play into the political game of our one-party, two-faction oligarchy, we will continue to live in an imperialist, police surveillance state of violent repression. No amount of voting into the colonial electoral system will free us from the shackles of racial capitalism.
When our Black relatives are being lynched on camera by racist pigs and thrown into state-sanctioned slavery while little Black and Brown children are brutally incarcerated and fed into the deportation machine, it is our moral duty to take to the streets in organized resistance to this tyranny.
We cannot be police and prison abolitionists and without recognizing that the same system that incarcerates close to 2,000,000 people and allows state-sanctioned murder is the same system that allows militarized border patrol death squads to slaughter migrants with impunity.
Furthermore, it is the same system that strips us of our tax dollars for the benefit of israeli settlers and gives billions of dollars to Ukraine to continue our proxy war against Russia while fueling the extermination of Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni and Syrian civilians.
Embracing the Politics of Revolutionary Love: Collective Liberation & the Path Ahead
As the saying goes, we must recognize that this system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as designed. It was designed to kneel on the necks of Black and Brown people and profit off of our plight.
Reform can only get us so far before we must confront the root causes of oppression: capitalism, colonialism, and ethnocentrism.
Over these next four years, we will have to organize intelligently at an unprecedented level, but we WILL achieve victory. Mutual aid will be paramount, and protests will likely become more dangerous, but the only people who truly protect us are the people ourselves.
We must show up for all our relatives and fill in the gaps for one another. Join in on calls to action from local organizations like Decarcerate KC, KC Tenants, AIRR and KC Defender. Engage in revolutionary political education and unlearn the white-washed history that infects our minds and collective consciousness. Build strong connections with those around you and strive to create the world we want our children to grow up in.
Radical community is not made with words; it is established through tangible acts of revolutionary love. We must first decolonize our minds to embrace the categorization of “radicalism” and partake in our globally shared nation of undying solidarity.
