Speaking on the Black liberation struggle in San Francisco in 1968 Black Panther Party Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver said something to the effect of , "either you are part of the problem or you are part of the solution". He was pointing out that those who had been trying to sit on the fence and remain neutral, were in effect supporting the status quo. It is my hope that the DragKing music collective will be part of the solution.
But we shouldn't begin to talk about trying to solve a problem, without first addressing the nature of the problem. So what is the problem being discussed here? I have alluded to "injustice", "commodification", "white supremacy", "patriarchy", "homophobia", "imperialism", "multinational corporations", "capitalism", and "individualism". But these familiar phrases are all shorthand for complex issues. They point to deep problems in the way our society is organized and to deep problems in the way we live our lives. These are not new problems, but have been compacted by years of denial.
All too often people set out to achieve equality without acknowledging that our society is founded on the oppression of women and that all men participate in this oppression, even unwittingly. Likewise we rarely admit that our society would not exist if not for a protracted, genocidal war against indigenous Americans, a crime which continues to this day, and which implicates us all. Or that the United States was built with the forced labor of generations of enslaved Africans and that we all must take responsibility for the continued oppression of Black Americans. We also can't ignore the way gender roles and sexuality have been shaped by the oppressive structures of our society. Homophobia has been a powerful psychological tool for enforcing conformity, as well as justifying the oppression of lesbians and gays.
Of course I am not pretending to have all the answers, the "correct analysis" of our society's problems, the "correct line" on how we should solve these problems, or anything like that. This is not the vanguard party or the way to some ultimate enlightenment. Better educated minds than mine have devoted more time and energy to trying to explain such things.
Instead, I hope to explain why I think action is called for and some of the directions for such action. My perspective is rooted in the belief that people can change the society they live in. I believe we are not the helpless captives of the world we have inherited. I believe that anything people create, they can destroy. We can create a society which does not assume that human beings are motivated by greed and indifference. We don't have to continue to defend the crimes of our fathers. We will be rewarded for aspiring to our hopes and not for merely preparing for our fears.
This is an unpopular view these days. We have settled for the trouble we know and dare not try for anything else. And anyone who does dare, is crushed by those who don't want things to change. Our society has developed powerful structures to prevent change.
1998 marks an important centennial for the United States, but one which probably won't be marked by official commemorations. 1998 marks one hundred years since the United States expanded beyond North America to seize control of Hawai'i, the Philippines, Guam and Cuba. 1998 marks one hundred years since the U.S. became a global colonial power. Even as we move into a neo-colonial reality, the legacy of the old, colonial reality persists.
Colonialism is a method which the industrialized nations of Europe and the United States use to provide a legal framework in which capitalist exploitation of indigenous labor and resources can flourish unchallenged. This may include formal annexation of the colonized country, as in the case of U.S. annexation of Guam, Puerto Rico, and Hawai'i. Or formal annexation can be abandoned once an indigenous elite can be relied on to maintain a stable environment for the exploitation of the colonized country by the colonizer, as in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century, or currently in Puerto Rico. In either case colonialism is established and maintained by military conquest.
Colonialism describes a power relationship:
The ruling country sets the laws in the colonized country.
The ruling country controls the population through direct use of the military.
The colonized country is viewed as being a resource for the ruling country.
Both the people and the natural resources of the colonized country are controlled
by the ruling country for the benefit of the colonizers.
The culture of the colonized people is attacked
by the colonizers as a means of controlling the colonized people.
U.S. history is a secession of colonial conquests, beginning with the genocide of Native American peoples, the seizing of Native American land, and continuing with slavery, the forced migration of African peoples, the theft of Mexican land(now the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California) and continuing to the present day.
On December 29th, 1890 the 7th Cavalry of the United States brutally massacred over three hundred Lakota, mostly women and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The same year the U.S. Bureau of the Census officially declared the internal frontier closed. "The white man made us many promises, but he only kept one", Mahpiya Luta(Red Cloud), the Oglala Lakota leader, stated, "He promised to take our land, and he took it".
But U.S. expansion didn't end with the conquest of North America. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge explained in 1895, "We have a record of conquest, colonization, and expansion unequalled in the nineteenth century. We are not about to be curbed now". Today the United States attempts to dominate the entire world.
The American War of Independence is portrayed as a struggle against the colonialism of the Old World: a struggle against monarchy, for democracy, against priviledge, for equality, against oppression, for freedom. But in practice the U.S. just replaced Great Britain as the conqueror of Native American Nations and the ruler of enslaved Africans. In fact, most Native American Nations fought alongside the British against the American colonists, because, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, "they have most to fear from us and most to hope from them". Africans in North America had more to hope from the British as well, who in their Emancipation Proclamation of 1775 offered freedom to "all indentured servants, Negroes or others...able and willing to bear arms" against the colonists. As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of The Earth, "a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It suceeded so well that the United States became a monster".
Paradoxically U.S. Imperialism is often portrayed as as defensive. Native Americans are portrayed in U.S. popular culture as irrational savages threatening civilized people. The most famous battle of the American West, known as "Custer's last stand" at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was a defeat for the would-be colonists. In the 1840's Americans were told to "Remember the Alamo!", but few remember that Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were fighting to succede from Mexico and create a republic where slavery could be legal. At the turn of the century Aemericans were told to "Remember the Maine!", but few remember that the U.S. defeated Spanish colonialists only to create its own empire. This selective amnesia allows us to confer victim status on the colonizers thus justifying their aggression and marginalizing the claims of the colonized.
As Americans, particularly as so-called "white" Americans, perhaps the most priviledged minority on earth, we have a moral obligation to support the struggles of oppressed peoples for self-determination, and to address the historical problems of our country.
We support New Africa, the nation of oppressed African people within the United States,
We support the indigenous,
sovereign,
First Nations upon whose ancestral lands the United States has been built,
We support Aztlan, the land stolen from Mexico in 1848,
We support a free and independent Puerto Rico,
We support a free and independent Hawai'i,
In short we support end to U.S. colonialism.
We see these as movements for social justice, against U.S. Imperialism.
Because these movements invariably encounter repression at the hands of the state which represents the interests of the rulers, not those of the oppressed, we also support the imprisoned members of these movements. Angela Davis put it well. She said that "If they come for me in the morning, they'll come for you at night". Ojore N. Lutalo, a New African political prisoner, has said, "any movement that does not support their political internees ... is a sham movement". His statement is available here. Any movement for social change will not be able to ask for sacrifice if it does not support those who make sacrifices. That is why we support imprisoned activists.
There is plenty of good information available on the web about political prisoners in the U.S. on the web.
There are web sites for specific prisoners like Fred Hampton Jr., or death row author Mumia Abu-Jamal. Refuse and Resist has
another site for Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Native American activist Leonard Peltier has several web sites dedicated to
him.
As do Chicano activists Ramsey (Tezcatlipoca) Muniz, Alvaro Hernandez Luna, Jose Luis Avina. Black Panther Eddie Conway also has a web site.
There are also web sites which list many political prisoners:
For example here
and here
and here,
and the Jericho '98 movement has one here.
Statements of Black Political Prisoners are available here
Information about Puerto Rican Prisoners of War is here,
and information specifically about Puerto Rican Women Prisoners of War here.
Capitalism itself creates its own prisons, and in fact the United States imprisions more own its own people than any other nation in history. Sojourner Truth once said, "The Rich rob the poor and the poor rob each other". And it is the poor who fill our prisons. As Mumia Abu-Jamal has written, "If one examines social, political and economic policy in the 90's, an unmistakable picture emerges of the poor as people who are despised for their very poverty, and punished for their lack of wealth. The state, and their cultural elite project this picture until it permeates political and popular culture, and is reflected in public policy". Bettina Aptheker has written on "The Social Functions of the Prisons in the United States"
here. Joel Olson has written on "The Role of Prisons in Capitalist Society",
here. And in 1995 the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown wrote on "The continuing Crime of Black Imprisonment" here.
Dr. Chinosole wrote "Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prison" for Wazo Weusi (Think Black):A Journal of Black Thought. And then there's the story of how backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan counter revolutionaries in the U.S. Government brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in early '80s to help finance war -- and a plague was born, as reported in the San Jose Mercury News.
The story of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader who created a powerful coalition with Black, white and Puerto Rican street gangs, and was assassinated by the F.B.I. is here.
More sources of information are here
here
here
and
here.
The amazing AdBusters are here.
We support organizations in the United States which struggle for social justice. Many have web sites, such as
National Peoples' Democratic Uhuru Movement,
The Black Panther Party here and also
here
And the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown has a site
here
There is also the African Net which has a site
here
The Zapatistas have a web site
here and another
here
Well, I am burned out. So I'm going to stop writing now. Lately I think we've been spending to much time scribbling HTML and not enough time making noise. But the links above should be enough to keep you busy for a while.
Later...
-Sluggo
back to the main DragKing page.