Will the Left ever redeem itself and truly become conspirators with the African diaspora and the holocausts against indigenous nations all over the global South? I have my doubts. Be it in the anti-war organizing, LGBTQ rights, and even the current focus on Gaza and the Israeli slaughter of over 1,000 souls, the European Left has framed the dialogue in the narrowest fashion and always to its advantage and to the exclusion of Africans, Natives, and occupied peoples it pretends to befriend.
White settlers and the regimes they live under must come to an different end-game if they are going to be worth hearing and allying with. So far, they get to pull the strings, design the blueprints, and set strategy for the darkies to follow, to do the heavy lifting. and of course to give the movements that faux democratic, multicultural feel-goodedness.
The result of this unbalanced alliance can be seen everywhere, not only in the persistent racism and cultural genocide in our respective countries' institutions but specifically in things like the mass incarceration of men of African descent - widely disproportionate to our numbers; to persistent spread of HIV/AIDS among young men of African descent and higher mortality rates generally - also, disproportionate to our numbers; our greater vulnerability as wage slaves - lower wages and higher unemployment - again, also disproportionate to our numbers.
Within the context of the US settler nation-state, dated from 1776, the central defining document of the role of Africans in the United States is not the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. It is still the US Supreme Court Dred Scott vs Sanford decision, written by the Chief Justice Roger Taney - a racist and a slave owner - which decided that Africans in North America were not then and had never been considered part of this country, were not citizens, and therefore had no rights, that their only purpose was as livestock.
The indigenous nations on North America have it much, much worse. Their indices show this, are actually worse than people of African descent, but are never discussed. We are at best allowed exoticizing American Indians because to do otherwise challenges the very existence of the white settler plantation formed when those lowly Pilgrims came over from Europe to do what the European Jews did in Palestine: land theft, concentration camps, genocide.
The real foundation of this settler nation-state continues to make our role precarious at best. When the farmer has too many rabbits, he culls them - meaning he slaughters them for their meat and pelts lest they overtake the farm and become nuisance pests. The white settler regime when faced with a surplus population of people of African descent - that is, numbers the capitalist system has no use for - it similarly culls us by shooting us in the streets and locking us up in prisons.
The capitalist system's current phase as a post-industrial, technological one will prove to have less use for us, as it strives to grow richer and is proportionately more threatened by our presence.
Since our importation from Africa, people of African descent have been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we forcibly provided free labor to literally build the empire on the land stolen from indigenous nations; but on the other, our numbers have represented a constant threat.
The second amendment to the US Constitution was put there to ensure that a time when standing armies of any kind were a provocation against [white] liberty, the individual states - particularly in the South - could maintain standing armies to keep the Africans in check. There is no other reason why that amendment is in the Bill of Rights; owning a gun - even a cache of guns was not controversial in 1776 or 1876.
The white settler state knows the threat the Africans and indigenous nations pose to it, so it has strategized to keep us in our places. We may not know it today, may not be intimately conscious of it, but we are a revolutionary cadre always on the verge of waking up and striking back.
What does this have to do with the Left, our supposed friends, and their Programs we are supposed to sign up for?
The Left has never really acknowledged our beginnings. It will rhetorically support us, but invariably direct us to the very institutions which are both racist and illegitimate - as illegitimate as an Israeli settler institution on Palestinian land. In other words, the Left wants us to work within a framework - the system. The Left implicitly believes in the "Promise of the Founding Fathers." This Left lacks revolutionary zeal to overturn the system altogether because it benefits from this system.
And I do not mean to suggest the so-called Right is any better. It is just another wing of the same bird.
People of African descent are disproportionately filling US jails and prisons for the same reason the Second Amendment was embedded into the US Constitution. The white Left is not. Our numbers represent a provocation to the white settler when the white settler has no use for us in his fields. Not to lock us up would threaten rebellion and revolution. The white Left does not menace the settler state because it always acts within in.
People of African descent indoctrinated in government [public] schools may not know this. The settler does.
I've had enough of this dog-and-pony fiasco. With the current slaughter in Gaza, the Left will refer to a few months back, or maybe a few years; they may allow that Israel has a right to defend itself; they invariably return to the magical year 1967; or even 1948.
But implicit in everything they say is Israel's legitimacy as a settler state and theft of land. The Establishment of these countries are settlers, the Left being no better and not of the caliber to end one epoch for a better one.
When Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney [author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] had a dream fulfilled to go to London to continue his education as young student, he was looking forward to meeting this European Left, the Labour Party, and other radicals he had read so much about. He talks about what he found is more comparable to Dorothy arriving at OZ and finding a little weasel behind a curtain.
White people - especially white settlers - love to talk. Admittedly, so do many of their indoctrinated pupils of color. But we don't have the luxury to sit behind a curtain pulling strings. The gun is at our head, knives at our throats, and we must act. If you're not down with our revolution, you're just in the way.
