GAINESVILLE, FL–On March 7-8, 2015, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) will host its National Convention, “Break the Silence! Refuse to Be Complicit!” in the city of Gainesville, Florida.
USM is the organization of white people committed to taking responsibility for our own history as beneficiaries of oppression and to building a principled relationship with African people and oppressed peoples everywhere.
USM is not a white-led organization. We work under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party.
We are white people who answered the call of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) to organize in the white community for reparations to African people.
In this period, U.S. imperialism is in a serious crisis, as the oppressed peoples of the world strike at the heart of this oppressive and parasitic system.
Colonized peoples — from the barrios, ghettos and reservations of this country to the people of Occupied Palestine — are changing the course of history with their courageous fight-back for national liberation.
As the parasitic U.S. economy and social system comes apart, the African People’s Socialist Party is fighting for the right of African people to self-government and self-determination: political, economic and social control over their own lives and resources.
The demand for reparations is intensifying on every continent. We believe that reparations are due to African people inside the U.S. and around the world.
The governments of the U.S. and Europe, along with the lives of white people in general, are built on a platform of slavery, genocide and colonialism.
If we are honest, we must admit that there are two Americas. There is the America of police murder, mass imprisonment, extreme poverty and overall misery imposed on African people. And then there is the America of prosperity, opportunity, comfort and power enjoyed by white people.
We sit on a pedestal of the oppression of the rest of the world and we have to reject this untenable reality.
This is a call to white people: refuse to be complicit with the system that brutalizes and tortures the world’s peoples to fuel our white lifestyle.
How can we live in a world where every 28 hours an African man, woman or child in the U.S. is murdered by police or white vigilantes, where over half the 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons are Africans, and where every single day Africans, Arabs and other colonized peoples are attacked and slandered by the U.S. and European governments?
How can we stand by in the face of such massive bloodshed, drone strikes, police murders, mass incarceration, white phosphorus and depleted uranium attacks, and all the other methods of carnage, deployed against the black and brown peoples of the world, in our name and for our benefit?
When we look around the world today, we see nothing but war, crisis and destruction. But the oppressed peoples of the world are fighting back.
We must break our complicity and do our part to go back into the belly of the beast to build a movement in solidarity with the liberation of humanity.
There is no other future for this Earth. It is in our deepest interest to unite with the emergence of a system without oppressed and oppressor, in which all human beings can live in peace, sharing the resources of this beautiful planet. We can and must embrace the interests and aspirations of Africans and other oppressed peoples as our own.
On March 7 and 8, leaders from the worldwide African Liberation Movement will speak on the most burning political issues of our time.
How can we begin to see the struggle for women’s liberation through the eyes of African, Arab and Indigenous women?
How can we be more than just a white “ally”?
Why is the fight against colonialism (a political and economic system), not racism?
What is the role of violence in the struggle against injustice and oppression?
The USM Convention will host a national debate on the role of white people in the African Liberation Movement, a hotly contested question in this period of the re-emerging black struggle.
Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African Socialist International, founder of the Uhuru Movement and author of “An Uneasy Equilibrium: the African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism,” will present as the keynote speaker.
Chairman Yeshitela has traveled to Ferguson repeatedly since the August 9 murder of Mike Brown by white cop Darren Wilson, to organize and lead the mass movement on the ground there. He played a leading role in the famous Black People’s Grand Jury held in Ferguson in January where African people came together to review the evidence in the Mike Brown case and determined to indict Darren Wilson for first degree murder.
Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, and author of “Overturning the Culture of Violence,” will present on the history of white people as an oppressor nation and how we can take steps to rectify our relationship to Africans and other oppressed peoples.
Friends and comrades throughout the world, join us in building a movement to break the silence.
Be part of changing the world by standing in unity with a strategic African-led movement for justice through political and economic power for oppressed people. Take this opportunity to end our isolation from humanity and break our allegiance with a system built on slavery and genocide that grants rights for us at the expense of others.
Break the silence. Refuse to be complicit!
Registration for the 2-day convention is $30 and you can register online at uhurusolidarity.org/convention or call 727-888-3797.
