Special Features

St. Petersburg, FL—A candidate for mayor representing a pitiful sector of the white ruling class told attendees of Tuesday night’s Mayoral debate to “go back to Africa.”

Paul Congemi made these vile comments in response to Uhuru Movement mayoral candidate Jesse Nevel, whose platform calls for “Unity through Reparations.”

It was July 10, 2017, a rainy night in Florida’s fourth largest city, St. Petersburg.

The Hilton hotel was the battleground for for two political debates, one featuring the District 6 Seat and one for the Mayor. This all may sound like the backdrop to a typical evening of political banter, but this evening was anything but normal.

While Coastal Living recently ranked St. Petersburg as one of the best 20 places to live calling it a cosmopolitan city that “strikes a balance between historic, small-scale neighborhoods and big-city pleasures.”

There’s just one problem… this cosmopolitan city does not care about the black culture and they aren’t very “worldly” towards the black community. The building of Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play baseball displaced a thriving African Gas Plant District, which has confined the black community to south part of the city which has no grocery stores for low income or working class African people to go for food. But unfettered, dog eat dog capitalism wants more.

A building spree of $500,000 to $600,000 luxury condominiums are being put up to put out the black community. So sorry Coastal Living your balance of small-scaled neighborhoods and big city pleasures is full of shit and is for a white audience only.

And now the Black Community has been backed into a corner and they are coming out swinging, and full-on revolting. This movement is being led by the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement which is running candidates in the District 6 (Eritha “Akilé” Cainion) and Mayoral Race (Jesse Nevel).

On Monday, July 10th the voice of the black working class shattered the stifling “decorum” set by the St. Petersburg, FL League of Women Voters and the Downtown Neighborhood Association.

The SEIU’s People’s Budget Review held a local forum on Thursday June 15th at The Sunshine Center so that the nine district 6 candidates could have an opportunity to hear out the concerns of the community. The description of the event read: “You’ll be able to engage in dialogue with candidates for the District 6 race and hear them respond to how they will be supporting the People’s agenda.”

The open forum quickly became a battle royale. Most candidates were obviously fighting in the interest of prime real estate, while others were engaged in a vested struggle against police violence and gentrification.

According to the World Heath Organization, there is an estimated 125 million girls and women throughout the world who have been subjected to a practice called female genital mutilation (FGM), a majority of whom lives in Africa and the Middle East.

FGM is the removing or altering of the external genitalia of girls and young women, which is a centuries-old practice that predates modern religion.

Supporters of this practice provide various reasons for maintaining it, often citing cultural traditions. Opponents of FGM provide a long list of medical and moral reasons why it should end.

Whatever the medical or cultural reasons given for or against FGM, the African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) is clear that, at its core, female genital mutilation further limits the freedom of African women and girls who are already suffering under colonial domination.

Therefore, we unite with the African People’s Socialist Party’s position to end the mutilation of women that reads:

“African women also find themselves locked into backward social practices that have assumed the weight of culture. Genital mutilation is one of the most obvious of such practices.

“While there is a debate on whether this practice was introduced into Africa by Arabs or other external forces, the fact remains that genital mutilation is a brutal method used in attempt to guarantee male inheritance rights by limiting the sexual freedom of women.”

There has been much discussion in both bourgeois and independent media centered around the bodies and identities of transgender people.

This has especially been the case over the course of the current political period generally characterized by deepening imperialist instability as well as conscious and unconscious struggle against the status quo.

We see the visibility of transgender and gender nonconforming people in popular culture.

We also see the LGBTQIA+ struggle for equality against discriminatory policies such as the so-called bathroom bills.

These bills, under the pretense of public safety, deny transgender and gender nonconforming people the right to utilize the public restroom accommodations that best correspond to their gendered identity.

Somewhere amidst the bourgeois feminist milieu is mention of the persisting murder, dehumanization and brutalization of African transgender people.

It is through African Internationalism that the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), the Uhuru Movement and its component mass organizations have on different fronts offered a dialectical and historical materialist accounting of the colonial, capitalist social system that gives life to the oppression of African and other colonized people throughout the world

Uhuru Buzz Words is the glossary of the African People's Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement. The Buzz Words appear in every issue of The Burning Spear newspaper and function to help outline for our readers the meanings of some of the terms that appear in our article.

Many of the buzz words, though very much applicable to today's struggle for African liberation, are bastardized by the bourgeoisie or may seem like "dead words" to the general masses.

Hence, the Uhuru Buzz Words help to deepen the political education of the masses.

I have seen my fair share of sell-out politicians try to sell their lies to the black community to get our votes. So when two honest and committed comrades who I know and have worked with for years told me they were entering the electoral arena, I was ecstatic.