Resistance

What’s at the end of my rainbow? Freedom!

My name is Gazi Kodzo and if you have seen me chanting at one of the many marches I have led you should have easily determined that I am a homosexual. As a Gender and Sexuality Nonconforming African (GSNA) I have to endorse Akilé and Jesse because I am African before anything else! This is why…

“Millennials” is a generalized and imprecise term used to describe people born between the years of 1981 and 1997. This generation lives in a time where access to information is both endless and extremely suppressed. A time when paid leave is the system’s response to videos of police shootings that have live coverage, millions of views and instant commentary. A time where hashtags can start movements and end careers.

We are a generation that demands an immediate stance in response to the world and its developments. We are a generation that was sold a message of hope and change only to be betrayed by the status quo of a corrupt system that had been turned against the interests of the people.

Presented one piece of evidence after the other, millennials are suspicious, looking to differentiate between genuine representatives of progress and those who would sell out at the expense of the people.

Despite what corporate media would have you think who millennials are, we are invested and often participate in politics. Locally this is evident from the huge millennial support of Eritha Akilé Cainion’s campaign for District 6 and Jesse Nevel’s campaign for Mayor.

This article is part of a special Black August series on TheBurningSpear.com. We encourage all our readers to help “Keep The Spear Burning” during our Black August Fund Drive. Support your black power newspaper! Sponsor a prisoner or donate today at Burningspearmarketplace.com

Black August is a commemoration begun in 1979 by Africans in prison to raise up those who have died struggling for African liberation from within prison walls or in attempts to liberate Africans from the colonial prisons like George and Jonathan Jackson.

August 9, 2017 marks 3 years since the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Young Michael was murdered by Ferguson, MO copy, Darren Wilson. 

Witnesses stated that Mike Brown was shot eight times while his hands were in the air. His rotting body was then left on the concrete for more than eight hours as an example to the Ferguson community of what the police will do if we disobey their colonial orders. 

What the police did not expect in this suburb of St. Louis, MO was resistance from the African working class community. This powerful display of African Resistance on August 9, 2014 marks one of the critical dates in Black August.

With bullhorn and banners in hand, on Saturday July 8, militant protesters marched on the spot where Houston cops murdered 38-year-old Alva Braziel on July 9, 2016.

It was a one year anniversary resistance march and rally.

For the second time in three months, a white people’s grand jury in Harris County, Houston, Texas has no-billed two cops: L. Lopez and E. Macias.

These pigs pumped fourteen bullets into the body of Alva Braziel while his hands were up.

Some of those shots hit the 38-year-old black father while he lay on the ground mortally wounded.

Nevertheless, the pigs still handcuffed him.

Back in March and again on July 29, 2017, prosecutor Kim Ogg, the new female pro-death penalty district attorney presented to grand juries cases she knew would not win indictments.

Securing indictments was never the intent.

Reinforcing the colonial relationship that Africans have to the State is always the unstated goal of unindicted police murderers.

A judge in  U.S. federal court ordered the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to deliver a new report on the environmental risks associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline on June 14, 2017.

This decision came down after the Indigenous group known as the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota began a fierce resistance in 2016 that continues today against the colonial State and Energy Transfer Partners, a parasitic capitalist energy company.

The court gave the order, citing that the Army Corps of Engineers did not fully investigate the potential environmental hazards that come along with the construction of the pipeline so close to the water and natural resources on which the Standing Rock Sioux rely for survival.

Yet another frontline warrior and prominent activist of the African resistance in Ferguson has met an untimely end.

Colonial media sources reported that 27-year-old Edward (Emijah) Crawford died from a “self-inflicted gunshot wound” to the head on the evening of May 4, 2017.

You may remember Edward best as the young man immortalized in the Ferguson uprising photo holding a bag of chips in one hand and tossing a police deployed gas canister back in the direction of the pigs, away from a group children and other protestors with the other.

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

The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) presents the broadcast of “African Resistance Now!”

“African Resistance Now!” is critical political education for the masses which airs every other Wednesday at 6:30 CST/7:30 EST on www.facebook.com/INPDUM.

Under the leadership of Kalambayi Andenet, the International President of the InPDUM, “African Resistance Now!” serves the African working class by bringing raw, unfiltered political insight on various sectors of the African life that are affected by colonialism.