On June 4 and 5, 2011, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement will hold its National Convention “Resistance is the Future: Solidarity with African Liberation”, in Philadelphia, PA. The USM Convention is for white people and other allies of the liberation struggle of African people—inside this country, in Africa, the Caribbean and the world.
The Convention will align white people who are looking for a real stand of solidarity and unity with reparations to African people to get involved. The two-day event will include workshops and presentations from the leadership of the African Liberation Movement in the U.S. in order to forge genuine unity with its goals for self-determination and justice.
Uhuru Solidarity Movement, working directly under the leadership of the African-led Uhuru Movement, is for white people who are tired of empty talk and want to take action that can make real changes not through a single issue but through real transformation of the world.
USM is an activist movement: organizing fundraising for reparations to African people, taking a stand in support of organized African resistance to US government attacks on the African community and engaging others like ourselves in the war of ideas on the side of justice for African and oppressed peoples of the earth.
After George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the U.S. in protest.
Although his successor Barack Obama has brutally expanded U.S. wars of occupation in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere, with U.S. forces stationed at more than 800 military bases around the world, there is deafening silence from the predominately white so-called “peace” movement.
Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report and member of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIBC) — one of the key presenters at the upcoming Uhuru Solidarity Movement Convention “Resistance is the Future,” — recently addressed the white “anti-war” movement in his May 3, 2011 commentary called “The Phony Anti-war Movement.”
“Two university researchers have proven, by the numbers,” Ford writes, “what the real antiwar movement has known for years: that many of the folks who turned out in such large numbers to demonstrate against America’s wars when George Bush was president, were really only opposed to Republican wars. Thus, when Barack Obama captured the White House, the so-called antiwar movement largely collapsed.”
Ford goes on to cite a new study by University of Michigan and Indiana University researchers, that the majority of the antiwar movement were Democrats who were motivated by their dislike of Bush rather than genuine opposition to US wars of occupation.
Noting that while Obama has expanded Bush’s wars, Ford quotes one of the authors of the report as saying the, “antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead ‘attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated.’”
The Black is Back Coalition held a conference in March of this year in Washington, DC, bringing together activists, leaders and others from the African community and their allies challenging the white left and galvanizing an African-led movement in opposition to Obama’s “other wars.”
The other wars include not only the continuing US wars against the people of Iraq and the expanded war against the people of Afghanistan, but also the US backed war against the people of Congo, the US/UN occupation of Haiti, the bombing of Pakistan, and the long-ignored devastating war against the African community inside the US, which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims of police murder and brutality over the past 20 years.
America’s war against black people in this country—a war never acknowledged by the white left—has rounded up millions of African men and women and locked them away for most of their lives in a deadly prison system, based on discriminatory arrest, prosecution and sentencing laws.
The Democratic party-loving white antiwar movement, which has historically walked over the besieged African community right here to get to a peace rally, prefers a Democrat, especially Barack Obama, to carry out the U.S. wars of plunder and occupation inside this country and around the world.
The Uhuru Solidarity Movement unites with the criticism of the white left and peace movement by Glen Ford and by the Black is Back Coalition. We recognize that the white peace movement is only interested in an imperialist peace, not liberation for oppressed and colonized peoples struggling against US war not only around the world but in the inner cities of this country.
We are white people, organized under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, which leads the Uhuru Movement. We are tired of the talk fests and the ideological imperialism of a white left that struggles to perpetuate white power in a kinder, gentler form rather than recognize that the only force that has ever changed the world is African and other colonized peoples in the struggle against US imperial domination.
We recognize that as Chairman Omali Yeshitela, founder of BIBC tells us, we have to stand against imperialism itself, a system born of slavery, genocide and colonialism and fed throughout its entire existence on wars of occupation and plunder of the resources, land and labor of colonized peoples around the world.
As white people we recognize that all of us sit on a pedestal that rests on the backs of Africans, Indigenous, Arab and other peoples for our benefit. Everything we got comes at their expense. Can you name something that wasn’t grown on stolen or occupied land or wasn’t made in a sweatshop in a formerly colonized country? Keeping the US in control of the world’s resources, battling China and other former colonial countries who are now struggling to compete with imperialism, is why the increasingly desperate US is waging increasingly vicious wars.
We recognize that “America” that was stolen from the Indigenous people with their survivors now living in terrible poverty on “reservations.” America was built on enslaved African labor that created the wealth, jobs and prosperity of the US and Europe to begin with.
We’re not looking for a kinder, gentler way to suck the blood of the oppressed whether they are in Libya or the south side of Chicago.
We believe that genuine peace can only come about when Indigenous people, including the Mexican people streaming across the borders of land stolen from them 150 years ago, have control of their land and resources again.
There will only be peace when the people of the Middle East can use their oil and other resources to feed and house their own people without the US military and corporations stealing them and assaulting their society.
There will only be peace when African people—one nation of people in Africa and wherever they have been forcibly dispersed around the world—have control over their homeland still under neocolonial control and all its vast resources and win reparations for 600 years of stolen labor and land.
There can be no peace in an imperialist world that feeds itself at the expense of everybody else.
Peace and justice for us all, white people included, means standing on the side of solidarity with African people and the majority of humanity and in their struggle for national liberation. Down with imperialism!
Uhuru!
Attend the Uhuru Solidarity Movement Convention “Resistance is the Future: Solidarity with African Liberation” on June 4-5, 2011 in Philadelphia, PA. For details about the program and to register, go to http://apscuhuru.org/usm/convention2011/index.xhtml
