“Are you trying to kill us?”
This is the question raised by Demetrius Young, a city commissioner in Albany, GA, the center of the COVID-19 outbreak. The state of Georgia has begun to ease its lockdowns and allow some businesses to open up as of April 24.
Africans in the U.S. are outraged that the U.S. president, governors and mayors have begun to “re-open” the capitalist economy while Africans suffer the highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths throughout the country.
The answer is “Hell, yes, they are killing us!”
African people don’t have power over our lives. Without that we are always the victims of their colonial policies that determine whether we will live or die.
An article in the Washington Post on May 7 reported that 22 counties in the U.S. that have high African populations account for more than half of all U.S. Coronavirus cases, nearly 60 percent of all U.S. deaths, as a national study by an AIDS research group found.
Gregorio Millett, vice president of Amfar, the Foundation for Aids Research, was reported in the Washington Post as saying that “black people will be more vulnerable to the pandemic as states begin to reopen businesses and public spaces.”
Most Africans are clear the government simply does not want to provide unemployment payouts to the masses who have been laid off without pay.
Many of us are also the “essential workers” forced to stay on the job throughout this pandemic, usually without protective equipment and with very low pay.
We are made to suffer while the ruling class and moneyed sector has already awarded privately owned banks trillions of dollars in bailout money–that’s our money!
Even before we knew African and Indigenous people would be dying at a disproportionate rate from COVID-19, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) called COVID-19 the colonialvirus.
It’s not a medical problem; it’s a political problem
Declaring that the virus was not a “medical problem; it’s a political problem,” Chairman Omali Yeshitela launched The People’s War Campaign in March to deepen the crisis of imperialism and intensify the struggle for political and economic power in the hands of the African working class .
The People’s War has been providing political and health leadership for the masses of African people around the world.
We have assumed the role of government for African workers who have no government anywhere on the planet.
We advanced the correct fighting slogan “the Coronavirus is a colonialvirus and Black Power is the cure.”
We have gone door-to-door providing personal protective equipment throughout African communities and have plastered posters and informational brochures.
Every front of the dynamic Uhuru Movement took The People’s War to internet platforms where we flooded social media with online events putting out The People’s War Campaign to enthusiastic and supportive audiences.
We are kicking the ass of the white ruling class
Our Party has provided political and organizational leadership to the African working class for nearly 50 years.
We have always fought to keep the Black Revolution of the 1960s alive, because this time we are going to win.
Even as the colonialvirus lockdowns are hitting us hard, we find that U.S. white power is getting weaker every day.
The crisis of imperialism is getting deeper and the U.S. can’t solve its problems or give leadership to the world.
The U.S. is the laughing stock of the world, in fact, as Africans and oppressed people everywhere are rising up and fighting back.
This period has enabled African and other oppressed peoples throughout the world to increasingly recognize the international white ruling class as an illegitimate and inept social force.
Our problems did not begin in 2017 when Donald J. Trump became president.
We have been colonized since the European assault on Africa 600 years ago.
More and more people are recognizing that the whole system is a putrid corpse as summed up by our Party’s political theory of African Internationalism.
We see Africans throughout North America’s virus infested prisons rising up in fierce rebellions as we recognize we are essentially sitting ducks left to die in a ‘‘petri dish of Coronavirus infections’’ spread to us from paid prison staff.
The compounded crimes by the State apparatus reveals to us the illegitimacy of government bureaucrats and private prison shareholders who enrich themselves with every new colonized body they stuff in a jail cell.
APSP: A Revolutionary Party of African workers
The African People’s Socialist Party understood early in our history that the entire African Nation is an oppressed nation and the African working class is the progressive social force within the African Nation.
African workers are the social force that as a class cannot solve our problems within the existing social system.
Our relentless struggle to liberate the African Nation under the leadership of the African working class has allowed us to forge a philosophy created in the image of African workers.
This is why we have been able to conclude “the Coronavirus is a colonialvirus” and why our struggle remains a struggle for power!
Colonialism is the central contradiction
The origin of the Coronavirus itself exists inside the relationship between colonizer and colonized.
When we look at the international bourgeoisie’s inability to respond to the virus, we likewise see the same driving force – the struggle between colonizer and colonized.
This same struggle revealed itself when a hurricane hit the island of Ayiti (Haiti) in 2010.
It was not the hurricane that was responsible for the death of 300,000 people in a single day; it was colonialism that left us powerless to protect ourselves.
It was white power that plundered the resources of Ayiti. Colonial domination is the reason Ayiti does not have an infrastructure that could withstand an earthquake.
U.S. colonial domination is thereby responsible for the slaughter of a third of a million people!
If Africans in the U.S. cannot afford healthcare, it is likewise because the system of colonial capitalism requires that everything exist for the purpose of profit, with African bodies as the colonial guarantor.
That’s why when white people get a cold, we get the flu.
Racism obscures the real contradiction
Colonialism has its origins in political and economic relationships in the real world and can be destroyed through political and economic struggle.
Racism, on the other hand, is just the ideas in white people’s heads.
“How do you know when you’ve overturned racism?” Chairman Omali Yeshitela asks.
Fighting colonialism demands a struggle against the oppressor white nation which has dominated politically and economically for the benefit of white people ever since they kidnapped us from Africa and turned us into enslaved workers who forcibly built the wealth they still enjoy today!
What we are fighting for
As colonial capitalism continues to reveal itself as an illegitimate social system and a parasite on the body of humanity, our responsibility is to help Africans identify what we are fighting for and against.
Our fight is for national liberation against colonial capitalism.
This means a fight for a return of all our human and material resources, to liberate the 12,000 square miles of Africa and to consolidate African people throughout the colonized world into a single organization.
This alone can ensure that we are no longer dependent upon a foreign and hostile entity for access to food, healthcare for all, to cure diseases, end poverty, and provide technology that serves human need.
We are ultimately fighting to obliterate exploitation of nations by nations or, in a word, colonialism.
To keep white power from killing, raping and enslaving us, we must organize for power over our lives! We must determine our own future and get back the wealth that has been stolen from us in the form of reparations.
Join the African Revolution!
Join the African People’s Socialist Party.
