Concerning Violence: Political Power and Guns: Black Community Control of the Police!
By Chairman Omali Yeshitela
June 2022
On August 6th and 7th, 2022 the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will be holding our 13th Annual National Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. The theme of the two-day conference is: Concerning Violence: Political Power and Guns; Black Community Control of the Police!
This is a theme that recognizes the level of escalating violence being imposed on the lives of Africans and the colonized within the U.S. and globally. Mass murder of the colonized is growing in ubiquity and colonial powers, under the leadership of the U.S., are engaged in a war against Russia in Ukraine that pushes the world toward a possibility of nuclear conflagration.
Our August 6th and 7th Annual Conference is designed to put our struggle for Black Power over our lives in motion within the context of the intensifying existential crisis of a social system that was born of our oppressive exploitation and has exceeded its “use-by” date.
This is a Call to join the hundreds of African people who will attend the Coalition’s Annual National Conference to acquire greater ideological and political clarity and practical unity in opposition to the life and freedom-negating system currently under the leadership of declining U.S. imperialism.
Within two weeks in May of this year, 10 Africans in Buffalo, NY and 21 mostly Mexicans in Uvalde, Texas were slaughtered by young gunmen. While the murderer of the Africans in Buffalo was a white man, a colonizer, and the Texas killer was Mexican, the fact is the victims in both places were colonial subjects. Their deaths stemmed from the chokehold that the colonial mode of production imposes on every aspect of our lives.
The colonial mode of production is parasitic by definition. It is a mode of production that has enveloped the world since the initiation of colonial slavery in 1415 by Portugal with its attack on Africa.
This attack on Africa by Portugal initiated the process that locked the world into a single European-dominated political economy that stretched from Europe to Africa and to what is now known as the Americas. It is a bloodsucking system that extracts life from the colonized to benefit the colonizer as a normal function of its existence.
The colonial mode of production is permanently crisis-ridden. The nature of the system – built on a faultline of colonial domination – makes crisis inevitable. Today that crisis has reached a boiling point in history.
We are at a point where the perennial contest between contending European colonial forces for economic superiority and world domination has been joined by growing organization and resistance of the colonized.
The dying founding European colonial states now face competition from powerful outliers like Russia and China. These two Asian forces achieved prominence and strength independent of the European colonizers who have controlled the world for the last 600 years and the U.S., which has been the colonial-capitalist hegemon since the end of the second imperialist world war of the 1940s.
During the Chinese Revolution Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party made the very informative, related statements that, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and “politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
Anti-colonial revolutionary struggles of Africans in Haiti, the U.S, Algeria and other places, along with the revolutionary struggles of the peoples of Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and in China itself and all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, are magnificent affirmations of Mao’s dictums.
This is the spirit of the 13th Annual National Conference of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. Our Conference is designed to take us beyond the most recent expressions of organized African anti-colonial activity restricted to computer screens and social media.
Since our inception the Black is Back Coalition has called for reparations, for freedom for our long-suffering political prisoners and for Black Community Control of the Police as a mass demand to move toward our own state power to replace the colonial standing army called police.
These demands are indicators of the seriousness of our Coalition and the significance of the August 6th and 7th Annual National Conference Concerning Violence: Political Power and Guns; Black Community Control of the Police!
Your presence at our Annual National Conference will guarantee victory for our liberation struggle. Be there!
Register now!
