The Call
2023 Electoral Campaign School
1245 18th Avenue South
St. Petersburg, Florida
Register Now | Hotel/Housing
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is convening our Seventh Electoral Campaign School on April 7-9, 2023.
On April 7-9, 2023 the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold our 7th annual electoral campaign school. The electoral school is a tradition begun by our Coalition in 2017 as part of our work to deny a total monopoly of the electoral process by our colonizers and their minions in our midst.
Our Coalition has no illusions about the electoral process in the U.S. We have always recognized that the electoral process is an instrument of non-violent struggle between contending sectors of the settler-colonial ruling class for control of the state to their own profitable advantage.
It is also true that the electoral process within the U.S., as initially established, had no intention of participation from the domestically colonized enslaved Africans and other subject peoples trapped within the U.S. prison of nations. The independent interests of the colonized, especially Africans, were never expected to be debated and voted on within the electoral process.
Colonialism was not to be a ballot issue. Democracy was to be defined by those who benefited from colonialism, not by the interests of the colonized. Hence, the political violence always directed against Africans in our efforts to utilize the electoral process in our own selfish interests, violence that also occasionally targeted the white settler-colonizers who had the temerity to work with Africans to place anti-colonial democracy on the ballot.
The struggle by Africans to win access to the electoral process was secondary to the struggle for African liberation within the U.S. It only achieved its primary status with the U.S. government’s success in crushing other forms of resistance, especially those which called for self-determination, the highest expression of democracy.
As various forms of anti-colonial struggle heated up during the 1950s – from the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Cuban revolution in Latin America and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, all of which were represented by the Africa-Asia Bandung Conference in 1955 – the right for Africans to vote in the U.S. was an effort by domestically-colonized Africans to sharpen the contradiction revealed by the U.S. claim to be the embodiment of democracy while shamelessly maintaining its bloody, autocratic colonial domination of Africans within the U.S.
Passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, allowing Africans the right to vote, conferred the presumption of universal suffrage within the U.S. However, this was a form of political sleight of hand, exemplified in various iterations throughout the colonized world: The appearance of democratic inclusion within an anti-democratic colonial system. (more…)
