This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of The Burning Spear newspaper. It is republished with permission from The Burning Spear .
Transcribed from the political report to the Uhuru Solidarity Movement National Convention 2024
As the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) is the African People’s Socialist Party’s (APSP) solidarity front within the white population organizing white people to recognize that our true interests are not with this dying, colonial-capitalist, baby-killing, terroristic and genocidal system hell-bent on destroying life and the Earth itself. Our true interests are one with the rest of humanity.
What has kept us from realizing our true interests historically has been our own white opportunism, our willingness to sacrifice the long-term interests of humanity in pursuit of our own narrow, short-term interests as colonizers and settlers, on the backs of African and Indigenous people.
What Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the APSP has created, with the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, is the only meaningful way for us to right this wrong, to rectify our history, to end our complicity, to leave to their own devices our hated ruling class who have slaughtered and pillaged in our name and in whose name, we, as Chairwoman Penny Hess stated, have slaughtered and pillaged as well. No more!
With the creation of the APSC and USM, the Chairman and the Party have broken through into the homes and communities of the colonizer and recruited us to become instruments of the anti-colonial struggle, to become vessels through which the voice, message and strategy of the African Revolution can be expressed and heard on the other side of the colonial divide.
This is why the outrageous FBI attacks and bogus indictments against Chairman Omali Yeshitela have also included indictments of Chairwoman Penny and myself. It is part of the attack on the Chairman, on the Party, on the African Liberation Movement itself.
When they try to silence us, when they silence you, they are trying to silence the African Liberation Movement. The attack on our right to speak, on your right to speak as a white person who stands in solidarity with Black Power, is an attack on African people’s right to free speech, because APSC and USM are the voice of Black Power in white face.
This is a new development, a breakthrough in the struggle, made possible by the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the APSP.
In the 1960s a white-led “free speech” movement emerged on the campus of UC Berkeley after white students were arrested for tabling in support of the Civil Rights Movement.
But though it began with their support of the black freedom struggle, a “free speech movement” in the hands of white people became another white-centered movement fighting for the right of students to say profanities or say whatever else they wanted.
Fight the attacks on free speech, for anti-colonial struggle
Today, under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, we can fight back against the attacks on free speech as a strategic component of the struggle against colonialism, not as an opportunist effort to reform colonialism and make it more “democratic” for us, the colonizers!
In the 1960s it was the Black Revolution that sparked, radicalized, mobilized everybody into action! This included white women, students, workers, LGBTQ, disability rights activists, etc.
Why? Not just because those groups saw African people fighting and decided they wanted to fight too, but because, as the Chairman teaches us, the structure of the colonial mode of production rests upon the basis of the oppression of African people, and therefore the Black Revolution was an assault on the foundation of the social system that also oppresses sectors of the white population.
So when the Black Revolution destabilized this oppressive foundation, it unraveled the whole society and opened the space for others to fight for their liberation as well.
But when the FBI and U.S. government militarily crushed the African Revolution, white women, students and LGBTQ activists did not come to their defense; instead, we abandoned the cause of liberation altogether and pursued our own rights on the pedestal, at the expense of African people.
This is an opportunity to rectify that history. Today we are seeing an intensification of the assaults on free speech in this country, based on the attack being made against Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru 3. Attacks on free speech are rapidly escalating.
African liberation is our liberation
Recently Chairman Omali Yeshitela said: “White people have defined this colonial intrusion on the rights of the colonial citizens as fascism. This thing called fascism can only occur for the colonizer or white citizens because crisis stemming from the resistance of the colonized to the ongoing theft of liberty and resources that enriches the colonizers is accepted by the colonizer citizens as their crisis—while the resistance of the colonized to colonialism goes unrecognized as their resistance.”
When we can see the world through the eyes of the African working class and without the blinders of our own opportunism, we can realize that African resistance is our resistance too! African liberation is our liberation too!
This is why, as the Chairman said, when Aaron Bushnell took the stance that he took, he found solidarity with himself. When we stand with African and oppressed peoples, we are actually finding our way to solidarity with ourselves, with our own future and deepest interests which can never be separate from the interests of the rest of humanity!
We stand in complete and unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people. We speak for Jews who want to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, from the river to sea, and, as the Chairman says, with the Indigenous peoples’ struggle to free their land—from sea to shining sea.
We say, Free Leonard Peltier! Not one more year!
“No More Genocide In Our Name” cannot just be a demand to stop genocide. It must be tied to the action we take to repair the damage of centuries of slaughter, torture and destruction. It must be tied to reparations.
Aaron Bushnell said: “If you were alive during Jim Crow, apartheid, slavery, what would you do?”
We can add to that, if you were alive during Marcus Garvey, during Malcolm X, during Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton: What would you do? You’re doing it right now.
You are alive, at this time when colonialism is dying, and the U.S. government is trying to imprison Chairman Omali Yeshitela, trying to imprison those who tell the truth and fight for freedom. You are alive during that time. We are here. So what will we do?
It is time to fight. Time to build. Time to organize. Time to mobilize for the trial on September 3. Time to build USM to a higher level, an organization of thousands of white people who fight for reparations and solidarity with the African Revolution. Time to fight for anti-colonial free speech. It is time to join and build the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. White solidarity with Black Power.
Unity through Reparations!
Uhuru!
Join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement!
UhuruSolidarity.org/Join
