The Monarchy of Materialism: Understanding White Fragility

[PHOTO CREDIT: WARNER IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES]

By @badgaltranny

In my frustratingly liberal Ivy League classroom, I raised my hand.

My professor, a former editor in the New York Times, had opened class by saying that people are misguided in fearing Trump; most of his anti-immigration orders will be shot down by the courts.

I told her, calmly, that the fear is not misguided. Because of Trump, many immigration officers have become even more unabashed about their inhumane and often illegal practices.

She said I was challenging her knowledge so I relayed the real-life story of an unpunished criminal officer.

She framed it as a debate between her knowledge and mine. I told her, calmly, that she was arguing with facts.

It was this statement that she brought up in our one-on-one meeting a few days after she suggested I leave the classroom. She cited it as an example of why it was impossible to have a conversation with me. But facts are facts, and the story of the criminal officer was just one in a deluge of narratives reported even by her beloved New York Times.

If events like these happened only to me, this would be a boring story. But white people’s hostile emotional response to their knowledge being challenged—often marked by an accelerated heart rate, shortness of breath, and feelings of terror and rage—have become laughably predictable. 

One study calls it cultural anxiety. It’s characterized as “feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment.”

Apart from causing people to call 911 in fear of a hijab? It led 63 million people to vote for Donald Trump. Nationalist religious movements are popping up all across the world, not only in Europe but even in India and the Philippines, expanding wars and militarizing borders, murdering thousands inside their own nations, withdrawing reparations from their former colonies, and even closing borders to millions of climate refugees. If rising sea levels pose the greatest threat to our species, “cultural anxiety” is our greatest enemy.

Another name for this phenomenon is white fragility. When I packed my bags and finally left the East Coast to come home to the Midwest, I realized it’s just called white supremacy. Most people don’t like being called racist, and white liberals get especially triggered.

Someone who has some insight into this emotional phenomenon is Mark. He’s part of an anti-oppression education program on campus and agreed to speak under a pseudonym; he’s facilitated dozens of anti-racism workshops.

How does he help people move through their hostile emotions?

“By not making too much space for it in the workshops,” Mark says. “By acknowledging the emotions, and saying there are many reasons they may feel uncomfortable. Biases in their language, interactions, research, classes, conversations, you name it. I’m asking them to acknowledge that all of us have these implicit biases that have been culminating all our lives. In everything we consume.”

Yes, everything. Even for me.

I’m a transgender Indian-American woman, raised in an upper-class Hindu family in a beautiful American suburb. Since I wanted to find the truth at the root of white fragility, it brought me to an interesting dilemma: how do I escape my own biases?

I quickly realized it was both impossible and unnecessary. I’d say I’m pretty vocal in my low tolerance for bullshit even when it comes from myself. Instead of ignoring my life, how do I use it scientifically to understand cultural anxiety?

I followed three popular ways to find truth. The scientific method led me to the natural sciences. Studying history led me to social sciences. And, in what will probably draw tense laughter from the European-minded: meditation led me to the spiritual sciences.

And I’ll give you three guesses as to which of the three yielded the most reasonable answers. You might need all three.

I also encourage you to call me on any bullshit you find—I have so much to learn and I’d rather us help each other out. This article is long, so I’d section off about twenty minutes if you’re ready to listen.

“What is actually happening to a white person’s mind when they are called racist?”

The Oatmeal, a website for incredibly cute comics, explains it surprisingly well. In fact, if you haven’t already, read the comic quickly then come back when you see the last panel:

Good? Let’s dive in.

“Confusion,” Mark says, describing responses he’s seen from people who were asked to recognize they could be racist. “A lot of times they don’t know what to say. You can hear hints of defensiveness, but my words are granted a little more legitimacy as an educator in those spaces specifically.”

Responses I’ve gotten to notifying white people of their racism? Being called libelous, sensitive, abusive, violent, and manipulative. That I’m hurting them. One professor even threatened to sue me, comparing me to Donald Trump and reporting me as a threat to the university.

We’re seeing different realities. Even when I’m crying, they still view me with terror. There’s a chasm between intellectual understanding and self-reflection, and I’ve seen few people cross it.

In the mid-1900s, Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel ran an experiment where participants would guess the lengths of a few lines. Unsurprisingly, errors in judgement were random. But when longer lines were labelled as ‘A’ and shorter ones, ‘B’, the errors got…less random.

They got uniform.

People thought the shorter ‘A’ sticks were longer than they actually were in reality, and that the taller ‘A’ sticks were shorter. Similarly, they thought the longer ‘B’ sticks were shorter than reality, and the shorter ‘B’ sticks as taller. The very act of categorization made participants see conformity to the category where there was none.

This example helps illustrate what happened. In one study, if uncategorized, Lines C and D were judged to be the same length. But once they were categorized, line C was inaccurately perceived as longer than line D. Source.

Henri Tajfel later became famous for his theories on social identity, saying that people tend to view themselves according to how society views them.

So: societies construct my view of others and myself.

I believe society’s ideas about me because inclusion provides me with assurance. Core beliefs (such as ‘A’ lines being taller than ‘B’ lines) are rarely questioned and always nurture my sense of reality. Members of “out-groups” are discarded.

But what if a social identity you are placed into…is not you?

I’m talking with a white-skinned professor of history at my university, whom I’ve named ‘Jane’. I’m trying to figure out what “white” even means. When I ask her what history has to say about this, she responds: “The meaning of white for whom?”

She points out how, in the nineteenth and twenty centuries, American newspapers—and even the Census—did not grant Whiteness to Jews, the Irish, or Eastern Europeans. And she notes how today, there is no Census category for Arab or Persian. Middle Eastern immigrants are legally white. What does white even mean then?

“I don't think there's a consensus,” Jane says. “So perhaps what has changed is who gets to be white, but what hasn't is the contested nature of that being.”

Even the natural sciences back her up. It is the scientific consensus that racial categories have no basis in biology. But this fact was not always the scientific consensus, and Jane’s words reminded me of something Mark had mentioned during our talk: the skull studies that made a lie scientific.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 'science' of categorization split humanity into five different subspecies, with the Caucasians being the most ‘handsome’. As you can see in the sketch of him below, he was incredibly biased. But you be the judge.

Craniometry, the study of skull measurements, formed the base of European scientific racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European scientists, most notably French scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, categorized the races as distinct species based on cranial circumferences. It is a fascinating case study not only in the psychology of Whiteness, but in the anti-human irrationality that continues to underlie Western sciences to this day.

Let’s put his skull studies in context.

Historically, the concept of race came after European elites began enslaving Africans.

Unable to rely on their own increasingly-poor, increasingly-angry citizens to run their plantations, their eyes fell upon Northern Africans. The Christian Church had already practiced hating North African Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition. This made the job of lazy European elites even easier.

Because North African Muslims rejected Christianity, Europeans convinced themselves that they weren’t human. Gone were the ideas that Africans were industrious, intelligent, and artistic peoples. To the European-minded, they became inhumane, heathens, irrational, backwards, threatening, childlike, animals. This allowed them to enslave the Muslims with little guilt.

But in the eighteenth century (think: French Revolution, American Revolution) plantation owners faced slave uprisings, revolutionary ideas of universal human rights, and the exciting possibility of creating a new nation independent from England’s taxes.

They sought to create a new nation but these lazy people needed trendy, secular, ‘enlightened’ ideas to justify enslaving Africans and murdering Native Americans. Thus: the very same process that Tajfel had noticed in his studies of social identification began—in reverse.

Imagine the sticks in Tajfel’s study. The tall ‘A’ and short ‘B’ ones. Now imagine if only the B’s have labels. The rest have no label. Place yourself in the shoes of one of those unlabeled lines. If Tajfel, who invented the ‘B’ category, told you that “you are a line because B is not a line,” it would be kind of terrifying on an existential level, right? Especially if you believe all lines matter.

The goal of the New England elites was to divide people to make profits for themselves. They feared unity. In one case, Bacon’s Rebellion—an armed rebellion by people of many classes and races against the Doeg tribe in Virginia and Governor William Berkeley—terrified them to their aristocratic core (they responded with the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705). But unable to find any actual cultural unity between the poorer European laborers and themselves, the proslavery rich simply created a ‘B’.

They targeted enslaved Africans. They called them “Black,” and scared the white-skinned poorer colonists about the “Black danger.” The elites then said to these frightened white-skinned immigrants, who were already anxious due to their unfamiliarity with the land, “Your enemy is my enemy, and we are friends. I’ll create a nation where you feel at home.”

It was a master stroke. Now, European elites could feign unity with poorer (and now, terrified) European colonizers despite having no unified culture with them. No ‘A’.

“White” came from this fear, a lowest common denominator between themselves and poorer white-skinned laborers, a manufactured friendship based on fear and greed. This ‘A’ would convince white-skinned settlers of their Manifest Destiny to murder thousands of Native Americans and expand white borders.

"American Progress" John Gast, 1872

The skull studies come from this eighteenth-century period. White-skinned people exaggerated differences in their own bodies to make them seem as opposite as possible from non-‘Caucasians’. Whiteness became a cultureless culture. All it could do was manufacture fear against any “other”.

But maybe “any” is the wrong word. Whiteness means, quite literally, anti-Blackness. Its existence depends upon Black people’s dehumanization. Paired with nationalism, Whiteness means indigenous genocide to this day. (I find it interesting when white-skinned people ask me what my ethnicity is, expect me to say ‘Indian,’ and stumble when I ask them what theirs is. They rarely say ‘British’ or ‘German’ and instead say ‘American’ or ‘White’ as if either of these labels have even a semblance of a unified culture.)

But Black people and Blackness are humane (surprise, surprise). They were the first race to be identified. Blackness can exist and has existed without Whiteness. But Whiteness without Blackness, without an “other”? It does not exist, has not existed, and can never exist.

Yet, in the post-Civil Rights era that we find ourselves in today, where we know we are all the same despite our skin color, where the USA even grants ‘freedom’ to all its uncriminalized citizens, shouldn’t racism be gone?

It should…if racism was about skin color.

But the issue was never about skin. It was always about making Wall Street money off the ‘other’. Whiteness creates an ‘other’, and othering hasn’t vanished and it never will. It simply hides. If you can’t find it, simply praise, unconditionally, the humanity of the “Other” and watch as the entire culture comes out of the shadows to revolt against you.

Whiteness is holding on for dear life to its last hope: to create a white nation where they, ironically, don’t feel like “others”. With tanks and fences, to take back “their” country from “others” whom they’ve leeched off since before July 4th, 1776.

For the Wall Street elites, this is perfect: cultural anxiety makes white-skinned people ignore Wall Street.

But a white nation will never be great or even succeed, if you’re looking for some truth.

When white-skinned people tell me to leave their country if I hate it so much, I feel a little bad for them because they don't know their nation is an illusion. Lies can exist only in the mind and a white culture has always been a rich man's lie. A plantation-era anxiety. As the great Fred Morten said, "Settlers always think they're defending themselves. That's why they build forts on other people's land. And then freak out over the fact that they are surrounded." Identities built upon an "other" eventually cannibalizes itself. Even if they end up murdering me in their anger, I'll pass happily, knowing they'll soon destroy themselves. 

But if Whiteness is a lie, why does critiquing it feel so…real?

Well, because it is.

Whiteness creates horrible living conditions for the “other”. Sapped the “other” of their food, water, shelter, and even their children and their bodies.

On a spiritual level? Plantation owners knew how to convince us that the “other” exists. Millions of us have spent our lives believing Whiteness has the divine power to actually rip our humanities from us if we don’t show them respect.

Exposing Whiteness for its lie traumatizes our sense of reality—how could I have believed in such a demonic white lie?

So was this it? Misery and guilt, the answer at end of the scholarly road?

Not quite.

Of my three initial processes, I still had one path left: meditation guided by my gurus. And suddenly cultural anxiety became almost laughably (if frustratingly) simple.

Touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing.

According to the European sciences, I have these senses which have their sense organs: skin, tongue, nose, eyes, ears.

But how can I sense my humanity? How can I sense my Self?

During the questionably-named Age of Reason, European scientists championed secularity. Things that are touchable, testable, smellable, seeable, and hearable—only those can be evidence for anything. Only those exist.

But it is other people’s tradition is to recognize immaterial thoughts as another sense, with its sense organ: the mind.

And what does the mind sense when it thinks, ‘I’?

There is a basic truth that I had doubted for so long: that the mind senses something. I’ve been calling it ‘humanity’. To observe this, all you need to do is meditate on your mind.

If you can see, close your eyes.

What do you see?

If you answered “nothing,” you are wrong. What you see is the undersides of your eyelids.

Sit with this reality. Try it for ten minutes. If you start feeling anxious, ask yourself: “Who is feeling anxious?” If negative thoughts storm in, simply watch them. Ground yourself in love for your Self.

Did you feel this bliss? If you did, I feel it too. In coming to terms with my transgender identity (a life-long process) I am pulling myself from myself using this precise method.

Other than ‘humanity,’ people have called it Consciousness, the soul, the Self, natural law, the wild, divinity, God, spirit, the universal, Allah, the Brahman, Time, the Buddha, Jehovah, Truth, Jesus, Oneness, the Holy Spirit, science, history, Shiva, I, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, the fourth dimension, the irrational…you get the picture. Truth inspires limitless love.

But Whiteness finishes where Christianity left off: it asserts that this divinity is exclusive.

In a stunning (and for me, foundational) 1980 spoken essay denouncing both capitalism and communism, Russell Means, an indigenous freedom fighter, said, “The European materialist tradition of desacredizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person.”

Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota activist from South Dakota and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement. He passed away in 2012.

I sometimes wonder what Darwin would say if I came up to him and said, “I am fully human.” How would he have convinced me of his materialism against my reason? The reasonableness of his rationality and the irrationality of my reason? Would he have asked for proof and then laughed if I presented myself?

This anxiety will never go away until the idea of an out-group vanishes. That is what we mean by spirituality, by Self-awareness. That I am not my ever-changing body, but the observer through it. It is the anxiety of Self-avoidance that protects the out-group in the first place. This fear gave birth to Whiteness. And it is with this existential anxiety that materialists colonize the world, create its governments and economies.

And when white people realize they are on this path to Self-destruction? There will be anxiety.

Yes. I think, by pledging themselves to the white culture, white-skinned people have come to dehumanize and avoid themselves.

It didn’t start off that way of course.

Prior to the revolutions of the 1700s, the Church answered the “Who am I?” question with divinity and secularity. Divinity is a separate entity: God. You are in God’s image. You are a child of God. You are human. You are human if you follow Jesus Christ the man—you are not if you don’t. The Church and Europe used “othering,” this false separation from the divine, this Hell, to terrorize people into terrorizing other people across the world. People who may have simply called “Jesus Christ” something else, something less material.

White-skinned people’s humanity itself was exploited, taken for granted, trivialized, ignored, and then: self-sabotaged.

“After all,” Russel Means says, “Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.”

The European Enlightenment’s rationality, in Russell Means’ words, “picked up where Christianity ended.” The Church conflated Peter with Jesus and Jesus with Peter. It asserts that the Self, this divinity, is exclusive only to followers of Jesus of Nazareth. The European sciences assert that Truth does not even exist.

Christian versus heathen.

Instead, their sense of humanity came from the material world. Human versus animal. White versus Black. In-group versus out-group. A world where fewer and fewer people get to be fully human.

René Descartes, dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, believed that all living organisms are essentially biological robots - 'automaton' – and that humans alone have immaterial souls.

Why this madness?

For millennia, people in the South Asian peninsula have written thousands of texts and constructed full-blown universities (such as Takshashila) where they studied and continue to study the Self. The mind and the body as one.

(It is interesting to realize that extremely-similar scholarly endeavors happened all across the Americas too, before colonial conquistadores burned or appropriated every text, artefact, and spiritual vessel they could find. I talk about the South Asian peninsula simply because it is closer to my area of knowledge.)

Their fundamental realization? Consciousness is everywhere. Of everything.

A view of a Buddhist stupa in Takshahila, in modern-day Pakistan. Takshahila was founded around 1000 BCE and is considered some of the earliest (if not the earliest) universities in the world. The big caveat is – how do you define ‘university’? Students came to study over 64 disciplines, including grammar, philosophy, ayurveda, yoga, agriculture, surgery, politics, archery, warfare, astronomy, commerce, futurology, music, and dance. Yet, school fees were considered perverse. They had no degrees, examinations were considered superfluous, and the use of knowledge to earn a living was considered sacrilegious. Knowledge was considered sacred.

You would even categorize their fervor for Truth as religious…which would be inaccurate. Religion implies non-religion: secularity. But the secular does not exist. The more accurate term for our fervor would be a way of life. A culture. A mental outlook.

The European sciences are catching up to our ancestors’ eons-old realization.

The human species evolved from ape species, which came from rats, which came from lizards, which came from fish, which came from worms, which came from sponges, which came from small multi-cellular organisms, which came from single-cell organisms, which came from molecular reactions, which came from planets, which all came from the atoms of the Big Bang.

There is no ‘out-group’ in the entire universe, no line between human and non-human, soul and soulless, divine and secular. Exclusivity is the imagination of people who ignore their Selves.

My true identity, my humanity, does not depend upon any human opinion—even my own. I am. I always am.

That is what we mean by Self-awareness. By seeing true divinity when the monarchs of materialism beg us not to. By cutting down their lies. By slowing down (and thinking) when they insist that we speed up (and forgetting). Laughing at our ignorance. Loving our Selves by upending borders wherever people create it. Unity through material difference, not despite it.

In our present era, this means to include Blackness so unconditionally, to uplift indigenous peoples so thoroughly, to free ourselves from women’s silence so completely, that we upend everything that resists our Selves. To realize that seeing undocumented, criminalized, and imprisoned people as fully human is a radical proposition—and the fact that it is radical reveals just how ignorant we have become.

That we begin to heal ourselves and each other from the violence of our ignorance through repentance and reparations. Heal our humanity instead of our bodies which will decay regardless.

Self-doubt is the deceptively simple root of white fragility.

See, this is why this topic of cultural anxiety is so important even for people of color. Whiteness is not limited to the lighter-skinned.

Self-avoidance also gave birth to murderous forces: slavery, colonialization, to both the Hindu-regimented caste system and the famines in the Indian peninsula manufactured by the British. To the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny, to Whiteness, European rationalism, fascism, to the White, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu nationalists.

To borders and fences. Self-doubt gave birth to fears and hatreds eons old. To guilt instead of joyous repentance and reparations. To glorifying military states instead of glorifying welfare states.

Peace and borders are incompatible.

And when we realize we’ve been led to doubt ourselves our entire lives by elites? When we understand that we are living in a terrorist nation? Sure, we’ll be anxious. We feel lost. This anxiety is within us.

 It too shall pass. The climate, and the times, are a-changing

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"

"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory

No More Confederate Nostalgia in NOLA

By Darryl Barthe

For the last few days, armed men in New Orleans have been protesting the removal of monuments to a failed, White-Supremacist republic. The workers tasked with carrying out the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans are working in flak jackets and with masks to obscure their identities since threats of violence have surrounded the plan to dismantle statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Pierre Beauregard. Many of the "protestors" at these monuments are not from New Orleans but have traveled from elsewhere in the South in order to express their disapproval of the City Council of New Orleans' decision to remove monuments to men who raised armies against their own country in order to defend slavery.

It would be easy to attribute this latest episode of white racial outrage to the rising tide of "populism" surrounding the ascent of Donald Trump to the Presidency. Yet, the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, in particular, had been the cause of controversy in 1989, 1993, and 2004. White Supremacy and racism wrapped in a veil of "heritage" is not new for Louisiana.

It would be even easier to connect the liberal insistence on removing these monuments to the Charleston Church Massacre. In June of 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans at a prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church because he believed black people "rape (white) women and are taking over our country." Roof wrapped himself in symbols of White Nationalism for pictures he posted of himself online before he went on his rampage and so, of course, liberals concluded that these symbols were problematic and, to be fair, these symbols are problematic. However, what is more problematic is that the United States has existed as a White Nationalist Republic for much longer than it has existed as a, nominally, representative democracy where all citizens enjoy equal protection under the law.

The American South, and specifically the Confederate States, lost a war that they fought in order to preserve slavery. That same war that the Northern States won was a war to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery in the South. After the Civil War, there was a mad rush to reconciliation that resulted in the reinstitution of "White Rule" in the Southern States through a regime of racial terror. The Battle of Liberty Place was one episode of racial terror and violence, inflicted on New Orleans by White Supremacist terrorists, and was fought between the Metropolitan Police Force and the White League, a White Supremacist paramilitary organization comprised mostly of Confederate veterans that served as a street army for white conservative politicians in New Orleans.

The Monument to the Battle of Liberty Place is a monument to Louisiana's "redemption" and the reinstitution of the old, antebellum caste order following the period of Reconstruction, when people of color in the South enjoyed the briefest semblance of the rights of citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Redemption of the South for White Rule meant the dispossession and disenfranchisement of non-white people. It also entailed a rearticulation of slavery through the criminalization of black life. Indeed, the legacy of that political program persists today in the form of a mass incarceration state that has extended the life of that "peculiar institution" of American slavery into the 21st century. And Louisiana, in particular, stands out as the state with the highest rates of incarceration in a country that incarcerates more people than any other in history. [1]

To be certain, that is the "history" and the "heritage" that is currently being reified and dignified through the demonstrations of armed men flying the Confederate battle flag ("the Stars and Bars"), in New Orleans tonight. They hide their threats behind a fig leaf of free speech, but the very history they are celebrating is a history of treason and lawlessness. They are a modern day White League (replete with token people of color, desperate for white approval) hinting at a willingness to resort to violence should anyone -even the elected government of the city of New Orleans-dare to abandon the trappings of a failed rebellion perpetrated by their ancestors, men who were wicked and ignoble, who betrayed their country and who fought and killed and died to preserve their right to buy, sell, rape and murder black people.

Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Pierre Beauregard were all men willing to throw in their lot with a slave regime and do not deserve to be commemorated for that decision. To pretend as if these men deserve to be lauded for leading men into the jaws of oblivion, in defense of an evil regime ruled by men whose position was "thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery" is absurd, and it is long past the time that the people of New Orleans recognized the absurdity of it and put an end to it. [2] None of these men deserves to be elevated on a pedestal, and the question of celebrating the history of the Civil War is moot: the South remembers the heroes of the Civil War every 4th of July when they celebrate the birth of the Union.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu will face waves of criticism for his decision to remove these monuments. Those criticisms don't matter though, and Landrieu should not waste time arguing with his detractors in this matter. The fact that the men tasked with dismantling these memorials must hide their identities and conduct their work wearing Kevlar vests is a testament to the character of the people who oppose Landrieu's efforts in this. Those people deserve no reasoned consideration at all. Mitch Landrieu, the first white mayor of New Orleans since the Civil Rights era came to an end (the last white mayor was his father), was the person who had to get this done, and he did.

Notes

[1] "The peculiar institution" was the way that Kenneth Stampp described the American slave system in his book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: A.P. Knopf, 1969).

[2] See Civil War Trust "A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union," civilwar.org https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states#Mississippi (accessed May 5, 2017)

Gun Control in Capitalist America

By @leftistcritic

With the beginning of the "Trump era," the calls for gun control have been partially (but not fully) muted. This article will go beyond the critical history of gun control and armed resistance by discussing my justification for rejecting gun control and, instead, an embrace of armed self-defense and armed resistance, terms which I will explore later in this post.

The Battle Between Gun Control, Gun Rights, and Armed Resistance

Gun control and armed resistance, with the latter used to defend against acts of oppression, have been often at odds. When the White European settlers came to the Western Hemisphere, indigenous peoples "offered heroic resistance" but they were ultimately suppressed because "Europeans possessed a huge superiority in weapons." [1] At the same time, armed resistance has been an effective form of self-defense. During the Reconstruction period, Black militias were formed to defend the Black population against racist Whites, sometimes even unifying with poor whites to achieve this goal. [2] Examples of such self-defense later on includes Robert F. Williams and his gun club, called the Black Armed Guard, as noted in a previous post, meaning that "becoming a threat to the capitalist order and defending the gains of the workers movement and democratic rights through force if necessary" is important. The long history of racial domination in the United States (1510-2017), with "systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World" beginning on January 22, 1510 , shows that the right and ability to own guns is an essential tool to "stand up to white terrorists and overt racist ideologues." [3] This has been flaunted by the fact that, as also noted in the previous post of this series, some of the first gun control laws were aimed at Blacks, which is why many view the debate over such control with caution, and the fact that the KKK was first a "gun-control organization," and that policies like "stop and frisk" were driven by gun control desires, feeding an "exploding prison population." [4] Such history allows gun rights supporters on the "Right" to claim that gun control has racist roots, even though some liberals say that this claim does not negate the possibility of adopting any gun regulations in the present. [5]

The history of guns and gun rights have become politicized. Some claim that the assertion that gun control is racist and that the civil rights movement succeeded because blacks "were willing to take up arms against their oppressors" came from libertarian and "obscure right-wing" websites. [6] Some of these people have also used the example of gun control laws enacted after the Civil War and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was "blocked by segregationists when he tried to get his concealed carry permit" to argue against current gun control efforts, criticizing "Obama or his gun-grabbing cohorts," saying that gun control is racially motivated. [7] This claim reportedly was tied with the claim that "slavery might not have lasted so long in America if black people had been granted the right to bear arms at the outset of their arrival in the new world." [8] To digress a bit here, not only is the claim that armed enslaved Blacks could have resisted their bondage with guns ahistorical (because why would the white overlords give enslaved Blacks guns at all? wouldn't that undermine their whole system of control?) but it implies that enslaved Blacks did not resist their chains of human bondage. Any analysis of history shows this to be completely false. Yet again, gun rights supporters will do anything they can to promote the use of guns. Saying that, the liberal arguments for gun control are at times so deluded as to be a joke.

Ladd Everitt, the former communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), a gun reform organization, is one of theses people. In his article on Waging Nonviolence, one of those progressive publications, he scoffs at the idea of gun control being racist, asking "if gun control laws had targeted blacks for disarmament, how would they have been able to successfully engage in armed resistance against White terrorists during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement?" [9] This ignorant argument doesn't even make sense, because it disregards the fact that enslaved Blacks gained guns during the Civil War and due to evasion of gun control laws, allowing them to engage in armed resistance. Apart from Everitt's silly argument, he then claims that calling gun control racist doesn't make sense because "for most of our 234 years, the entire U.S. legal system has been arrayed against blacks" and that history is "replete with examples of African-American communities being severely punished and repressed after they did take up arms against white terrorists." [10] Now, he is correct that the entire US legal system has been arrayed against Blacks and that some Black communities did suffer backlash from armed resistance, but he dismisses the obvious reality that such resistance allowed Blacks to survive through years upon years of bondage, discrimination, and bigotry.

As the years have gone by, the " political forms of the left-right axis " have begun to change. In 1976, cities like DC led the way in gun control, with the majority black city council banning "residents from owning or carrying handguns (excluding guards, police, and those with already registered handguns)." [11] By 1989, the NAACP voted to support gun control measures, and four years later, during "the peak of gun homicides among African-Americans," 74% supported gun control." [12] Still, a number of groups have historically engaged in armed self-defense, including the Deacons for Defense and Justice , the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets (which has a modern version formedin 1993) the Young Lords, the Young Patriots , and the still-existing American Indian Movement. Currently there is the Fruit of Islam, Muslim Girls Training , the Red Guard Party (Maoists in Texas), Brothas Against Racist Cops , Redneck Revolt, Black Guns Matter, the John Brown Gun Club/ John Brown Militia , the Huey P. Newton Gun Club , and the Indigenous People's Liberation Front , among many others, showing that "marginalized communities and their supporters [can use]…firearms for self-defense and the defense of others against hate crimes, protection against the police, and as a means of challenging oppression from across the political spectrum." [13]

There have been a number of current developments when it comes to gun rights. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller , held that the Second Amendment "guarantees an individual's right to possess a gun" rejecting the existing D.C. law that someone could own a shotgun but could not use in self-defense apparently, but Antonin Scalia had a whole set of exceptions to this declaration of gun rights including allowing "laws banning guns in sensitive places…laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, [and] laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed." [14] This decision was also one of the first fortes into "gay rights activism for the Second Amendment rights of sexual minorities and of all other Americans." [15]

In 2010, the Supreme Court hit another nail in the coffin of gun control in the United States. In a 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago , the longstanding ban in Chicago of handguns was overturned, with the declaration that the Second Amendment applies to states. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, noted Black Americans who used guns throughout US history, noting that "Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights." [16] The amicus brief for the Pink Pistols group declared "Recognition Of An Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms Is Literally A Matter Of Life Or Death For Members Of The LGBT Community," which was cited by Justice Scalia , contending that gun rights are "especially important for women and members of other groups that may be especially vulnerable to violent crime." [17] Scalia further argued that even the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because it was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 , which is not likely referring to the law itself, since it NEVER mentions the words "gun" or "arms," but rather to the fact that "advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cited the disarmament of freed blacks as a reason the law was necessary" as the arch-conservative National Review claims . While these claims may seem erroneous, a number of books seem to back up this assessment as a correct one. [18] There is no doubt that gun rights were on the minds of Radical Republicans in Congress since the State of Mississippi had enacted a law in November 1865, part of the " Black Code " in the state, saying

"…it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed for trial in default of bail…That if any white person shall sell, lend, or give to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto any fire-arms, dirk or bowie-knife, or ammunition, or any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, such person or persons so offending, upon conviction thereof in the county court of his or her county, shall be fined not exceeding fifty dollars, and may be imprisoned."

Furthermore, the Second Freedman's Bill the following month declared in Section 7 that

"…whenever in any State or district in which the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, and wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms, are refused or denied to negroes, mulattoes, freedmen, refugees, or any other persons, on account of race, color , or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, or wherein they or any of them are subjected to any other or different punishment, pains, or penalties, for the commission of any act or offence, than are prescribed for white persons committing like acts or offences, it shall be the duty of the President of the United States, through the Commissioner, to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases affecting such persons so discriminated against."

White racist attacks on Southern Blacks and efforts to take guns away from them by the KKK and other terrorist groups likely influenced the provision in the 1868 Mississippi Constitution saying "All persons shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their defense."

Back to the McDonald case, Clarence Thomas had a concurring opinion which was evidently different than Alito's . He noted how "blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs" and after this, and the decision itself, articles appeared in numerous conservative publications saying that gun control was racist. [19]

Fast forward to 2013. That year, the Washington Post came out with an article about Black gun clubs in Maryland such as the Metro Gun Club, Big Foot Hunt Club, and elsewhere. The members of the club who were interviewed said that they loved "their guns and recalled growing up in black farming communities where every family had guns for hunting - and protection" noting that such love for guns "spanned generations in their families." [20] Members had a variety of opinions, with some believing that "guns should be in the hands of decent, honest people" but that assault rifles should be "restricted to military and law-enforcement personnel," some saying that guns could protect women from rapists, others saying there are new challenges being in favor of guns "in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December and talk of tighter gun control laws," and one long-time gun owner saying "I'm torn. I don't want guns to shoot people, but I don't want you to take away my guns either."

As the years past, more began to question peaceful protest and thought that violence could be the answer. One writer put it in 2014 that "weeks of peaceful protests and outright riots in Missouri have accomplished nothing" and said that people should act to "preserve their own life" from an out-of-control police state, and then posing the question "is it time to start resisting police with violence?" [21] This question is nothing new, as resistance to police has taken a more combative tone in the past, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, during the main thrust of the Black Power movement.

In 2015, the tension between gun control and gun rights continued. That year, 60 percent of Black Americans believed firmly in gun control, while White Americans believed the opposite. However, the racist history of gun control is present for some in the Black community, with the right to bear arms seen as civil rights issue, support for gun control in this community decreasing in the last 20 years, and support for gun ownership by black Americans has grown, especially since the massacre at the Charleston Emanuel AME Church when gun control was pushed as a solution by President Obama. [22] Taking this into account, it worth remembering that "gun control and race…are inextricably linked." The idea of gun ownership as a form of civil rights may result in some balking from liberal gun control supporters. One point they can dispute is the idea that guns are used in self-defense. From first glance, it may seem that firearms are not used in self-defense, with gun rights supporters countering that "in most cases shots are never fired, because simply displaying a weapon can deter a criminal." [23] The idea of guns being used for self-defense is supported by many Americans, even if evidence may not be as clear, especially when it comes to armed civilians ending acts of mass killing, with date from places such as the Violence Policy Center. However, it is worth noting that even the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, cited by gun control advocates, says that "firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense." [24] While they say that this isn't a use of self-defense, this is actually the idea entirely. It is worth quoting this Center in full:

"We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense…We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns…We found that these young people were far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use a gun in self-defense, and most of the reported self-defense gun uses were hostile interactions between armed adolescents…Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss." [25]

You could say that this disproves the idea of armed self-defense, but actually I would say that in a sense, it actually proves the idea by saying that guns can frighten and intimidate. And isn't that part of self-defense?

In 2015, the Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale . They argues against a ban on standard magazines for common defensive arms, such as popular handguns from Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Springfield or Glocks, making clear the idea of a "relationship between gay rights and gun rights." [26] That same year, there was a powerful argument against gun control. The writer said that the idea to do something after a tragedy is nothing new, but new gun laws have consequences for Black people. He argued that any new criminal laws should be "carefully considered" saying that gun laws, like many criminal laws have "contributed to sky-high rates of incarceration for minorities," citing the story of Marissa Alexander, and saying that "strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can also ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes." [27] He goes on to say that gun control, historically has "been directly or indirectly tied to race," citing bills such as the Gun Control Act in 1968 and the Mulford Act in 1967, noting that these laws, among others in the years to come , "opened the floodgate to further federalization of criminal laws and the "tough on crime" mindset that dominated late 20th century American politics." He ends by saying that while "every gun death is a tragedy," with loss of life being horrendous, gun laws, even if well-intentioned, disproportionately burden the black community, arguing that "as calls grow for more gun laws, let's not compound a tragedy by continuing the same mistakes of the past."

From 2015 to the present, Black Lives Matter fits into this equation. They didn't focus on gun control as a priority possibly because of the "racist history of gun control" and the fact that such gun laws are "are more likely to be used against African-Americans than whites." [28]

There have been a number of developments in the fight between gun rights and gun control. The NRA, which declared that women with guns can stop abusers and rapists, called for armed guards in schools after Sandy Hook), was mum when unarmed Blacks (incl. Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, and Tamir Rice) were killed, even when a black man with a concealed permit, Philando Castile, was killed. [29] They weren't the only game in town. In Dallas, Texas, a Black man named Mark Hughes was marching with an AR-15 rifle across his chest in a solidarity rally to protest the deaths of Castile and Sterling, shooting began and he was referred as the "suspect" in the shooting on Dallas police officers by Micah Xavier Johnson, leading Black gun owners to feel, rightly, that "they're discriminated against for exercising their constitutional right to bear arms." [30] Clearly, the NRA is "a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don't think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues" as Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, put it, even as he said that they were "afraid to make the wrong statement," which just seems like a convenient excuse. [31]

In the Black community in the United States, there have been strong calls for Black gun ownership and establishment of a Black nation within the US. [32] As General Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the New Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club argued, "we [Black Americans] are a defenseless people and surrounded by a hostile society here in America…Blacks and African people need to be armed, We look at our history in this country…Being surrounded by white supremacy like we are, we are in the most volatile position of any race in the world." [33] Such feelings means that as Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War, a book on Newton Knight, a white Mississippi farmer, soldier and Union sympathizer who united with Confederate deserters and escaped slaves to secede from the Confederacy, puts it, "we're at a critical juncture of history in terms of race relations, reminiscent of the post-Civil War era" with independence and separatism viewed as the only recourse. Christian Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa , adds that "it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States" including organizations like the Nation of Islam occupying "decent size areas in American cities." [34] Apart from this, other groups have been formed. In February 2015, Philip Smith started a group, the National African American Gun Association (NAAG), for "law-abiding, license-carrying gun owners who happen to be African-American" which had grown to over 11,000 members in all 50 states, a sign of more interest by Black Americans in gun ownership, especially from Black women. [35] This has also manifested itself on protests by armed members of the New Black Panther Party (with questionable beliefs) and the Huey P. Newton gun club against the anti-Muslim hate group named the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), with the horrid group declaring that, in typical fashion, "we cannot stand by while all these different anti-American, Arab radical Islamists team up with Nation of Islam/Black Panthers and White anti-American anarchist groups, joining together in the goal of destroying our country and killing innocent people to gain dominance through fear! We will be going in full gear for self defense only. This is a full gear situation." [36]

Since Trump's election, there have been a rise in memberships in gun clubs and gun ownership because they are worried about their safety, especially threatened by white racists, bigots, and neo-Nazis emboldened by the Trumpster. This includes more members in the Liberal Gun Club, which will be described later, Black Guns Matter, and the NAAG among "non-traditional" people such as self-described liberals, non-binary folks, Black Americans, and Latino Americans. [37] This included people, like Yolanda Scott, who said "I'm not the type of person who is afraid of my own shadow. I'm going to protect myself, whatever that means."

In 2016, there were a number of other developments. After the shooting at the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub, Democrats in the US Senate pushed forward a "gun control" measure to demonize Muslims by pushing to exclude those in on "watchlist" that the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center maintains. [38] Bursting to the forefront was the Pink Pistols, a decentralized "LGBT self-defense" group founded in 2000, headed by a disabled woman in Philadelphia named Gwendolyn Patton, with 45 chapters nationwide and 1,500 to 25,000 members, declaring "armed queers don't get bashed." [39] The group also files court cases on their behalf. They describe themselves as people dedicated "to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community…We change the public perception of the sexual minorities, such that those who have in the past perceived them as safe targets" and sometimes work with the NRA on certain cases, but not always. [40] At the present, there is another gun group, called the Liberal Gun Club. This group aims to "provide a voice for gun-owning liberals and moderates in the national conversation on gun rights, gun legislation, firearms safety, and shooting sports." [41] They also describe themselves as an "education and outreach non-profit" Beyond this, they declare they provide a place for gun owners who do not agree with "right-wing rhetoric surrounding firearm ownership" a voice. [42] With a range of opinions, the long-time contributors and annual meeting attendees (not all members), who they call "elders," believe in stronger mental healthcare, addressing homeless and unemployment, along with poverty, enforcement of existing laws instead of new laws such as the Assault Weapons Ban, uniformity in permits for guns if they are the law of the land, licenses for carrying a concealed weapon. [43]

There are a number of aspects worth keeping in mind. For one, at the present, as Democrats push forward gun control measures, including a number of Black politicians, White politicians oppose the measures, along with the NRA, which wants gun use to be deregulated without a doubt, and "conservative entertainment complex." [44] Perhaps those who call for Communist Gun Clubs to "learn basic skills of using weapons and armed self-defense, could become a basis for future workers militias that will fight all forms of reactionaries," recognizing that the principle of self-defense is universal, that views of guns are racialized, and that "opposition movements [to bigots] cannot function without simultaneously building communities." [45] Once we realize that, we should not reject those in the heartland of the United States who may oppose fracking but also strongly believe in their right to have firearms, with " liberals " possibly a section of the citizenry which is "less well informed than it believes it is, more driven by emotion and prejudice than it realizes," leading it to harboring "dangerous biases," as shown in the recent presidential election. [46]

Where we Stand Now

With the beginning of Trump's presidency, a grueling four years (or horrifyingly eight) is ahead. While there are some who say that gun control laws are classist, some say that gun control efforts are not racist, others who demand the removal of all gun laws, there is no need to delve in such areas [47] There is no doubt that there are people in the United States who feel that guns make them safe, whether they are part of the largely White NRA or not. [48] As it stands now in the US, gun laws will contribute to the white supremacist order. [49] More specifically, such laws are related to the fact that class rule in all states and in the US at large, reply on "bodies of armed men," such as police, prisons, a standing army, and other "instruments of coercion" to maintain order, manifesting itself in the Klan disarming Blacks, the "stop and frisk" laws in New York City, and creating "ore reasons for police to suspect people of crimes," bringing with it more justifications for a militarized police force. [50] Already, over 7 million Americans are subject to a form of correctional control, with gun control efforts as a major factor, coupled with Supreme Court decisions that authorized exceptions to the Fourth Amendment since policing guns, with unequal and unfair enforcement, can said to be like policing drugs.

While practical measures, such as increasing funding for mental health programs should occur, we have to turn to "mutual help and self-defense" to strengthen the solidarity between all of those never meant to survive under the unjust system of capitalism. [51] Additionally, a "reasonable gun control regime" is not possible in the US currently, with the need for racial justice ignored, even as some claim that "permissive gun laws [in the US] are a manifestation of racism," and claiming that gun control are anti-racist measures, which doesn't even make sense. [52] Some who are in favor of gun control have proposed all sorts of "technological fixes." This includes support of (1) "smart guns" that can only be fired by "authorized users" and connected to cell phones perhaps; (2)"gunfire detectors" or make a school a "fortress" with lockable doors and a computer terminal at a local police department allowing police to control the school; (3) using robots to detect those who "don't belong" in an effort and ultimately having "lethal robots" to kill suspected shooters. [53] In all, each of these ideas is horrible and should not even be considered as a "solution" as they would increase police power and reinforce the problems with the (in)justice system. Others are vehemently opposed to guns, like one person who was incensed with "gun ads" on TV, the rhetoric of the NRA, and romanticizing gun efforts. [54] One piece specifically, mocking those on the "Left" who "active oppose gun control," says that it doesn't make sense that people need "guns to wage an eventual revolution and liberate themselves from the shackles of the state and corporate America," saying that such "leftist dreams" would not occur because of a "toxic gun culture….with a lethal cocktail of supercharged masculinity, racism, and provincialism" and that "disarming the Right" would do more, even saying that "guns hardly keep away the police or help communities fight back against the cops" and implying that such laws are "against patriarchy and other forms of oppression." [55] While the piece may have some good points, it misses the bigger picture. Gun control laws are not the the "only ways to reduce gun violence and save lives" and such laws don't help protect marginalized communities, arguably disarming them at most, or weakening their protection at minimum. [56]

As the Trumpster continues to sit in office with his cronies and state violence increases across the country by police, immigration enforcers, and bigots, we should listen to Lorenzo Raymond . He said that in this "historical moment," hate crimes and racist terror is growing and the "Left" needs to recognize the right of "necessary self-defense against oppressive force." Raymond goes on to say that there is a growing "black gun movement" in the US based on past history, remembers that there has been a "virgorous Black gun culture" in the South when the Black freedom movement was working to overturn segregation, and that gun control for most of the establishment isn't about peace but has to do with "an orderly and centralized capitalist empire." He adds that while guns kill 33,000 a year, alcohol (80,000 a year) and prescription drugs (120,000 a year) kill more, with more lobbying by these interests than the NRA since as the New York Times put it once, guns are a small business in the US at large. He goes on to say that gun control won't bring us to a humane society, noting that Australia has such control and their society isn't humane, while saying that the "open-carry state of Vermont" has elected imperialist "progressive" Bernie Sanders, and citing the "autonomist Kurds of Northern Syria," who are not as radical as he portrays them but are actually serving the interests of imperialism in helping to split up the Syrian Arab Republic, as examples. Raymond has more. He says that "unilateral disarmament of the American Left" is new, with Eugene Debs calling for guns after the Ludlow Massacre to protect from Rockefeller's assassins (and goons), armed miners in Harlan Country in the 193os, and armed protection by urban labor unions. He ends by saying that armed resistance by the Right-wing is likely in the coming year, such as by right-wing militias and white terrorists, that there is a need to recognize the right to bear arms like conservatives, joining groups like the Liberal Gun Club and Phoenix John Brown Gun Club, since it is the only hope of making the country safer, defending from bigots and others by any means necessary, even as the "right-wing's fetishization of brute force" should be refuted most definitely.

While Raymond is right, he is only putting forward part of the puzzle. A month ago, in an article where I attempted to predict the likely agenda of Trump's administration, I declared at the following:

"…Considering that US society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted, it is criminal and irresponsible to fight for gun control. Anyone who is a person of color, whether female, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, intersex, or is otherwise considered a "minority" in current society, should have the right to defend themselves with arms as necessary. That right is already claimed by white, straight men, so why can't others in society arm themselves to fight off bigots? You can't fight a revolution with flowers and sayings, but political power, as Mao Zedong put it, "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Gun control, if decided as necessary, should happen after a socialist revolution, not before it."

Now, in saying this, I am simply saying that any "minority" should have the right to self-defense by arms as necessary. Also, in saying that revolution can't be fought with "flowers and sayings" but that political power grows out of a gun barrel, I was trying to say that there should be a diversity of tactics. When I pointed out that gun control should happen after a socialist revolution, not before, I was arguing out that such self-defense cannot occur as effectively with gun control measures in place. Also, I was trying to say that the focus on gun control should be removed from the equation, with other approaches instead, which are more effective.

Guns have been seen as necessary by those advocating for socialist revolution. Karl Marx, in his 1850 Address to the Communist League, declared that

"…it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition must be carried out at once; we must prevent the revival of the old bourgeois militia, which has always been directed against the workers. Where the latter measure cannot be carried out, the workers must try to organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff…under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted." [57]

Marx was not the only one to make such a declaration. Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the Great October Socialist Revolution , supported "special bodies of armed men" as part of a socialist revolution and believed that armed people can make communism a possibility. [58]

He even went as far as saying, in earlier years that workers should be immediately armed and said something that should make liberals tremble:

"…only an armed people can be a real stronghold of national freedom. And the sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming itself, and the longer it maintain its position of striker and revolutionary, the sooner the soldiers will at last begun to understand what they are doing, they will go over to the side of the people against the monsters, against the tyrants, against the murderers of defenceless workers and of their wives and children" [59]

There is no doubt that guns can be a tool to allow socialist revolution to succeed. Why should the "Left" focus on limiting such a tool? Sure, guns can be used for malevolent ends and have often been used in such a way as gun violence on the streets of cities across the US, in the slums and ghettos of the oppressed, demonstrates. However, they can also be used to allow socialist revolution to succeed in countries such as China (1949), Russia (1917), Cuba (1959), and the DPRK (1948-1950), among many more.

Finding the way forward requires looking at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. I am aware that the document in its entirety is classist and bourgeois in character. However, I think it is worth reprinting here:

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Apart from the fact that this Amendment reads like an unfinished sentence, one can still have an interpretation. I think it is fair to say that the amendment says that militia units in states should be well-regulated for the purposes of securing the State from "undesirables" (whoever the elites and society think they are) but also declares that "the people" which means the whole population of the US, over 324 million people, have the right to "keep and bear Arms," a right which shouldn't be infringed.

Now, while the Second Amendment is mainly said to be about gun rights, I would argue that is too narrow. The word "arm," which has been associated with weapons since its origin in Indo-European languages is defined by "any instrument used in fighting" or a "weapon," with a weapon defined as either an organ used for defense or an "instrument of any kind used to injure or kill, as in fighting or hunting" as noted by Webster's New World College Dictionary and numerous thesauruses. This means that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" applies to ALL weapons, not just guns. Hence, people, as noted by Akinyele Omowale Umoja in We Will Shoot Back, on pages 7 and 8, have the right to defend themselves with "fists, feet, stones, bricks, blades, and gasoline firebombs," along with guns of course.

Keeping this in mind, it worth defining a number of terms. Umoja, in We Will Shoot Back, on page 7, defines armed resistance was the "individual and collective use of force for protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights," while also including armed struggle, armed vigilance, guerilla warfare, spontaneous rebellion, retaliatory violence, and armed self-defense. He also defines armed defense, on the same page, as the "protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." Adding to this, Black's Law Dictionary (Third Pocket Edition), defines force (which they break down into eight types), on page 294, as "power, violence, or pressure directed against a person or thing," meaning that one does not have to kill or maim someone to apply force. These definitions are suitable for describing tactics used in the current political climate of the United States.

As we watch the Trump Administration from our TVs, computer screens, phones, or read it in the papers, we must recognize the need for resistance and act on such feelings. Still, we cannot be roped into the bourgeois milquetoast resistance by the Democratic Party and their lackeys and instead engage in solidarity, at minimum, with those under attack by the capitalist system within the US and across the world as a whole. It is not worth "waiting" for revolution. Rather, it is best to act in the present against the threats that face this planet and its people, even when one should do so without illusion, whatever form that takes offline or online.

This was originally published one the author's personal blog.

Notes

[1] LeftistCritic, " Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia ," Soviet History, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 6.

[2] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[3] Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[4] Ibid; Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World, ; David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017.

[5] David B. Kopel, "The Klan's Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South," Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "Gun Control is "racist"?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. The latter piece Ends up advocating for gun control.

[6] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). He goes on to talk about Nat Turner's rebellion, the Colfax Massacre, and numerous other instances to disprove the gun control is racist idea.

[7] Newsmax, "Top Firearms Group: Gun Control Has Roots in Racism," February 25, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[8] Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[9] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1." They also note the Sylvia Rivera Gun Club for Self-Defense as an example but this group could not be found despite internet searchings. It is possible the group exists but may be a small group with little publicity or its name has changed from the past.

[14] Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[15] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[16] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV).

[17] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[18] Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law , Vol. 1 (ed. Gregg Lee Carter, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 9; John Massaro, No Guarantee of a Gun: How and Why the Second Amendment Means Exactly What It Says (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009), 652; Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 93; Deborah Homsher, Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America: Politics of Firearms in America (Expanded Edition, New York: Routledge, 2015), 292; Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 19, 197; Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 45; Philip Wolny, Gun Rights: Interpreting the Constitution (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2015), 26.

[19] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[20] Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, "Black gun clubs and the right to bear arms," Washington Post, February 19, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[21] Rob Los Ricos, " The US police state is out of control - is armed self-defense a necessary option? ," rob's revolting, November 15, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Justin King, " When Should We Start Forcibly Resisting Police Tyranny? ," September 19, 2014, TheAntiMedia; accessed January 16, 2017.

[22] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[23] The Week Staff, "The truth about guns and self-defense," November 1, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[24] Michael McLaughlin, "Using Guns In Self-Defense Is Rare, Study Finds," Huffington Post, June 17, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[25] Harvard Injury Control Research Center, " Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[26] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[27] Jonathan Banks, "Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism,"Vice, June 22, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017. I know its horrid Vice, but so what.

[28] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[29] Claire Landsbaum, "NRA Ad Claims 'Real Women's Empowerment' Is Owning a Gun," New York Magazine, July 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Max Plenke, "When Black Men Are Shot and Killed, the NRA Is Silent," Mic, July 7, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[30] Tessa Stuart, "Black Gun Owners Speak Out About Facing a Racist Double Standard," Rolling Stone, July 14, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[31] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[32] David Love, "Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?," Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[36] RT (Russia Today), "New Black Panthers in armed showdown with anti-Muslim militia in Texas," April 6, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[37] Charmaine Lomabao, "Liberal Gun Club Experiences Increasing Membership Since Trump Victory," Newsline, December 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Shantella Y. Sherman, "Black Gun Purchases Reportedly Skyrocket Since Trump Election," Afro, January 4, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; The Grio, "Gun sales to blacks, minorities surge after Trump win," Aol News, November 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; , "Firearm sales rise among minorities," WBCD (NBC Affiliate), December 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Ben Popken, "Trump's Victory Has Fearful Minorities Buying Up Guns," NBC News, November 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Teryn Payne, "Gun Sales Among Blacks See Increase," Ebony magazine, November 29, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017. Reprinted from Jet magazine; Brian Wheeler, "Why US liberals are now buying guns too," BBC News, December 20, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Joe Schoenmann, "Fearing Trump Supporters, Now Liberals Are Buying Guns," KNPR, January 10, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Teresa Walsh, "Now it's the liberals who are arming up," McClatchy DC, December 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016.

[38] Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World, Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World,

[39] John Burnett, "LGBT Self-Defense Site 'Pink Pistols' Gains Followers After Orlando Massacre," NPR, June 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Julia Ioffe, "The Group that Wants to Arm Gay America," Politico, June 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[40] Pink Pistols, " About the Pink Pistols ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[41] The Liberal Gun Club, " Who We Are," accessed January 16, 2017.

[42] The Liberal Gun Club, " What We Do," accessed January 16, 2017.

[43] The Liberal Gun Club, " Talking Points Regarding Regulation ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[44] Adam Winkler, "Is Gun Control Racist?," The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, "The Long, Racist History of Gun Control," The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Edward Wyckoff Williams, "Fear of a Black Gun Owner," The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[45] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Nicholas Johnson, "Negroes and the Gun: The early NAACP championed armed self-defense," Washington Post, January 30, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Alexander Reid Ross, " "Death to the Klan" and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US ," It's Going Down, July 26, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[46] Barbara Nimiri Aziz, " Profile of a Progressive Gun Enthusiast ," CounterPunch, Accessed January 16, 2017.

[47] David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[48] Ehab Zahriyeh, "For some blacks, gun control raises echoes of segregated past," Al Jazeera America, September 1, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, "Gun control is people control, with racist implications," NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017.

[49] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[50] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World,

[51] Ibid.

[52] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Gary Gutting, "Guns and Racism," The New York Times, December 28, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[53] William Brennan, "Bulletproofing," The Atlantic, January/February 2017.

[54] Bruce Mastron, " My Latest Reason to Boycott the NFL: Guns ," CounterPunch, January 16, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Ken Levy, " If You Don't Support Gun Control, Then You Don't Support the Police ," CounterPunch, July 16, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[55] Andrew Culp and Darwin BondGraham, " Left Gun Nuts ," CounterPunch, May 29, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017.

[56] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1."

[57] Karl Marx, "Address to the Communist League," The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 67.

[58] V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution" (1918), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 572, 591.

[59] V.I. Lenin, "The revolution in 1905: The beginning of the revolution in 1905" (January 25, 1905), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 508-509.

Wrenching: On Building Coalitions

By David I. Backer

In the movie Independence Day, terrifying aliens show up to take over the earth, but something amazing happens: all the peoples of the planet join together--despite their differences--and successfully fend off the threat. We don't get a good look at this coalition, or how it forms, but it appears to encompass a vast swath of the spectrum of difference: race, gender, class, nation, religion, language...

It was a rainbow coalition, right out of Fred Hampton's playbook--except the enemies were colonizing aliens rather than colonizing capitalists. (The metaphor is pretty good, however.) Other examples of such coalitions include the Communist Party's organizing in the Black Belt in the 1930s, as well as the Young Lords' work in Chicago in the 1970s.

What do these coalitions show us about emerging forms of solidarity as we build the Left now? Specifically, what gets in the way of rainbow coalitions?

One answer is that folks belonging to various social categories are wrenched apart by the categories themselves. The best-known case is race and class. When it comes to race and class in the US, as Adolph Reed has long argued, the ruling class wins when race wrenches workers apart.

Racism is thus a tool the ruling class uses to make sure workers don't get together and get rid of them. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has articulated the same insight in reference to the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent Women's Marches.

But that phenomenon--wrenching--can and does happen in many struggles, both between and within many social categories. Wrenching is one of the things that can keep the Left from getting together and warding off threats to the planet.

How Wrenching Works

Wrenching works like this. There is a ruling set with certain nefarious structural interests. The ruling set could be the ruling class (capitalism), white supremacists (racism), cis-male patriarchy (gender oppression), heterosexual norms (sexual oppression), able-bodies (ableism)...and others.

Adolph Reed, building on a long tradition of thinking, has pointed out that racism divides the working classes and helps capitalists maintain power. Yet we know this same thing happens in other social categories. Racism divides women in their struggle against patriarchy. It divides queer communities in their struggle against normativity.

But racism isn't the only wrench dividing subordinated sets when making gains against the ruling sets. Class divisions wrench African Americans apart in their struggle against white supremacy. Gender divisions wrench queer folks apart in their struggle against heternormativity.

In each case, wrenching has the same form but different contents: in the struggle of a subordinated set against a ruling set within one social category, another social category--adjacent to their struggle--divides the subordinated set.

That's wrenching: when a subordinated set is struggling against a ruling set in one social category and the subordinated set is divided by another social category orthogonal to their struggle.

Workers fight capitalists, but racism divides them, and capitalists keep exploiting. Women fight patriarchy, classism divides them, and the patriarchy stays strong. In each case there's a wrench: racism is the wrench in the first and classism is the wrench in the second.

But the thing is, there's never just one wrench. There are always wrenches. In any given struggle there will be multiple wrenches with different salience, as intersectional sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins point out. You might work through the race problems in your union, but next up is the patriarchy and then the heteronormativity and then the ableism and transphobia...

Wrenching is gut-wrenchingly powerful and complex. But if you've ever quit something difficult to quit, you know that the first step to getting rid of the problem is knowing that you have one. Then hopefully you can do something about it. Same goes for wrenching (hopefully).

Taking Out the Wrenches

The concept helps. 'Wrenching' names a key barrier to coalition and accomplicing: wrenching wrenches us apart as we fight against the ruling sets. But a wrench is also a human made object, a tool, and tools can be used or not used for various purposes. They can be manipulated and moved around. So what do we do about the wrenches?

First, we have to find the wrenches, be clear that they are tools the ruling sets use to divide us. This isn't easy to do. Most organizations are only sort of aware that there are a number of wrenches dividing them from one another and other groups. If they do know about the wrenches, it probably hasn't been made crystal clear that these wrenches were put in the works by the the ruling sets in order to divide them (or at least have that effect).

After finding the wrenches, we have to pick the most salient one and take it out, which can be a painful process full of friction. It must be slow, careful, intentional. Workshops, discussions, debriefs. There will be mistakes. False starts. Hurt feelings. Time "wasted." It won't happen immediately, and if you try to take the wrench out quickly without the right plan the machine could fall apart, particularly if it's been in there for a long time.

After that we have to find the other wrenches and take them out too. After the first time, it should be easier--but each wrench is different and might require starting all over again.

Finally, we put the wrenches into our tool box and save them if we need them in our work. We probably don't want to use them against our enemies since they're the master's tools, as Audre Lorde said.

Maybe, at the very least, we should keep the wrenches to remember how they were used against us so as not to let it happen again, and also remember the process for removing them in case another one gets lodged in the works.

Wrenching need not divide us. The time for removing these tools of the ruling classes is now. Somehow the people in Independence Day did it. Like them, our world can't wait.

Remembering Martin Luther King in the Age of Trump

By Jim Burns

This year's celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. assumes special significance, poignancy, and urgency as we remember King during the same week that Donald Trump assumes the U.S. Presidency. My university, like many other institutions across the United States, paid homage to Dr. King. Yet leaving the commemoration, replete with speeches that praised King's dream, I wondered whether the paradox of celebrating the life of a Black anti-capitalist, anti-war radical juxtaposed with Trump's empty "Make America Great Again" sloganeering was lost on many of those in attendance. Trump's victory, which stunned so many White liberals, resulted from a historically proven winning strategy that tapped White fear through racist appeals for "law and order" and virulent anti-immigrant sentiment tied to economic stagnation.

In the aftermath of Trump's victory, many in the White liberal academic, media, and political establishment, who apparently viewed Hillary Clinton as entitled to the U.S. Presidency, fumbled to explain Clinton's defeat. Columbia University Humanities Professor Mark Lilla, for example, in a New York Times Op-Ed , characterizes the electoral outcome as "repugnant," yet he condemns liberal identity politics and the "obsession with diversity" for producing Trump's victory. Lilla offers his own "make America great again" prescription for a "healthy" national politics based not on affirming and appreciating difference, but on "commonality" and returning to the liberal politics of the New Deal, racial exclusivity and all. Lilla's appeal to contextualize education about the "major forces shaping the world" in their "historical dimension" sits uncomfortably beside a stunning lack of historical perspective, particularly in the presentation of Whiteness as a neutral norm and the glorification of the American project as the assimilation of difference.

Katherine Franke, Lilla's colleague at Columbia, provides that critical perspective in her response in the Los Angeles Review of Books . Franke characterizes the liberalism championed by Lilla as the "liberalism of white supremacy…that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction." The Trump phenomenon, and analyses of it such as Lilla's, represent, as Franke points out and as Michael Kimmel writes in Angry White Men , a sense of White, heteropatriarchal aggrieved entitlement. Anyone who possesses the deep understanding of American history advocated by Lilla would conclude that Trump's victory actually demonstrates the victory of the White heteropatriarchal identity politics long deployed through relations of institutional power against many Others. Trump's election is no anomaly; it illustrates a history of White terror and backlash against demands by historically oppressed groups for their rights and human dignity.

Returning to the memory of Dr. King, his life and legacy have long suffered the tragedy of many civil rights leaders, who have been caricatured to comfort White America and fit a partial historical narrative to preserve the status quo. King's vast body of public intellectual work and activism have been reduced to his "I Have a Dream" speech, trotted out yearly to absolve the guilt and paralysis many Whites feel for their lack of personal commitment and action in the struggle for justice-racial, economic, social, and political-for which King and many others fought and died. Understanding King requires engagement with the entirety of his evolutionary thought, for example his Letter from Birmingham City Jail , in which he clearly articulated his disappointment with the white moderate "more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

Yet a major aspect of the justice that King fought for, which seems lost in the sanitized celebrations of his life and work, included economic justice for all the people of the world. In an August 16, 1967 speech entitled " Where do We Go from Here? " King concluded that "the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society":

"There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."

James Baldwin echoed King's skepticism of the White moderate in his 1965 essay The White Man's Guilt . White Americans, Baldwin wrote, possess the ability to see the "disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility," but in lacking the "energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it." Baldwin, like King, appeals to the force of history, not as something exterior to us, but as something that we embody, a force that exercises unconscious control over us and "is literally present in all that we do."

Yes, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in what Gore Vidal famously called the United States of Amnesia illustrates yet again the masterful and predictable use of the White identity politics of fear, racial divisiveness, and class oppression. Trump's election demonstrates the dearth of meaningful dialogues about class in our political discourses, specifically the intersection of race and class, and the historic expunging of the class consciousness of working people through the destruction of organized labor. Super-wealthy plutocrats like Trump and much of his cabinet, to whom Adam Smith referred in his day as "the masters of mankind," maintain a clear sense of class consciousness lost by so many in the burgeoning precariat of disposable people mired in contingent work and living increasingly tenuous lives. Remembering Dr. King in the age of Trump should remind us that we cannot realize the totality of King's dream without immersing ourselves in the full range of his thought and the grandeur of the Black intellectual tradition more broadly. Commemorating King's life should also remind White Americans that we cannot develop a more complete and humane understanding of our country, ourselves, or the world without engaging with the force of history to which the African American intellectual tradition is integral.

Welcome to the Trump Era: Time To Rethink the Word "Allies" (Yes, White Women, We Are Looking At You)

By Cherise Charleswell

The Orange Empire Strikes

On January 20, 2017 we will be entering what some have begun to call the Trump Era, an era that will be post-facts, considering the disdain that Donald Trump seems to have for facts and truth . It will also likely be marked with attacks on civil liberties, civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights, along with cuts to social services and funding of government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health & Human Services, and Department of Education. When a President is elected on a platform of climate change denial and promises to end the Affordable Care Act, all of this should be expected. However, this clearly is just the beginning of attempts to erode democracy and the right to dissent. In fact, any form of dissent or disagreement has been viewed as an unforgivable slight that cannot be ignored by President-Elect Donald Trump, a man who is unable to control his emotions and "Twitter fingers," often rushing to provide 140-character responses with startling regularity. Then there is the scandal at the Department of Energy , where the Trump transition team sent a 74-point questionnaire to workers, requesting an inventory of all agency employees or contractors who attended meetings or conferences on climate change, and asking for a current list of professional society memberships of any lab staff. All this has raised fears among civil rights lawyers specializing in federal worker whistleblower protections, who say the incoming administration is at a minimum trying to influence or limit the research at the Department. And at worst, attempting to target employees with views that run counter to the president-elect. The incoming administration's and Republican party's anti-science stand has actually led to Scientists frantically copying U.S. climate data because of fears that it may vanish under the new administration.

Then there is the recent failed attempt of the Republican-majority House of Representatives to end the House of Ethics Office , which was swiftly and rightfully met with backlash.

There are arguably Dark and Dangerous days ahead, particularly for women and other minority groups (Latino- particularly Mexican-Americans, African Americans, Asians, Muslims, LGTBQ) in the United States, all of whom were individually attacked during Trump's campaign. Since the Presidential election there has been a reported rise in hate crimes and speech, where many of the offenders are actually referring to Donald Trump and "Making America Great Again" amidst their acts of hate. See here , and here - regarding attacks against Jews, despite the GOP's peculiar love affair with Israel. Proving once and for all that they view they view this "Greatness" as a throwback to the time when White Protestant Heterosexual men (and women) were the majority, and discrimination and segregation were the status quo.

His Administration, and the Republicans that are seizing this opportunity, with control of the Legislative and Executive branch of government, have already announced their priorities to defund, repeal, and cut programs that helped to ensure access to health for women and others, including what some may refer to as an all-out war on women's bodies:

· Supposed Man of Faith, Vice President Michael Pence's statement to the press explaining that the Administration promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and that it will be THE priority of the Trump administration. Now they have been saying this and attempting to do so for 8 years now, but still have yet to come up with a replacement. And on January 5, 2017, before Trump takes office and President Obama's final address the Senate voted 51 to 48 to repeal the Affordable Care Act .

· Promises to defund Planned Parenthood. To see what's at stake there, revisit my Ensuring the Right To Reproductive Health: The American Public Health Association Takes A Stand With Planned Parenthood .

· Mike Pence has actually positioned himself as an opponent of Planned Parenthood and has openly acted to dismantle the organization. In October 2016, during a speech at Liberty University, he promised that "a Trump-Pence administration will defund Planned Parenthood and redirect those dollars to women's health care that doesn't provide abortion services." In addition, in 2011, the House of Representatives passed a bill co-sponsored by Pence to defund the group.

· Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions. Despite asking then mistress-Marla Maples to have an abortion , in 2016, Donald Trump stated that abortions are "not acceptable," and that women who try to obtain them should be subject " to some form of punishment ." Following a public outcry, Trump backtracked on his remarks , saying it's not women who should be punished for having an abortion, but the doctors who perform the procedure.

· Making open promises not to cut social security, while stacking his cabinet with millionaires and lobbyist who are Pro-Privatization . A lesson in believing what people "show you", not what they "tell you".

· Continuing to deny what scientist, public health specialists, human rights activists worldwide, and others agree is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Climate change and environmental degradation. The Trump administration is unfortunately a triumph for climate change deniers .

The Blame Game

Now that we are in this era we cannot make the same mistake as previous generations, and that is to dismiss history and not take the time to truly reflect on how we got here. This process of reflection should not solely be about placing blame, but accountability has to be done. In a previous article Bamboozled: On African Americans and Feminists Casting Their Votes for Hillary Clinton , I discussed many of the blaring problems with Hillary Clinton's candidacy, much of which has also been pointed out by many others, such as Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow. Yet, the DNC is still taking it upon themselves to deflect and blame Russia for hacking emails -while ignoring the fact that even if hacked, the Russians did not create the content of those emails. The Russians did not set out to sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign and disenfranchise many Democratic voters. The DNC did that, and needs to take full responsibility for it and the fall out that it created, which includes the millions of dismayed voters who chose to sit out the 2016 elections all together. Seriously, constantly blaming and being upset with Russia for their deceit is the equivalent of being upset with a Woman who chooses to let her friend know that her husband is cheating on her. Maybe she decides to share a Tinder profile as "evidence" with her friend. Perhaps she got the information because the husband left his phone unlocked. None of this changes the fact that the husband - like the DNC-did the cheating.

But the DNC's blame does not stop there. It includes lashing out at those who voted for third-party candidates (again a foolish strategy that will only help to further distance and infuriate these voters), and then the DNC actually had the audacity to lash out against minority voters who did not show up at the polls. Those who have been left off the hook, who have seemed to be forgiven because they are part of this often-mentioned group, are "white working class" voters - the people who seem to be the only group that has a right to be angry and heard. The group who is just now feeling the effects of unchecked capitalism, high rates of unemployment, and poverty. And this is why a historical lens is always needed. Other historically disenfranchised groups could literally just leave the " Welcome" mat out for them. A welcome to their reality. Malcolm X once made the remark that when "America catches a cold, Black people catch pneumonia," and this speaks to the historical social disparities that continue to exist. For instance, one can consider the national unemployment rate (4.9), and that of Native Americans (11.3%), African Americans (8.8%), and Latinos (5.6%). For a further explanation of why this focus on the White working class voter in a country that has changed greatly in terms of demographics and attitudes is problematic, see here .

Still, the greatest problem with the DNC's misdirected blame game is that it goes back to asking groups of people whose issues are not acknowledged or addressed until it comes to election time - to mobilize and do the heavy lifting, and this is especially true of Black women, who were the largest voting block for Hillary Clinton. Malcolm X once described this problem in his speech Ballot or the Bullet . This is an issue that has been discussed in great detail by Black- and intersectional feminists.

Intersectionality: Seeing Beyond Privilege

But let's focus on this term intersectionality, coined by Kimberlee Crenshaw, Civil rights advocate, educator, and leading scholar. While Black feminists and other feminists of color have pointed out the relevance of an intersectional framework in politics and legislation, establishment feminism - including Hillary Clinton, her pants-suit nation, and the strategist at the DNC - focused on what seemed to be a revisionist history of Suffragists and Second-Wave Feminists., conveniently ignoring the racism and classism present in both movements. Yes, the part of history that most white feminists would like to forget, or have not even been taught about (conveniently not discussed and swept under the rug), includes historical facts such as - once it became apparent that the right to vote would either come first to Black men or White women, the White suffragettes quickly betrayed Black women who had worked beside them. Just reference the history of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and their treatment of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, many white feminists extended this indifference toward intersectional issues throughout the 2016 Primaries and National election - up until it was too late. Sure, they conveniently put on a "dog-and-puppy show" inviting the mothers of victims of state-sanctioned violence out to attend the 2016 Democratic National Convention, referring to them as " Mothers of the Movement" after previously refusing to provide a space for Black Lives Matter protestors or even have an open and honest conversation about the Clinton legacy and Hillary's use of the term "super predators" to describe African American children. Still, there was the concerns with Hillary's dishonesty, lack of sincerity, pandering, and bolstering of imperialist foreign policy that primarily negatively impacted women and children, people of color, and the poor through war, political de-stabilization and disenfranchisement, environmental degradation, and unchecked capitalism.

Again, there should be no surprise that we are in a Trump Era, given the DNC's support of a candidate as flawed and out-of-touch as Hillary Clinton, despite the electorate's demands for Change and a much needed rift between multinational corporations and those in government. I am not one to readily believe in psychic powers, and I do not believe they were needed to predict this win. It is something that I pointed out in my interview for the Hampton Institute's podcast, A Different Lens, entitled, False Feminists & Hillary Clinton.

Intersectionality has always been understood by Black feminists and other feminists of color, as well as women of color in general who do not identify as feminists or may not be familiar with the term. They literally LIVE the reality of intersectionality, leading lives where they do not have the privilege to ignore the impact of racism, sexism/misogyny, and classism on their lives; and it is this perspective and understanding which really sets them apart from white feminists (often referred to as allies) and certainly white women voters. In the 2016 election white women voted 53% for Donald Trump (compared to only 43% who voted for Clinton ), making it clear that they certainly do not view the world through an intersectional lens, and that white privilege for the most part " trumps" solidarity or womanhood/sisterhood.

A Closer Look at the 2016 Exit Polls:

There was a distinct racial gap between voters, which opened wider when age and religion came into play.

· 58% of White women voters ages 45-64 voted for Trump (perhaps they remember the days of blatant White supremacy - and thought that a Trump presidency would harken back to that and "Make America Great Again".

· And again, it was not just White working class women who supported Trump - 45% of White college educated women supported Trump.

· 64% of White Protestant women also voted for Trump.

· While 88% of Black voters supported Clinton.

· And 65% of Latino voters supported Clinton

Source: NBC News Exit Poll

Further, as much as the media likes to focus on the uninformed, uneducated, poor, working-class white voters, the fact of the matter is that the educated and more affluent voters came out in support of Trump. The median income of Trump voters was reported to be $72,000--- $16,000 more than the national average. Perhaps one can make the argument that when it comes to a platform characterized by racism and ran by a millionaire who will look out for corporate interest and that of the upper middle class - these people really may have believed that they were "voting for their own interests, and not against it."

The reality of who Showed Up to vote for Donald Trump sent Comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actress, media critic, and television host, Samantha Bee, to unleash a tirade that bemoan the country's decision, calling out the group responsible for his election: " The Caucasian nation showed up in droves to vote for Trump, so I don't want to hear a goddamn word about Black voter turnout…… How many times do we expect Black people to build our country for us? ........Continuing with " If all 3.3 million Muslims in America apparently have to be held accountable for every radical terrorist, then white people better be ready to take their responsibility for their peers, too. "

Then there is the fact that Trump's candidacy did not come into question, or begin to lose endorsements, until the "Grab Them By The Pussy" moment; because his crass remarks were specifically about White women, sending many to clutch their pearls and wag their tongues in disgust. Apparently, he had taken things too far! And this despicable reality was appropriately addressed by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, in her article " Dear Fellow White Women: We Fucked This Up:

"After all the supposed progress we've made, painstakingly trying to change a white feminist movement into an intersectional one (and for that we have only the hard work of women of color to thank ), white women didn't show up to fight back against a man whose rhetoric and policies directly attack women of color , immigrant women , Muslim women , LGBTQ women and more ."

She goes on to add:

"So I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my country. I am ashamed of white people. But more than anyone else, I am ashamed of white women. Is this who we really are? Clearly ― and it is who we have always been ."

So, who really are these "White middle class, educated, women" supporters of Trump, who helped to usher in this era of despair?

I think that the following excerpt from the Buzzfeed article " Meet the Ivanka Trump Voter " provides a great description:

There's a Trump supporter you rarely see at rallies, but whose existence has been affirmed, again and again, through polling. Call her the Ivanka Voter. She lives in the suburbs. She has great highlights, most certainly not out of the box. She might be middle-aged, with kids in high school or college, or a stay-at-home mom; she might be an up-and-coming professional, not yet married. She lives in the well-to-do suburbs - places like Rochester, Michigan; Indian Hill, Ohio; Eden Prairie, Minnesota; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. She had to drive to get to the rally, because not enough people would come if he held one where she actually lived. She wears expensive jeans tucked into her cute boots. She doesn't wear a Trump shirt - but she might wear a button on her fashionable sweater. She shops at Nordstrom, and Macy's, and Marshall's.

This voter is almost entirely absent from the images that proliferate around Trump and his events, which are overwhelmed with obvious signifiers of class: the men and women depicted might be overweight, have bad haircuts, or wear crass T-shirts. They might have bad teeth. They might be worked up, red-faced, quoted spouting a racial epithet. They're the heavily mythologized "white working class": men and women who've been left behind by globalization, ignored by both parties, and magnetized by Trump

More about this group:

· They most likely do not consider themselves racist - and much of that is because they truly do not know what racism is. However, even if they do not see themselves as racist - they have no problem supporting a racist.

· They have the privilege of voting for Donald, even when they do not "agree with EVERYTHING" he's said. And as people of color and others are being openly attacked, based on his inflammatory remarks, that has emboldened bigots and racists --- they also have the privilege of knowing that they will not be attacked by these groups of people.

· They are certainly not all conservative, and may view themselves as socially moderate. It should not be hard to believe that white women also have abortions. The fact that there decision to vote for Trump jeopardizes this freedom-is one clear example of where they did vote against their own interest; regardless of socioeconomic status.

· They do not realize that the way that you vote, much like budgets are a reflection of morals. It is about what you prioritize and what you deem acceptable.

· They are dangerous - moving in silence, while secretly upholding white supremacy. Essentially the vote for Trump is just another example of the use of macroaggression against minorities. More about that here , here, and here.

· They are willing to look past blatant nepotism and cronyism when it comes to Ivanka Trump, and they actually believe that she is qualified to serve in her father's cabinet and hold a position of prestige and power. Why?? Because they like her, find her relatable, and think that she has phenomenal people skills. And we should note that this reflects the same mentality of the "Ol' boys club" that ensured that only those who one lives amongst and interacts with (other white people) would be those who were (are still) able to get the most prestigious positions, or employment period. But hey, why should we demand that Ivanka be qualified, when her father is grossly unqualified for the position that he was elected to serve?

Moving In Silence. Silence in the Face of Fascism

Let's go back to the issue of silence, and how these "Ivanka Voters" may not have openly taken part in the rallies, shied away from the cameras, and chose to not openly discuss their support from Trump. They told exit pollers one thing, and their actions reflected the exact opposite.

This tradition of doing things in "Secret" to uphold white supremacy is certainly nothing new. Just consider the KKK and their love of white sheets that serve as their cloak of anonymity. This practice of Secrecy helped to spawn the use of Dog Whistle politics, covert in nature, allowing for one to readily go back and deny charges of racism.

When looking closely at their actions, and the need to hide their true intentions, one can only assume that they went through all of these shenanigans because they knew Who and What they were supporting, a racist and bigot, and they did not want to admit it to themselves and colleagues. They didn't want to face judgment. They did not want to explain why they were casting their vote for a candidate who was openly endorsed by the KKK, and for whom the KKK held parades in celebration following his election. Leaving them with no way to pretend that they didn't notice that he was not a racist. Ultimately, what they have shown us all is that they are not to be trusted, that being women does not automatically make them an ally, and further that we must come to the realization that not all women should be viewed as minorities or "marginalized majorities." The Ivanka voter was not fighting to dismantle systems of oppression, racism, and discrimination; they were fighting to uphold them, because they believe they are part of and benefit from that power structure. In the words of the late Poet, memoirist, actress, dancer, and civil rights activist, Dr. Maya Angelou, "When people show you who they are, believe them."

What is clear is that there was a convenient narrative to Blame a certain subset of voters, particularly white, uneducated, "low informed" and working-class women; and that was done because it is more difficult to deal with the fact that even the more educated and affluent white women, those who benefitted the most from Affirmative action, the women's rights movements, and may (or may have identified) as Second Wave feminists, quietly and secretly casted their votes for Donald Trump. And they did so because they have the privilege -- white, affluent-- to look past his racist views, even his misogyny.

In terms of Pants Suit nation and the white feminists who could not understand why many women of color and others had such a visceral reaction and disdain for Hillary Clinton as a candidate-this image from Glamour magazine provides the best visualization of the problem . In describing this issue, which involved no use of Photoshop , Editor-in-chief Cindi Leive stated that "Gender equality is on all of our minds. It's really important to me that Glamour not just talk the talk about female empowerment, but that we also walk the walk …… So we've decided to support women in the most meaningful way we can: by hiring them. From first page to our last, every photo we commissioned for the February issue was created by women: photographers, stylists, hair, makeup, everything." However, in looking at the cover, it is quite clear that this is White Feminism, a wall of white women, who believe that their representation and presence reflects or represents ALL women.

The Trump ERa is in part brought to us by the toxic mix of Pants Suit nation and establishment feminism, and their quest for the first Female US President, which left them blind to her many flaws. From suburban soccer moms (60-70% of who stated that they viewed Trump negatively but found a reason to vote for him regardless), professionals who have successfully "lean forward" and push against the glass ceiling , and working class "angry" WHITE women - it is truly time to reevaluate whom are considered and called allies. It is time to redistribute the work being done, to counter oppression and yes, get candidates elected. Because those who overwhelmingly (many holding their noses) to vote for Clinton were again Black women, who for far too long been viewed as "mules of the earth," as described by Short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist, Nora Zeale Hurston. In this Trump Era, if you want to really be any ally, checking your privilege will not be enough. You will have to literally put down and unpack that invisible knapsack of privilege . And this process begins with stepping forward, getting on the front lines, and being the first to resist and push back against the rising fascism of the Orange Empire, which now threatens the health, viability, security, and well-being of all Americans. Essentially, you caused the spill -- and simply cannot ask African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, those who are LGTBQ, and even the disabled (who were also openly mocked by the President Elect) to handle the clean up on Aisle 4 for you.

President Rodrigo Duterte's Killing Fields and People's War in the Philippines: An Interview

By Andy Piascik

E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies, English and Comparative Literature, is currently professorial lecturer at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously he served as Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium; and visiting professor of literature at Trento University, Italy; and at National Tsing-Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan.

San Juan received his A.B. from the University of the Philippines and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among his recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press). Forthcoming books are Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) and Filipinas Everywhere (De La Salle University Press). His recent anthologies of poems in Filipino are Kundiman sa Gitna ng Karimlan, Ambil, and Wala.

San Juan has received awards from MELUS (Katherine Newman Prize); Association for Asian American Studies, Gutavus Myers Center for Human Rights; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Italy; Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh;; and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for Cultural Logic, Humanities Diliman, Malay, and Kritika Kultura.

Who is President Rodrigo Duterte and who and what does he represent?

San Juan: For 22 years, Duterte was mayor of Davao City, the largest urban complex in Mindanao island, Philippines. TIMEmagazine dubbed him "the Punisher" for allegedly organizing the death-squads that eliminated drug dealers and petty criminals via "extra-judicial killings" (EJK)-no arrests or search warrants were needed, the suspects were liquidated on the spot. That's the modus operandi today. If Davao City became the safest or most peaceful city in southeast Asia, it was also called "the murder capital" of the Philippines.

Drug addiction is rampant in the Philippines. Previous administrations either turned a blind eye or coddled druglords, often police and military officials, infecting poor communities and generations of unemployed and unschooled youth. My relatives in Manila and friends in the provinces have complained that their children have been corrupted by the drug culture in neighborhoods and schools, so that when Duterte ran for president last May, he got 16 million votes (39% of total votes cast), 6.6 million votes ahead of the closest rival, Mar Roxas, a grandson of Manuel Roxas, the first president of the Republic in 1946. This implies that people want a government leader who can rid the country of the drug menace.

News reports described Duterte's victory as an upset, like Trump's win over highly favored Hillary Clinton. Is it accurate to say that voters simply wanted a change, regardless of the substance of Duterte's platform?

While the U.S. set up the electoral system in the Philippines, the feudal/comprador classes manipulate it so that personalities, not ideology, and bribery determine the outcome. Democracy in the Philippines is actually the rule of the privileged minority of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and business partners of foreign mega-corporations (called compradors) over the majority.

All presidential candidates promise change for the better. In the last two decades, the popular demand has been: get rid of corruption, drugs, rapes, wanton murders, etc. Over 75% of 130 million Filipinos are impoverished, sunk in palpable misery. Consequently, over 12 million have travelled to all continents to earn bare subsistence-about 5,000 OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) leave every day for Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, North America, Europe, etc.

Scarce decent jobs, starvation wages for contractual labor, unaffordable housing, lack of adequate medical care and schooling-symptoms of terrible underdevelopment- have pushed millions out of the country, or driven them into the hills and forests to take up arms against an unjust, exploitative system whose military and police are trained and supplied by Washington-Pentagon, IMF/World Bank, and global capitalist powers. The country has been a basket-case in Asia since the Marcos dictatorship in the seventies, outstripped by smaller nation-states like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

Relatively unknown to the MetroManila political milieu, Duterte's reputation as a scourge of druglords was glamorized to the point that he became a harbinger of change. His slogan was: "Change is coming." The public responded to this propaganda. Although unlike Roxas and his group, among them the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and Makati (Manila's Wall Street) corporate moguls, Duterte does not belong to the traditional elite dynasties, his campaign was supported by some of the biggest corporate stakeholders, such as the Floirendo agribusiness, and by billionaire investors (Uy, Te, Alcantara, Villar) engaged in mining, public utilities, construction with huge government contracts, etc.

We cannot underestimate the Marcos family's contribution, which added to the P375 million that Duterte allegedly spent. This fact explains why Duterte allowed the controversial burial of the Marcos cadaver in the National Heroes' Cemetery. Duterte's father, and other relatives in Cebu, collaborated with the Marcos martial-law regime.

Duterte thus belongs mainly to a hitherto excluded fraction of the comprador bureaucrat capitalist class, with links to the patrimonial landlord families. He now serves as a "populist" front of the parasitic oligarchy that has dominated the class-conflicted order of this dependency since the U.S. directly ruled the country from 1899 to 1946 as a classic colony, and a pacified neocolony during the Cold War up to now. Duterte's regime prolongs the moribund structure of colonial institutions and practices that feed off the labor of the peasantry, workers, middle stratum, women, Moros, and the Lumads (indigenous) communities-these last two are now mobilized to oppose this predatory status quo.

What is your assessment of Duterte's intent of becoming more independent of the United States and the moves he's made in that direction thus far?

This was a burning topic before the US elections, when the Cold War was being revived. Duterte got the cue. His move to invoke his youthful experience with the nationalist movement during his student days was a smart one. Tactically, he beguiled the leaders of BAYAN (the major anti-imperialist legal opposition) and their parliamentary foot soldiers to join him against the lethargic Roxas-Noynoy Aquino fraction of the oligarchy. Obviously he needed symbols of radical change monopolized by BAYAN, which reinforced the outsider image.

Part of his strategy is to firm up his base in the Mindanao-Visayas elite and consolidate his hold on the ideological State apparatus controlled by holdovers from the previous reactionary administrations. He has been doing this when Obama, the US State Department, and the UN entered the scene and began scolding him for his murderous method of amplifying EJKs, his jettisoning of the Philippine Constitution's Bill of Rights and various UN covenants guaranteeing the right to life and due process for all citizens. Karapatan (a human-rights monitoring NGO), church groups, and civil-society associations blasted Duterte for the "brazen impunity" shown by the orgy of police violence and State terrorism.

Cognizant of those criticisms, Duterte offered to renew peace talks with the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP) and its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA) which, up to now, is still stigmatized by the US State Department as terrorist. This broke the long stalemate in the peace talks during the Arroyo and NoyNoy Aquino regimes. Duterte made a token release of 18 political prisoners involved in the talks and promised to grant amnesty to 434 jailed dissenters. This was hailed by the local media as constructive and a promising change-maker. At the same time, Duterte also made noises about the meddlesome US military presence in Mindanao, the annual U.S.-Philippines "Balikatan" exercises, and the US intervention in the China Sea prior to his visit to China and Japan. This triggered heavy media coverage, projecting Duterte as a Latino anti-imperialist crusader like Fidel Castro or Chavez.

For a while, there were rumors of a CIA plot to kill Duterte. When former president Fidel Ramos berated Duterte for his anti-U.S. polemics and withdrew his support, was there a symptom of some crisis in the regime?

No, it was a calculated publicity technique to divert attention away from the bloody police-vigilante blood bath. Duterte's complaint was mere grumbling, blowhard gestures of the bully in the hood. His "pivot to China" may have calmed down the turbulent waters of the South China Sea, with the US fleet continuing to maneuver from its bases in Hawaii, Guam, and Okinawa. Obama dismissed Duterte as uncouth, ignorant of diplomatic niceties. Vietnam and Japan rolled out their red carpet to the cursing Leviathan of what academics designated as "Hobbesian" Philippines. Poor Hobbes, maybe Machiavelli's Borgia would have been the more appropriate analogy.

Nothing to worry about for Washington and the Pentagon. The U.S. military presence all over the islands, legitimized by the 1947 Mutual Assistance Agreement and the 1951 Philippines-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty, plus the recent Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), insure the continued stranglehold of Washington-Pentagon on Duterte's military, police, and various security agencies. With Trump's condoning of Duterte's "killing fields," Duterte has proved himself a wily demagogue whose touted popularity, however, is fast eroding on the face of mammoth protests all over the islands, and in the Filipino diaspora around the world.

Are we likely to see a decrease in the U.S. military presence in the Philippines soon?

Not at all. First of all, as I already mentioned, all the onerous treaties that subordinate the Philippine State security agencies are safe and stable. Even the Supreme Court and the trial courts follow U.S. protocols, as laid down initially by two well-intentioned civilizing missionaries, Justice George Malcolm and anthropologist David Barrows. Legal scholar Eric A. San Juan has clearly documented this fact in a recent essay, "Cultural Jurisprudence" (Asian Pacific Law & Policy Journal, 2013). In short, we have been thoroughly Americanized according to the racialized, utilitarian bourgeois standards of the industrialized metropole.

Of course, the entire ideological state apparatus, including the military-police, court and prison system, was systematically crafted by the U.S. colonial administrators for surveillance and repression of those unruly natives, as proven by Professor Alfred McCoy's research, Policing America's Empire. Incidentally, Professor McCoy has also documented the role of the pro-U.S. military in the People Power revolt against Marcos in 1986 and the subsequent coups against Corazon Aquino marked by the assassination of radical militants Rolando Olalia and Lean Alejandro.

Duterte's cabinet reflects the conjunctural alignment of class forces in society today. Vice-president Leni Robredo represents the Roxas-Aquino oligarchy which (except for Robredo, whose victory is now challenged by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's patron) lost the May elections. Except for three progressive ministers, all the officials in Duterte's Cabinet are pro-U.S., chiefly the Secretary of Defense General Delfin Lorenzana and the Foreign Affairs Secretary Alfredo Yasay.

More revealing of Duterte's retrograde bent is the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) Eduardo Ano, the notorious architect of summary killings and abductions of activists in the last decade. He is the prime suspect in the kidnapping of activist Jonas Burgos, among others. The party-list youth group KABATAAN called Duterte's appointment of this bloodstained general a signal for more massacres of civilians, forced disappearances of critics, and military occupation of the countryside. This is in pursuit of U.S.-inspired counterinsurgency schemes launched from the time of President Corazon Aquino and intensified by the Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo and Noynoy Aquino regimes.

Like General Fidel Ramos, who succeeded Corazon Aquino, all the military and police officials in the Philippines follow U.S.-ordained training, ideological indoctrination, and political goals. Their logistics, weaponry and operating procedures are transplanted wholesale from the Pentagon and U.S. State Department, following treaty regulations. Military aid to the Philippines rose during the Carter and Reagan administrations in support of the beleaguered martial-law Marcos regime. From 2010 to 2015, the US military aid totalled $183.4 million, aside from other numerous training and diplomatic exchanges, for example, the active presence of CIA and FBI agents interrogating prisoners at Camp Crame police headquarters.

Given the massive archive of treaties, ideological control, customary habits, and various diplomatic constraints, only a radical systemic change can cut off the U.S. stranglehold on this neocolony. At least, that's a first step in changing people's minds, dreams, and hopes.

Will President-elect Trump water down Obama's "Asian pivot" in view of his isolationist impulse, instead of allowing Duterte to assert a more "independent" foreign policy?

That remains to be seen. As of now, there is no real sign of a foreign invasion from China or anywhere else-it's the U.S. that has re-invaded several times. There's no sign of a brewing confrontation in the South China Sea today. The threat to the global capitalist system comes from the masses of oppressed workers and peasants, women, Lumads, and especially the formidable forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which Duterte has to address by diplomatic means before long. From Marcos up to Noynoy Aquino, for over four decades now, the Moro people have resisted total subjugation and genocide. It would be foolish, if not suicidal, for Duterte to persist in implementing a militaristic approach-unless the U.S. (via his generals) needs to dispose of surplus weapons following the imperatives of the profiteering military-industrial complex.

For all his braggadocio and macho exhibitionism, Duterte is unable to halt the attacks of the dwindling Abu Sayyaf group, the al-Qaeda-inspired gang of kidnap-for-ransom Moros in Basilan and Sulu. Like drug addiction, the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of a deep and widespread social and political cancer in society. Studies have shown that its followers have been paid and subsidized by local politicians, military officials, businessmen, and even by U.S. undercover agents. Only a radical transformation of class-race relations, of the hierarchy of power linked to property and economic opportunities, can resolve the centuries-long grievances of the BangsaMoro peoples.

Will you address Duterte's crackdown on drug dealing and drug use, the one thing about him people in the U.S. are likely to have heard about?

This is probably the only issue that preoccupies the infotainment industry eager for high ratings/profits. The international media (e.g., Telesur, Al-Jazeera, UK's Guardian, CNN worldwide) does not allow a day to pass without headlining or commenting on the new "killing fields" in the Philippines. The New York Times, December 7 issue, devoted a long elaborate video/print special to this topic, in English and in Filipino (at YOUTUBE) entitled "They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals." This equals in visual power the TIME report "The Killing Season: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs" (October 10) that provoked Duterte's wrath. Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and social media have blanketed the atmosphere with Duterte's EJK performance.

Right now, however, reports of Russian meddling in the US elections have marginalized Duterte's antics, overshadowing even the horrible wars in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. We might have a reprieve on the carnage in that remote outpost of the Empire.

The New York Times reporter Daniel Berehulak counted 54 victims of police raids in the 35 days he accompanied the guardians of law-and-order in the urban complex of Metro Manila.

Filipino addicts and small-time pushers inhabit impoverished squatter areas in suburban Caloocan, Pandacan, Tondo, outside the gated communities of the rich in Makati or Forbes Park. As of now, the total victims of police and vigilante violence of Oplan Tokhang (the rubric for the drug war) has reached 5,800 suspects killed: 2000 by the police, the rest by vigilante or paramilitary groups. According to the Philippine National Police (PNP) headquarters, there have been 35,600 arrests that netted 727,600 users and 56,500 pushers. Duterte himself initially said he will kill another 30,000, enough to fill the waters of Manila Bay and to make funeral parlors thrive. This represents a new level of ruthlessness that has converted the country into "a macabre house of mourning."

Most of the victims are part of the vulnerable, marginalized sectors of society. Curtailing their basic rights to a life of dignity, denying them due process and equal treatment under the law, will surely not solve addiction. Everyone recognizes that Duterte's plan is an insane program of solving a perennial socio-economic malady. Scientific studies have shown that drug addiction springs from family and social conditions, contingent on variable historical factors. Only education in healthcare, a caring and mutually supportive social environment, as well as support from government and health agencies, can reduce the havoc wrought by this epidemic. Not by stifling human lives, no matter how damaged or dysfunctional. But as we've remarked, the hegemonic norms of a class-divided society do not allow this consensus to prevail.

So is there another motive or underlying purpose behind this terrible war against drugs?

Surely there is a larger political intent: dividing your enemy, splitting communities, demoralizing the angry citizenry. To some degree the climate of fear and terror has sown animosities among members of the middle class, and incited antagonisms among the lumpen and ordinary citizens toward the relatively well-off and those who welcome authoritarian policies and security in exchange for liberties. Meanwhile, the police ride roughshod over everyone, and so far there is no sustained legislative or court opposition to the relentless executive coercive power behind this unconscionable outrage.

Karapatan chairperson Tinay Palabay has acutely seen through the smokescreen of this drug campaign: the State's program to pursue counterinsurgency under cover of a hitherto well-meaning campaign. The AFP has labelled national-democratic militants as drug suspects, such as the case of anti-mining activist Joselito Pasaporte of Compostela Valley, Davao.

Under cover of the drug war, Oplan Bayanihan, the counter-insurgency low-intensity war of the AFP, proceeds in the form of civic action-peace and development programs. During Duterte's 100 days in office, Palabay's group has documented 16 victims of political murder, 12 frustrated killings, two cases of torture, and nine victims of illegal arrest and detentions, mostly involving indigenous peoples in Sumilao, Bukidnon, and farmers massacred in Laur, Nueva Ecija. As of December 12, the NDFP has documented 18 activists killed, 20 survivors of attempted assassination, and 13,000 persons victimized by forced evacuations from their homes. Consider also 14,000 cases of schools, clinics, chapels and civilian infrastructure being used as military barracks in violation of peace agreements in respect for human rights signed by both the government and the revolutionary NDFP.

Irked by Karapatan, Duterte has vowed to kill all human rights activists. His agents are already doing their best to sabotage and abort the peace talks. If he dares to carry out this pompous threat, he might drastically shorten his own tenure and stimulate the opposite of what he wants: mass fury against tyrannical rule and police-state barbarism.

What is the state of the revolutionary armed struggle that has been going on in its modern form since 1969?

As of last week, the revolutionary elan has peaked with huge nationwide mass demonstrations against Duterte's decision to allow the burial of Marcos in the National Heroes Cemetery. This has politicized millennials and a whole generation otherwise ignorant of the horrendous suffering of the people during the Marcos dictatorship. It has mobilized anew the middle strata of students, professionals, workers, women and the urban poor, as well as Lumads, Moros, and the peasantry who constitute the majority of the citizenry. The anti-Marcos-dictatorship resurgence has diminished Duterte's popularity, exploding the myth of his supposed incorruptibility and pro-change posture. It's more of the same, and even worse.

It's a mixed picture that needs to be viewed from a historical-dialectical perspective. While the size of the NPA has declined from about 25,000-30,000 fully armed guerillas in the 1980s to less than 15,000 today, its influence has increased several times. This is due to deteriorating socioeconomic conditions since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Thanks also to the immiseration of workers' lives and the pain inflicted by the vicious rampage of the military and police in the countryside. Large areas in Mindanao, Luzon and the Visayas are under the sway of partisan units of the NPA. Meanwhile, the MILF continues to preserve and defend its liberated zones from AFP incursions.

Meanwhile, the character of people's war has changed in its quality and direction. The shift to political and diplomatic tactics within the strategy of protracted war (following Mao's teaching) has made tremendous gains in organizing women, students, the urban poor, and Lumads.

Various cultural and social formations engage in pedagogical and agitational campaigns to expose the chicanery and deception of the Duterte regime. Not a single perpetrator of human rights violations has been arrested and punished, such as the soldiers guilty of the Lianga and Paquibato massacres, the murderers of personalities such as Romeo Capala, Fernando Baldomero, Fr. Fausto Tentorio, William Geertman, Leonardo Co, Juvy Capion, Rebelyn Pitao, Emerito Samarca, and hundreds more. Meanwhile General Jovito Palparan, who murdered many activists, continues to enjoy army custody instead of regular civilian detention. The scandalous "culture of impunity" is flourishing in the killing fields of the tropical neocolony.

Many disappeared activists (among them, Jonas Burgos, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, Luisa Dominado-Posa, and others) have not been accounted for by the State, while martial law victims and their families have not been indemnified. All these existing anomalies may explain the belief that given the corrupt bureaucracy and justice-system, the only feasible alternative is to join the armed struggle against the rotten, inhuman system. This is why the communist-led insurgency cannot be defeated, given its deep roots in the 1896 revolution against Spanish tyranny and the resistance against U.S. imperial aggression from 1899 up to the present.

What is your assessment of Duterte's overture to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the BangsaMoro insurgency?

As I noted earlier, Duterte's overture was hailed as a positive step to solve a durable, national-democratic insurgency dating back to the sixties, when the Communist Party of the Philippines was re-organized and the NPA founded. The peace talks began with Corazon Aquino's recognition of the role played by the underground resistance in overthrowing Marcos and installing her. Similarly, Duterte implicitly recognized the political traction of the left-wing representatives in Congress in the last few years. While Duterte welcomed the unilateral ceasefire declaration of the NDFP, lately he declared that he would not grant amnesty nor release any more prisoners unless the NDFP stop fighting and submit to the government's dictates. The severely punished prisoners are now pawns in Duterte's gambit to coopt the subversives. Duterte's mandate has been changed to: One step forward, two steps backward.

Duterte allows his military and police to terrorize the citizenry. No substantive reform of those decadent institutions has been carried out. Criminalization of political activities still continues with the AFP arresting Lumad teacher Amelia Pond and peace advocate John Maniquez, charging them with murder, illegal possession of firearms, etc.-the usual alibi of detaining activists which proved utterly barbaric in the case of the Morong 45 during Macapagal-Arroyo's tenure. Rape, torture, robbery, threat of assassination, and warrantless arrest of innocent civilians remain the State's formula for safeguarding peace and order in society.

No tangible step has been made to seriously confront the Bangsamoro insurgency-unless Duterte's attempt to cement his friendship with Nur Misuari, leader of the other Moro group, the Moro National Liberation Front, is a tactic to divide the enemy. That may be his Achilles' heel.

On this arena of diverse antagonisms, with fierce class war raging all over the country, Duterte finds himself in dire straits. Sooner or later, he will be compelled to either defy the pro-U.S. imperialist hierarchy of the AFP and the fascist PNP if he is sincere in challenging the status quo, or suppress a rebellion from within his ranks. He has to reckon also with the opposition of the more entrenched, diehard cabal of the Ayalas, Cojuanco-Aquino, the comprador owners of malls and export industries, as well as the traditional warlords and semifeudal dynasties that depend on U.S. moral and financial support. That will be the day when Duterte's fate as "Punisher" will be decided. Meanwhile, the struggle for national liberation and social justice continues, despite the trumped-up charges inflicted on anyone denouncing Duterte and his friend, president-elect Donald Trump.-##

Andy Piascik is an award-winning author who writes for Z, Znet, Counterpunch and many other publications and websites. His novel In Motion was published earlier this year by Sunshine Publishing (www.sunshinepublishing.org).

White, Working-Class America: My Family of Addicts

By Susan Anglada Bartley

There is a pain that many of us hide, a truth that is hard to bear. It's a pain that starts slow, like a pin-prick, but flames into a fire that burns forever, until we are all consumed. We are a family of addicts. May I speak to you privately, family? White addicts and family members of addicts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and nationwide, especially those who voted for Trump, this is for you. As a fellow family member of multiple heroin​ addicts, I feel your pain, but family, hate will not heal our broken hearts.

Where did it start for your family? Was it your Brother, your best friend? Was it your beloved Mother? How long did you deny it? How much time, money, and energy did they steal? When did you lose your ability to trust? Can you ever regain it? What did you see that you can't unsee? Who did you lose that you will never, ever hold close again? How is the hole in your heart today?

At four years old, in 1982, I remember pressing my face close to the glass, making halos of steam on the inside of the window, staring out at my favorite Uncle-a brilliant, 30-something Irish-American man with shocking red hair, a man whose stories mesmerized neighborhood strangers. I waited for those stories, for days, for hours, for years sometimes. And there he was, waiting outside on a freezing winter day. He was not allowed to come inside the house because he was addicted to heroin and would steal everything we had. He stood out there waiting for hours, for days, through a whole Buffalo, N.Y. winter. He wasn't waiting for love. He wasn't waiting for justice. He was waiting for my grandmother to give him money to buy heroin.

Sometimes, when my Mother and Father weren't home, she let him inside the house. He came upstairs into her small room, talking her out of her social security check while I played with buttons on the floor. I waited for a wink, for a smile, for a flash of brilliance from his light blue eyes; I waited outside of his window for the day when he would break through his addiction, coming back to my childish heart, which revered him.

Anyone who really knows heroin knows that he never really did come all of the way back. He came back in fits and rages; he came back in bouts; he came back in moments of extraordinary storytelling; he came back in strums of his guitar; he came back in calls from jail; he came back from prison; he came back to life from suicide; but there was something in him that stayed far, far away forever.

And I still fucking miss him.

And that wasn't the whole story. The whole story is too hard to paint with a poetic brush. So I'll say it this way. They were a band of brothers living in Detroit during the Vietnam era. Due to one-eyed blindness that runs in the males in my family, they avoided the draft. Their Father, an Irish alcoholic who was an amateur boxer, horse-trainer, and expert auto-upholsterer before being fired from every auto-plant in the city of Detroit, was murdered and thrown in a ditch when my Mother was 18. At that time, the brothers fell deep into the Hippie Movement in Detroit, they all took up guitar; they were all taken by the needle.

When I was six months old in 1978, my Uncle James Fitzpatrick died of an aneurysm while battling heroin addiction. My Uncle Kearney, after fighting and playing with heroin and other opiates for the past thirty years, died an addict a few years ago. My beloved Uncle who waited outside the window, attempted suicide two months ago, and continues to battle with depression while managing his relationship with methadone and other substances.

Lately, I hear a new rhetoric about addiction--many Black and Latino writers say that the new efforts to remove the stigma of addiction are racist. In a 2016 PBS article, critical of Obama's campaign to end the national opioid epidemic, Judy Woodruff writes, "Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans." When I read Woodruff's words, which I know are true, there is still a part of me that asks does she really know what it is like to have a family member live and die in addiction? She must not really know because if she knew the reality of living with family members addicted to heroin, she could never speak against the work being done to destigmatize it.

The answer, though, is yes, she does know. F​or Woodruff and other Black and Latino family members of addicts, along with addiction, they also face the brutality of a system that incarcerates and kills their family members on a systemic level. Where I had thirty years, off and on, with two severely addicted Uncles, Black and Latino people actually faced the pain that we are feeling right now, while also experiencing racial hatred in society, and taking all of the stigma and shame of the beginning of our society's addiction only to see that now that their loved ones are dead or in prison. We want to take off the mask and ask for compassion for our pain.

When I think of all of you tonight -- family members of opiate addicts in a nation facing unprecedented levels of addiction in almost every state -- I want you to know that I truly feel that pain that you experience on a daily basis. What I need to say is that, statistically, it is evident that many of you also voted for Donald Trump. Have you thought about the way that he appeals to that last shred of pride in you, that part that hasn't been taken by your addiction, or your family member's addiction to opiates? Have you thought about the way that, in a moment when you and your family were hurting, he came along to say what you needed to hear--that you, your family, and your country could be great again?

I know the blindness that heroin causes in families of addicts. Are you unconsciously blaming Black and Latino communities for the presence of heroin and opiate-based pills, when really Big Pharma is profiting off of working-class whites like you as you vote a man to power who will boost their corporate reach, making a killing off of your family and friends?

Dig deeper. Those of us who have survived ancestral legacies of addiction must come together to unite against hate, despite the pain that we feel. We cannot blindly follow an individual who is promoting Nazis while promising us a stronger economy. Be honest. Seek the healing that you need as an individual; don't sacrifice your humanity for the promises of a rich executive who wears a mask while stabbing you and your loved ones in the back. Love yourself more. Love your faith more. Love your country more. Reject the hate machine of Donald Trump.

Susan Anglada Bartley is an activist, writer,​and teacher in Portland, Oregon. She earned her B.A. from NYU, and her M.Ed from Portland State University. She was awarded a National Education Association H. Councill Trenholm Human and Civil Rights Award in 2013 for her work to end racism in public education. She presented her work on Systemic Barriers to AP and IB Courses for Black, Native American, and Latino Students, and co-presented with Pedro Anglada Cordero, MSW on Invisible Fences: Removing Obstacles for Latino Students at the Teaching for Social Justice North West Conference and at the Evergreen Education Association Diversity and Social Justice Conference. She has published articles with Artvoice Buffalo, Literary Arts Portland, The National Education Association Magazine, NEA-Ed Votes, and The Hampton Institute: A Working Class Think Tank.

"How Much Do You Cost?": A Story of Sexual Neo-Colonialism

By Sonasha Braxton

I'll start at the beginning. Here is who I am…I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here…Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. I consider myself African by nature, American by nurture.

Once upon a time when I was 21 years old, I was a student at United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya. It was my first time in Africa. I had been there about for about two months, when I was out at a bar with my friends, very close to the campus. My friends and I were all college students, and dressed accordingly so. I walked myself to the bar and took 200ksh out of my pocket to buy my myself a beer. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was a Caucasian male in his late 40s with scraggly hair. This man was slightly out of place in a college bar, but not an unfamiliar sight in the Nairobi nightlife. The music was blaring. I couldn't hear him well, but he seemed to be pointing to another corner of the bar and making motions towards the beer I had already ordered. I side-eyed him and shook my head. Whatever it was I wasn't interested. I had what I came for. He tapped me on the shoulder again and motioned for me to bring my ear closer to his lips so he could tell me something without yelling. I sighed and conceded, bending down slightly. "My friend would like to buy you a drink," he said. I, beer already in hand, raised my beer and pointed to it. "I'm okay! I just bought myself a drink, but thanks!" I sashayed away back to my friends, and started dancing.

Scene 2. I was thirsty again. I walked back to the bar. The same 40-something white man with the scraggly hair was there. This time he stood up directly in front of the space I thought I would be able to squeeze into the bar. "My friend wants to buy you a drink! He wants to meet you!" he yelled, again pointing over to some dark corner. At this point somewhat curious, and one Tusker in, I replied "why can't your friend talk to me himself?". "He's shy," he responded. Amused that we had reverted to middle school interactions, and half expecting him to deliver a paper which said "will you go out with me" with "yes", "no" and "maybe" as boxes to check, I became curious. I thought, maybe his friend is a cute 20-something Kenyan banker, a gorgeous 30-year old Ugandan lawyer… I thought, who knows. "He's right over here" he insisted. I said "ok" and followed him just a few steps away from the bar, to a high top in the corner. The friend was an unattractive 50-something Caucasian- American. He greeted me, shook my hand, asked my name, and where I was from. I answered, recoiled my hand, said "nice to meet you, but I'm going to go back to my friends". He motioned for me to join them. I shook my head and hustled back to the table where my friends were.

Scene 3. Last drink. Same man. Same spot. Same question. Same refusal. Followed by the question, the first of many of the same design, with different accents, languages and configurations, that I would hear often while living in Kenya, "my friend wants to know how much". I said, "how much what?", totally confused. "My friend wants to know how much it would cost for him to sleep with you?". What happened next, is somewhat of a blur. I know that a fury engulfed me. I remember walking outside. I felt like I was suffocating. I remember coming back. I remember using a lot of expletives. But what I will never forget is how the situation was resolved. I was asked to leave the club… I was told I was making too much noise. I was disturbing business. This was not the last time something like this would transpire. It would go on to happen in Djibouti, and in Ethiopia, and in Ivory Coast. I Black woman, minding my own business, sexually propositioned by he, White man with a few dollars in his pocket, was at fault for disrupting a totally unacceptable and disrespectful attempted "transaction".

Since this first occurrence back in my 20s, I have learned to contain myself somewhat better, to learn to listen for the response to the question I now pose genuinely curious, "what makes you think you can buy me?". I have heard everything from "oh I'm sorry…I thought you were from (insert country here)" to "everything can be bought"; everything equally as insulting. All that these answers have amounted to is this, "as a Black woman, your body is a commodity, that I as a White man, have the right to purchase it/you". While this is a personal narrative, I do not share this burden alone. It becomes important as it makes the case of what I will call "sexual neo-colonialism", a legacy of the exploitation of the bodies of women of color. If we understand neo-colonialism, as the last stage of imperialism, as did Kwame Nkrumah, as its most dangerous stage; as a stage in which sovereignty is only a façade and that power is used for "exploitation rather than development", than we must too understand neo-colonialism as the most dangerous stage not just for the "developing state" but for its people, particularly its women. The African female whether in diaspora or continental stands to lose her sovereignty, and too be exploited, rather than space intentionally made for her to develop herself the way she sees fit.

Colonialism left in its wake the destruction of pre-colonial political, social and economic systems in which women ranked highly, and replaced them first with "native authorities" exclusive of women followed by clientele-patronage systems, which too excluded women. Women often lost tremendous power during the colonial period as well as economic autonomy. This resulted from women's exclusion from the global marketplace and new reliance of women's unpaid labor. Customary laws developed under colonialism and inherited from Europe, disadvantaged women favoring men. They accorded particular rights to men, such as the right to testify in trials, that were closed to women. Women were removed from power as heads of associations often with the final say over market or agricultural disputes, and replaced with men[1]. Simply colonial rule restructured family, sex, gender and sexuality by creating legal mechanisms to control women's positions in society, positions in their families, and expressions of their sexuality, for the sake of White Western capital.

The trickle-down effect of the disempowerment of the African woman has also emboldened the White hetero male to assume his place in the hierarchy of African affairs is one of superiority, and one in which any Black woman continues to be for sale. This is further reinforced often by the colonial mentality, the internalized colonialism of many members of African society, which favors and in fact protects unfettered white male hetero sexuality and promotes its unbridled exploits. It is this internalized colonialism, in actuality, the reaction of those around her, that asks the Black woman either to suppress her reaction to verbal sexual violence totally, or to react within the confines of what white hetero-males have sanctioned as polite gender normativity; to smile and say "no thank you", to gently brush away prodding hands, to repeat "no" quietly, avert our eyes, and meekly insist that we decline such advances. This internalized colonialism of its witnesses says she is "overreacting", when she yells, pushes away, tells, or even says no firmly. It says that "well, most other women would have said yes".

Someone will say that this will stop when African women stop having relationships with such men. Someone will say that when these women, who may find poverty less miserable than sex with the occasional dream peddling foreigner, simply say no, then all African women will stop being objectified. To which I would respond that until the system that has systematically underdeveloped not only Africa but the entire Global South, a system which has destroyed indigenous spirituality and replaced it with a White savior both hanging in the homes of its believers and walking the streets as sex tourists, is dismantled, then Black women, Brown Women, all women of color, will continue to be harmed by it.

This returns me to my story. The man in question was an American. There was no question of impoverished conditions. I clearly stated that I too was American, but this did not prevent the proposition, nor has it on multiple occasions. I, due to the intersectionality of my race and gender, was considered a commodity, buyable, and expendable. I am not the only woman of color who has had such an experience. I often exchange stories with my expat women of color friends, who have often witnessed and experienced the same. The globally internalized white hetero male superiority complex and systemic inherited exploitative North-South relations that support the continued effort to colonize, conquer and commodify the woman of color's body, as an economic enterprise, must necessarily change, and sexual neo-colonialism, must be destroyed and at last put to rest….

So I will finish at the beginning. I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here. Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. But, "How much do I cost?"…I am priceless. We are priceless. Not even on the auction block were my ancestors' souls for sale.