My late father was born nine days before New Year’s Day in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression to the son of a slave who fled the Jim Crow South for the Midwestern job market near the turn of the last century. The old man worked so much when I was young--by day making engine blocks at the Chrysler factory on Indianapolis west side, then as a night janitor cleaning up at a Nabisco cookie factory—that I seldom saw him during the week, and got to know him, really, by lazing with him on weekend afternoons in the tiny bedroom I shared with my older brother, watching him watch our small black-and-white television with a misshapen clothes hanger for an antenna.

What I remember, vividly, is how bone-tired he typically was, and while he seldom seemed to actually sleep, he laid there on my brother’s twin bed, still as a stone. But no matter how weary he appeared, he would sit up, with a start, whenever either of two people materialized on the miniature screen, scramble to his feet, and approach the chest-high, unfinished pine dresser upon which the tv was perched. Then, leaning in close as though he was either half-blind or hard of hearing, he would cheer them on, mumbling unintelligibly and laughing, almost maniacally, in that guttural, baritone howl of his that seemed to rumble through his body and the ground below.

One was a funny, fast-talking boxer I later came to know as Muhammad Ali, and the other was a bearded, cigar-chomping soldier who spoke with an accent. His name was Fidel Castro. My Dad seemed so happy to see both men that I remember wondering if my father knew both men personally.

His affection for Castro and Ali endured until he died nearly 15 years ago. When I was a teenager in the early 1980s during the Reagan era, I remember asking my father once why he liked Castro so much. At once the coarsest and gentlest man I have ever known, my father smiled slyly, raised the middle finger of his right hand to me, and said: “Because Casto has been doing this to the white man for 20 years.”

Like most African-Americans of his generation who were radicalized by post-war independence movements at home and abroad, my father was politically astute if formally uneducated. And having endured practically every humiliation a man could suffer at the hands of other men, he found some measure of redemption in Castro’s triumph.

“Cuba,’ says the narrator of the splendid 2007 documentary Cuba: An African Odyssey, “was living proof that David could beat Goliath.”

Thumb through the photo album of Africans’ global struggle for dignity and self-determination over the past century, and you are bound to see the avuncular smile, the unkempt beard, the military fatigues, the half-bitten cigar hovering somewhere in the frame: from Angola to Zimbabwe, Maurice Bishop to Amilcar Cabral, the Black Power Movement to the Bolivarian Revolution, Castro’s Cuba has been the sun around which Black revolution orbits.

To be sure, a big part of my father’s fondness for Castro lay in the aesthetics, and the almost casual symbolic gestures that conferred upon Blacks a humanity that white settler states typically reserved for their own: the ease with which he checked into Harlem’s Hotel Theresa Hotel when none of the midtown hotels would have him; the warmth with which he would embrace Mandela, the ferocity with which he vowed to protect Assata Shakur, or how comfortable he appeared in the company of Malcolm X, as though the two were childhood friends who’d bumped into one another unexpectedly at the neighborhood barber shop.

And then there was his fearlessness; Castro didn’t just confront the villainous rogues gallery of white settler villainy, he taunted them, like schoolyard bullies put on blast: Reagan, Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, South Africa’s P.W. Botha.

“The history of Africa is at a turning point,” he said in 1987 after famously sending more than 30,000 Cuban soldiers to defend a key Angolan stronghold from an onslaught by U.S.-supported rebels and apartheid-era South African Defense Forces. “They will write about ‘before Cuito Cuanavale’ and ‘after Cuito Cuanavale’ because the power of South Africa, the whites, the ‘superior race’ has come unstuck in a little parcel of land defended by blacks and mulattoes . . .I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of apartheid.”

He was right. Not even three years later, South Africa’s white minority government freed Nelson Mandela from prison and rescinded its ban on the African National Congress, and three years after that, it was a wrap, when voters of all races went to the polls for the first time.

Years later, Mandela and others would point to the battle of Cuito Cuanavale as a turning point–and perhaps the turning point after the 1976 Soweto riots which revived a moribund struggle–because it demonstrated that the apartheid military was not invincible, and that the dragon, could indeed be slain.

As the South African writer, Sean Jacobs wrote in the Guardian newspaper after Castro’s death:

The cold war ended a long time ago, but Cuba continues its involvement on the African continent, including training Africans in Cuban universities. During the Ebola outbreak in three west African countries, even Cuba’s US critics had to acknowledge the Cuban contribution to alleviating the crisis. At one point during the Ebola crisis, Cuba – a country with only 11 million people – had supplied the largest contingent of foreign medical personnel by any single nation working alongside African medics.

Despite its profanity, the hip-hop classic, One Mic, by the rapper Nas, has always reminded me of Fidel’s legacy:

I let this shit slide for too many years, too many times

Now I’m strapped with a couple of MACs, too many 9’s

If y’all n!gg@$$ really with me, get busy, load up the semis

Do more than just hold it, explode the clip until you’re empty

There’s nothing in our way,

They bust, we bust, they rush, we rush

Lead flying, feel it, I feel it in my gut

That we take these b!tche$ to war, lie ‘em down

Cause we stronger now, my n!igg@, the time is now

This was Castro’s essence. In the context of a global revolutionary struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, it was Castro’s deeds, not his words, that explain his towering iconography, and imbues it with meaning; that explains why the very thought of Castro animated my weary father with a pride, and a joy that I seldom saw, and why across the world today, the people of African descent, as much as anyone, are celebrating the centennial of his birth.

Sixteen years ago, I attended a panel discussion in Harlem with a delegation of Cuban women who were in New York City for a United Nations conference. The mostly-Black crowd was welcoming for the most part—there was one father who reported that his daughter had just graduated from a Havana medical school without buying so much as a single textbook— but there was one middle-aged Black man who angrily demanded the panelists explain why racism still existed in Castro’s Cuba.

After a rant about his personal experiences during a trip to Cuba, one of the women took the microphone, and as best I can remember, politely said:

“It is true that there is still racism in Cuba. We have not quite managed to eliminate in 50 years what has existed for 500 years previously. But having said that, I would say that with all its flaws, Cuba has created the most socially advanced society in the world today, for women, and for all people of color.”

The room fell so silent that you could’ve heard the proverbial gnat piss on cotton in Georgia. A few weeks later, I had lunch uptown with a Black woman friend of mine who had attended the event, and we were discussing Castro, and how one of the things that most endeared him to Blacks was his acknowledgment of his failures, and his adherence to Amilcar Cabral’s dictum:

“Claim No Easy Victories!”

At one point, she said this:

“You know, going back to the (Brazilian) quilombos and the abolitionists, there have always been whites who have articulated a kind of class solidarity with Blacks. Here in the US we’ve got John Brown, and people like Marlon Brando back in the day. Black South Africans had Joe Slovo, and Caribbean Blacks had Simon Bolivar. And (assassinated Swedish Prime Minister) Olof Palme was a great man.

But to my knowledge, the African Diaspora has never, ever, since the first white man stepped foot on the continent 500 years ago, seen a white man quite like Fidel Castro.”

Thirty years ago last month, South Africa’s Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, delivered the country’s most iconic public address since Nelson Mandela’s defiant speech from the dock at his 1964 trial on charges of sedition against the apartheid government. With then-President Mandela looking on, Mbeki commemorated the adoption of a new constitution that enshrined the rights of all South Africans and in doing so articulated a poetic, redemptive vision of a nation coming together after 48 years of white-minority misrule. He began:

“I am an African.

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter-day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightning, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope. The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld. The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-colored waters of the Lekoa, iGqili no Thukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito. A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!

I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result…

I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.”

When he had finished his address to Parliament, there was hardly a dry eye in the house, according to my predecessor as the Washington Post’s southern Africa bureau chief, the late Lynne Duke. And while I would go on to write critically of Mbeki’s neoliberal policies as Mandela’s successor, his address in 1996 cemented his reputation as an orator possessed of uncommon gifts. More importantly though, in acknowledging the Dutch and French emigrees—known as Afrikaners-- who introduced the apartheid government in 1948, Mbeki not only extended an olive branch to white South Africans but committed them to a nation-building project that would’ve quickly disintegrated without their cooperation.

It was a gesture born of both statesmanship and common sense. Had Mbeki pretended that apartheid never happened, both Black and white South Africans would’ve regarded his remarks as insincere. But as a practical matter, the new Rainbow nation would’ve never gotten off the ground without buy-in from a small yet influential minority.

By most any measure, post-apartheid South Africa has failed to deliver on its early promise, and squandered the momentum from Mbeki’s venerated address, known to this day as the “I am an African” speech. Thirty-two years after voters of all races went to the polls for the first time, the distribution of wealth remains the most unequal in the world, with whites’ living standards mirroring those of Canadians while Blacks’ are consistent with Zambians.

Notwithstanding that, Mbeki’s speech was a thunderclap that left the air crackling with energy, helping to cauterize South Africa’s racial fissures to give the country’s class project a fighting chance out the gate.

If only the white Left in the U.S. would borrow a page from Mbeki’s book, Americans might stand a fighting chance to withstand the relentless barrage of body blows delivered to the midsection of the working class in the dying days of Empire.

But central to the ethno-nationalist projects represented by both the U.S. and Israel is the suffering of the Other--be it African Americans or Arabs-- and European settlers who are far too preoccupied gazing at their own navels to articulate solidarity with the very people whom they fear competing against on a level playing field.

Consider three racially charged killings or court cases from the month of June alone. On June 1, a South Carolina jury acquitted an Asian merchant, Chikei Rich Chow, of murder for chasing and fatally shooting a 14-year-old African American boy, Cyrus Carmac-Belton, in the back after falsely accusing the teen of stealing from his convenience store. Eight days later, an all-white Texas jury sentenced a 19-year-old African American, Karmelo Anthony, to 35 years in prison for fatally stabbing a white teen at a high school track meet; Anthony said the stabbing was in self-defense. Six days after that, police in Senatobia, Mississippi opened fire on a car driven by a woman they suspected of stealing diapers from Wal Mart, killing a one-year Black toddler, Kohen Kartier Wiley.

A perfunctory Google search turns up few public statements on any of these cases from white and non-Black Leftists who have consistently criticized “wokeness” and identity politics as politically divisive yet fail to address the yawning racial disparities in virtually every aspect of American public life, including wealth, health, housing, education, jurisprudence and police shootings.

A partial list of high-profile white scholars and journalists who bemoan Black demands for racial justice but have so far remained relatively silent about the slayings of Wiley and Carmac-Belton and Anthony’s conviction by an all-white jury include Max Blumenthal, Norman Finkelstein, Christian Parenti, Kristal Ball; Ana Kasperian who proclaimed recently that she “doesn’t give a shit about race;” and Jimmy Dore who endorsed Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2021 acquittal on charges that he fatally shot two white men protesting anti-Black police violence in Wisconsin.

The author Catherine Liu did denounce Wiley’s slaying and Chris Hedges has referenced all three cases but with nowhere near the fervor that they have railed against wokeness and identity politics as wedge issues that fragment working lass movements. Liu has, in fact, insisted, rather bizarrely, that people are morally bound to largely ignore stories of trauma like those of Wiley’s, Anthony’s and Carmac-Belton’s.

Conversely, the Communist Party in the U.S. recognized the story of the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teenagers falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white sex workers aboard a train traveling through Alabama in 1931—as the spark the party needed to ignite a nationwide workers’ movement.

Similarly, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was also of the opinion that the Bolsheviks could not govern without ridding the proletariat of the ancient ethnic rivalries that were stoked by the czars in a cynical attempt to divide and conquer the more than 100 nationalities in a “prison-house of nations,” as pre-revolutionary Russia was often referred to. Tribalism re-emerged years later under Stalin but in the revolution’s formative years, bigotry was expressly forbidden, culture exalted, and self-determination in the form of republicanism encouraged.

Mbeki understood this, and his 1996 speech was an effort to strengthen racial solidarity in South Africa in preparing to retool society. The roles in the U.S. are reversed, with an African American minority population that is the aggrieved party. And while South Africa has failed, abysmally, in reconstructing a functional Rainbow Republic, Mbeki’s oratory 30 years ago stands as a stark example to America’s white Left that fails to comprehend that their Blues aren’t quite like ours; that you cannot simultaneously collaborate with allies and gaslight them; and that if grassroots political movements are a lot like pushing a stalled car uphill, 50 million African Americans might be encouraged to lend a hand if there is something in it for us.

Between 1865 and 1900, every state below the Mason-Dixon line experimented with biracial political coalitions that enjoyed varying degrees of success in expanding public education, building hospitals, extending transit lines, hiring Blacks for civil service positions, reforming tax laws and the criminal justice system. The turning point, however, was President Hayes’ withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederacy in 1877 to deliver on his promise to southern Democrats who supported him in a tight election the previous year. That effectively left Blacks unprotected from white lynch mobs such as the 500 gunmen, known as Red Shirts, who descended on the prosperous, all-Black South Carolina town of Hamburg in July 1876 just a few months before the presidential poll.

Led by Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, who would go on to a 24-year career in the U.S. Senate, the gang killed seven Blacks in a bid to intimidate African American voters and dismantle the biracial state government that had created opportunities for Black and white workers alike. Stuffing the ballot box, the Democrats reclaimed control of the state, introducing the period of violent repression known as Jim Crow. Tillman and 93 other Red Shirts were charged but never prosecuted, and later as a U.S. Senator, Tillman boasted that “the leading white men” ... had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.”

It was in this charged political atmosphere that my grandfather, James Jeter, was born in Union, South Carolina, in 1884. Some dates are unclear but he was almost certainly born to a freedman, and was likely part of the first wave of the Great Migration, fleeing political violence in South Carolina for the industry of the North, moving first to New Jersey and then to Indianapolis, where he found work at Link-Belt, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, cranes, excavators, and material-handling equipment. My father described him as a tough old bird who, while not affectionate, loved his kids, of whom he bore eight—burying two of them—along with his first wife, Lula Mae Cohen, who, I was always told, was born to a teenage girl who was raped by a white, South Carolina physician.

I only remember my paternal grandfather from photographs; he died in 1966 when I was a year old.

I knew my maternal grandfather, Ray Shannon, much better. He was born in Kentucky in 1905, I believe, and died in 1998 at the age of 92. He must’ve moved to Indianapolis for work as a teenager, and like James Jeter he buried his first wife, leaving him to raise five kids on his own, During the Great Depression, he was one of the few African Americans to catch on with the Works Progress Administration. But because there was no public transportation, and no whites in the neighborhood to give him a ride, he had to walk from the historic Haughville neighborhood on Indianapolis’ West Side to reach his job site on the northeast side. I remember him as a kind but stoic man who loved professional wrestling and baseball and worked until the day he died at the age of 92, which is probably why he was built like a bantamweight boxer.

My mother likes to tell the story of rushing him to the emergency room in his last days and the doctor asking him a series of questions—name, age, year—to evaluate his mental acuity. Then he asked: “Who is the president?’ My grandfather replied unhesitatingly amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal; ‘I don’t know but he’s in a whole lot of trouble.”

My father, I remember, adored his father-in-law, and the two would often talk for hours on the porch at his house. I do not know what they spoke of , although I know my father was a keenly political man who seldom discussed sports for more than a few minutes. I remember watching the evening news broadcast or reading the Indianapolis News and asking him who was Salvador Allende—“he’s sort of like Chile’s Martin Luther King,” I remember him saying—or about apartheid or why Iran abducted hostages from the U.S. embassy? Other than in an argument with my mother or cursing out a white gas station attendant who accused my father of giving her a $10 when he had given her a $20, the angriest I ever saw my father was watching a morning newscast of President Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran—“now that fool Reagan is sure to win!” I recall him saying—and again months later when Ben Vereen donned blackface at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. (Twenty-five years later I would see Vereen in a Manhattan department store and had to resist the temptation to at least slap him across the face.) After my father died in 2011, my big sister told me that he had volunteered for the United Autoworkers to transport U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy from the airport to his hotel, presumably during a stop on his presidential campaign.

It wasn’t until years later that I contextualized my old man’s politics as part of a radical Black working class tradition, and he and both my grandfathers as emblematic of African masculinity in a white settler Republic that exists to emasculate them, daily, and rob them of dignity, or failing that their lives. I remember a police officer pulling my father for a traffic violation in downtown Indianapolis when I was 6 or 7. I remember bawling my eyes out because I knew, even at that age, that the police shot and killed Black men, particularly downtown.

The 1-year-old Mississippi toddler, Kohen Wiley was born into a Deep South that is every bit as violent and anti-Black as the one my Grandfather, James Jeter, was born into 142 years ago. And the Louisville police that fatally shot Breonna Taylor in her bed while she slept six years ago are no different from the white lynch mobs that killed David Walker’s entire family near Hickman, Kentucky in 1908 when my maternal grandfather was 3 years old.

I write today to pay tribute to my father and my grandfathers not because they were extraordinary but because they were not. The sacrifice made by Black fathers over a period of 400 years is a tribute to their warrior spirit, brilliance, moral grit and stamina.

I take nothing away from fathers of other tribes but no one in America has endured what African American fathers survived and remain standing tall, though certainly battered and bruised and perhaps most importantly, slandered by a settler Republic that simply cannot co-exist with men such as James Jeter, Ray Shannon and Cecil Jeter.

I’m here to testify.

And it is my fervent hope that in however many days I have left on this earth, I can do my part to redeem the reputations of Black men who, through nothing more than grit and guile and grace, stared down a genocide to raise their children

.

Anticipating the United States’ assassination program in Iraq 25 years later, the FBI’s “surge” targeting the Black Panthers began with the 1968 murder of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton, escalated sharply with Richard Nixon’s election and culminated nearly a year later with Fred Hampton’s execution-style slaying in Chicago on December 4, and the attack four days later on Panthers’ headquarters in South Central Los Angeles, marking the debut of the Special Weapons and Tactics unit, or SWAT.

But if Nixon hoped that violence would dissuade whites from collaborating with Black radicals to protest the Vietnam war and bite off increasingly larger chunks of gross national product for workers’ wages, his plan backfired, at least in the short-term. Three weeks after Hampton’s assassination, nearly 300 mostly white activists attended an emergency War Council called by the Weathermen, the militant cell that splintered from the Students for a Democratic Society. Squeezing into a Flint, Michigan dancehall for three days, the council concluded with a decision by the Weathermen to go underground to elude the FBI’s widening dragnet, and to turn up the heat with guerilla attacks targeting the state.

Five months later, in May 1970, the Weathermen released this communique to the press:

“Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn. I’m going to read a DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR ... Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we’ve been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way. ... Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikán injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people. Never again will they fight alone.”

That same month, New York magazine published a startling story written by Tom Wolfe entitled Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, illustrated with a cover photograph of three glamorous white women in evening gowns raising their gloved fists in a Black power salute à la Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Wolfe’s account of a lavish fundraiser for 21 jailed Black Panthers held at the composer Leonard Bernstein’s tony Upper East Side townhouse was a novelistic treatment of the event, which made no pretense of objectivity and deployed an Oscar Wilde-like sensibility in its rendering of what unfurled inside Bernstein’s home. Its poetry notwithstanding, however, Radical Chic was a hissing broadside that took aim at the white limousine liberals who would support Black militants. Abandoning the standard “who, what, when, how” journalistic framework to vilify the left-leaning sympathies articulated by Bernstein and his guests, Wolfe mocked the Panthers for everything from their afros to the manner in which they spoke to their apocryphal shakedowns of Jewish merchants, and dismissed white solidarity with African Americans as nostalgie de la boue, the French phrase meaning “nostalgia for the mud.”

“God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events. ... But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve-endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status. Deny it if you want to! Nevertheless, it runs through every soul here. It is the matter of the marvelous contradictions on all sides. It is like the delicious shudder you get when you try to force the prongs of two horseshoe magnets together ... them and us...

Yet, if Wolfe’s reportage was intended to isolate the radical Black Power militants who were the vanguard of the revolution, then Gail Sheehy’s two-part series that appeared in New York magazine five months later took dead aim specifically at the African American men who were its most visible ambassadors. Centered on the trial of 12 Black Panthers for murdering one of their own in New Haven, Connecticut, Sheehy’s article, The Agony of Panthermania, was published in the November 16th, 1970, edition of New York magazine, and purported to interrogate the relationship between New Haven’s Black middle-class, and the Panthers’ “bad n!$$ers.” According to Sheehy, Black men in the Panthers were often addicted to heroin “chipping a little ... under the skin of [the] knee” ... they were overly sexual, had low IQs, and were overly concerned with cool headgear and fancy cars. Sheehy even mobilized the motif of the emasculated Black man “desperate to claim his manhood” fixated entirely on “ego and sex.”

In one passage, she recounts an exchange between John Huggins—the Panther who was killed in a 1969 shootout on the UCLA campus with a rival organization—and his father who was a proud member of New Haven’s Black bourgeoisie.

“I’m thinking of heading out to California to UCLA,” came the call to his father from Lincoln University where John was a restless freshman. “I’ve got to do something for my people.”

“They’re not your people!” The father’s voice thickened then as it does today, with scorn for what he calls the Negro downtrodden. “I know a lot of them, laying about with their hands out, and they’re no damn good.” New Haven was where John belonged, the father insisted, where his powerful friends would bend over backwards to pass out opportunities.”

In retrospect, Sheehy’s Orientalist narrative can best be understood as a counterrevolutionary crowbar that is used to pry apart the racial solidarity that was the engine of American industrial prosperity for roughly 40 years between 1935 and 1975. Similarly, you can draw a straight line between Sheehy’s Agony of Panthermania to the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, both of which depict Black men as unfit to participate in public life. In 2020, for instance, the sports journalist Jemele Hill tweeted:

“I have increasingly found that many black men just want better access to patriarchy. They don’t actually want it dismantled.”

Hill’s assertion stands in stark contradiction to the former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, who said in a 2016 interview:

“When our Black Panther movement began in the mid-60s ... the women’s liberation movement in the white community began and they were assuming that our pattern was their pattern ... that they had domination by powerful men and that women have to be liberated in this little context ... we didn’t have that context. What we needed to be liberated from was racism.”

Published in 1989, Ms. Crenshaw’s seminal paper on the subject of intersectionality seems to prove this point. She begins by recounting a 1976 lawsuit, DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors, in which five African American women alleged in federal court “that the employer’s seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against Black women. Evidence adduced at trial revealed that General Motors simply did not hire Black women prior to 1964 and that all of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a subsequent recession. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, rejecting the plaintiffs’ attempt to bring a suit not on behalf of Blacks or women, but specifically on behalf of Black women.”

Curiously, Ms. Crenshaw does not present an iota of evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that institutions led by African American men endorsed the court’s decision. In fact, the leading organizations that focused on workplace discrimination, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Congress of Black Trade Unionists, expressed support for women both on the shopfloor and in the community. Since 1982, the CBTU has sponsored an annual all-day conference for the expressed purpose of increasing the number of African American women in union leadership positions, and in 1976, the very year that DeGraffenreid was filed, the organization came within a hair of passing what would’ve been a transformative piece of legislation guaranteeing a job, at union scale, to every able-bodied man and woman in the country.

This is entirely consistent with the history of 20^th century labor organizing that birthed the civil rights movement. When the NAACP formed a special unit to investigate the wanton sexual assaults of African American women in the South, there is no evidence that Black men were anything but supportive. Similarly, when African American women at the RJ Reynolds tobacco manufacturer in Winston-Salen decided on an impromptu work stoppage in 1943, they had the full support of Black men, with 38-year-old James McCardell declaring “If these women’ll stand up for their rights, I’m with them,” before keeling over dead from a stroke. Similarly, plant managers appealed to another Black man, Robert Black, to speak to the women. He refused, saying:

“Now, Mr. Whitaker, you want me to go over there and speak for the company. I’m not going to do that. I’ve got a wife working over there. Just to let you know how I feel about it, we’re going to close down this plant. I think it’s wrong for me working in Number 64, with my wife over in Number 60 trying to better her condition with all those other people. I’m going to send word up and down this five-floor factory and in thirty minutes we’ll have everyone of those machines at a standstill.”

Any critical analysis of Ms. Crenshaw’s work has to conclude that it is not scholarship but fabulism, similar to the cartoons and op/eds published in the Raleigh News and Observer in the spring and summer of 1898 leading up to the Wilmington race massacre. The massacre was intended to derail an interracial political movement, the Fusionists, that was redistributing financial resources downward to workers in the form of road and school construction, farm subsidies and tax relief. With no cards to play, the Democrats created out of whole cloth, the image of Black rapists who were preying on white women. Said the white writer Rebecca Felton at the time:

“If it requires lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand (Negroes) a week if it is necessary.”

Sheehy reprised Felton’s role 72 years later in hopes of defusing the Black Panthers’ growing appeal—like the Black Fusionists before them-- to a wide swath of white workers, triggering what one scholar, Michael Staub, described as a “moral panic” among the nation’s plutocrats and their vassals in the media who were frantic to quarantine an outbreak of class-consciousness. If you are old enough to remember, scroll through the photo album in your mind’s eye and what do you see? The Dirty Harry franchise debuted in 1971, Death Wish in 1974, Rocky in 1976, all portraying the honest white man locked in mortal combat with the Black criminal or showboat, reminiscent of the Wilmington rapist. In the 1981 classic Alien, the only thing more menacing than the extraterrestrial on board Sigourney Weaver’s spaceship was Yaphet Kotto’s character demanding overtime pay to repair the vessel. The 1985 movie, The Color Purple, introduced the idea of Black men as the source of all that is wrong in the world, while The Cosby Show responded that the African American community could prosper and live happily ever after if only Black men surrendered their rage a la Heathcliff Huxtable. By the late 1980s African American women had begun to jump on the white supremacist bandwagon with the scholar Bell Hooks joining Donald Trump in his withering denunciation of the Central Park 5, Oprah Winfrey and, of course, Crenshaw.

Befitting a class project, it has struck me that the African American women who subscribe to intersectionality are either of the professional comprador class or aspire to it. And if I can offer a word of advice, it would be that provided recently by a Kenyan friend, Penina Mwaura, who said to me:

“Do African American women think they can save the Black family, or the Black community by only saving women?”

Dear White People:

Can we talk?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the apocalypse is nigh, that the fire next time is closing in on the Republic, and that the ship, in the immortal words of Michael Ray Richardson, “be sinking.”

With Iran administering a whooping to the Trump administration’s backside, causing the worst energy crisis in history, and potentially an economic downturn that eclipses the Great Depression, some among you may even have begun to suspect, as Malcolm X famously admonished, that:

“You’ve been had! You’ve been took! You’ve been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!”

It should be apparent, at least to the critical thinkers and honest actors among you, that the problem was not, as Ronald Reagan said 45 years ago, Cadillac-driving welfare queens or affirmative action, nor was it the super predators that Hilary Clinton conjured out of whole cloth 15 years later, nor is it DEI, critical race theory or that mother of all boogeymen, “wokeness” that is invoked by both conservatives—such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—and leftists—such as former New York Times’ reporter, Chris Hedges—alike.

It was you!

Similar to a classic film noir, it sounded good when the femme fatale was giving you a tug job and whispering in your ear that the two of you could run off together with her abusive husband’s fortune if only there was some way to get rid of that fat bastard. But as you sit on death row waiting for the axe to fall you realize that you got played for a fool and are soon to be just as dead as the sucker you killed.

How did you get here?

Let’s review:

Ninety-two years ago this month, dockworkers on the West Coast threatened to strike if shipowners did not raise their hourly pay by 25 cents to $1 and replace the daily shape-up—in which a company pit boss handpicked the stevedores to work that day, often in exchange for a kickback—with a hiring hall where the union controlled the hiring process. If the strike had any chance of success, however, the longshoremen would have to take African American dockworkers up on their longstanding offer to integrate the whites-only-union, the International Longshoremen Association, or ILA. Dating back to the freedmen, Blacks understood Jim Crow as their employers’ strategy to pit workers against each other and begged whites to allow them into their unions so they could fight together. When the ILA went on strike in 1916, for instance, the shipowners merely hired African American stevedores as scabs until the white picketers relented.

At the nadir of the Great Depression, it had finally dawned on white longshoremen that doing the same thing and expecting a different result was indeed the definition of insanity. Their boycott could only work if they admitted Blacks into their shop to prevent them from crossing the picket line. According to the late African American journalist, Thomas Fleming, co-founder of the Bay Area’s African American weekly newspaper, the Sun-Reporter, the job of messenger fell to an Australian dockworker and former Wobbly named Harry Bridges.

“Bridges went to black churches on both sides of San Francisco Bay and asked the ministers: could he say a few words during the Sunday services? He begged the congregation to join the strikers on the picket line, and promised that when the strike ended, blacks would work on every dock on the West Coast.”

On May 9^th, 1934 at 8 p.m., longshoremen walked off the job at all Pacific Coast ports between Seattle to San Diego and within two days, the strike clogged up nearly 2,000 miles of coastline, tying up nearly 100 ships in San Francisco’s ports, leaving tons of perishables to rot in the summer sun. A few Blacks seized on the opportunity to earn a paycheck, but the strike survived the shipowners’ attempt to forcibly reopen the ports including a July 5^th assault by police that left three strikers shot, two fatally. Strikers named the July 5^th clash “Bloody Thursday,” but did not surrender the fight, calling for a general strike in the San Francisco Bay Area that began on the morning of July 16th, 1934, shutting the city down for the most part.

The 83-day strike ended with the longshoremen agreeing to arbitration, resulting in a coastwide contract, wage increases, a reduction in workloads, and a hiring hall that was jointly controlled by the employers and the union but with a dispatcher chosen by the union who effectively tipped the balance of power in favor of the employees. Also, as part of the deal, African Americans insisted on a “last-shall-be-first” hiring process in which longshoremen who had gone jobless the longest moved automatically to the front of the line the next shift. The historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying:

“Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners, against the raiders and all our enemies.

The 1934 strike became a template for the Congress of Industrial Organizations that formed the following year for the explicit purpose of integrating organized labor, ultimately creating the densest and most prosperous middle class ever.

That would begin to unravel 40 years later when Wall Street executives proposed a takeover of New York City’s finances to erase a huge budget deficit. The financial control board that emerged would become not only a model for the nation but for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs which demand that sovereign borrowers slash government spending on health, education and the environment to free up taxpayer money to repay usurious loans that are, in fact largely responsible for countries’ budget deficits.

But before Wall Street investment bankers could implement their insidious plan they needed buy-in from powerful public unions in the city such as AFSCME District Council 37, led at the time by Victor Gotbaum. Financiers like Felix Rohatyn and Citibank CEO Walter Wriston made a concerted effort to woo Gotbaum, meeting with him regularly in their office suites during the summer of 1975 to discuss the finer points of finance over contraband Cuban cigars and top-shelf cognac. Eventually Gotbaum agreed to Wall Street’s cost-cutting concessions and sank nearly $2 billion of his employee pension funds into the city’s bonds, paradoxically incentivizing his union to champion cuts to the city’s heavily Black and Puerto Rican workforce.

Within three years, the employees’ pension fund had invested 38 percent of its assets in municipal debt, leading DC 37 ’s rank-and-file to joke that Rohatyn and Wriston had given Gotbaum his “white man’s wakeup call,” or that if the bankers planned to seduce the leadership of the municipal unions into betraying them, they’d certainly chosen the “white man for the job.” Others suggested printing T-shirts that read: “Vic and Al Got Blow Jobs; Now we got NO jobs.”

In choosing a “white” identity, Gotbaum helped Wall Street to lay off Blacks and Puerto Ricans, transferring wealth upward, fleecing New York’s macroeconomy of its buying power, culminating in today’s dystopian Gotham. Bridges on the other hand, identified as a “worker” helping transfer wealth downward and imbue the West Coast with enough buying power to buoy a booming consumer economy. Testifying before Congress after the 1934 strike, Bridges said of the rebranded International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU:

“It’s also a union that recognizes that from time to time it’s got to stand up and fight for certain things that might not necessarily be just wages, hours and conditions: civil liberties, racial equality and things like that.”

As one example, African Americans looking for work in the shipyards during the war often found housing in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood. Invoking eminent domain, the city’s redevelopment agency began razing thousands of “blighted” homes in the neighborhood shortly after the war ended, eventually forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity that sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights. Bridges’ second-in-command at the ILWU, Lou Goldblatt, had a thought:

“There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn’t be used to build some low-cost housing.^”

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks—out of a total of 60—that the city had set aside for affordable housing construction. In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs:

“I’ve just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square ... and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in ... and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon.”

The first draft of her story arrived in my email inbox two years ago this month, landing, if memory serves, in the still of night, like a prayer, or perhaps a premonition, the mechanical chime from my laptop jarring me from a light sleep.

I snapped to attention, scrambled the few feet to my laptop, and eagerly clicked open the file. A freelancer of Palestinian descent, Malak Silmi’s previous work for Al Jazeera English Digital--essentially the media outlet’s Western-facing online newspaper--had impressed me and so I was eagerly anticipating her delivery of a good yarn describing in granular detail the season of Ramadan in Detroit’s large Arab community five months after Israel began its siege of Gaza.

What she delivered was not a yarn but a revelation, as finely wrought as any prose I’d ever edited in a journalistic career that dates back to 1985 when I interned at the Tallahassee Democrat.

After a few tweaks from me, Malak’s story began:

Dearborn Heights, Michigan, the US – For most of her life, Yasmeen Hamed has been an observant Muslim. But by her own admission, she did not often wear the hijab in public. She was hardly an apostate - here in this Detroit suburb, the Palestinian American mother of four is known for her charity work caring for gravely injured Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation, and she did don the hijab at the mosque – but she stopped short of complying with the religious edict requiring women to wear the veil at all times in public.

But then the images from Israel’s siege of Gaza began to unspool across her phone screen and she found herself traumatized by the violence and its unimaginable scale, yet also drawn to the religious devotion of the embattled Palestinian women continuing to wear their bloodied and tattered prayer garments – known as an “isdal” or “toub salah” – even at night in the event that they are killed in their sleep.

If their grief saddened Hamed, their grace – their nobility – inspired her to rededicate herself, fully, to the Islamic faith that she had held at arm’s length, if only slightly, for most of her 46 years. And so, on the first day of Ramadan this year, she put on the hijab that symbolizes both her strengthened faith in Islam, and her solidarity with her sisters in Gaza.

Now, with Ramadan coming to an end, and Israel’s bombs continuing to disfigure the Palestinian landscape, Hamed prays harder, and more often, and she reaches for her hijab whenever she leaves the house just as reflexively as she does her purse.

“With what’s happening in Gaza, you’re questioning your mortality,” she told Al Jazeera in an interview at her home here in Dearborn Heights. “I didn’t want to die not wearing the hijab. When I was younger I used to say, ‘Oh, I’ll be more religious when I get older. I’ll go to Hajj when I’m older. I’ll put the hijab on when I’m older’ and well, I’m older now.”

Across the United States, Ramadan is different for Muslims like Hamed this year.

Traditionally a celebratory time of fasting, feasting and charity, Islam’s holy month of worship has been a far more sombre affair since it began on March 10, nearly five months to the day after Israel began its bombardment and blockade of Gaza.

The killing of more than 33,175 Palestinians and the wounding of another 75,886 have transformed Ramadan’s typically joyous atmosphere into one that is more spiritual, more emotive, and more thoughtful as Muslims in the US contemplate their relationship to Allah, and each other, amid a genocide so horrific that it has destroyed not only entire households and city blocks, but entire bloodlines by some estimates, meaning that there are no survivors bearing the family’s name.”

I finished editing the story at the end of my shift on the first Friday in April of 2024. When I returned to work the following Monday, an email from Al Jazeera Digital’s Managing Editor, Carla Bower, awaited me. It read:

“We have to be careful not to fall into Orientalist narratives here and I think speaking of the grace and nobility of suffering Palestinian women crosses that line. It’s also unclear why, if wearing the hijab was a response to the war on Gaza, she waited until the first day of Ramadan. We say she was an observant Muslim, but then say she’d kept her faith at arm’s length. This is unclear but, more worryingly, seems again to be entering the territory of claiming that following one set of practices - or dressing in a particular way - makes someone more or less devout than others.

Contrary to Carla’s claims, the grace and nobility of Palestinian women enduring the wanton slaughter of their families is the very essence of good journalism, and it beggars belief that a white British woman would accuse—without any apparent hint of self-awareness—an Arab woman quoting other Arab women of Orientalism, a strategy of deflection deployed historically by the West, or Occidental world, to shift the blame for white settler exploitation from the colonizer to the colonized through dehumanizing, racist narratives.

There was nothing remotely racist or dehumanizing about Malak’s intimate portrait of Detroit’s Muslims. Indeed, the height of Orientalism, as I explained to Carla in an email, is a British woman whitesplaining to an African American editor why an Arab writer describing Arabs as “noble” is Orientalism.

Moreover, Carla had published another article concomitant with Malak’s. Written by a staff writer in Washington D.C., Ali Harb, the article also expounded on Ramadan in the killing season, but Ali’s prose was everything Malak’s was not, lacking in deep reporting, storytelling, feeling, energy, and even photos of any journalistic value. With all the elan of a police blotter, he wrote:

Washington, DC – Standing outside the White House, Mohamad Habehh placed his right hand on his face and closed his eyes in a sign of spiritual devotion, reciting the Muslim call for prayer.

“Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar [God is greatest, God is greatest].” The words announced the end of a day of fasting as dozens of people gathered last week to protest against President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and an iftar meal the White House was hosting for government employees.

The demonstrators had their own iftar outside, despite the gloomy weather that evening, breaking their fast with dates, a shawarma sandwich and a bottle of water.

“End the siege on Gaza now. Free, free Palestine,” the crowd chanted as the rain intensified, drenching a large Palestinian flag fluttering on the edge of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crimes.”

Their humble meal, preceded by communal prayers on the soaked pavement underscored the push by many Muslim Americans to prioritise Gaza activism during the holy month, which is normally a time of joy and reflection.”

With its exhaustive and even heroic coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Al Jazeera’s flagship Arabic channel was launched 30 years ago to serve a discerning and devout Muslim audience. Al Jazeera English, on the other hand, debuted in 2006 but with a far different agenda, representing a petition by the Qatari royal family that owns the media network to apply for membership in the club of European settler elites, or in effect to be “white.”

I worked for roughly 16 weeks as the Americas Desk Editor at Al Jazeera English Digital before I was fired in the spring of 2024 for consistently trying to produce stories like Malak’s when Carla much preferred the excrement vomited up by Ali. Never in my career—that includes stints at the Washington Post, This American Life and TeleSur Engish-- have I seen such a textbook example of what the Jamaican sociologist Charles Mills dubbed the “racial contract” in his eponymous, 1997 book. Because settler colonialism assigns a material value—an actual dollar amount-- to a white identity, and another lower figure to people of color, Mills asserts that whites essentially agree to misinterpret the world and help police people of color in exchange for the bag.

Similar to the African American bourgeoisie in the post-civil rights era, the Gulf monarchies—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar--also signed this racial contract, hosting a combined 19 U.S. military bases used to attack neighboring Iran, the largest of which is the Al Udeid Air Base southwest of Qatar’s capital city, Doha. On a recent podcast, Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst said of the region that Iran is now pummeling with drones and ballistic missiles:

“They are American assets…. Frankly, they’re no better than prostitutes, whores. They’re American whores. They take the money from America…they give money actually, just like with a pimp who runs a bunch of women on the street. The United States is the pimp. And these ladies all have to pay up. They pay up to the United States for ‘quote’ protection. You say, ‘Oh, we’re going to protect you.’ Well, how’s that worked out?

Iran’s aerial bombardment of the region lends clarity to my puzzling, short-lived tenure at Al Jazeera English Digital, that is for all intents and purposes, the media arm of Qatar’s failed bid to join the West in its subjugation of West Asia, befitting a kind of Arab meritorious manumission. With a few exceptions---most notably a coterie of Muslim editors from central and Eastern Europe who did not attend college in the U.S., and an African American Muslim writer—Al Jazeera English Online was a veritable rainbow coalition of brittle whites and Stepin Fetchit-like brown-face minstrels crying out in unison:

“We sick, boss?”

When, for example, I proposed that a gifted, young African American woman named Eden Harris write a story about the stunning commercial decline at Washington D.C.’s Union Station, my white subeditor, Allison Griner, chimed in that Eden was a terrible writer whom she had trouble editing in the past, forgetting, apparently, that she is the one who recommended Eden to me. Another white woman, Jillian Kestler-Amours, flatly refused to interview Montreal’s large Haitian community about a surge in violence in Port-au-Prince in early 2024, and instead produced an abysmal story on Quebec’s maple syrup production, five years after the New York Times published a much better story on the same subject (written, ironically by a Black woman of Haitian descent.) In August of that year, the aforementioned Ali—not only a mediocrity but a Muslim Uncle Tom-- published a story naming the three Green Party finalists to be Jill Stein’s vice-presidential running mate, none of whom was the actual choice, the Islamic scholar, Butch Ware. I have never seen published a story identifying three finalists for high office, and all three were wrong. The two African American women in HR gaslit my complaints with one, Lashawn Foust, who hired me, questioning whether Allison Griner was in fact my boss, rather than the other way around.

Conversely, a freelancer who had just been laid off by the Los Angeles Times, Leila Miller approached me just days after I started the job with a story she was hot to write: the New York Times correspondent in Mexico had recently written a story about the FBI investigating Mexico’s tremendously popular socialist president Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, for drug trafficking. Finding no evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI pulled the plug on the investigation, but AMLO called a press conference, taking the young Times’ reporter to task, inviting his supporters to express their displeasure, and releasing the newspaper’s local office phone number, a process I later learned was called “doxxing.”

“They murder journalists in Mexico,” she said with alarm.

They murder Mexican journalists in Mexico,” I responded, “Ain’t nobody going to touch a New York Times correspondent in Mexico.” Rejecting her pitch, I said:

“I don’t really understand why the Times would publish a story on an investigation that went nowhere. And it says something to me that the people are siding with AMLO and not the NYT.”

Leila was fit to be tied, and the following day, I reversed myself, offering a compromise: I would take the story if she did not gaslight the Mexican working class that supported AMLO and devoted three paragraphs to explaining their dislike of the New York Times and their devotion to AMLO.

Within minutes, she shot me back an email:

“No thanks.”

Six weeks later, I published a story by another freelancer, Jose Luis Granados Ceja—nicknamed Lucho—who I worked with briefly at TeleSur English, that accomplished what Leila had flatly refused to do, reporting from the ground up to explain AMLO’s iconoclastic appeal. In tandem with his upstart ruling party, Morena, AMLO had modernized Mexico similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformation of the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s.

Like Malak’s story, Lucho’s was a revelation: exhaustively reported and spectacularly written. Carla had not a mumbling word to say about it, however, but lots to say about a story I commissioned comparing the martyrdom of two white Americans, Aaron Bushnell and Rachel Corrie, 21 years apart.

Two days later, Carla wrote:

“Hi Jon

I have a few concerns about this story that I wanted to mention:
I feel it leans more toward an opinion piece than a news story. The tone is opinion-like and opinion would have been a more natural home for a story that aims to connect several cases across different times and places like this one. Making the connection between Corrie and Bushnell is quite subjective as is the connection between the Israel-Palestine conflict and race politics in the US. (I know that connection is often made in the US but I think it can read as a bit simplistic or lacking in nuance for an audience more attuned to the Middle East).

I tried to explain journalism to her like she was a second-grader rather than the managing editor.

“First, an opinion piece is written in the first-person and it’s intended to persuade the reader. A news article is written in third person and is intended to inform the reader about something interesting that is going on in the world, which in this case was the relationship between racialized groups and white allies who sacrifice their lives to alleviate the suffering of others. News articles often describe the differing opinions held by people because that builds the tension that is, in fact, an essential element of journalism.

Secondly, plagiarism is the appropriation of someone’s work as your own. You cannot attribute a passage to its author—as I clearly did-- and plagiarize. Any college freshman journalism student should know this.

Thirdly, the relationship between African Americans and Palestinians is not a matter of debate. Malcolm X championed self-determination for Palestinians as did the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (one of their members pulled a pistol on a Martin Luther King Jr. lieutenant who defended Zionism) and the Black Panthers. President Jimmy Carter’s African American Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was forced to step down for having back-channel communications with the PLO; the Palestinian resistance collaborated with Black Lives Matter protesters in Missouri following the police shooting of Michael Brown; one of the last poems written by Marcellus Williams, the innocent African American inmate who was executed by the state of Missouri in September, lamented the genocide in Gaza, and only days before he was killed, Yahya Sinwar compared anti-Black racism in the U.S. to anti-Arab racism in the occupied territories.”

No serious journalist would ask questions such as those raised by Carla who sees a relationship between African Americans and Palestinians as threatening to the white settler project that is wholly responsible for her vaunted position in Al Jazeera’s newsroom.

Qatar’s royal family gambled that the West—with Israel riding shotgun--would continue to run roughshod over West Asia for the foreseeable future. On the monarchy’s behalf, Al Jazeera English Digital bet the house on these inert narratives that continue to contextualize the white settler as the gold standard of everything that is good in the world.

It was a bad bet, and Iran is here to collect.

More than a decade before grassroots activists in Minneapolis last week accused an Atlanta pastor of trying to hijack a nationwide consumer boycott that they organized, demonstrators on the ground in suburban St. Louis described a high-profile Black Lives Matter protester as a dilettante who was attempting to do the same to their movement to avenge Michael Brown’s 2014 slaying by a white police officer.

In a series of texts complaining about the BLM activist, DeRay Mckesson, a grassroots Ferguson organizer, Darren Seals wrote in 2015:

Seals, who was later murdered in a case that remains unsolved, went on to slap Mckesson during a public confrontation, and in retrospect, that thwack was to African Americans what the first shots fired on Fort Sumter in 1861 were to the Civil War.

Nearly a generation after the election of the country’s first Black President, Barack Obama, the class war within the African American community has reached its zenith, as evidenced by last Wednesday’s news conference at the National Press Club in which Reverend Jamal Bryant, pastor of the New Birth Baptist Church in Atlanta, abruptly canceled a boycott against Target in response to the Twin Cities-based retailer’s decision last year to abolish the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that corporate executives committed to in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

That prompted a second press conference later that same day outside Target’s headquarters on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis where the boycott’s local organizers—Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Racial Justice Network; Monique Cullars-Doty, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Minnesota; and Jaylani Hussein, exxecutive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations—asked essentially:

By what authority did Bryant presume to end their boycott?

In language that was nearly identical to Seals’ 2015 texts lamenting Mckesson’s activism, Hussein told reporters:

“The Target boycott continues. It began right here in Minneapolis, and it will continue until Target restores its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion and addresses the concerns that communities raised.”

In an open letter to Target’s CEO, Levy Armstrong wrote:

“The authority to end this boycott does not belong to individuals who did not start it.”

Far more emphatic, however, were the denunciations of Bryant on social media.

“Pastor Jamal Bryant is out of his cotton-pickin’ mind,” read one Facebook post.

“You don’t get to tell Black women that the boycott is over,” read another on Bryant’s Instagram page. “You don’t speak for us!! Period!”

And another:

“This ain’t no game!

You ain’t from here, never lived here, have no connection or nexus to anything remotely close to the organizers, and were called out so tough that you had to admit that you didn’t start the Target boycott. And you still actin’ a donkey.

You know this is recorded history, right... Ya’ll will be remembered for this. SMH”

Fueling the vitriol is the growing sense by poor and working-class African Americans that their estrangement from the Black bourgeoisie has widened exponentially in the 18 years since Obama was elected president.

“There seems to be an ongoing and ever-growing chasm between the leadership and the led,” Dr. Wilmer Leon, political scientist and host of Inside the Issues on SiriusXM Radio told me in a phone interview. “And that begs the question: whose interests are really being served here?

While Bryant vehemently denies it, the clear insinuation is that Target executives paid the pastor to call off a boycott that they acknowledge has hurt the company’s bottom line since it began in February 2025. Leon, for instance, questioned why Bryant would propose ending an embargo before achieving any of its stated objectives, suggesting that Black social movements are more tepid today than they were 70 years ago.

“You don’t call off the dogs until you do what you’re supposed to do. We can’t engage in a boycott of Target without understanding the broader historical context that boycotts have played in the Black freedom struggle dating back to the Montgomery bus boycott.”

One social media post read:

“Target donated some money now u want to lift the boycott? All this means is ‘We’ can be bought for the right price.”

It’s not that class tensions didn’t exist in the Black community before 2008. Slaveowners famously favored their own mixed-race children who were produced from liaisons with enslaved women, as well as docile slaves who were occasionally offered meritorious manumission in exchange for their help in quelling plantation revolts. The proliferation of historically Black colleges and universities in the postbellum Reconstruction era deepened fissures between formally educated African Americans and their unschooled neighbors, and the relationship between Black workers and the Black elite worsened still, beginning with the Great Depression when organizations like the NAACP parroted their white liberal benefactors in discouraging collaboration between organized labor and communists.

Those class fissures, however, have escalated sharply since 1985 when conservative southern Democrats, led by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, launched the Democratic Leadership Council to compete with Ronald Reagan’s GOP for the votes of racist, white suburbanites. Four years later, a young California congressman named Tony Coelho resigned his seat to avoid an ethics investigation and went on to reinvent party fundraising by strengthening ties to Wall Street donors.

The shifts in electoral and fundraising strategies weakened the Democrats’ relationship to their traditional base of support, organized labor, and combined with deindustrialization to sever African American politicians’ ties to labor unions and Black workers. With nowhere else to turn, African American elected officials joined white Democrats in pursuing corporate money. That money, of course, came with strings attached.

Obama embodied this new quisling Black polity and his success heavily influenced a generation of Black politicians, including Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and surrogate for the 2016 and 2020 White House campaigns of Vermont’s U.S.Senator Bernie Sanders. Turner, who joined Bryant on the dais for his National Press Club news conference, has a strained relationship with Cleveland’s African American community largely as a result of her support for a Draconian school reform plan when she was an Ohio state senator.

“Bottom . . . line, Sister Turner ain’t doing her job,” said an African American Cleveland activist Donna Walker-Brown while leading a small protest outside Turner’s home in 2012. “Her job is to bring state dollars from (the state capitol) Columbus to Cleveland public schools.”

Also joining Bryant for his press conference was Tamika Mallory, a high-profile Black Lives Matter activist who was excoriated for appearing on stage at the 2021 Grammy Awards by Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son, Tamir Rice was fatally shot by a white police officer while playing at a Cleveland playground in 2014.

“Look at this clout chaser,” Rice wrote on social media. “Did she lose something in this fight? I don’t think so. That’s the problem. They take us for a joke. That’s why we never have justice cause of s*** like this.”

In an interview with reporters to elaborate on her social media post, Rice echoed themes sounded by Levy Armstrong last week in Minneapolis, and Seals in Ferguson in 2015, saying that activists like Mallory are “benefitting off the blood” shed by poor African Americans in the line of police fire.

“Who hired them to represent these families?” Rice said in the interview. “She doesn’t speak for us. If you were going to do anything you should have had the mothers on stage so they could speak for themselves.”

The question of authenticity also arose in 2019 when the hip hop icon, Jay-Z, was accused of hijacking former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest movement against police brutality by entering into a promotional agreement with the NFL. In response to a reporter’s questions about the deal, Jay-Z responded cynically: “I think we’ve moved past kneeling and I think it’s time to go into actionable items.”

Kaepernick’s girlfriend, Nessa Diab, responded to Jay-Z’s remarks in an Instagram post:

“We will never turn our backs on @kaepernick7 because your idols decided to work with the same organization that is actively keeping Colin unemployed all because he peacefully protested against social injustice in black and brown communities, specifically police brutality.”

In another post, she wrote:

“What is disgusting and disappointing is Jay-Z let them use him. Whether Jay-Z knew it or not (I don’t doubt his intelligence - so I would think he knew) he helped the NFL bury who he said is an iconic figure.”

Another NFL player, Eric Reid tweeted: “Jay-Z knowingly made a money move with the very people who’ve committed an injustice against Colin and is using social justice to smooth it over with the Black community.”

The defection of African American elites from grassroots movement politics represents an ominous inflection point. Could anyone, for example, imagine Jackie Robinson or Nat King Cole announcing an end to the Montgomery bus boycott without so much as consulting with Martin Luther King Jr?

In a social media post two months after he complained about Mckesson in a series of texts, Seals wrote:

“Millions and millions flowing through the hands of these organizations in the name of Mike Brown yet we don’t see any of it coming into our community or being used to help our youth. I’ve been calling out this shit for months […] People see this as an opportunity to not only build a name but make bank at the expense of the lives of people like me.

“BLACK DEATH IS A BUSINESS.”

The sun was beginning to set on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline nearly 40 years ago when Benson Nyaga called it a day at his clinic in the town of Malindi, just north of the port city of Mombasa. Wandering into a half-empty seaside bar, he struck up a conversation with a middle-aged German woman who was vacationing with her husband. Now 72, the Kenyan physician and pastor remembers the conversation vividly, mostly for the stunning confession the tourist made after she’d had a few drinks: like safari hunters in search of big game, she and her husband would go on the prowl each night hunting for young, willing Kenyans to bring back to their hotel room for sex.

“The husband would go looking for young (teenage) girls and the wife would go looking for young boys,” Nyaga told me. “You hear about this kind of thing all the time in Kenya, but this was the first time I had seen it up close and personal. Among Africans, the West has long had a very bad reputation for sexual degeneracy and so the Epstein affair is unsurprising for most of us.”

Six weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice released its latest cache of documents shining a spotlight on Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring and his relationship to a cabal of global elites, both the African street and news media have responded mostly with a mixture of indifference and resignation, despite revelations that link the disgraced financier to influential politicians and businessmen on the continent. Whether in barbershops or hair salons, bars or social media channels, morning newspapers or evening news broadcasts, revelations of Epstein’s misdeeds are of little interest here on the world’s poorest continent where the paramount quotidian concern is simply surviving the threadbare conditions.

“We don’t talk about Epstein to be honest,” said Elias Abay, 54, who lives near Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa with his wife and young son. “Most Africans, we’re just trying to get through the day.”

But for many Africans there is also the feeling that the Epstein documents revealed very little that is new about what they have always understood as a white, Western libidinal appetite so rapacious that feeding it requires something resembling human sacrifice. Few Africans would put it in these terms, but Epstein is further confirmation that while whites are almost infinitely wealthier, Africans are morally superior, and by a wide margin.

A 2006 UNICEF report, for example, found that three of every 10 teenagers on Kenya’s coast were “involved in casual sex for money…linked to an influx of foreign tourists.”

Of the town, Malindi, where Dr. Benson encountered the German sex tourist decades ago, a 2019 report by an international research organization, ENACT, wrote:

“In Malindi, expats – who, in many cases are also foreign investors – have been alleged to run sex rackets in close cooperation with existing local networks. In places like Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya, the underage sex trade is highly visible and it’s not unusual to see tourists soliciting underage girls on public beaches and in nightclubs. Tanzanian cities like Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Tanga are no different.”

Kenyan authorities strengthened laws protecting children against child sex trafficking in 2010 and in 2019 banned adoptions by foreign nationals following allegations of neglect and abuse. Among the Epstein files released in January are emails identifying Malindi as a haven for pedophiles from the U.S. and Europe mostly. In a 2009 email, a Manhattan publicist wrote to Epstein of her upcoming safari in Kenya:

“Can bring a little baby back for you....or two. Boys or girls? So Madonna. Will email when we get to Amsterdam.”

Continuing, she wrote:

“If the Masai warriors don’t eat us, the pirates from Somalia will. Coming to PB to see you in Jan. Taking photos. Will have a ball and think of you all the time.”

While written jokingly, the cartoonish depictions of Africans remind Kenyans, especially, of the European aristocrats who settled more than a century ago in this former British colony’s central highlands, where their feats of debauchery provided the backdrop for Karen Blixen’s 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, that was made into a 1985 Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

The libertines who comprised the “Happy Valley set,” as they came to be known, drove their African farmworkers hard by day, and partied harder by night to the point of scandal. Blixen’s husband infected her with syphilis, Lady Idina Sackville hosted wife-swapping soirées at her estate, often greeting guests as she bathed in a bathtub made from green onyx, and Josslyn Hay, a Scottish nobleman, was publicly horsewhipped by his married lover’s husband; Hay’s unsolved murder was later depicted in a Hollywood movie, White Mischief.

In her 2005 book, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Caroline Elkin wrote:

“Beyond such gentrified leisure, these privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance, followed by more of the same. In Nairobi, where some settlers lived a full time urban, professional life, they congregated in the Muthaiga Gold Club also known as the Moulin Rouge of Africa. They drank champagne and pink gin for breakfast, played cards, danced through the night and generally woke up with someone else’s spouse in the morning.

At the Norfolk Hotel, better known as the House of Lords, settlers rode their horses into the bar, drank heavily, and enjoyed Japanese prostitutes from the local brothel.

Outside of Nairobi part of the highlands became the notorious Happy Valley, where weekend houseguests were often required to exchange partners, cocaine and morphine were distributed at the door, and men and women compared their sexual notes when the debauchery was over. The colony’s settlers were notorious worldwide for their sexual high jinks, and the running joke in Britain became, ‘Are you married or do you live in Kenya?’”

“We grew up hearing these stories in Kenya,” said Duncan Andaje Cheto, 30, an unemployed engineer in Nairobi. “Lady Idina was among the first pioneers in Kenya and then the rest came to play…the likes of Epstein came in her footsteps and the structures she built. This is why Africans have always associated the European colonizer with sexual deviancy.”

This immorality, many Africans are quick to point out, is not innate, but the product of a colonizing culture built on enslavement, genocide and rape, all three of which are recognized as crimes against humanity. If you thrive in such an ecosystem, where precisely do you learn to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior?

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Florence Nyaoke, the country coordinator for an international non-governmental organization, Interconnected Justice, told me in a phone interview. Similar to the Happy Valley set, the players in the Epstein scandal took their cues from a system of exploitation.

“Capitalism told Epstein that he needed to accumulate more and more wealth so that he is the one on top and he’s the one calling the shots. At the same time, the young women he exploited were just trying to come up from a place of poverty, or they saw an opportunity to move up from poverty. We shouldn’t waste time questioning the human frailties of one man, we need to question the system that enables this exploitation and makes it virtually inevitable.”

And most telling, she said, was not the role played by powerful white men in Epstein’s sex trafficking but that played by white women who both failed to protect teenage girls from predation and even aided and abetted it. Similarly, she asked where was the community that allowed this to happen?

“When I was growing up, I was taught that children belong to the entire community and if I was doing something I shouldn’t have, I could get such a beating. When we live in capitalist spaces, we’re all so isolated. Someone from these girls’ community should have stood up and said, ‘who is this man, where are you going and what for?’”

Yet, she said there is something valuable to be learned from Epstein’s crimes and misdemeanors and she wishes there was more discussion of the matter among Africans.

“You know, Africans are taught to believe that what is different is superior. We are told constantly that white people have more intelligence and encouraged to align ourselves and our values with them.

Maybe now Africans will take a second look at who it is that we’ve been told to worship.”

No sooner had the Confederate soldiers fired on the Union fort in Charleston Harbor in the spring of 1861 than President Abraham Lincoln ordered a naval blockade of southern ports, cutting off Britain’s supply of cotton, shutting down nearly 2,650 textile mills in the northern city of Lancashire, and throwing tens of thousands of employees out of work.

The “Cotton Famine,” as it came to be known, produced horrific Dickensian streetscapes of hungry, shoeless children and painted ladies huddling under coal-gas lamps, serpentine lines for soup kitchens and relief funds, and the suddenly brisk trade in household goods at the local pawn shops. While the mill owners lobbied the Queen to recognize the secessionists across the pond, intercede militarily on behalf of the Confederacy, and revitalize the domestic textile industry, their employees gathered in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in December 1862 to talk it over.

In what I would argue is the greatest expression of whites’ solidarity with nonwhites, jobless British workers in Manchester gazed upon enslaved Blacks in Mississippi and saw neither the Other or a n!$$er but a coworker.

“We would rather perish,” they wrote that night in a letter to President Lincoln, “than be fed by slavery.”

The mill workers’ sacrifice is all the more stunning when you consider that 164 years later many whites on the political Left have joined with their conservative adversaries to denounce as polarizing even vague articulations of the profound racial disparities that characterize all aspects of American public life. In a 2024 interview with the author Christian Parenti, Chris Hedges, a former New York Times’ foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner, introduces the concept of “wokeness” thusly:

“Woke ideology is pervasive in liberal institutions, especially universities, but does it further or hamper the liberal values and inclusiveness it purports to advocate? It seeks to transform society through what Christian Parenti calls the ‘moralizing micropolitics of politicized etiquette.’ It is fixated on the politics of language and symbols, the sins of cultural appropriation and misnaming and calls for centering historically oppressed groups. It advocates identity politics, prioritizing race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation, physical disability, mental health diagnosis, immigration status and socioeconomic status over political content. Woke discourse, Parenti writes, is imbued with a therapeutic mentality expressed in safety-obsessed incantations about harm, trauma, healing care and doing the work. Personal struggles take precedence over political struggles but as Parenti argues, wokeness is deeply anti-intellectual endowed with a moralizing that draws a distinction between the politically clean and unclean, friend and enemy good and evil. It demands the censoring and cancelling of the politically incorrect along with books and ideas. Woke culture has displaced old-fashioned universalist class politics, the fundamental struggles over who produces wealth, how and for whom? It not only divides the working class but often serves the interests of the ruling class.”

Imagine now the British workers applying Hedges’ tortured logic to their plight in 1862. Might they have argued that it was rather the duty of the enslaved population in the Deep South to continue to suffer bondage so that their proletariat brethren in northern England might have jobs?

Speaking at a meeting in the spring of 1862, no less an authority on class struggle than Karl Marx told 3,000 trade unionists:

“The English working class has won immortal historical honor for itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on behalf of the American slaveholders by its enthusiastic mass meetings, even though the prolongation of the American Civil War subjects a million English workers to the most fearful suffering and privations.”

Owing partly to his experience as a war correspondent for the New York Tribune and Vienna’s Die Presse, Marx’s understanding of U.S. political economy was remarkably astute, and when the guns of war finally fell silent, he took a break from writing the first volume of Das Kapital to pen a letter to white American workers, urging them—out of basic self-interest if nothing else—to include the freedmen in their postbellum plans.

“An injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease. Let your citizens of today be declared free and equal, without reserve. If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood. The eyes of Europe and the world are fixed upon your efforts at reconstruction and enemies are ever ready to sound the knell of the downfall of republican institutions when the slightest chance is given. We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.”

It is hard to imagine Marx’s warning falling on deafer ears. What he understood—and white leftists such as Hedges, Parenti, Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Ball and others do not—is that racism is to the proletariat’s struggle what Kryptonite is to Superman, encouraging whites to identify with the bosses, their class enemies, rather than their coworkers simply because they are darker- skinned. In the aftermath of the Civil War, that meant, on a practical level, segregated labor unions pitting whites against Blacks; when one union walked off the job, employers merely hired the other as scabs until the strikers caved and relented in their demands for higher pay.

This enervating pattern held for nearly 70 years until the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, formed in 1935 for the express purpose of integrating workers of all races into a labor juggernaut that ultimately birthed the civil rights movement.

That ethos of interracial solidarity more or less created the singular achievement of the Industrial Age—a prosperous American working class—that ruled the roost for the next 40 years, seizing more than half of national income for employees in the form of wages. That coalition—tenuous as it was--only began to fray during the economic downturn that began as the bicentennial approached. Reagan finished it off by convincing even more white workers that Blacks—not the bosses—were responsible for their shrinking paychecks.

It was a sucker move, and the white proletariat, in the main, fell for it. As Reagan and then Clinton shifted manufacturing production overseas to lower wages, white workers were subtly instructed to take their share of gross national product from their Black co-workers instead of their employers, in the form of discrimination in the labor market, the growth of a prison industrial state that employed unskilled whites, and financial schemes such as payday loans and subprime mortgages allowing whites to leverage wealth accumulated over generations of homeownership.

The resulting racial inequities are, in fact, the germ of Americans’ discontent, and the anti-intellectualism lay not in identifying them but in denying their importance. As W.E.B. DuBois noted in his classic tome, Black Reconstruction, even on the terms established by monopoly capitalism, southern slaveholders could have exponentially expanded their wealth by freeing their slaves, paying them a nominal amount, then clawing it back in rent, food, and clothing purchased from general stores that they owned.

That financial arrangement is, ironically, precisely what radical organizations such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were fighting in their attack on slumlords and their championing of African American political control of their own neighborhoods in the early 1960s and 1970s. But in marginalizing Blacks even more, the post-industrial economy raises two questions that Hedges, Parenti and their ilk have no answer for:

First, how do you cut off Blacks’ buying power without adversely impacting whites’ buying power?;

And secondly, wouldn’t it be prudent for any working-class movement to focus on restoring African American buying power as the predicate for restoring everyone’s buying power?

Perhaps the anti-woke left will better grasp that they are being played for fools if they hear it from Marx rather than a simple darkie like myself. In a letter dated April 1870, Marx tendered an opinion of the “Irish question” for two friends living in New York that could easily have doubled as a diagnosis of America’s “Negro question,” with Irish workers standing in for African Americans and English laborers as proxies for their Yankee counterparts. He wrote:

“And most important of all! All English industrial and commercial centres now possess a working-class split into two hostile camps: English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker because he sees in him a competitor who lowers his standard of life. Compared with the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and for this very reason he makes himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland and thus strengthens their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ towards the ‘niggers’ in the former slave states of the American Union. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially sustained and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret which enables the capitalist class to maintain its power, as this class is perfectly aware.”

At one point in the first of their three epic heavyweight title bouts, Muhammad Ali whispered into Joe Frazier’s ear as the two fighters were locked in a clinch: “Boy, don’t you know you can’t whup me? I’m God!”

As Frazier recalled the moment years later, he smiled as the referee untangled them and replied: “Well, God is fittin’ to take an ass-whooping tonight.”

And with that, the smaller Frazier proceeded to pummel Ali, handing him the first loss of his professional boxing career.

War is no prizefight and yet Frazier’s retort to Ali in their 1971 title bout is an apt metaphor for Iran’s vigorous response to the belligerence emanating from Tel Aviv and the White House as both articulate the European settler’s version of a God complex.

From the barrage of ballistic missiles and drones raining down on Israel and U.S. military bases in West Asia, it would appear that God, once again, is fittin’ to take an ass-whooping.

While it is not a fait accompli--several scholars and journalists have opined that Israel’s deranged Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu might respond to Iran’s thrashing by launching a nuclear weapon—the signs so far point to a stunning setback that may augur the end of the West’s ethno-nationalist project.

If indeed the European colonizer does suffer a humiliating battlefield loss to Iran, however, it won’t be its first.

In December 1878, the British High Commissioner for South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere, issued an ultimatum to the Zulu King Cetshwayo, that was eerily similar to the Trump administration’s cynical demand that Iran dismantle its arsenal of ballistic missiles. Frere, for his part, ordered King Cetshwayo to dismantle the Zulu’s “military system” within 30 days; when the demand was not met—as the British knew it would not be-- three British columns, led by their commander-in-chief, Lord Chelmsford, invaded Zululand in January 1879, moving west to eat. Simultaneously, Cetshwayo sent his warriors to meet the invaders, advising them to “march slowly, attack at dawn and eat up the red soldiers.”

On January 22, 2,000 British soldiers were confronted by nearly 20,000 Zulu warriors at an isolated hillside known as Isandlwana. Wielding mostly spears, the Zulus killed 1,300 of the 2,000 British militiamen.

Anticipating Lord Chelmsford’s hubris, General George Armstrong Custer led nearly 600 of his men to their death on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory, when they encountered a band of nearly 3,000 Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. When indigenous tribes missed a federal deadline to relocate to reservations following the discovery of gold, the U.S. Army dispatched Custer and his 7th Cavalry to confront them. Rather than wait for reinforcements, Custer plowed ahead.

Custer’s Last Stand, as it came to be known, represented Native Americans’ most decisive victory in the long Plains Indian War, and the general’s name would go on to be ridiculed in cinema and standup comedians’ monologues as a synonym for muddleheaded recklessness. But similar to the Zulus’ victory at Isandlwana, the triumph at Little Bighorn did little to slow the advance of settler colonialism. Within five years, virtually all of the Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations.

The same cannot be said for the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which signaled the end of France’s colonial influence in Indochina.

In November 1953, the French occupied the mountain outpost on the Vietnamese border near Laos, hoping to draw Ho Chi Minh’s communist rebels into a decisive firefight, in which they would be overwhelmed by France’s superior artillery. Viet Minh guerillas quickly moved to cut off all roads to the fort, but the French calculated that they could resupply by air because the Viet Minh had no anti-aircraft capabilities.

They were dead wrong. Beginning in early 1954, 40,000 Viet Minh troops began encircling the French garrison, moving anti-aircraft weapons and other heavy munitions up hilly, muddy terrain. On March 12, the Viet Minh opened fire on 13,000 French soldiers. Two months later, France surrendered, leading to the end of French colonial rule, although the U.S. moved to fill the void.

The battle most relevant to Iran’s military campaign, however, occurred in the African winter of 1987, when Angola’s Marxist government launched a military offensive against guerrilla insurgents known by their Portuguese acronym, UNITA. Erupting only days after winning its independence from colonial rule, Angola’s internecine struggle was, from the start, a proxy for the Cold War powers, with the U.S. and apartheid South Africa providing the rebels with arms and logistical support, and Cuba and the Soviet Union doing the same for Angola’s armed forces.

The government offensive, however, threatened to break a protracted stalemate, routing UNITA’s insurgents from one stronghold after another, and driving them southeast towards the Namibian border that it shared with South Africa. Like most European settler states in the post-Vietnam War era, South Africa’s apartheid rulers were reticent to put troops in harm’s way for fear of a public backlash at home. But worried that Angola’s onslaught would overrun UNITA and make permanent the installation of a hostile, communist country on their doorstep, Pretoria made the fateful decision to send 9,000 soldiers to fight in the former Portuguese colony at the ocean’s edge.

On October 3rd, 1987, South Africa’s Defense Forces, or SADF, joined with UNITA’s rebels in a pitched battle that nearly destroyed an entire Angolan brigade attempting to cross the Lomba River en route to the town of Cuito Cuanavale, 25 miles away. That battle set in motion a series of crushing, battlefield losses that had the Angolan army on its heels as the African winter turned to summer.

And then the war took yet another turn; when Cuban President Fidel Castro heard of UNITA’s advances, he sent 30,000 soldiers into the fray, helping Angolan defense forces withstand assaults from the South Africans on January 23rd, 1988, a month later on February 25th and a month after that on March 23rd. These decisive battlefield victories enabled Angolan government troops to recapture the area of Southern Angola adjacent to the Namibian border, effectively encircling UNITA and SADF. Within three months of the Cubans’ arrival, the Angolan defense forces were able to build two airstrips near Cuito Cuanavale.

On June 27th, 1988, the South Africans made one final, desperate attempt to break the encirclement, but with their fighter jets unable to access Angolan airspace and their tanks bogged down by the mud from the rainy season, the ferocious Cuban reinforcements — many of them of African descent — teamed with Angolan troops to beat the brakes off both UNITA and the South African Defense Forces.

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a game-changer. So emphatic was Angola’s Cuban-aided victory over the forces of settler colonialism that it forced Pretoria to withdraw its troops from Angola and agree to Namibian independence from apartheid South Africa. Scarcely 18 months later, South Africa’s last apartheid ruler, President Frederik de Klerk, freed Nelson Mandela from jail and lifted the ban on the African National Congress. By 1994, South Africans of all races went to the polls to abolish white-minority rule.

Mandela would say repeatedly that the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was instrumental in the fight against apartheid because it demonstrated to South Africa’s Black majority that apartheid’s military was not invincible.

The dragon could be slain.

This is the context in which Iran is challenging the U.S. and Israel. Much like Ali in 1971 and apartheid South Africa 16 years later, both white settler Republics are past their fighting prime and poised to be toppled from their perch atop the world geopolitical order. And even if Israel doesn’t resort to the nuclear option, dark days are ahead for Iran and the world.

But if Iran succeeds—like the Zulus at Isandlwana, the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne at Little BigHorn, the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, and the Cubans and Angolans at Cuito Cuanavale—we, the people might at long last begin to free ourselves from the twin scourges of racism and monopoly capitalism, and the barbarism of the global Epstein class.

The war in West Asia has begun.

Equal parts Gulliver’s Travels and General Custer’s hubristic folly at Little Bighorn 150 years ago, there is a farcical quality to the Trump administration’s attack on Iran. But let there be no doubt that this conflagration is ultimately a Fanonian struggle, or perhaps better yet a Manichean battle with good and evil locked in mortal combat twixt and tween the Caspian and Arabian seas.

As paradoxical as it seems, there is grace in Iran’s shedding of blood. By rejecting Trump’s overtures to return to the negotiating table after the assassination of their Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, Iranians are signaling to the world that they intend, at long last, to end settler colonialism’s reign of terror by speaking the only language that the Epstein class—a we’ve come to know the global elite over the course of few weeks in February--fully understands:

Violence.

Indeed, it is difficult to fathom that Trump can politically survive a flagging economy and the inevitable procession of body bags returning to Andrews Air Force Base, eroding his support both among the 75 percent of Americans who oppose regime change in Iran, and even among his MAGA base that voted for him as a result of his staunch opposition to the Democrats’ policy of miliarism abroad. Similarly, it is difficult to fathom Democrats ginning up much enthusiasm with the electorate with their pro-war policies. Said former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman over the weekend:

“Interestingly, perhaps the strongest condemnation of the attack came from Donald Trump’s former cheerleader, Marjorie Taylor Green. But there have been other voices on the Republican side that seem to recognize that if this is not corrected, it marks the end of the American Republic and its constitutional aspirations.”

The war ahead won’t be any walk in the park. Iranians will lose innocent civilians, and we, here at home in the U.S., will lose servicemen and women-- Black and white and brown-- who only signed up for the military because they were poor. But as Malcolm X told us, there is no such thing as risk-free liberation, the cost of freedom is often death, and Iran’s sacrifice might help us to begin to heal a gaping scar that has disfigured the world’s humanity for half a millennium.

Nor will the changes happen immediately. As a delegation of Cuban women told a gathering in Harlem 16 years ago of the revolution’s inability to root out racism on the island, “we cannot eradicate in 50 years what has existed for 500.”

But in their defiance of the U.S., and their willingness to give as good as they get on the battlefield, Iranians are writing their own narrative, and communicating to the world that the dragon is not invincible, and can be slain, just as surely as 30,000 Cuban soldier landed in southeast Angola 40 years ago to mollywop South Africa’s anti-communist apartheid forces who were trying to overthrow that country’s Marxist ruling party. Cuba’s defeat of South Africa’s surging defense forces at Cuito Cuanavale rallied Black South Africans, augured the end of white minority rule, and sent a clear message to people fighting Western colonialism all over the world:

“We can take them!”

While Americans typically associate the Orient with easternmost Asian countries such as Japan and China, Europeans--the Occidental world--coined the term to refer to exotic Arab nations in West Asia and North Africa. In his eponymous, groundbreaking 1978 book, the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said described Orientalism as the epistemology of racism, or in layman’s terms, the study of the European colonizer describing the colonized for the sole purpose of qualifying colonization.

To be sure, Orientalism is not a good-faith effort intended to foster greater cultural understanding or awareness, but a deeply cynical endeavor calculated to alibi Western imperialism—and by extension white supremacy---by manufacturing from whole cloth lesser categories of humanity. Dating the practice as far back as France’s 1798 invasion of Egypt when Napoleon encouraged junkets by artists, writers, and anthropologists to re-imagine the Nile’s inhabitants, or to Orientalize the Orient, Said wrote of the famed French novelist Gustave Flaubert, for instance:

“Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess [her] physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental.’”

Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” testifies to Said’s theory, which is a staple of postcolonial studies. By both infantilizing and demonizing the typical Filipino as “half-devil, half-child” Kipling cheers on the United States’ campaign to annex the Philippines and nobly civilize the aboriginal menace. Similarly, the Hollywood director D.W. Griffith’s iconic 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, applies an Orientalist lens to his depiction of Black men as incorrigible rapists and drunkards whose loutish behavior doomed Reconstruction’s ambitious experiment to integrate the freedpeople into the mainstream of public life. And Orientalism continues to inform 21^st century cinema with films such as The Green Book, The Blind Side, Precious and the Butler portraying African Americans as intellectually bereft and spiritually adrift until rescued by white saviors such as Sandra Bullock or Viggo Mortenson, or mixed-race proxies such as Lenny Kravitz.

Not since Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, however, have we seen a book that traffics in Orientalist folklore quite like Steve Oney’s hagiography of white liberalism, On Air: The Triumph and the Tumult of NPR, a treatise that is spellbinding for its stupefaction.

Tracing NPR’s trajectory from its inauspicious debut in the early 1970s to tens of millions of listeners today, Oney’s is a Manichean account—whites good, Blacks bad—in which well-meaning broadcasters such as Terry Gross, Ira Glass and Rene Montagne have fought heroically, like modern-day pamphleteers, to enlighten the masses and inform American democracy, only to have their gallant efforts jeopardized at times by the hiring of grossly incompetent, lazy and careerist African American journalists.

On Air’s narrative is eerily reminiscent of Birth of a Nation’s deconstruction of Reconstruction, or, if I may paraphrase Gore Vidal’s critique of William F. Buckley’s prose, Oney’s reportage is perfectly fine as anything other than journalism. On Air is, in fact, not journalism at all but a compendium of inaccuracies—he misspells the name of the Washington Post’s longtime media critic, Paul Farhi, not once, not twice but thrice—and catty quotes from NPR staffers about their coworkers, often of the darker hue.

Of the African American foreign correspondent Sunni Khalid’s assignment to the Cairo bureau, Oney quotes a former deputy foreign editor, John Dinges:

“In that bureau you had to cover the intifada, but he wouldn’t go.”

Perhaps—and I am just spit balling here—because the combat stage of the Palestinian intifada ended in October of 1991 and Khalid did not start work at NPR until the following month.

Similarly, in a hissing broadside against NPR’s first African American vice president for news, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the namesake of the iconic Harlem pastor and Congressman, Oney writes that his father coined the term “Black Power.” He did not; the phrase was introduced into the national lexicon by Kwame Ture, née Stokely Carmichael, in late 1966.

Far more shocking than Oney’s sloppiness, though, is his total lack of self-awareness, resulting in shallow reporting that only serves to confirm his racial biases. Quoting Powell, Oney wrote:

“‘When I walked into work in July 1987,’” he recalled, “‘NPR had no—zero—minority hosts, correspondents, newscasters, directors, executive producers, or senior editors.’”

Continuing, he wrote:

“Neal came in,” he recalled, “and said, “ ‘Welcome to NPR, and you’ve got to get us out from under this court order.’” What followed was a discussion of the ruling that nearly a decade earlier directed the network to hire more Black reporters.”

I literally gasped reading the remainder of the chapter which took Powell to the woodshed without interrogating in any meaningful way the obvious racial discrimination that led to the court’s consent decree, undermined Powell’s leadership and created a black hole—pun very much intended—that characterized NPR’s employment of African Americans as late as the 1980s when even august media organizations such as the New York Times, ABC News, and my former employer, the Washington Post, had embarked on hiring sprees that by that time had produced editorial staffs that were approaching double digits in the percentage of minorities in the newsroom.

In Oney’s myopic, white liberal estimation, however, Powell was not the solution but the problem, his efforts to diversify NPR’s newsroom were hamstrung by quotas, the unqualified African American journalists he tried to hire or promote, and a distant management style that white reporters found off-putting. Oney wrote:

“A year into the job, Adam Clayton Powell III was regarded as the most enigmatic executive in the history of NPR news. He seemed, if not indifferent to the network’s primary functions—journalism and programming—at the least too distracted to get involved in the particulars.”

Oney was dismissive of Powell’s explanation that he was a corporate executive—as opposed to an editorial manager—and as such was tasked with the newsroom’s overall strategy, similar to a newspaper’s executive editor, who leaves the day-to-day decision-making largely to a managing editor.

When Powell did try to shape NPR’s daily news coverage, Oney found his news acumen underwhelming, holding up to ridicule, as one example, his suggestion that NPR send a reporter to interview Assata Shakur, the Black radical who broke out of prison and fled to Cuba after an all-white jury convicted her of fatally shooting a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. Shakur, who died last September at the age of 78, referred to herself as an “escaped slave” and was a deeply polarizing figure in the U.S., particularly in the Reagan era. Yet Oney seemed to agree with the foreign editor’s baffling view that there would not be much interest in a Shakur interview. And then, in what may be the most stunning display of white arrogance and lack of self-awareness that I have ever witnessed—on par with Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates whitesplaining that African American deaths from police chokeholds could be attributed to an anatomical defect—Oney writes that Powell failed at NPR not because of racism, but because he didn’t know how to be Black, as evidenced partly by his first marriage to a white woman.

“The consensus was that having grown up the son of fabulous but self-involved parents, then marrying into a wealthy family that due to race and class was on some level impenetrable, Powell—for all his poise and gifts—was a man apart. In fact, he didn’t seem comfortable in his own skin. How could he have been, when following his parents’ divorce, Adam Jr. remarried and sired another namesake, Adam Diego, who eventually changed his name to Adam Clayton Powell IV? ‘I came to think of Adam as incredibly well educated and well spoken,’ Conan recalled, ‘but he was not grounded. He didn’t know who he was. He was a chameleon.’”

I should acknowledge at this point that I have ample skin in the game. If I recall correctly, I met Powell 25 years ago when I was the Washington Post’s South African bureau chief and a gaggle of Black journalists who had either worked for him at NPR or knew of him by reputation invited me to a dinner in his honor when he was visiting Johannesburg. Among the African American journalists who feted Powell was Nolu Crockett-Ntonga—née Phyllis Crockett--who Oney mentions only in passing in the book. Powell had named Nolu NPR’s first Black national correspondent in 1988, covering the White House and winning the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy award the following year for her three-part series “Black Men: Lost Generation?” that explored the accelerating death rate of African American males.

But when Nolu applied for the South Africa posting in the runup to the country’s first democratic election in 1994, the same white editors who Oney writes so glowingly about chose a white journalist instead. Exasperated, Nolu would eventually quit but continues to this day to describe her experience at NPR as deeply “traumatizing.” In a 1990 book entitled Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media, she told the author that she had languished in obscurity for six years before Powell’s arrival, despite a master’s degree from Northwestern University and nearly a decade of journalism experience:

“Each time I applied for a full-time reporting position at NPR I was turned down. Each time a white male was hired instead. In two instances their experience was less substantial than mine. Not being one to take injustice without a fight, I found the best lawyer in town for equal opportunity cases and contacted the National Black Media Coalition. The Coalition functions in an advocacy role on behalf of blacks in the industry as well as those who want to be in the industry. The NBMC agreed that African Americans at NPR were not getting equal treatment and decided to take my case. I never filed suit, instead my lawyer and the Coalition wrote letters to NPR pointing out the problems and suggesting that we work out a solution. Of course, there was an implied threat of a suit if things did not work out.

During this time, NPR sent a crew of about ten people to the United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi, Kenya. I applied but was turned down. Instead, NPR sent an all-white editorial team to Africa where the problems of black and other third world women were high on the agenda. When asked why I was denied the opportunity to go, my superiors told me that the white folks who were chosen had “third world experience.” I had a third world experience by having been married to an African for seven years. I had covered third world issues in the past. I had personally known poverty and the problems of single female-headed households. All of this I felt would make me a valuable addition to the African assignment, but my superiors felt this experience was unimportant.”

Also in attendance at the Johannesburg dinner for Powell was the late Kenneth Walker, who produced an award-winning series on apartheid South Africa for ABC’s Nightline in 1985. I would put my body of work in South Africa up against anyone’s but with his profound understanding of African politics, repertorial gravitas and charisma that could’ve, I am sure, charmed a cat off a fish truck, and a honeyed baritone voice that would’ve made James Earl Jones envious, Ken was far and away the best expat journo that I encountered on the ground in the region.

So of course, NPR fired him.

The reason, according to NPR’s foreign editor at the time, Loren Jenkins, was Ken’s lack of productivity yet Ken had compiled a spreadsheet of all NPR foreign correspondents at the time and it showed that he had broadcast more stories over the previous year than any of them.

Oney does not tell Nolu or Ken’s story in On Air but is effusive in his praise of Jenkins who “was accused of racial and religious discrimination in a lawsuit filed by a correspondent with the Washington-based radio network, who also charged Jenkins with making a racial slur in reference to Arabs – a claim NPR acknowledged by disciplining Jenkins,” wrote the Aspen Times upon his resignation from NPR in 2011.

Similarly, Oney all but canonizes Ira Glass, the host of the long-running documentary series This American Life. I worked for Ira at This American Life for about 10 months in 2007 and 2008, and I can attest that he is indeed a genius storyteller, but only if the subject is affluent white people. For everyone else, he is practically illiterate. I was fired about a month after reporting a story that was critical of gentrification in Washington DC and recommending that we produce a piece on a Native American teenager named Lolita Respectnothing—the name alone was worth a story--who attended an alternative school located in the juvenile courthouse in the affluent Denver suburb of Boulder. The principal was a dynamic African American juvenile court judge who joined the school’s racially diverse student body of delinquents in cheering for Lolita, whose basketball skills had earned her a partial college scholarship before her senior year. She would be the first in her family to attend college.

At a story conference back in New York City, I told Ira that Lolita Respectnothing was one of the greatest narratives I had ever stumbled upon, to which he retorted:

“I don’t see the story.”

He then proceeded to propose a story on couples breaking up.

He was nearly 50 years old at the time.

But the pièce de résistance of Oney’s narrative is his Orientalist slander of the aforementioned Sunni Khalid, the African American journalist who sued NPR and Jenkins for racial and religious discrimination. Sunni is not only one of my best friends but he is as fine a journalist as I have ever met, an assessment widely shared by a generation of African Americans who started their media careers in the 1980s and regard him and former New York Times foreign correspondent Howard French as the finest journalists of their generation. In an email to me about this review, French wrote: “I’ve known Sunni forever, and I share your opinion of him, and it’s a damn shame the way he was treated.”)

Oney, however, wrote of Sunni the way that Flaubert wrote of the Egyptian sex worker.

“He didn’t have the reporting chops,” Oney wrote, without offering any details or quoting from any of his dispatches, while quoting at length the work of whites he praised. “Sunni was not highly regarded,” he quoted Montagne, who was herself the butt of jokes among both South African and expat journalists, both Black and white, when I arrived in Johannesburg in early 1999.

And Oney’s reporting is hard to square with some of my own reporting for an article I had planned to do on racism at NPR n 2021. For instance, he quotes Sunni’s editor Joyce Davis, saying that he performed poorly. Perhaps she’d had a change of heart when I interviewed her and she was effusive in her praise of Sunni, citing one article in particular on crippling United Nation’s sanctions against Iraq in which he ended the report with the chilling cries of a sick infant.

In my interview with Davis, she did mention that NPR’s white editors were troubled by Sunni’s voice because it sounded too “Black” but she referenced it as an example of their racism. Oney apparently thinks that diversity means people who look different but sound exactly the same writing:

“For his part, Khalid argued that his competence was not the issue. It was his blackness. He made no effort to disguise it on air, and this made NPR editors uncomfortable. Davis, who saw both sides, concurred. NPR had ‘an on-air sound,’ she said later. ‘It was sophisticated, East Coast. The sound of the Black male was not the NPR sound. Sunni couldn’t camouflage his Black male voice. Sunni’s cadence and diction were not what they wanted. Did anyone say, ‘He sounds like a Black man?’ No.” But that was the unspoken message.”

Continuing to keep it classy, Oney wrote that one white woman editor was never alone with him, either ignorant or indifferent to the history of sexual innuendo that has led to the lynching of thousands of African American men. Later he writes that Sunnis dispatches left him “vulnerable to the charge that he was pro-Palestinian,” presumably because he talked to Palestinians unlike other correspondents based in Israel. Perhaps if the New York Times’ Zionist correspondents interviewed Palestinians, they would never have published their ridiculous story, Screams Without Words” which alleged mass Palestinian rapes of white settler women during a running gun battle.

Sunni refused to speak to Oney for his book because he signed a confidentiality agreement with NPR as part of the settlement for his lawsuit. Oney quotes Sunni although at no point does he identify the source of those quotes.

Oney does quote Adam Clayton Powell Jr. but funnily enough, there appears nowhere in the book a very telling quote that Powell said to me in my 2021 interview, by which time he had spent nearly 50 years in media.

“National Public Radio is the most racist news organization that I have ever worked for.”

I was just sitting down at my desk in a soaring office tower overlooking Lake Michigan when the phone rang. “Washington Post, Chicago bureau,” I said.

“Jon,” the voice on the other end said excitedly, “this is Rev-un Jackson.”

Good morning, Reverend Ja...”

“Jon, we’ve got to talk about…” he interrupted. When Reverend Jackson had something on his mind—and he always had something on his mind—he hadn’t time for any banalities.

He would call occasionally in the months after I accompanied him on a 1998 nostalgia tour of Appalachia as he weighed a 2000 presidential campaign, which was nothing more than a vainglorious attempt to recapture the startling energy from his 1984 and 1988 White House bids that were growing more distant in the public’s rearview mirror as the 21^st century dawned. It would be an exaggeration to say that we’d become friends, but I’d gotten to know him a bit as we talked for hours on end while sitting next to him on the bus as we traversed the border between Ohio and West Virginia.

Like most everyone in his orbit, I was of two minds about Jackson, at once drawn to him, like the sun, yet repelled by his solipsism that threatened to destroy everything he touched. And although his 1998 tour was little more than a vanity project, it also offered a glimpse of this deeply flawed titan of American politics who towered over the final years of the 20^th century like no one else. I wrote at the time:

“Flanked by union officials, actor and liberal activist Martin Sheen and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an evangelical and conservative who is often at odds with Jackson’s brand of politics, Jackson exhorted the audience to ‘leave no American behind.’

Jackson’s political organization, the Chicago-based Operation PUSH/Rainbow Coalition, has focused its efforts this year on building a coalition of poor working-class voters from mostly white rural communities, such as Appalachia, and heavily black and Latino inner-city areas.

With the nation enjoying a major economic expansion, elected officials have turned away from the problems of the poorest Americans: affordable housing, lack of health insurance, failing public schools and stagnant wages, Jackson said.

Jackson said that the obstacles confronting coal miners in this mountainous region where President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his War on Poverty are not vastly different from those facing jobless steelworkers on Chicago’s South Side.

‘We’re here today to change the framework of the national debate,’ Jackson said. ‘The media wants to talk about sex and tapes,’ he said, in reference to the scandal surrounding President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. ‘Politicians want to talk about politics and posturing. We seek to bring dignity, jobs and justice to Appalachia. We’re blessed enough and we’re fortunate enough that we should share America’s growth with all of its people.’

That Jackson was singularly responsible for squandering what might have been the Republic’s best opportunity since Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination to fulfill his vision of a pluralistic society was not lost on me even then as a 33-year-old African American whose revolutionary consciousness had not yet fully formed. In his refusal to abandon an increasingly conservative Democratic party to form a third party that represented the working class, Jackson anticipated the party’s cuckolding of Senator Bernie Sanders following his failed 2020 presidential campaign.

Still, there was something magical about watching Jackson connect with white West Virginia coal miners and Midwestern college students on a level that transcended electoral politics. In my career as a journalist I have been in close proximity to Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Paul Wellstone, Cyril Ramaphosa, Marion Barry, Coleman Young, Kenneth Kaunda, and Hugo Chavez; only Chavez had Jackson’s magnetic personal charisma combined with a knack for knowing precisely what gesture or words would win someone over in a particular moment.

I was introduced to Reverend Jackson a half-century ago as a fifth-grader at Indianapolis Public School #106 when he addressed a school assembly, urging the mostly African American student body on with a message and a cadence that I associated only with Muhammad Ali up until that point.

“I am — somebody.

“I may be poor, but I am — somebody.

“I may be on welfare, but I am — somebody.

“I may be uneducated, but I am — somebody.

“I may be in jail, but I am — somebody.”

And then:

“If you can conceive it, and believe it, you can achieve it.”

If he had been a cult leader, my 10-year-old self would’ve joined on the spot.

Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns transformed the nation, though not as he had hoped. When two Dixiecrats—Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Tennessee’s U.S. Senator Al Gore—were plotting to recapture the White House in the 1992 election after 12 years of Republicans in the Oval office, their choice was clear: they could parrot Jackson’s big-tent strategy that sought to expand the interracial coalition that propelled the New Deal with policies that were unambiguously pro-worker; or they could compete for bigoted, white suburban voters with policies and rhetoric that portrayed Democrats as more racist than the GOP.

You need only consider Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign to understand which strategy Clinton and Gore chose and endures to this day.

Reverend Jackson was impossible to categorize; he was not one thing or the other but all things and another. A civil rights leader and a capitalist. A Black nationalist who feared Black men. A married man of the cloth who fathered a child out of wedlock. Martin Luther King Jr. famously scolded him for his careerist ambition. When he floated the idea of challenging Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry at the polls, Barry mocked him, declaring “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth.” Black South Africans loathed Jackson for daring to lecture them.

While they were close allies, Chicago’s first African American Mayor, Harold Washington, resented Jackson’s thunder-stealing antics, according to many Black Chicagoans who recall Washington comically struggling to free his hand from the reverend’s grasp as he tried to raise their fists in tandem in a gesture of solidarity and triumph. Bruce Dixon, the late managing editor at Black Agenda Report, once told me that Jackson had approached the chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, about collaborating on some commercial scheme. Hampton wasn’t trying to hear it and when he’d finally had enough, he signaled to three Panthers, who promptly frog-marched the minister from the premises and bounced him off the pavement.

And then there is this: in 2009 I was interviewing a half-dozen workers at Republic Windows and Doors at a southside Chicago restaurant when Jackson materialized outside. The workers—four Mexican immigrants and two African Americans—had organized a sit-down strike months earlier when company executives had decided to relocate to Iowa without paying their employees the back pay and benefits they were entitled to under their union contract. With Jackson’s endorsement, the workers had won their back pay and started a successful workers’ cooperative. But none of the workers had ever met Jackson. When they saw him approaching the restaurant’s door, all six leapt to their feet and rushed to greet him in the parking lot. Jackson spoke patiently with the group in freezing winter temperatures for what had to be 15 minutes. All six workers returned to the table beaming like lottery winners.

Regardless of what anyone thought of him, Reverend Jackson was ours. He belonged to working people generally and African Americans most of all because he was a product of Black culture, and a recognizable figure in the neighborhood. He was “Hustle man,” who grew up with nothing and vowed to do whatever it took to get a bag for himself and his family. Maybe he opened a car wash, or a chain of them, or maybe he ran numbers, or organized illegal gambling from his garage. But long after he made enough money to move out, he remained in the hood, showing up for summer barbecues and Thanksgiving dinner, pitching in $100 here and there for a high school graduation gift or to help a neighbor out of a jam. They were deeply flawed men but all in all they were an asset to their community, helping us get through.

Jesse Jackson was the greatest Hustle Man of all time. I had tried to maintain a professional distance when our paths crossed nearly 30 years ago because white newsroom editors police Black reporters’ relationships to the people we covered. But the truth is that I loved the man from the moment I first laid eyes on him at a school assembly 50 years ago and I’ll continue to love him for as many days as I have left on this earth.

He was family.

And for those who say that he fell short of the glory one too many times, I would only ask if you can even imagine an America in which Reverend Jesse Jackson had never existed?

I would propose that we, the people, might both honor and redeem him by settling our quarrels and coming together to construct, at long last, a Beloved Community.

It’s Nation Time!

By the time she had mustered up enough resolve to file a criminal complaint, depression and anorexia had ground her down to almost nothing. The five-foot-four-inch 16-year-old arrived at the Phoenix Police Department in the summer of 1996 weighing barely 95 pounds, her gaunt frame swallowed by a faded blue jean shirt like a tidal wave might disappear a surfer.

But she had a story to tell, and so she sat, still as a stone, in a metal chair in the corner of a police interrogation room as a beefy, balding middle-aged detective peppered her with questions that seemed intended to either gaslight or humiliate her rather than discern any objective truth. If she was flustered, however, she showed no sign of it, responding to each question in a clear voice and unflappable tone that suggested that she was the adult in the room and not the fat cop thrice her age.

What she told him was that she had been molested the previous summer by a wealthy, powerful man about town, 13 years her senior, who had initially expressed an interest in mentoring her. It all seemed innocuous enough initially: he sent her flowers for her 16^th birthday, took her to the cinema to see Batman Forever, and met up with her at Border’s bookstore.

“I looked at him as… my father hasn’t been in my life and I don’t really have any, like male figure, so I was really excited that somebody outside of my family took interest in me and he told me like, how special I was.”

Their relationship quickly turned weird, though. When she gave him a photograph of her and a classmate, he cut out her friend, consonant with a jealous teenage suitor and not a multi-millionaire closing in on 30. He nicknamed her “Whiskey”—which was odd because she didn’t drink—and would sometimes call her to say he needed “a shot of whiskey.” Another time at his condo, he pretended to search for coins in his sofa cushions and ended up on top of her momentarily. Then he escalated, she said.

“He started fondling me and then he took off my clothes and then took off his clothes…”

The detective interrupted her; “Where did he fondle you?”

Unhesitatingly, she responded; “My stomach, my breasts, my butt.”

“Anywhere else?” the detective asked.

“Between my legs,” she said.

“And what are we calling that?” he asked, the condescension hovering in the air like a foul mist.

“My vagina,” she said in an almost clinical tone.

“(And)… who is he?” he asked her.

“Kevin Johnson,” she replied unhesitatingly.

“I want you to describe Kevin Johnson to me…white, Black?”

‘Black,” she responded “he’s 6-1.”

“What does Kevin Johnson do for a living?”

“He plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns…”

Just as African Americans such as Bill Cosby and Russell Simmons are accused of mirroring the crimes and misdemeanors of the #MeToo movement’s arch-villain, Harvey Weinstein, the trail of accusations that have followed the former NBA all-star point guard and two-time Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson over a period of 30 years invite stark comparisons to the disgraced serial child molester Jeffrey Epstein.

To be fair, while Johnson has been accused on multiple occasions of sexual assault and harassment of both girls and young women, he has never been charged criminally, nor is there any suggestion that he trafficked teens or young women internationally for sexual exploitation as Epstein did. And Johnson has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

What Johnson and Epstein seem to share in common, however, is a monstrous predilection for children, and a brand of regressive, racialized politics that insulated them legally from their accusers.

America’s is a rape culture that is deeply rooted in the peculiar institution of slavery, in which the patriarch availed himself of everyone on his property, according to Edward Baptist, the author of “The Half Has Never Been Told.” Appealing to the white settlers’ lust for both profits and pleasures of the flesh, traders marketed not just the merchandise’s potential as a laborer but her comeliness, often using the term “fancy girl” in slave-trade notices to describe young women who could fetch a pretty penny because of their physical attractiveness.

“Slavery’s frontier,” Baptist wrote, “was a white man’s sexual playground.”

Like Epstein, Johnson is a wealthy man whose reactionary politics gained him access to a powerful in-group of mostly affluent white men who closed ranks around them when it hit the fan. Epstein was shielded by a coterie of elites that included Alan Dershowitz, Lawrence Summers, Noam Chomsky, and Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration who went on to become Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer.

Johnson’s defenders included Obama himself. Despite his accusers’ 1996 statement to police, and corroborating statements by her therapist, Phoenix police unsurprisingly declined to prosecute (although Johnson would pay her $230,000 on the condition that she not discuss their relationship with anyone other than her “therapist or priest.”) But Johnson’s 2007 campaign to be mayor of his hometown, Sacramento, revived interest in a 1997 Phoenix New Times article exploring his teenage accuser’s police statement.

That, in turn, inspired others to come forward with allegations of abuse, including a teacher at St. Hope Academy, the Sacramento charter school founded by Johnson. In a 2007 written statement, a student complained to the teacher:

“Mr. Johnson came up behind me and started to massage my shoulders. Soon his hands were on top of my breasts. The situation grossed me out and that was not the first time. He has, on numerous occasions, hugged me and kissed me, either on the cheek or my forehead. He is a family friend, but I feel creeped out when he does this. He has also done this to other girls in the class and with one of the Hood Corps students he tried to crawl into her bed. And that is why she quit Hood Corps.”

Again, no charges were filed but in its final report in August of 2008, the Office of the Inspector General wrote that it had uncovered sexual improprieties while investigating Johnson, now Sacramento’s mayor, for spending federal education funds on personal expenses. The Inspector General, Gerald Walpin, wrote:

“While those Agents were in Sacramento, on April 25, 2008, the Sacramento Bee (the local newspaper) related that, after a teacher at Sacramento High School reported that Kevin Johnson had inappropriately touched a female student who told the teacher about the incident, Johnson’s personal attorney and business partner investigated the complaint for the school. The Sacramento Bee reported that the student later recanted, and that Sacramento police investigators found no merit to her complaint. It also reported that the teacher resigned and, in his resignation letter, asserted, “St. HOPE sought to intimidate the student through an illegal interrogation and even had the audacity to ask me to change my story.”

Walpin’s own investigation concluded that Johnson made inappropriate advances toward three young woman involved in the St. Hope program and that Johnson offered to pay at least one of those young women $1,000 per month in hush money.

Walpin made a referral to the federal prosecutor in Sacramento, recommending that Johnson be banned from future contracts with the federal government and that he face criminal charges for misuse of federal money, and sexual misconduct with St. Hope Academy students.

The acting United States attorney, Lawrence G. Brown, declined to prosecute, and when Walpin continued to campaign for Johnson’s prosecution through news conferences and press releases, he filed ethics charges against him. Johnson’s fiancé, Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of Washington D.C. schools at the time and a St. Hope Academy board member, intervened on his behalf.

Rhee was known for privatizing D.C. schools and relied heavily on standardized testing to close more than 20 schools, and fire 36 principals and 250 teachers in the majority-African American city. She reportedly defended Johnson to Walpin as a “good guy.”

In June of 2009, Obama weighed in at the behest of a prominent Democratic fundraiser, firing Walpin, saying little except that he had lost confidence in him; privately White House officials accused Walpin, a Republican, of partisanship, in alleging wrongdoing by Johnson. Shortly thereafter, Obama exonerated Johnson of misusing federal funds, restoring his eligibility for grants if he repaid a portion of the contested money.

The scale of the allegations against Johnson pale in comparison to Epstein’s but his corporatist, neoliberal politics—his crowning achievement as Sacramento’s mayor was using $258 million in taxpayers’ dollars to fund a new stadium for the city’s NBA team—earned him protection despite his complexion, and accusations that he committed heinous crimes against teenagers. Many in the medical profession believe that the trauma caused by sexual abuse can have an effect on children’s emotional and mental development that is comparable to brain damage from a car accident or precipitous fall.

But Johnson’s story is a case study in racial capitalism’s disfigurement of our humanity. In convincing wealthy men that their divine right as kings extends as far as the violation of children to satisfy their libidinal appetites, America has become a hellscape populated with the most gruesome monsters as exemplified by a local radio personality’s remarks to the Phoenix New Times after it was revealed that a teenage girl had filed a criminal complaint against Johnson:

“I think K.J. is a little weird. But what happened here is I think some sick slut and her attorney fed you the story after K.J. told them to take a hike. . ”

Rita Anaya was a 32-yerar-old graduate student working on her dissertation and teaching at a Nigerian university when she spotted an online ad calling for journalists to work at Telesur’s new English-language website in early 2014. The daughter of a Chicano farmworker and a Jewish labor organizer, she was among the first group of hires when Venezuela’s socialist government began publishing from Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, in its high-profile collaboration with several other leftist governments in the Caribbean and South America.

The network was launched on July 24, 2005—coinciding with the birthday of the Venezuelan revolutionary known as the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar—as a riposte to the legacy media. Telesur’s first director general, Uruguayan journalist Aram Aharonian, described the network’s objective as:

“. . . to see ourselves as we truly were. . . . We were presented through a colonial mentality as blond and tall and European, and some of us are, but we’re also short, dark, Zambo, Indian. We needed to shake off our inferiority complex and tell our own stories.”

Telesur English was launched nine years later but by that time, Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chávez Frias, had died of cancer after 14 years leading the second Bolivarian Revolution. Having studied the grassroots media that rallied Caracas’ barrios to take to the streets and rescue Chavez from a 2002 military coup, Rita expected Telesur English to resemble the citizens’ journalism that not only served the people but ennobled them. It was immediately obvious to Rita that this was not the case. The citizen journalists she saw at work on-the-ground in Venezuela during her 2007 junket were constantly out in their communities, their reportage crackling with the energy and chatter of the streets.

Telesur English, on the other hand, was located in Quito’s toniest neighborhood and resembled an insurance office, its reporters seldom venturing outside, and only sporadically conducting phone interviews.

“What I saw in the community media was democratic, participatory and horizontal,” Rita (not her real name) told me in 2019, “while Telesur English was a top-down structure...”

About six weeks in, however, Rita pounced on an opening for one of the few jobs that required more than cutting and pasting, a local correspondent’s job in the Quito office, which would afford her an opportunity to engage with the community and generate her own stories. She beat out another writer for the job — a blonde, blue-eyed American woman — and started her new assignment in July.

But from the start, no one seemed invested in her success. She received no training on how to edit video, nor did she receive any instructions on what kind of stories to pursue. It was difficult to find a cameraman to accompany her and, flying blind, she typically worked 12-hour days.

After two weeks on the job, she was summoned to a video conference meeting with Telesur’s top editors, including Greg Wilpert who is of German extraction and married to Venezuela’s ambassador to Ecuador at the time. Expressing dissatisfaction with her work, they honed in on one dispatch in particular, describing indigenous women organizing collectives and labor unions since the 2007 election of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, whose liberal policies Telesur supported. What seemed particularly nettlesome to her editors was that Rita mentioned, even in passing, the patriarchal attitudes that were prevalent in Ecuadorian society. Rita exploded.

“Greg, whose side are you on?” she asked, singling out Wilpert, who had hired her. “You’re not a leader; you’re a ball-less piece of shit.”

But management had already decided to replace Rita with the blue-eyed blond who she’d just beat out for the correspondents’ job three weeks earlier.

I have told Rita’s story and that of Telesur’s Vichy journalism before, but it bears repeating in the context of the Trump administration’s abduction of Venezuela’s duly elected President, Nicolás Maduro. The minister of communications who hired Wilpert and shaped an editorial policy at Telesur English that was at cross purposes with the Bolivarian Revolution’s stated mission was none other than Venezuela’s interim President, Delcy Rodriguez, who many journalists, podcasters, and pundits speculate aided and abetted the White House in ousting Maduro.

How, as one example, did Russian anti-aircraft systems fail to shoot down even one of the more than 150 aircraft that entered Venezuela’s airspace? How were commandos able to identify the exact safehouse where Maduro and his wife were staying on the night in question and how were U.S. soldiers able to wipe out Maduro’s entire security detail —32 of Cuba’s best-trained soldiers—without suffering so much as a hangnail?

While the smart money seems to implicate Rodriguez, several African American activists and podcasters pushed back. Wrote one in response to my accusatory Facebook post:

“Comrades, these are special times. The kinds of unsubstantiated speculation that we might engage in at a different time becomes dangerous and potentially reactionary when a nation finds itself in the crosshairs of U.S. aggression and requires not only a vigilant response internally but firm, unwavering support from anti-imperialist forces globally. As someone who has been involved with Venezuela intimately for more than two decades and has been in small conversations with President Maduro and Delcy on more than one occasions let me share two things that I an certain of: the details of the military assault that resulted in the kidnapping of Maduro can be characterized in different way but the one thing that is certain it was not “with ease.” Look at the time on the ground and the firefight that took place and number of casualties, including 32 Cubas (we don’t know the number from the other side unless one accepts the versions from the NYTs and other bourgeois outlets). Secondly, the notion that Delcy and significant elements of the security apparatus would sacrifice members of the Venezuela armed forces to collaborate with U.S. imperialism demonstrates a profound cynicism and misunderstanding of the revolutionary personality of the Bolivian process and leadership of that process. I would urge you to be mindful of the consequences of engagements that only benefits the enemy as it attempts to demoralize opposition internally and disconnect and delegitimize external solidarity. If information emerges of the kind of betrayal so many are prepared to embrace at this moment, I will be the first one to denounce the traitors. Until then, please be careful. this is not time for amateurs.”

I removed his response because some Facebook technical glitch wouldn’t allow me to post a response. But in its incoherence (isn’t speculation “unsubstantiated” by definition?), sophistry and arrogance—hurled like a thunderbolt from Olympus demanding of the people “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”—the defense of Rodriguez reflects the widening of the global class war to include not only African American compradors such as Obama, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, but also elements of the African American Left who are willing to water down the Black radical tradition of bottom-up politics to get their hands on a bag.

I first noticed these shifting relationships nearly 25 years ago as a Washington Post foreign correspondent when Martin Luther King Jr.’s protege, Andrew Young, materialized in Zimbabwe to offer his support to the liberation hero-turned President, Robert Mugabe, who was at that moment terrorizing his own people in a bid to remain in power. Young had cashed in his civil rights bona fides for a career in business and was hoping to win a contract for his international consulting firm, GoodWorks International. But over a generation, his brand of graft extended beyond the corporate world and into Black civil society—those who claim to do good rather than well—reinventing some progressives as grifters who claim to represent the Black grassroots but are effectively joined at the hip with the white Left upon whom they rely for grants, contracts, access, social media shout-outs, and YouTube subscribers and viewers.

Redolent of the NAACP’s Executive Secretary Walter White who was required by his white, liberal donors to denounce communism at every turn, this same relationship of dependency requires segments on the Black Left today to ignore the Black Power Movement’s formula for success, as well as historic tensions within urban politics, pitting the poorest and most oppressed classes—often darker-skinned—seeking an overhaul of settler colonial society against liberal actors who want only to reform it.

Anyone who urges fealty to Delcy Rodriguez and not Venezuela’s Afro-Caribbean and mestizo proletariat must believe that the Bolivarian Revolution has managed to mend in 28 years what the Cuban Revolution could not achieve in 67. A political scientist, and author of We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, George Cicarriello-Maher has written extensively of these fissures:

“Even within some sectors of Chavismo, there exists a dangerous class disdain for the poorest that runs the risk of seeing residents of the barrios as beneficiaries rather than protagonists of the Bolivarian process. The Bolivarian Revolution itself has ironically created some of these beneficiaries among the middle-lower classes that are growing in recent years thanks to oil income and the fattening of the state. . . The bureaucracy [has emerged] as a class, with its own interests and new fears. If the Jacobins of the Bolivarian process turn toward this sector at the expense of the revolutionary base, they run the mortal risk of losing influence in the barrio as the privileged space for the production of Chavismo as a political identity.”

Cicarriello-Maher would seem to have taken Venezuela’s pulse far better than that faction of the Black Left that seems more interested in promoting their brand. Last month, I argued on social media with an African American activist in Washington D.C., advocating for puberty blockers for children who want to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Nowhere in the world, I told her, is that an issue for Africans, either on the continent or in the diaspora.

Concomitantly, while Rodriguez is urging closer collaboration with the U.S., the Venezuelan street is singing an entirely different tune. According to Tuesday’s New York Times:

“At this point, we should have cut off the oil, we shouldn’t have sold any oil to the United States. Zero oil, zero oil!” said one 63-year-old Venezuelan, Beatriz, who asked that only her first name be used as the government cracks down on dissent. “It’s the only way President Nicolás Maduro — the legitimate president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela — will return to our country.”

By the time I arrived in Quito in 2016 to start work as an editor for Telesur English, Rodriguez had left her post as minister of communications, leaving behind a hive of misogyny and racism and replacing one mediocre white man, Wilpert, with two, Pablo Vivanco and Cyril Mychalejko. Counter to Aharonian’s mission statement championing diversity, one of my writers, a Canadian woman named Heather, (who many of us had taken to calling “Cointelpro” because she snitched to Cyril and Pablo when fellow writers were late for work) profiled a Dutch woman who had joined the Marxist militia known by its Spanish acronym, the FARC.

Pablo and Cyril published Heather’s unremarkable prose as the website’s lead story, allowing it to remain in that position for nearly an entire day when most stories remained in the top spot for no more than a few hours.

Most of the staff ridiculed the profile as Orientalist dross. “There are enough n!@#$% in the FARC to make a Tarzan movie,” I said, paraphrasing Fred G. Sanford, “and they find the one white girl to write a story on.” Said a young Black woman who once worked as a Telesur editor.

“I call it white respectability politics. Why else would you have white men who are anti-Black and anti-woman in charge (of Telesur)?”

Anticipating questions surrounding Maduro’s abduction, I wrote in 2019 of my four months at Telesur English:

“…indeed it is hard to imagine that the hiring of such inept and morale-killing managers was an accident. Were Telesur’s top newsroom managers hired to rewrite the history of the Bolivarian Revolution, to return the European settler to power, and to restore the white man’s unquestioned authority?”

Known colloquially as boda-bodas for shuttling smugglers across East African borders in their previous iteration, the motorcycle taxis zip recklessly through traffic in Nairobi, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, and most ubiquitously, Uganda’s capital, Kampala, a city of 3 million residents but no mass transit system.

Though largely unregulated, boda-bodas represent one of Uganda’s largest industries—surpassed only by agriculture, tourism and food processing-- employing a workforce of 350,000, mostly young men, who come from all over the country to drive cabs in the cities, not because the jobs pay well but because there is little else available.

“We just do this…because we have nothing to do,”one boda-boda driver, Zubairi Idi Nyakuni, told the Associated Press last year. “All of us here, other people even, they have their degrees, they have their master’s (degrees), but they are just here. They have nothing to do.”

Many of the motorbikes are owned by Uganda’s Black elite—parliamentarians, city councilors, government ministers, and the politically connected—and a cadre of Indian entrepreneurs who rent the vehicles out for a pretty penny, relatively speaking. Most boda-boda drivers barely manage to break even. Some try to buy their motorcycles but that is also fraught with financial peril. One boda-boda driver who gave his name only as Rodgers told a reporter that banks considered him a credit risk and would not lend to him; he was only able to buy his motorcycle, valued at roughly $3,000, with a high-interest loan that saddled him with an aggressive, two-year repayment schedule.

Moreover, “(b)y the time I finish paying the bike will be worn out, almost un-roadworthy,” said Rodgers, who is 28 and has a degree in business administration from Kampala University.

Uganda’s pitiful economy and its failure to create opportunities for a population of 46 million is top of mind as voters go to the polls today to choose between their 81-year-old President, Yoweri Museveni, who is seeking a seventh term, and his main challenger, 43-year-old Robert Kyagulani—formerly a dreadlocked pop singer who continues to be known by his stage name Bobi Wine—the self-proclaimed “ghetto president” whose calls for change have captured the imagination of Generation Z and Millennials like the boda-boda drivers, who just can’t seem to catch a break.

There is, to be clear, little suspense about the election’s outcome. A former guerilla fighter, Museveni’s security forces have waged a campaign of terror against Wine and his supporters that is reminiscent of southern sheriffs in the Jim Crow South, patrolling campaign events on horseback and in armored vehicles and combat fatigues, disrupting rallies with batons and tear gas, arresting and beating dissidents, and torturing Wine, according to both the candidate and human rights groups. And in a repeat of the 2021 ballot when election officials announced that Museveni had staved off a challenge from Wine by winning 58 percent of the vote, the state has once again targeted social media channels favored by Wine’s youthful fans, banning Facebook, and shutting down access to the internet in the days leading up to Election Day, though many circumvent it by using VPNs.

Barring an act of God, virtually everyone in Uganda is resigned to the fact that Museveni will win this election by hook or by crook, but the more pressing question is what comes next for a country so deeply divided by age, class and tribe?

The son of cattle herders, Museveni was born in 1944 when Uganda was still a British colony, and came of age in a historical moment when virtually the entire continent was fighting for its independence from European settlers. He peppers his stump speeches with folklore, and references to 1986 when he was first elected president. His slogan in this campaign season is “Protect the Gains.”

Therein lies the problem. According to government figures, three-quarters of Uganda’s population of 46 million is younger than 35—the country’s average age is 16—and were not born in 1986, nor do they have any memory of British rule which ended in 1962. What they do know, if only intuitively, is that 1 percent of the country’s 23 million employees earn at least $270 a month; the official unemployment rate for Ugandans between the ages of 18 and 30 living in urban areas is 19 percent; and Museveni is the only head of state they have ever known.

“A vote should change our future,” a newspaper vendor who gave his name only as Kiconco told a reporter for a Kenyan newspaper, the Standard. “But we have been here before. The old man (Museveni) promises progress yet things stay the same or even get worse, while we carry hope in our pockets. Our children deserve more than the same cycles of speeches and pain.”

Gerald Bareebe, who is Ugandan and a professor of politics at York University in Toronto, told me in a phone interview:

“Every Museveni speech starts from 1986 and that’s the problem… the majority of the Ugandan population doesn’t remember 1986. They don’t want this dry history, especially when there are no jobs, the roads are not good, the hospitals have no drugs, the infrastructure is failing. But these old African leaders like Museveni and (Zimbabwe’s late President Robert) Mugabe see themselves as entitled. They start to believe that they are the country and the country is them. It is like their birthright.”

Uganda’s political crisis is not unique, however. From Kampala to Kinshasha, Cape Town to Cotonou, Africa is entering its interregnum, 32 years after South Africa purged the last European settler dictatorship. And yet, for the vast majority of the 1.5 billion Africans living on the continent, the old is dying and the new cannot be born, to quote Gramsci. Unimaginably, living standards have not improved substantively since the colonial era.

As one example, Africans account for nearly 20 percent of the world’s population but only 3 percent of global Gross Domestic Product. While China has become the world’s leading exporter over a 15 year period, quadrupling its global share of the market from 4 to 16 percent between 2009 and 2024, Africa’s share of exports has not grown appreciably since 1960.

Simultaneously, Africa is home to the world’s youngest population. Sixty percent of Africans living on the continent are younger than 25, with an average age of 19. African youth view the most immediate threat to their future not as apartheid or the Portuguese, or the French or the British but an indigenous African leadership that has maintained the European settlers’ colonial structures in order to profit handsomely from them. In October, hundreds of Tanzanians were killed protesting President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s reelection; Kenyan authorities are bracing for upheaval when President William Ruto runs for reelection next year; in South Africa, polls show the Democratic Alliance, which subsumed the National Party that created apartheid, poised to unseat Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, in local elections.

While African Americans are not nearly as young a their African counterpart, their median age of 32.6 is significantly lower than the overall median in the U.S. of 39. More importantly, the class tensions that characterize African American workers’ increasingly tense relationship with an out-of-touch Black political class resembles that between Ugandans and Museveni, or Kenyans and Ruto.

European settlers in Africa and the U.S. were once fond of saying, cynically, that African liberation fighters didn’t want self-determination for their people so much as the same privileges and material comfort that whites enjoyed both under colonialism and the Jim Crow era. While there is clearly some truth to that argument, the global crisis in Black political leadership is quite a bit more complicated.

Just as white supremacist violence combined with the FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, to wipe out an entire generation of African Americans’ best and brightest--Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton—so too did European settlers dispense with Africa’s top leadership, from Amilcar Cabral to Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba to Samora Machel, Steve Biko to Chris Hani to Dedan Kimathi, paving the way for lesser lights like Mobutu and Jomo Kenyatta,

Maybe what Museveni’s misleadership proves is that Fred Hampton got one thing wrong. Perhaps, if you kill enough freedom fighters, you might just kill freedom fighting too, at least for a while.

No sooner had New York City’s Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani taken the oath of office on New Year’s Day than a team of Delta Force commandos was whisking Venezuela’s Socialist President Nicholas Maduro from a Caracas safe house in the wee hours of the morning on January 3 to stand trial on charges of narco-trafficking in the U.S.

While the “best-of-times, worst-of-times” narrative perhaps augurs a season of political upheaval--redolent of Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities--it might surprise you to know that history and the laws of political economy strongly suggest that of the two socialist movements unfolding 2,000 miles apart, Maduro’s stands a far better chance of succeeding in the long run than do Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists.

That is because the motor of Venezuela’s 28-year-old Bolivarian Revolution is the country’s grassroots poor and working class--particularly the Afro-Caribbeans and mixed-race mestizos– who have repeatedly closed ranks around their government’s socialist project to rescue it from U.S. imperialism.

Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists, on the other hand, do not represent a political movement so much as guardrails installed to police radical ideas, and define the boundaries of what is acceptable political discourse. The country’s two most well-known socialists—Vermont’s longtime U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who represents Queens and the Bronx in Congress—are widely viewed by Leftists as liberal reformers who praise the Democratic Party with faint damnation, and loudly denounce Wall Street’s corporatist policies while quietly voting for them. Another high-profile Democratic Socialist, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin Magazine, wrote in a 2019 editorial in the Guardian newspaper, that African Americans’ support for reparations is misguided. Despite reams of evidence that show yawning racial disparities in health, education and wealth, Sunkara, who is of Indian descent and grew up in the New York City suburb of Westchester County, wrote that privileging Black demands for racial justice jeopardized the implementation of universal policies to uplift all workers, effectively aping Bill Clinton’s 1992 electoral strategy to reclaim the White House from Ronald Reagan’s GOP by appealing to the white supremacist vote. Wrote Sybil Davis and Otto Fors in the February 27, 2022 issue of the Left Voice:

“Jacobin’s age-old strategy of being attached at the hip (or, rather, the tail) of the Democratic Party has led it away from class struggle to the point where an issue dedicated to “the Left,” published after a year that saw such an uptick in labor struggle that NBC News of all people deemed 2021 the “year of the worker,” doesn’t even talk about labor. This isn’t just a mistake; it’s something much deeper: the end result of a strategy that draws socialists closer to a capitalist and imperialist political party and pushes them to make excuses for that party. This has led it to ignore huge shifts in the situation — such as the uptick in labor and the co-optation of the Black Lives Matter movement — in order to put forward the argument that we need more of the same — despite Jacobin’s own admission that the Left is in retreat. Rather than alter its analysis, Jacobin erases class struggle from its picture of the current situation. This is irresponsible from the leading magazine of the socialist Left.”

Similarly, while Mamdani’s campaign won a majority of New York City’s African American voters with his support for reparations, and a pledge to lower the cost of housing, childcare and groceries, he won solely on the strength of his messaging and redistributive policy proposals. That means that he may lack the critical grassroots support that could help him withstand the inevitable political pressure from New York financiers to water down his most ambitious aims. In July, the radical writer Dorothy Lennon excoriated Mamdani in a social media post for talking out of both sides of his mouth:

“Zohran Mamdani has been traveling to Washington and New York City attempting to corral Democratic Party leaders into his campaign. Let’s be clear on who Mamdani is trying to court…

He’s trying to court Democrats who have enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Democrats who would let the oligarchs kill you for a Klondike bar. He even seemed to backtrack from his comments on “globalize the intifada.” Clearly pandering to Zionists scared by his support for the Palestinian people.

If I was advising Mamdani I would tell him the following: stop pandering to these corporate soulless human beings. Stop saying you are excited to be working with them going forward. Instead, tell them you don’t want their support. You reject their support. You don’t want the support of people who would let Israel starve babies to death. You don’t want the support of people who bow before the oligarchy. Voters decide elections. Not them!

Though it would be unprecedented, Mamdani could yet deliver on his socialist plans. And while Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution may not ultimately be able to survive the Trump administration’s hostilities, it has a better chance than Mamdani’s because of widespread and energetic support from the grassroots, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have poured into the streets of Caracas over the past week to protest Maduro’s kidnapping.

The socialist government led by Maduro was born of a populist uprising in 1989 when the country’s President, Carlos Andrés Pérez, unveiled a sweeping package of neoliberal reforms only two weeks after he was inaugurated, including deep cuts to government spending and salaries, deregulation of foreign exchange rates, raising interest rates, relaxing price controls on food and fuel, a regressive sales tax, and the sale of state enterprises.

The tipping point occurred on February 27, 1989, a Monday, when Pérez’s liberalization of petroleum prices kicked in, doubling prices overnight both at the pump and at the fare box on public buses. When students, maids, gardeners, street vendors and other workers in the informal sector discovered the hike in bus fares on their morning commute from Caracas’s hilltop slums into the city, many simply refused to pay. Protesters overturned and burned buses, spat at drivers, and blocked major thoroughfares. Within hours it was apparent that gasoline prices had provided the spark for a much larger political conflagration, with workers turning their anger on wealthy neighborhoods on Caracas’s east side, setting fire to more than a thousand stores in the city and looting slabs of meat and bottles of champagne. “The people are hungry!” demonstrators shouted. “The people are angry!”

The violence spread to the suburbs, then to virtually every major city in the country: San Cristóbal, Barquisimeto, Maracay, Barcelona, Puerto la Cruz, Mérida, Maracaibo, and Valencia. Pérez put down the revolt by imposing martial law. A massacre ensued. In the barrios in and around Caracas, police dragged suspected organizers from their homes and opened fire on crowded street corners, apartment courtyards, and stairways. When the guns fell silent three days later, as many as 3,000 lay dead. Of the many bystanders taking in the events that unfolded in Venezuela’s cities over those three days in 1989, one was a young lieutenant colonel in the army who was steeped in Marxist theory and the historical feats of Latin America’s “Great Liberator,” Simón Bolívar. That officer was Hugo Chávez.

The caracazo, as it is known, was the first uprising against the neo-colonial trading system known as neoliberalis, and it set in motion a chain of events that led first to Chávez’s unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992, his election as president six years after that, and his introduction of socialist policies that erased illiteracy, nationalized the oil industry, and raised living standards dramatically for Venezuelans.

Chavez’s success inspired several other South American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay–to follow suit, creating what was known as the Pink Tide. Only Venezuela remains in the socialist camp, owing to the Bolivarian Revolution’s bottom-up quality, and a constituency that has risen to the occasion time and again.

When, for example, Venezuela’s oligarchs in 2002 orchestrated a coup attempt, abducting Chavez at gunpoint from the presidential palace known as Miraflores, the country’s major broadcasters and newspapers reported that he had simply resigned, and abandoned his presidency for Cuba, where presumably, he would live in comfort as a guest of his close friend, Fidel Castro.

But knowing that the country’s media moguls were in league with the coup-plotters (indeed, four media channels had ties to Chavez’s conservative opposition), Venezuela’s Black and mestizo working class refused to buy it, and took to pirated radio frequencies to rally the grassroots. Within hours, the barrios of Caracas rose up in unison, and tens of thousands of Chavistas streamed into the streets to assert their displeasure, louder than the proverbial bomb.

Armed mostly with pots-and-pans and white-hot indignation, the rainbow-colored phalanx marched on the military base where Chavez was held, Fuerte Tiuna — engaging well-armed soldiers who fired on them along the route — to arrive, finally, at their destination, and demand the release of their democratically-elected leader.

Outnumbered and outmaneuvered in the court of public opinion, the shocked oligarchs had no choice but to relent; Chavez was restored to power a mere 48 hours after he was ousted, and went on to rule the coastal country of 31 million people for another 11 years until his death from cancer in 2013.

The Bolivarian Revolution survived him, however. When the Trump administration blockaded Venezuelan oil in 2017, virtually capsizing the economy, Venezuelans began growing their own food and are today entirely self-sufficient. As Trump escalated his rhetoric this year, Maduro created a citizen’s militia, arming 4.5 million Venezuelans with weapons to defend the Republic, reminiscent of Gamel Abdel Nasser handing out guns to Egyptian civilians in 1956 to repel an invasion by the British who wanted to retake the Suez Canal, much as the White House wants to reclaim control of Venezuelan oil production.

Leftist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Thomas Sankara theorized that socialism, over time, flipped the white settler script, transforming a capitalist economy into a tool to serve the needs of the working class rather than the reverse. But they argued something else, which is that socialism, over time, raises workers’ consciousness, deepens our relationship to each other and ultimately creates more fully formed men and women, or the New (Wo)Man.

While it is virtually unfathomable to most Americans, it is not uncommon to hear political observers across the global South muse that the Bolivarian Revolution has, similar to the Cuban Revolution, created the New Man, and that it will be difficult–though not impossible–to put that genie back in the bottle.

That interpretation seems to be borne out by the events of the last week. While Maduro’s abduction certainly appears to give the U.S. the upper hand, it might be wise to consider Hugo Chavez’s failed 1992 coup when he appeared on television to instruct his comrades to lay down their arms por ahora, or for now, in remarks that are often compared to Fidel Castro’s defiant proclamation at his 1953 trial, “History will absolve me!”

A Venezuelan journalist, Andreína Chávez, this week interviewed several members of various worker communes who were among the protesters who poured into the streets of Caracas, carrying signs denouncing President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “We are here to demand that the North Americans who took our president and our first lady return them,” 18-year-old Orangel Vera told Chávez, a correspondent for Drop Site News. The teen is a member of the Juana de Ávila South Communal Circuit in the Venezuelan state of Zulia. “All the youth are backing our president. We are in the streets.”

A member of the Éxito Comunitario Socialista commune in the parish of La Vega, 61-year-old María Guaicara echoed Vera’s demands, referring to the first lady as “the first combatant.” But it was another protester, Iskra Pérez Sangronis, a member of the Gigante Cacique Tiuna Commune in the San Pedro neighborhood of Caracas, who seemed to suggest that the Trump administration may have bitten off more than it can chew when she said:

“The communes of this country are prepared to fight in any scenario to defend the homeland and the future.”

Twenty years ago this month, I quit the Washington Post after a 13-year-career at the newspaper that I would describe as both tumultuous and triumphant. There was a brief period of about seven years where I produced a body of work that surpassed my wildest dreams when I graduated from Florida A&M’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications in 1987. By no means had the Post made me; in previous jobs at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Detroit Free Press, I had authored stories that I remain proud of to this day. But with its ample resources, the Post allowed me to cast a wider net in search of narratives that fulfilled my sole creative ambition to produce finely wrought critiques of the twin scourges of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

As the son of a millwright and the great-grandson of a slave, I was always clear that my mandate as a journalist was to serve the people. And between roughly my 31^st birthday in January of 1996 and my 38^th in 2003, I came damn close. During that time, I was a regular presence on the Post’s front-page, writing about class politics in post-apartheid South Africa, life on the dole and on the reservation, the jobless in Zambia and Argentina, the sick, the landless, and the hopeless, grief, grace, graft and the grievous harm that is inflicted on all workers, but Black workers most of all.

That the good times would not last was always clear to me. I was respectful to everyone in the newsroom but I was nobody’s Good Negro. By the time I arrived at the Post as a 27-year-old in January of 1993, I considered myself a radical, a subversive, a Spook Who Sat by the Door. I read Fanon and George Jackson, Walter Rodney and Paulo Freire, Marx and Gramsci and Amilcar Cabral, and like Paul Robeson, the only thing I wanted to be was more African.

That, however, is not a recipe for longevity at the Post, which became a household name under the editorship of the iconic Ben Bradlee, who was almost certainly a CIA asset and famously published a story about an imaginary 8-year-old, Black heroin fiend in an attempt to derail Mayor Marion Barry’s administration. For me, something began to shift in the spring of 2002 just as I was wrapping up to leave South Africa for the Post’s bureau in Argentina. The first sign that something was amiss was when I met with the new deputy foreign editor, a mediocrity named David Hoffman, who began our conversation thusly:

“Jon, I am not a big fan of your work. I think you make things too complicated. It’s like when I was in Israel. People would say that Israel needs to do this and the Palestinians need to do that and it wasn’t until I figured out that the Palestinians are just terrorists that everything began to click.”

You could’ve bowled me over with a feather. Reminiscent of Chris Rock’s joke about whites who say they dislike hip-hop, I wanted to say:

“Lookit, you knuckle-dragging moron, you are not supposed to like my work. It’s not for you. Chances are that if you did like one of my stories it would be the worst story in the history of journalism.”

What I said:

“Un hunh.”

Over the next year, my relationship with the foreign desk deteriorated, gradually, and then suddenly, to borrow Hemingway’s phrase. After years of glowing job reviews that praised my slugging percentage—a higher ratio of my stories reached the front page than that of almost any other Post reporter –I was persona non grata. For the first time in my career, I couldn’t get my best stories published, let alone on the front page. No one explained why; stories just sat in the queue like limp stalks of celery in the fridge.

I knew where this was going. My dear friend, Esther Iverem, who is African American, had quit the Post in 1998 after editors refused to run her glowing profile of Paul Robeson on the 100^th anniversary of his birth. Another halfwit named David Von Drehle, editor of the Post’s Style section at the time, had claimed, absurdly, that Robeson was on “the wrong side of history.” In my case, the foreign editor, Phil Bennett, summoned me to a meeting in Miami in April of 2004 where he told me that he had investigated me for fabricating stories à la the New York Times’ Jason Blair. He cited only one story and I recall it vividly because I was especially proud of it before the desk waterboarded it into submission. The article explored how Buenos Aires, with a population that was 97 percent white, had begun to take on the same characteristics as inner-city neighborhoods in Detroit or Baltimore, including single- parent households, idle youth, crime, drugs, and even a growing affinity for hip hop.

With a robust industrial base, Argentina had been South America’s wealthiest economy for most of the 20^th century, its capital, Buenos Aires, dubbed South America’s Paris. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Wall Street financiers convinced politicians across the world, including Argentina’s President, Carlos Saul Menem, to open their markets to Western-made goods in exchange for U.S. dollars. But as Argentina soon discovered, all money ain’t good money.

In reporting the story, I had quoted by name an NGO executive in Brazil who told me that her organization had polled Paraguayan immigrants in neighboring Chile and found that about 40 percent of them had worked either as domestics or in the sex trade. I remember the phone conversation because it was in English, which was rare, and also because the figures she quoted sounded low to me. But Phil thought it was too high and that my Black commie ass had made it up, directing an editor to contact the executive who he said told them that no such survey existed. But when I doubled back to her, she said that she had only disputed my use of the word “survey;” she thought the sample size was too small and suggested the word “questionnaire” was more appropriate.

But this was all for show: Mr. Charlie showing an uppity Nigra whose phallus was really bigger. If there had been genuine questions about my reporting my editors could’ve quickly answered them simply by asking my interpreters, all of whom were known to the foreign desk because I had to include their names on my expense reports. The Brazilian NGO executive was an outlier; I required interlocutors for 85 percent of my interviews in South America because my Spanish was poor, and my Portuguese non-existent.

Tellingly, Phil said his investigation had cleared me of any wrongdoing but management had decided to demote me anyway, demanding that I return stateside.

This was traumatizing to me—not because I wanted approval from white people—but writing about indigenous and Afro-Caribbean resistance movements in Bolivia and Venezuela, a sex worker in Buenos Aires, or a cab driver in Brazil, was as blissful as anything I have ever known. To quote Fred Hampton, I got high off the people, and I wanted another hit of that glorious pipe.

Still, if there is one thing in life that you can depend on it is white people’s brittleness and white men in the newsroom are the brittlest of all. David Hoffman didn’t dislike my work because it was inadequate but because he was. My journalism challenged his notion of himself as “white,” or as W.E.B. DuBois wrote in Black Reconstruction, the European settlers’ worst fear is not that African Americans are inferior, but that in expressing our authentic selves we put paid to the lie of white supremacy.

Moreover, I have always speculated that my reporting in Argentina was particularly nettlesome for the Post because it articulated the correct view that the country was no more legally obliged to repay its bonds to Wall Street than a casino is required to pay a gambler who plays a bad hand at the poker table. My guess is that the Post’s investors—perhaps even Warren Buffett-- owned a shitload of Argentine paper at that time.

I expected such dissembling behavior from the Post’s white editors but was shocked by the enthusiasm with which a Black editor named Shirley Carswell rode shotgun for them. Shirley wasn’t really a journalist; she had been the Post’s copy desk chief and promoted to the role of assistant managing editor responsible for the newsroom’s financials, controlling the purse strings for foreign correspondents. I’d made it a point to steer clear of her because she was a protégé of the Post’s top Black editor at the time, Milton Coleman, a deeply unserious man. As one example, I had just happened to schedule my biennial home leave for the week of 9/11. Foreign correspondents are supposed to spend the week of their home leave consulting with diplomats and editors stateside, but obviously, no Post editor had time that day. Except Milton. Expecting him to be busy like everyone else, I poked my head in his office just to say “hello” and was surprised when he ushered me in to talk for at least an hour. He had nothing else to do. At one point during our conversation, with the Pentagon still smoldering barely three miles away, Milton said to me:

“Boy, Jon, I bet you get lots of pussy in South Africa!”

No one would describe me as especially religious or prudish but I’ve never spoken in such terms and I certainly wasn’t about to start with Milton, who had famously helped derail Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign by reporting that he had referred to New York City using a pejorative term for Jews albeit in the context of the Zionist pressure they were applying to his campaign. (Three years earlier when I was the Post’s Midwestern correspondent in Chicago, Jackson had told me: “I was trying to save the world from Ronald Reagan and Milton is telling white folks that I am talking bad about them.”)

Similarly, Shirley conspired enthusiastically with the Post’s campaign to railroad me. If Bennett and Hoffman scoured the sky with a searchlight to find charges that could plausibly stick, Shirley went with the old standby, insinuating, in no uncertain terms that I was robbing Mr. Charlie blind.

She accused me of overspending my budget which was, in fact, true. What she failed to mention, however, was that my $107,000 annual budget was considerably smaller than any other bureau outside of Africa. As one example, my budget in South America was nearly $70,000 more than it was in southern Africa even though the Buenos Aires bureau was responsible for covering only five countries and two languages; the Johannesburg bureau covered 11 countries and 73 languages in Zambia alone.

What also went unsaid was that the Post at that time was making money hand over fist and the $15,000 by which I had exceeded my budget was a relative pittance. And lastly, I did, in fact, have receipts that showed that I hadn’t padded my expense accounts. All of my spending could be verified as legitimate business expenses.

But Shirley was out for blood. In a 2002 meeting in her office, she harped on a $10 room service charge at the Meikles Hotel in Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare when I had ordered coffee while trying to make deadline on a big, breaking story. I remember Shirley saying to me:

“Jon, you should’ve just gone down to the hotel café and ordered your coffee and brought it back up to your room. You would’ve saved 7 or 8 dollars.”

Another expenditure she identified as problematic was a $300 phone call from Harare to Cape Town for a front-page story on land redistribution in Zimbabwe.

A few months later, when I was ready to travel to Brazil for the first time, Shirley wouldn’t release the $25,000 revolving fund, or float, that correspondents were allotted because it was her contention that I owed the Post about $8,500 from my four years in South Africa. At issue were a few big expenditures—I recall that moving the Johannesburg bureau to a cheaper and more secure space was one—that I did not submit for reimbursement until I was leaving the continent for my new assignment in South America. A simple phone call to the realtor listed on the invoice I submitted could’ve cleared up any questions about its veracity rather quickly. She also noted that I had expensed Zimbabwean currency at the official exchange rate rather than the black-market exchange rate which was considerably lower. That was true, I said, but I was forced to buy at the official exchange rate because the white foreign desk aide who fancied himself some kind of swashbuckling, Graham family consigliere inexplicably refused to front me the cash in my Post bank account—that was pointedly his only function-- ahead of a monthlong stay in Zimbabwe; I ran out of hard currency to exchange on the black market and had to withdraw it from an ATM at the official exchange rate.

Shirley relented and gave me my float but I was demoted about 16 months later. I spent a year on a journalism fellowship at Stanford and informed Post editors of my intentions to quit. Shirley instructed me via email to return my Post ID card and whatever equipment I was holding onto. I did as told and received my final check as a direct deposit. A few days later, however, my debit card was declined when I tried to buy a couple hundred dollars in books from Barnes and Noble. I checked my account and saw that the direct deposit had been reversed. I called payroll and the guy I talked to apologized but told me that Shirley had told him to claw back the deposit. She hadn’t told him why.

I emailed Shirley and politely asked her what the problem was. She wrote back to say that she had not received my ID card and that a laptop and satellite phone were missing from the Buenos Aires’s bureau. I told her that I had sent the ID card through the mail weeks ago and received nothing back so it must’ve arrived. I had never even touched the satellite phone during my time in Argentina and the laptop, I was sure, remained right where I left it.

I immediately recognized Shirley’s gesture as a power move just as surely as Phil Bennett’s 16 months earlier, intended to taunt me with the understanding that in political terms, Shirley’s appendage was bigger than mine. Just as the foreign desk’s investigation found no journalistic malfeasance on my part, neither was there any merit to any of Shirley’s accusations. Within hours she had my paycheck returned to my bank account.

She was not done, however. A few months later, two of my ex-coworkers at the Post phoned to tell me that Shirley and Milton were spreading the rumor that I had been fired for stealing the Post’s money for cocaine and hookers.

I think it would be the definition of protesting too much to deny such an accusation 20 years later, so I won’t. If I strike anyone as deeply unserious as Shirley and Milton’s portrayal, play it as it lays, I say.

Furthermore, my point in writing this is not to defend my honor but to identify a seismic shift in the Black community that does not bode well, either for the race or the country. Shirley’s antagonism of me was perplexing at the time because I had not to that point in my career experienced a Black woman editor or manager who was a pit bull for white supremacy, siding with the newsroom racists against me. As a college sophomore interning at the Tallahassee Democrat, LaNedra Carroll was demanding but patient, and rewarded my hustle with assignments that caught the eyes of job recruiters. The next year, I interned at the Minneapolis Star Tribune where Jackie Jones, now the dean of journalism at Morgan State University, an HBCU, talked to me about good writing, and apartheid South Africa in its death throes. Among other things, Jackie taught me that if you begin a news story with a simile, you should ideally return to that simile to end the story.

When I returned to the Minneapolis paper a year later, an assistant city editor named Sherry Marshall, offered both encouragement and constructive criticism, and told me where the newsroom’s racial land mines were planted. At the Detroit Free Press in 1992, another Black woman editor who was my supervisor, Connie Prater, championed my work, and made sure that I was in the mix for good assignments.

But similar to Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Stephen, in Django Unchained, Shirley’s blackness was performative, bordering on vaudevillian, redolent of another Samuel L. Jackson character, Gator, in Jungle Fever, dancing a little jig to con his mother out of money to buy crack. In her 1993 book, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, former Post reporter Jill Nelson wrote that African Americans hired as police officers and reporters in the aftermath of the 1968 riots were both prodded to prove their mettle by “shooting” other Blacks, literally and rhetorically. While I doubt she would understand the reference, Shirley’s effort to flatten the Black militancy that I represented was a dialectical exercise, intended to portray me as a caricature—the bad n!g$er—locked in a Manichean struggle with her, the Good Negro, all for the benefit of the white gaze.

I had long before come to understand most African American men hired for top editing jobs as collaborators who had defected to the dark (white?) side long ago. But Shirley represented my first encounter with a Black woman manager caping for white supremacy and petitioning for meritorious manumission by gleefully brutalizing Black men. Shirley was to me what the two Black inmates were to Fannie Lou Hamer when they were ordered by their white jailers to torture the civil rights icon in 1963 with the critical difference being that the inmates took no pleasure in attacking one of their own.

As I write in my book, Class War in America: How the Elites Divide the Nation by Asking ‘Are You a Worker or Are You White?’ capital has thrived historically by deploying a divide-and-conquer strategy that pits employees against each other. Wielding narratives like sledgehammers, the wealthiest 1 percent has over the span of 400 years managed to speak something called a n!$$er into existence, in persuading one tribe after another—the Scots, Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Swedes and Jews—to identify with their “white” bosses rather than coworkers of color, creating a buffer class of scabs.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Ivy League universities, think tanks like the Ford Foundation and the Nixon White House began to target the African American community itself in an attempt to indoctrinate the Black radicals who represented a grave threat to racial capitalism. If we’re being honest, it was not a terribly heavy lift to hire African American men as subcontractors for the white settlers’ ethno-nationalist project; that relationship dates back at least to Booker T. Washington, the NAACP’s staunch anti-communist, Walter White, and Bayard Rustin who even Martin Luther King suspected of being an FBI snitch after the 1963 March on Washington. By the time the Reagan administration took up the mantle of Black capitalism, an entire class of African American male professionals-- scholars such as Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Glenn Loury, lawyers like Clarence Thomas, journalists like Armstrong Williams, and soldiers like Colin Powell—had emerged to shore up the European settler’s misrule.

But you can scroll through the scrapbook in your mind until the cows come home and you will not be able to recall more than a few Black female outliers—maybe Shirley Chisolm in the 1970s, Oprah Winfrey in the 80s, Bell Hooks and C. Delores Tucker in the 90s—riding shotgun for white supremacy.

Until now.

In an interview this month, Dr. Miron Clay-Gilmore, a philosophy professor at Purdue University, told me that he traces African American women’s Damascene conversion back to the 1979 publication of Michelle Wallace’s book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Edited by the feminist icon and admitted CIA asset Gloria Steinem—the book, coming hard on the heels of the Combahee River Collective, created the template for the theoretical framework that would come to be known as intersectionality that is perhaps misinterpreted in blaming African American men—rather than white racism—as the primary oppressor of Black women. That represents a sharp departure from the liberatory ethos of the 1960s. Said Kathleen Cleaver in a 2016 interview:

“When our Black Panther movement began in the mid-60s ... the women’s liberation movement in the white community began and they were assuming that our pattern was their pattern ... that they had domination by powerful men and that women have to be liberated in this little context ... we didn’t have that context. What we needed to be liberated from was racism.”

The following year, the African American sports journalist, Jemele Hill, tweeted ridiculously:

“Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People.”

The death in April of the incandescent journalist, Kenneth Walker, stirred in me a trove of repressed memories that combined for a stunning clarity about the erasure of Black men from both the American newsroom and public life, its impact on the quality of today’s journalism and the disturbing supporting role that Black women have played in aiding and abetting this white supremacist purge.

Ken’s journalistic career was born almost literally from the ashes of Black rebellion. He began working for the hometown newspaper, the Washington Star, in 1968, shortly after the urban uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. When the Star folded in 1981, he joined the ABC News bureau, where he traveled to South Africa with Ted Koppel to produce an award-winning series on apartheid, and covered Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

I met Ken in 2000 when he arrived in Johannesburg as a correspondent for NPR and I was the Washington Post’s man in South Africa.

Ken’s dogged reporting and evocative storytelling were not enough, however to deter NPR’s foreign editor--a steaming pile of racist dogshit named Loren Jenkins, who was known to utter racial epithets in the newsroom—from firing him and replacing him with a young white correspondent whose dispatches from the continent had all the energy of a police blotter. A spreadsheet that Ken compiled contradicted Jenkins’ grievance about his productivity, illustrating empirically that Ken had in fact, authored more stories over a 12-month- period than any other NPR foreign correspondent.

Amid the back and forth between Ken and Loren Jenkins, however, my predecessor in the Post’s southern Africa bureau, another Black journalist, Lynne Duke, returned to Johannesburg for a visit. Lynne, who would die of lung cancer in 2013 (and who was one of the reporters who called to inform me of the rumors that were being spread about me) was an outstanding journalist and a good woman but she broke my heart when over dinner at a Chinese restaurant, the conversation turned to Ken. Parroting some white editor, she grumbled:

“Does he even do any reporting?”

Among the people with whom I commiserated Ken’s passing was Sunni Khalid, another African American journalist who also worked for NPR. Like Ken, Sunni is as talented as any journalist I have ever met.

And like Ken, Sunni would be fired by NPR’s Baltimore affiliate, WYPR-FM, after he wrote on social media in 2012:

“I, for one, have had enough of this pandering before the Israeli regime. The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”

Years earlier, Sunni’s reportage had rubbed his white editors at the Baltimore Sun the wrong way. At one point, he confided management’s mischaracterizations of his work to another African American journalist, Ginger Thompson, who he had worked with at the Baltimore Sun. According to Sunni, she responded:

“Well Sunni, maybe they’re right.”

Similarly, another gifted African American journalist, Barrington Salmon, told me that when he worked for the Washington Times he would occasionally see a Black woman journalist at the Post, Vanessa Williams, at press conferences. But Williams, who would go on to be an editor on the Post’s national desk, would never acknowledge Barrington, merely rolling her eyes at him and walking away. Barrington said he was shocked; it was something he would expect from a white Post reporter who viewed reporters from lesser newspapers with contempt.

These exchanges are not banal but reflect the news media’s complicity with U.S. imperialism. As a prime example, Ken was a staunch anti-Zionist, as am I, Sunni, and Barrington.

Moreover, the marginalization of Black men by Black women in the newsroom robs journalism of its transformative power. The day after I learned of Kenneth Walker’s death, a friend sent me this story published by Capital B, a new, nonprofit news outlet founded by three African American women. I applied for an editing job more than a year ago and after a third and final Zoom interview with three Black women editors, I was shocked when they did not hire me. As this story illustrates, however, I was not the only one who lost out.

The article begins thusly:

“PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Military veteran Obbie Riley is “sad, angry, and all of the above” as he thinks about the high cost and lack of broadband access in his rural Mississippi hometown.”

One of the first rules of journalism is to “show” and not “tell;” in other words, a news story should be more like a documentary than a seminar. A red flag is when the strongest verb in the opening paragraph is “is.” About two-thirds down in this story, the writer describes a Black man who is denied broadband service, only to discover that his next-door neighbor is a subscriber. That should’ve been the lead on this story; it offers the “surprise” that is the hallmark of good writing, and invites the reader to continue.

But the story’s biggest failure can be found in its dateline: Philadelphia, Mississippi is the site where three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. The slayings were a pivotal event in the civil rights movement and the subject of the award-winning film, Mississippi Burning.

It is difficult to fathom how anyone who claims to be a journalist would fail to mention that even once. How much better would this story have been if it had included what we call a nut graph, or summary, that read thusly:

“Just as access to the ballot defined the civil rights movement, access to the internet is a major hurdle for African Americans who are unable to fully participate in public life today. Cyberspace is, in fact, a critical resource for economic development and without it, Blacks are significantly disadvantaged compared to whites.”

I try to remain hopeful but the truth is that the emergence of a Black, female managerial elite to help prop up the white settlers’ ethno-nationalist project by frustrating African American demands for justice and freedom is entirely unprecedented. Not all Black women have defected of course—and not even a majority—but never before have African Americans been so shorthanded in our struggle to end either slavery or its afterlife. I ended my first book, Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People by reassuring the proletariat, generally, and African-descended people in the Americas specifically, that if we work together:

“We can take them!”

But with a critical mass of what has historically been our most ferocious fighters, Black women, working for the other team, I must confess that I am no longer sure that we can

.

After the jackhammers finally fell silent and the pickaxes were put away, after the work crews dismantled the bollards, erased the big, bumblebee-yellow letters and repaved the two city blocks within the White House’s direct line of sight, Black Lives Matter Plaza was gone.

When it was erected five years ago in 2020 during the season of upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis patrolman, the Washington D.C. press corps mostly described the mural as a symbolic middle finger extended by the District’s African American Mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, to President Trump who had publicly quarreled with her and antagonized protesters.

But if the mural’s unveiling is portrayed as an act of defiance, Bowser’s decision in February to remove it can only be understood as acquiescence to the notoriously petty Trump, who returned to the White House seeking to settle old scores by ordering his Republican vassals on Capitol Hill to issue the city an ultimatum: take down the plaza or lose hundreds of millions in federal funding.

While there is a germ of truth in this narrative, it is so lacking in context that it misses the point almost entirely. First elected in 2014, Bowser exemplifies a generation of African American mayors across the country who represent the economic interests of a gentrifying, white elite and a smattering of bourgeois Blacks who want in on the deal. Far from being a reliable ally to the city’s African American working class, Bowser’s policies, almost without exception, redistribute wealth upward, from employees to their employers, tenants to their landlords and borrowers to their creditors.

The activists who poured into the streets in the summer of 2020 following Floyd’s murder wanted a commitment to shrink the Metropolitan Police Department as a means of lessening state violence against African Americans and Latinos who are disproportionately in the line of fire. What they got instead from Bowser was a “temporary tattoo,” and an increase in the police budget every year since.

The irony is that for D.C.’s Black Lives Matter activists and their comrades, Bowser’s creation of the colorful but ultimately meaningless streetscape is widely considered a cynical and jejune ploy to placate—if not frustrate—their specific, material demands for racial justice. By their lights, when Bowser gave the order to erect the plaza, she was not extending her middle finger to Trump, but to them.

That perspective is borne out by their initial response to the mural. Just a day after its completion on June 5, 2020, a dozen or so activists hauled buckets of paint to 16^th street, converted the D.C. flag into an “equals” sign and added a phrase so that it momentarily read: “Black Lives Matter = Defund the Police.”

According to the Washington Post, one organizer shouted:

“This is ours. This is all ours. This city is ours. These streets? Ours.”

That same day, Black Lives Matter D.C. tweeted of the plaza:

“This is a performative distraction from real policy changes. Bowser has consistently been on the wrong side of BLMDC history. This is to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands. Black Lives Matter means defund the police.”

Rose Jaffe, one of the local artists commissioned to paint the street mural, expressed ambivalence about the project, telling the Washington Post:

“I’m conflicted about doing it. It’s about wanting to reclaim the streets, but I also know that it is a little bit of a photo op. Where is the action behind this?”

It seems only fitting that a transformative Black Power movement would meet its end here in this stronghold of African American political militancy once known as “Chocolate City.” The truth of the matter, however, is that the radical Black body politic has been a spent force for at least a generation; that it can no longer shape policies on the ground nor even sustain a purely symbolic gesture as impotent as Black Lives Matter Plaza speaks not to its death but to its decomposition, redolent of a rotting corpse found in a shallow grave.

An autopsy unearths a movement’s short life and brutal death.

Not just a call to arms, Black Power was as transcendent as any social movement of the 20^th century. First articulated by Malcolm X’s politics of self-reliance, Black Power is the understanding that integration is insufficient—if not altogether disadvantageous– to liberate African Americans from exploitation by a settler colonial Republic. What we need, critically, is self-determination: the ability to assert democratic control over our communities and its institutions—City Hall, the schools, the police, courts, banks, and businesses —just as whites exert authority over theirs.

The concept spread like wildfire after Malcolm’s assassination in 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act months later but nowhere did the idea of Black sovereignty catch on more than here in the nation’s capital, which is ironic since Congress does not recognize the District as an autonomous state.

Still, beginning in the mid-60s, activists with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, flocked to the District, which is home to Howard University and a population that, at the time, was roughly two-thirds African American. Among them was SNCC’s first chairman, Marion Barry, who would go on to be elected to the school board and later as mayor in 1979.

Barry’s administration provided summer jobs to tens of thousands of teenagers, home-buying assistance for working-class residents, and food for senior citizens. To fill thousands of middle- and upper-level management positions at City Hall that had previously been reserved for whites, he hired African Americans and increased seven- fold the number of municipal government contracts doled out to minority vendors, the vast majority of them Black. In 1986, the District awarded 39 percent of its business, $185 million, to minority-owned firms, more than any other city in the country, and worth more than half a billion in today’s dollars.

Housing was a focal point of the Barry administration. Sunni Khalid, who would go on to work as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio and as a Baltimore Sun reporter, recalled Barry campaigning for mayor at Howard University in 1979, Khalid’s freshman year, and urging students to help him revitalize the city by buying a home. After he was elected, Barry initiated a joint program between the city government and the private sector to rehabilitate 733 of the estimated 4,500 vacant, boarded-up housing units in the city. The program included rental housing, public housing, condominiums, cooperatives, and 200 new single-family homes, and even helped lower-income families borrow up to $11,000 for a down payment on a home.

Housing was also the centerpiece of a forgotten project undertaken by Barry’s colleagues in SNCC.

In 1965, the year that Barry moved from Tennessee to D.C., SNCC spokesman Julian Bond won election to the Georgia Legislature, representing an Atlanta district. Georgia lawmakers refused to seat him, however, alleging that Bond’s signature on a SNCC statement denouncing the Vietnam War was disqualifying. Simultaneously, SNCC’s leadership was looking to regroup following the Democrats’ refusal to seat Fannie Lou Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 national convention in Atlantic City. Omali Yeshitela, the chair of the African Socialist People’s Party and a former SNCC member told Black Republic Media:

“There was a sort of trajectory at the time to move away from the Democratic party. We assumed that we would not become full-fledged members of the Democratic party so we were no longer holding up the Democratic Party’s values…Our only objective was to win power… for Black people.”

The organization decided to support Bond’s reelection, but they would also use the opportunity to pivot from rural organizing to urban areas like Atlanta. Led by a dynamic group of young African American activists that included Bill Ware, Gwen Robinson and Michael Simmons, (who would later marry) the Special Committee to Reelect Julian Bond began canvassing Atlanta neighborhoods in January of 1966, with a particular focus on the hardscrabble neighborhood known as Vine City.

Standing in the shadow of the Georgia Capitol’s gold-leafed dome only a mile and a half away, Vine City was as poor as America gets. After touring the neighborhood in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. said that the “living conditions were the worst I had ever seen…I had no idea people were living in Atlanta in such conditions. This is a shame on the community.”

In his wonderful book, Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, Dan Berger wrote:

“The maxim of organizing still held true: meet people where they were at. And where they were, bright and early every weekday, was at Five Points. Segregation had kept Black from white when it came to housing but bonded through labor. Almost half of Atlanta’ s population in 1966 was Black, and the majority of them worked as laborers. Five Points was the transportation hub connecting Vine City to other parts of Atlanta. It resembled the area in the Bronx that SNCC advisor Ella Baker had, decades earlier, described as a ‘slave market.’ From Five Points, Black women would catch buses to the northeastern suburbs to get white children to school on time and tend house as domestics, while Black men headed downtown to the military induction center or low-level work.”

Michael Simmons told Black Republic Media:

“We would be at Five Points at 5:30 in the morning handing out leaflets and they weren’t one-page leaflets, they were four-page leaflets that told a story. We got so familiar with the workers that you know if we missed a day they would be looking for us.”

Continuing, Berger wrote:

“The most immediate concern was the blighted state of housing. Old shacks that often lacked plumbing and heat sat on cinder blocks to prevent flooding. One of the biggest slumlords was Joe Shaffer, who operated what the Atlanta Project described as a ‘plantation-like system in which he acts as landlord, employer, grocer, creditor, sheriff, judge and jury over the people who live on his property.’ Shaffer overcharged and underserved his tenants in violation of the city’s already weak housing laws. At the suggestion of SNCC attorney Howard Moore, the Atlanta Project began collecting affidavits from residents about the problems with their landlords. A thirteen-year-old who lived in an apartment without so much as an icebox reported that the ‘rats are almost bigger than my doll.’ In a two-room apartment occupied by eight people, a twenty-three-year-old man ‘had to kill a snake… The floor has holes and it is partly rotten,…‘I’ m afraid it will fall in.’ When Shaffer evicted several residents for failure to pay rent that January, the Atlanta Project — only weeks into existence but already with strong ties in the neighborhood — organized a protest. Gwen borrowed a truck from SNCC’ s headquarters to help one of the families move to another house while other project staff brought blankets to those without heat. Days later, the project held a rally against Shaffer, demanding, ‘Slumlords must go!’ This maelstrom helped catalyze a rent strike among the residents. All winter, the project kept pushing. With a paneled van and a loudspeaker, project staff drove through the neighborhood blaring The Impressions (‘You’ ve been cheating,’ dedicated to Shaffer) and Bobby Bland (‘Too far gone to turn around,’ dedicated to the tenants) while residents placed furniture in the street.

Short of money, the Atlanta activists substituted grit and guile, relying on innovation to solve problems, and creating a blueprint for radical groups such as the Black Panthers which was born in Oakland 9 months later. Berger again:

“With the streets blocked, Atlanta Project members helped residents charge a toll to anyone who wanted to cross. The unauthorized tax collection garnered $180, including ten cents from a police officer, to help bail out tenants and SNCC activists who had been arrested in the protest. All the while, they coordinated a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation — providing childcare for voting mothers, calling constituents, taking people to the polls, and knocking on doors, always knocking on doors. On February 23, Julian Bond was easily reelected to a seat he had yet to occupy.”

Winston Grady-Willis, Director of Black Studies at Skidmore College, told Black Republic Media that the Atlanta Project, as it came to be known, represented SNCC’s inevitable maturation.

“In Lowndes County, the Freedom Schools were confronted mainly with the Klan and the threat of domestic terrorism. When they wanted a break from dealing with the extraordinary pressures of that, they would go to Atlanta for a good time… one of the things that Ella Baker always stressed was this need for power to move from the grassroots upward for communities to be able to have control over resources and not just rely on a charismatic leader.”

The project also promoted a sense of Black consciousness. Early in February of 1966, as Atlanta police were arresting a cadre of SNCC activists for attempting to block an eviction, Bill Ware shouted out as he was being hauled away:

“There must be unity among Black people. The only way we can stop evictions is for the people to come together!”

By 1966, Marion Barry had quit SNCC to start a youth-centered non-profit organization in D.C., Pride, Inc. But all of the elements that characterized the Atlanta Project—the grassroots approach, innovation, Black nationalism, its focus on housing—characterized his leadership both as an activist and mayor. Yeshitela told Black Republic Media:

“A lot of other SNCC folks had gone with Barry to DC and there were some similarities between how he moved politically and how the Atlanta Project moved. I don’t think that was a coincidence.”

Barry’s friend and pastor, Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Baptist in southeast D.C., told Black Republic Media that while he never heard Barry speak of the Atlanta Project, Black consciousness was at the core of his leadership.

“He so identified with the masses of downtrodden Blacks and that is why he was beloved by the people. You are talking about thousands of young people who got their first paycheck through his administration. To a lot of them those monies were used to maintain their family household. You know, we’d be walking down the street and he would meet someone and he’d say ‘you got a job?’ Here, go downtown and say that I sent you.’ Barry instilled a pride in this city that… you could look at his government and look at all these qualified Black men and women who ran this city and that was something that the people in power couldn’t fathom

It was a model for the nation.”

Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) would famously coin the slogan “Black Power” at a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi in June 0f 1966, a little more than four months after Bond’s reelection. Ware, Robinson, Simmons and other organizers with the Atlanta Project would go on to author an influential white paper on Vine City which, among other things, exhorted SNCC to purge white members, partly as an acknowledgement of white liberalism’s limitations but also as an understanding that whites could best serve the Black liberation movement by organizing other whites.

The Vine City white paper was deeply polarizing within SNCC, and Bill Clinton referenced the rift in 2020, incorrectly, eulogizing the organization’s former chairman, John Lewis, as a safer Negro than Ture. In fact, while the moderate Lewis was critical of the Vine City paper, so too was the more militant Ture.

Said Grady-Willis at Skidmore College:

“I think the Atlanta project activists were really ahead of their time.”

George Derek Musgrove, a professor of African American history at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County and co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy, pinpoints the end of the Black Power era in D.C. to 1998 when many of the city’s then aging activists gathered to pay tribute to a terminally ill Kwame Ture. That event was held just one month before Barry decided not to run for a fifth term; he’d been reelected to his fourth following his release from prison for his conviction on a single misdemeanor count of cocaine possession. Bowser is the city’s fourth mayor since Barry left office in 1999, all of them are Black and all of them supportive of gentrification policies that are, in effect, a rejection of Barry’s Black Power agenda.

Though they share the same initials, Barry’s first three terms in office couldn’t have been more different from Bowser’s first three. While the percentage of city contracts awarded to minority vendors remains relatively high in terms of total dollars– 37 percent–70 percent of that goes to just a handful of vendors. Said council member Kenyan R. McDuffie, who oversees the council’s business and economic development committee and led the effort to fund the study:

“The numbers are extraordinarily low, even if the total dollar amount exceeds that of other places.”

Similarly, Bowser’s administration has continued to push home prices out of reach for African Americans. The percentage of Black households that own their own homes has plummeted from nearly half in 2000 to roughly a third in 2022. A recent study found that of all homes sold in D.C. between 2016 and 2020, first-time African American homebuyers could afford only 8.4 percent while first time white homebuyers could afford 71 percent of the homes on the market.

Moreover, if Barry’s administration inculcated in African Americans a sense of dignity, Bowser’s is defined by a growing sense of disillusionment, redolent of what SNCC encountered in Vine City when they arrived in 1966.

At the 2020 celebration to commemorate the impromptu revisions to the D.C. Black Lives Matter mural, onlookers began to dance to the Frankie Beverly and Maze classic, “Before I Let Go.” When the dancing stopped, Black Lives Matter members began calling Black people to stand on the mural.

“Come into the circle. Black people only.”

Eighteen-year-old Rohena Innocent was standing with her friend Dominique Frederick, 19, just behind the yellow caution tape as Black Lives Matter D.C. put the finishing touches on their pointed response. While Frederick referred to Bowser’s mural as a “temporary tattoo,” Innocent mused openly to the Washington Post:

“It’s great marketing.”

Then she added, speaking in unison with Frederick:

“But it’s not enough,”

Standing next to them was their friend, 21-year-old Sofia Martinez, who spoke wistfully of a D.C. that she was too young to remember, telling the Post:

“This used to be Chocolate City.”

Yeshitela said that Chocolate City was lost in 1989 when too many African Americans first saw the now iconic videotape of Barry smoking crack cocaine in a darkened D.C. hotel room and found it amusing. We should have recognized it for what it was: a coup.

“It was this decolonizing movement that thrust Barry into this position of leadership in Washington D.C., 70 percent Black surrounded by a sea of hostility. But he could withstand it as long as there was a deep and profound passion for freedom that permeated everything and we had organizers on the ground who were doing the work…But that was crushed, people were assassinated, put in jail. ..Marion himself didn’t have the revolutionary stamina. The people want to be free but we have no organization, we have no capacity as we did back…in the 60s when you saw an international movement, a global revolution was on the horizon. You don’t hear anybody talking about revolution today.

Back then we all presumed that the system is going to die soon. There is no such presumption today.

”

In his pioneering theory known as Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson, a professor of African American studies at the University of California-Irvine, cites research that reveals that whites typically grow more confident after seeing news reports of police killings of Blacks and Latinos because it reassures them that they remain at the top of the social hierarchy.

Similarly, immigrants to the U.S. learn this binary calculation that associates blackness with dispossession and death, both physical and social, in the form of alienation from the mainstream of social life. Said one Serbian immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island more than a century ago:

“You soon know something about this country: Negroes never get a fair chance.”

Like an app downloaded into your cell phone, racial capitalism infects the American body politic with a virus that causes it to go haywire, producing sadistic thoughts.

In 2022, the Los Angeles Times published excerpts from an audiotaped conversation between Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, two of her Latino colleagues on the city council, and the Latino president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Taking aim at practically every ethnic group in the city, Martinez reserved her bitterest vitriol for Los Angeles’ African American population.

Of the district attorney, Martinez said, "Fuck that guy . . . He's with the Blacks." And after referring to the adopted African American son of her white city council colleague, Mike Bonin, as a "changuito" or “monkey” in Spanish, she said:

“They're raising him like a little white kid . . . . I was like, 'This kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, I'll bring him right back”’

The boy was 2 years old at the time.

It is true, as the historian John Henrik Clarke was fond of saying, that “African Americans have no friends nowhere,” but it is also true, as Marx posited, that you cannot dip your toe in the same river twice, meaning that the political context is fluid and ever-changing.

In the aftermath of the Los Angeles City Council’s leaked audiotape scandal, Black Lives Matter protesters showed up outside the home of one councilman, Kevin De León, who participated in the redistricting hearing.

The African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel wrote:

A large group of Latino De León supporters showed up in the afternoon but, after a conversation with BLMLA leaders, switched sides and joined in the calls for De León to resign.

What African Americans must grasp, if we have any viable hope of achieving the self-determination that has largely eluded us since our arrival in the U.S. more than 400 hundred years ago, is that while the settler Republic encourages everyone else to believe they have a material stake in our death and dispossession, the pillars of white supremacy are so shaky that they require constant reinforcement.

That is precisely what President Trump is trying to do by dispatching 2,000 soldiers from California’s National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles against his administration’s aggressive deportation policies.

That has only escalated the violence and law-enforcement officials in Los Angeles are bracing for more clashes. Although he is not a deep thinker, Trump’s deployment is almost certainly intended as a strategy to turn public opinion against Latino immigrants and a feckless Democratic party, similar to the growing scorn for anti-war protesters after the National Guard opened fire on dissidents at Kent State University in May of 1970, killing four and injuring nine others.

But much like the Black Lives Matter protest outside Los Angeles City Councilman De León’s home three years ago, the upheaval in Southern California represents an opportunity to rebuild, and expand, the interracial Rainbow coalition proposed by the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, nearly 60 years ago.

Adherents to the movement to limit reparations to the African Descendants of Slavery, or ADOS, are among the most outspoken advocates for an isolated Black polity, insisting that the struggle of other racialized groups—including Arabs, Latinos, Asians and even Blacks from the continent and the Caribbean—are of no concern to African Americans, in part because those groups often mimic whites’ anti-Black racism. They are not wrong in their diagnosis, only in their prescription.

Whether known as settler colonialism or its alias, racial capitalism, Western ideas for improving macroeconomic efficiency have failed miserably since the Nixon administration organized a coup to overthrow Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973, and installed a military junta whose deeply conservative trade policies have bankrupted the world’s workers over a span of nearly 50 years.

There is no shortage of economists who believe that an economic crisis is barreling towards the U.S., and it may plausibly rival, if not eclipse, the Great Depression. That is important to note because as the Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci wrote—and the New Deal taught—people move differently when they hit rock bottom. At the nadir of the Great Depression in 1931, African Americans and communists—many of them Jews—led efforts to free nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama.

Their movement intersected with organized labor and went on to modernize the economy, seed the civil rights, Black Power and New Left movements, and pocket for employees more than half of national income as late as 1974. The Reagan administration began to dismantle that workers’ movement by blaming African Americans for a slowing economy and the attendant social ills, causing whites to defect from the movement responsible for their material prosperity. Other ethnic groups followed suit.

The throngs of protesters who have poured into Los Angeles’ streets to challenge Trump’s deportations coincide with the proliferation of pro-Gaza rallies on university campuses nationwide to decry Israel’s genocide, and a labor movement experiencing a resurgence. That suggests an opening for Blacks to rehabilitate an interracial workers’ movement with African characteristics by which I mean that we support universal policies such as Medicare-4-All, immigration reform, an increase in the minimum wage, and affordable housing, but in exchange for a Black Power, or reparations agenda that transfers control of institutions in our neighborhoods-- schools, banks, housing, jobs, and police—to the African American working class.

Our future is not in our past yet we can learn from a history that so far has always ended in the betrayal of the Black working class by other tribes and our own Talented Tent

h. We must account for Afropessimism even as we move towards Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton’s vision of African Americans collaborating with other racialized groups that have suffered the indignities and immiseration of settler colonial states. We can revisit the issue of federal guardrails as needed but rather than some idyllic liberal notion of integration, the objective should be a nationwide constellation of semi-autonomous homogenous communities—resembling pre-colonial African villages in the main-- that confer, to paraphrase Hampton:

Black Power for Black People

White Power for White People

Brown Power for Brown People

Yellow Power for Yellow People,

And X Power for anyone we left out!