“Defeat the War on African People in the US and Abroad” has been the rallying cry for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) since the formation’s inception in 2017. As we rolled out and expanded the campaign, we were frequently met with the same question in the teach-ins, webinars, panel discussions, and outreach efforts we conducted among colonized and oppressed Africans across this country and even the world: “What war on Africans?” We were similarly asked as a follow-up, “Who is waging war on us?”
Those are excellent questions, but before we get to those questions, let us deal clearly with the relationship of the working class and poor Africans, and others in the U.S. to the state.
We Are A Colonized People
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines colonialism as “domination of a people or area by a foreign state or nation : the practice of extending and maintaining a nation’s political and economic control over another people or area.” This definition, however, may not resonate with many working-class, poor and oppressed people of all races in the U.S. because they do not think of themselves as separate from the U.S. They think of themselves as Americans and therefore do not see the U.S. government dominating them or exerting political or economic control over them, as if they were separate from the rest of the nation. However, let’s take a look at the Kids’ Definition, which is used in a National Geographic article on the subject. It suddenly makes more sense: Colonialism is “control by one power over a dependent area or people.”
The conquering of Africans was done through chattel slavery, and through another genocide, that of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.. All of our ancestors in their separate but connected predicaments were subjected to the ripping away of our ancestral customs, languages, beliefs, and cultural values while forcing those of the conquering Europeans upon the people.
But this is akin to trying to force a square peg into a round bottomless colonialist pit, as there has not been a time in the history of this domestic colonization of our people that has not been marked by resistance against this diabolical transmogrification of sovereign, independent, and proud peoples into European examples of sub-human and savage chattel and peculiarities who needed to be transformed into something useful to and by the settler colonial Frankensteins.
As the people resisted this monstrous process of colonizing populations that were no longer useful to the colonizers, the only response the European interlopers had was repression to keep those populations docile, controlled, and dependent upon them and their private-property focused and ruling-class-run economic system (capitalism), while simultaneously keeping them on the fringes of society, rendering them unable to move into the “mainstream” of workers who earned living wages, the so-called “middle class.”
This domestic repression of our people, implemented even after grudgingly changing the legal status of our oppressed ancestors; a change that only occurred with unrelenting resistance from the oppressed; has been a consistent factor in the relationship between us – the colonized working class, poor and oppressed people of the US – and government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.
Many of us are familiar with the remote and desolate reservations the Indigenous were forced onto, the Black Codes that criminalized movement for the formerly enslaved after “Emancipation,” the violence committed against oppressed populations by civilian citizens of the U.S., the complicity of law enforcement and members of the legal system in either carrying out that violence or covering it up or legitimizing it, and certainly the use of the U.S. military to crush mass uprisings of the people demanding full citizenship and human rights. But in the modern era, say post-1970, what does domestic repression look like?
Domestic Repression
Far from the “Officer Friendly” model of years gone by–that itself was a façade employed to deflect from the terrorism police unleashed upon citizens outside of the classroom Good Cop propaganda–daily policing in working-class, poor and oppressed neighborhoods looks more like military patrols in a combat zone than beat cops “keeping the peace.” That is because policing in the U.S. today is shaped by the “warrior mentality” that is ingrained in police training, and supplemented by surplus military equipment from the Department of Defence, dressing cops on our streets with the tools of war that they use against our communities. The equipment is provided through the 1033 Program , which allows the transfer of military equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies. On BAP’s Resource Page for this program, images of the kind of military equipment domestic police forces have deployed on our streets are seen, but surely one can never forget the sight of military tanks manned by local police sent to pacify the uprising against police terrorism in Ferguson, Missouri after the police murdering Michael Brown in 2014. By the time the police murdered George Floyd in 2020 , people began to take note of the increase in battleground equipment being used by local cops against people resisting police repression.
Repression by law enforcement is not limited to state and local cops. So-called special operations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) often target African communities and frequently lead to abuses of power and violations of civil rights.
One such operation was introduced in Baltimore, Maryland which along with seven other cities saw Donald Trump’s Operation Relentless Pursuit launched on January 7, 2020. Detroit, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis and Milwaukee were also selected for the Trump Administration’s FBI-led operation which had the stated intention of “surging” federal, state and local resources into cities where violent [horizontal] crime rates remained high.
The operation did not put a dent in the so-called crime wave. Instead, as BAP organizer Vanessa Beck stated at the time;
“This newest version of the so-called war on crime must be seen for what it is – the latest incantation of the State’s relentless war on Baltimore’s Black working class and poor and should be categorically rejected by Baltimore’s public officials.”
The FBI is also still in the repression business by continuing their long history of targeting radical African organizations, particularly those fighting for the working class, poor and oppressed and advocating international solidarity and socialism–in short, challenging the capitalist dictatorship that is the U.S. government. The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), is the latest target of the state through the FBI indictment of the organization.
The FBI connected the federal indictment of a Russian national to the APSP, alleging that Chairman Omali Yeshitela has been working to spread “Russian propaganda” in the United States under the influence of this Russian specifically and on behalf of the Russian government generally. This was the impetus for the July 2022 FBI raids against APSP’s Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida and their Uhuru Solidarity Center in St. Louis, Missouri and the private residence of Chairman Yeshitela also in St. Louis.
All of this brute force from the enforcement arm of the state continues the long history of state repression directed against Black people in the U.S. Despite allegedly having the right to freely associate with people around the world, to hold any political beliefs it may choose, and to express them without fear of intimidation, persecution, or prosecution in an allegedly free and democratic country, the FBI is still deploying the illogic that Black people do not know we are oppressed until a so-called “adversary” nation tells us we are. So Black people continue to bear the brunt of surveillance and deadly police violence as we legitimately and righteously continue to challenge the brutally undemocratic state.
Deadly Exchange Program
In response to the Black-led uprising Against Racist Police Terrorism in 2020, militarized police responded with massive violence against protestors, backed by city governments and the full power of a president (Trump) who declared martial law. It was in this context that the existence of the long-running Deadly Exchange Program between the military of the Zionist Israeli apartheid regime and U.S. police forces was exposed.
According to the website Deadly Exchange by the organization Jewish Voices for Peace, the program,
“…bring together police, ICE, border patrol, and FBI from the US with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel. In these programs, “worst practices” are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries. These include racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”
Deadly Exchange programs like the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) , founded in 1992 and housed in Georgia State University’s (GSU) Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, is one way that Zionist violence against Palestinians directly impacts African/Black populations in Georgia and across the U.S. The IOF “trains” soldiers at GSU’s Urban Warfare Training Center, built in 2005, in violent occupation and counter-insurgency to brutally suppress Palestinians and Palestinian resistance daily. This includes environments such as “Mini Gaza”,designed to replicate the ‘on the ground conditions’ in Gaza itself, and is the dangerous inspiration for the Cop Cities being built across the U.S.
Proliferation of Cop Cities
Rather than these military base-type installations for police being an organic and isolated phenomenon in Atlanta, Georgia where most people first heard the term “Cop City” and where the #StopCopCity movement originated, these “training facilities” for already militarized police forces are connected to the oppression of working class, poor and oppressed people internationally and are not limited to just Atlanta.
Since the #StopCopCity campaign came to fruition in 2023, it has been exposed that there are nearly 70 of these facilities in various phases of construction, with only three states that currently have no plans for such facilities to be built, or at least there are no plans that can be found.
The entrenchment of a massive militarized domestic repression force against our communities persists, and is rapidly deployed to crush the resistance of the domestically colonized to our material conditions, and brutally crush domestic opposition to U.S. government foreign policies as well, as is seen in violent police response to the ongoing student protests against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and Rafah being committed by Zionist Israel.
But it is important to note that police repression is not the only way the state crushes its opposition domestically. There are also other methods of repression that so-called non-state institutions carry out in support of the state.
Crackdown on Dissent
Dissent and resistance are met with crackdowns in various spheres of society. This includes the press, where journalists and media outlets that challenge the narrative of the state or expose the truth are targeted, including this author and her comrade and co-host of the Sputnik Radio show By Any Means Necessary, which is no longer on the air because we refused to legitimize Israel’s lies about Hamas atrocities.
This reality reflects the precarity of African and other marginalized workers who organize and advocate for the human rights of the oppressed, and who often face repression and retaliation ourselves in doing so.
As we see, this crackdown on dissent, no matter how moral (how much more right can one be than to stand against genocide), is expanded to students across the country who continue to protest against the Zionist Apartheid Israeli (ZAI) regime and its injustices against Palestine.
College students have seen their university administrations eviscerate their students’ rights to free speech by imposing restrictions on speech, canceling events, or taking disciplinary actions against students involved in these protests, up to and including arrests and criminal charges, expulsion from school, revoking of housing, denying diplomas, canceling graduations, and even lawsuits against student organizations.
Of course, none of this could be carried out as swiftly as it has been without the help of a well-oiled and primed militarized law enforcement apparatus across this country that monitors, surveils, and descends upon student activists with all the brute force at their disposal.
Bipartisan Support of Repression
As the façade of democracy is being swiftly ripped away by the swift, brutal, and wholly undemocratic crackdown on marginalized peoples fighting for their human rights domestically and students of all ethnicities across the country fighting the human rights of oppressed people internationally, many have wondered where the Democratic Party is on these issues, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which was once known the “ Conscience of The Congress.”
What has been a shock to many is that the support for repression is not exclusive to one political party. As much as the Republicans are responsible for the passage of anti-democratic anti-protest laws across the country in the wake of the 2020 uprising, with some being successfully challenged in court and others passed and still in force today; there has been plenty of support from the Democratic Party, the Black Misleadership Class in state and local legislatures controlled by mayors and city councils, and all the way up to the Congressional Black Caucus supporting repressive measures as well.
Despite their rich history of resistance to U.S. government domestic and international aggression in support of the people and their rights, the CBC’s support for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 , aka the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill was a watershed moment for that group. Their move to save the Clinton presidency by supporting this legislation which increased funding and militarization for police and slashed funding for social programs resulted in the worst impacts on poor Black and other marginalized communities among the CBC’s constituents with increases in poverty, homelessness, poor educational outcomes, incarceration, and substance abuse and mental health issues that are largely still unaddressed. The CBC has since never strayed far from their neoliberal turn when it came to warmongering and repression.
Today we see a Congressional Black Caucus that supports the 1033 Program that puts police with combat equipment on the streets of their constituents’ communities. On the state and local level the fight against Cop Cities has revealed a deeply entrenched Negroliberal cabal firmly in support of these repressive projects in places like Atlanta , the alleged “Black Mecca,” where author Eve Dickerson points out;
“The failure of Abrams, Warnock, Nikema Williams (John Lewis’s successor), and other Black Georgia Democrats to oppose the facility is a slap in the face; but as the Black faces lending “respectability” to the Cop City project, they are simply performing their role in the Atlanta Way bargain. The fact that many of them fell over themselves to offer “solidarity” when Tennessee Republicans expelled two Black elected officials from the Legislature shows they play the game as they have been instructed for decades: make nominal nods to the importance of justice and democracy, and no more.”
On foreign policy, that connective tissue that links the struggle of colonized people domestically and those abroad, the Black Misleadership Class of the CBC is no better. From the CBC’s role in denying Africans the right to engage in business with whomever they choose through the Countering Malign Activities in Africa Act ; to their support for the U.S./EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine; to their support of Zionist Apartheid Israel ; and finally to their support for the U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM on the continent, more people are realizing that the Democratic Party and even the Black politicians within it are no friends of the oppressed yearning to be free from neoliberal repression, because those politicians tell our people that their brand of Blue oppression is the lesser evil than the Red oppression.
But we know that oppression imposed by a Red, Blue, Black or Brown hand is still oppression, and we must continue to fight against them for all of our liberation, as our brothers and sisters on the Continent know all too well in resisting the Black Faces In High Places in the roles of neocolonial puppets for the U.S. and its western allies.
War Against Africans Abroad
The concept of colonialism and that of Africans being a colonized people in the U.S. is closely linked to the concept of imperialism, which is the policy of using power and influence to control another nation or people, and is the ideology at the foundation of colonialism. It’s all about control to exploit for the profit of the ruling class!
So this war on Africans is not limited to domestic repression but extends to actions taken against Africans abroad. One example is the situation in Haiti, where political instability caused by foreign intervention has impacted the well-being of the African population.
It is in the context of the crisis of imperialism in Haiti and the interconnected crisis of domestic colonialism in the U.S. that New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been revealed to be the Black Cop he openly brags about, and a warmongering imperialist right down to his faux-solidarity core.
In this expansive Medium article, Clash Collective writes of Adams’ gambit to garner Haitian immigrant support at the ballot box after his decades of supporting and implementing racist policing and worse, saying;
“Mayor Eric Adams recently has played around with press conferences to express solidarity with Haiti’s burdens. He gathers with Rev. Al Sharpton for prayer vigils with representatives of the Haitian community, to reflect on the plight of Haiti. Adams even suggested the increasingly chaotic New York City feels somewhat like the Haitian capital, Port au Prince. Now Adams rallies this “community sentiment” in harmony with the UN/US policing action in Haiti which is in fact a consensus to militarily invade Haiti to stabilize it.”
The article also states ”…Adams not only revived police units that were disbanded in 2020 for their disproportionate abuse against black and brown New Yorkers; he revived stop and frisk. Since he became mayor, 97% of all stops and searches have been on Black and Latino New Yorkers. And the “…$17 million is the amount of money Eric Adams cut from reentry programs for people at Rikers Island prison, only for New Yorkers to have to shell out the exact same amount of money to pay for NYPD’s misconduct settlements. Is Mayor Adams, who received votes from anti-racists and fascists alike (just like the imperialist Barack Obama), really a bad guy? It depends on our political worldview and how we see strategy for empowering African Americans, the Caribbean Diaspora and the Haitian homeland.” [Emphasis added]
Our answer to this question of whether Adams is a bad guy is unequivocal–he is the Negroliberal Black Cop he has always been, and given that reality he is a bad guy, and enemy of the people of New York City, and a grave threat to the people of Haiti and the Caribbean.
The same is true of the members of the CBC who continue to support AFRICOM, and the continued arming of the genocidal ZAI by their Corpse Boss Genocide Joe Biden. Those who share our melanin but are complicit in the targeting, repression of, and violence against melanated peoples domestically and abroad are bad Negroliberals doing the bidding of the evil neoliberal status quo of both parties that support this monstrously apocalyptic imperialist system. They are enemies of the people here and abroad, and they are a grave threat to all who seek freedom from U.S. imperialist hegemony.
This is not just a war, this is FASCISM
We must understand that this war on working-class and poor Africans and other marginalized people at home and abroad can best be characterized as fascism. Despite the political confusion about which politician is or is not a fascist, or which political party is or is not fascist, it must be made clear that fascism is not limited to a personality or one particular political party. Rather, fascism is an ideology that prioritizes authoritarianism, nationalism, and the suppression of dissent. If people are still looking for brownshirted thugs to march in jack-booted lock step through the streets like in the American propaganda movies about WWII, then they have and will continue to miss the fact that we are already at the point of fascism in the U.S., and it has been and is being exported around the world deny freedom, democracy, and life itself to millions.
But don’t believe me on this. In 1972 George Jackson wrote in his seminal revolutionary work “Blood In My Eye,” in which he said of fascism :
“We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be “reform.” We can make our definition more precise by adding the word “’economic.'” “Economic reform” comes very close to a working definition of fascist motive forces.
Such a definition may serve to clarify things even though it leaves a great deal unexplained. Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses. Disguise enters as a third stage of the emergence and development of the fascist state. The modern industrial fascist state has found it essential to disguise the opulence of its ruling-class leisure existence by providing the lower classes with a mass consumer’s flea market of its own. To allow a sizable portion of the “new state” to participate in this flea market, the ruling class has established currency controls and minimum wage laws that mask the true nature of modern fascism. Reform (the closed economy) is only a new way for capitalism to protect and develop fascism!
After the German SS agents or Italian Black Shirts kick in the doors and herd Jews and Communist partisans to death camps, after Peg-Leg White’s Black Legion terror and the Guardians of the Republic and their offspring legitimize the in other words, after the fascists have succeeded in crushing the vanguard elements and the threat they pose is removed, the ruling class goes on about the business of making profits as usual. The significance of the “new fascist arrangement” lies in the fact that this business-as-usual is accompanied by concessions to the degenerate segment of the working class, with the aim of creating a buffer zone between the ruling class and the still potentially revolutionary segments of the lower classes.”
Jackson concludes by saying: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
Fascism is here.
What will you do about it?
Black Agenda Report
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation , an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here )