Concerning Las Vegas

What drew me to the Uhuru movement was not a sophisticated study of the African People’s Socialist Party platform.  The formulation “No one lives at the expense of anyone else.  War against the corporations!  War against the System!” rang true, and made Uhuru worth checking out, to be sure.  But equally persuasive — I experienced at the Jesse/Akilé campaign kickoff rally — was the sense of collective strength and, well, just plain human warmth that filled the room, something so lacking in the rest of the nasty, petit-bourgeois U.S. left.  The decision to study Uhuru’s theoretical writing only followed from that.

Among the writings that impressed me was “Chairman Omali’s 2017 Political Report:  Putting Revolution Back on the Agenda!” which said in part:

“The fact is that millions of white people are in distress, some by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.  We must offer them all a way forward in defiance of the [Trump] election outcome and, to the extent possible, also to unity with our understanding of colonialism and reparations.

“The state of the fractures of the body politic of the U.S. can provide us an excellent opportunity to affect the unity of large sectors of the colonizer population with its own ruling class and with the colonial domination of Africans and the oppressed of the world.  Opening this front of struggle can only enhance our ability to put revolution back on the agenda within the U.S. and the world.”

Yesterday, I read a marvelous piece by Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report, in response to the Vegas shooting, which stated:

“In a country where cutthroat capitalism is the national ethos, social compacts wither, or are still-born.  Such is the collateral damage that white America has suffered from its failure to fight white supremacy in its ranks; it has poisoned its own soul, creating monsters that turn on their ‘own.’ ”

I will let the article speak for itself.  With what I would call “ruthless compassion,” Ford details the utter moral and social destruction of the white working class as it descends into the war of all against all.  This moral/social destruction is what allows mass murder to become normalized as never before, whether in incidents such as the Vegas shooting, the destruction of Puerto Rico, or the living death of mass incarceration.

This destruction is what allows overtly fascistic forces to openly recruit, the police to murder Black youth with impunity, and the public to just look the other way.  It is a disease gone epidemic.  But ironically, it is a disease for which our movement has the cure (or CURED to be more specific — Communities United for Reparations and Economic Development).

We offer not only the correct political solutions, and viable economic answers.  With Unity through Reparations, we offer the moral and human path to repair the human fabric that is being torn apart daily.

— Jeff Roby
October 5, 2017