This article is based on a speech given on Martin Luther King Day at the event “Mass March Against the Racist Wars at Home and Abroad” in Pittsburgh. Endorsed by over 40 organizations including the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, the event was attended by over a thousand people uniting the struggles against racism, police brutality and imperialist wars.
Sisters and Brothers,
We are here tonight to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, to unite in the struggle against what he called the three evils of our society: racism, militarism and poverty. We are here to unite in the struggle against these evils since the forces behind them are the same.
The forces at home that kill a Black person every 28 hours and the forces that wage imperialist wars abroad, murdering millions are the same.
The forces that shoot the tear-gas in Ferguson and the forces that bomb children in Palestine are the same.
The forces behind the racist mass incarceration at home and the secret torture centers abroad are the same.
The forces at home plundering billions of our tax dollars, making the poor poorer and the rich richer and the forces that profit from wars abroad are the same.
So who are these forces? They are the racist police, the prison-industrial complex, the military industrial complex, the banks, the corporations… and they all exist to serve and protect the same evil: White supremacist U.S. capitalism. For the forefathers of today’s capitalists, the rich white colonialists, racism was one of the true founding principles of this country. Racism was an indispensable tool to fool the average white person, for him to rationalize and normalize white supremacy, the genocide of millions of indigenous people and the enslavement of millions of Africans. Yesterday’s genocide and slavery is today’s police terror and mass incarceration and racism is still at work today to justify those crimes of white supremacy in the eyes of the white working people.
Racism is also the tool to legitimize imperialist wars in the eyes of the whole U.S. public, Black and white. Arabs, Middle Easterners, Asians have always been the targets of racist propaganda for the US war machine. It is no coincidence that when a nation is in the cross-heirs of U.S. imperialism, before the bombs start raining, we, in the US, are bombarded with racist mass media campaigns demonizing that nation and its leadership, whipping up hysteria for war.
The media portrays Middle Eastern people in the most racist fashion as inherently violent people. Being from the Middle East, I will tell you who is violent: U.S. imperialism is violent, it slaughtered over a million people in Iraq. The terror groups they have armed and funded in Syria, they are violent. They killed tens of thousands of people in cold blood. The racist, Zionist state of Israel is violent, they have bombed schools, hospitals, shelters in Palestine murdering thousands of children and civilians.
Let us also remember how the same media portrayed the protesters in Ferguson: “Violent criminals, looters, animals” they said. The police that murder Black andLatino people with impunity, they are the real criminals! The CEOs, the bankers, they are the real looters!
We have to realize racism, imperialist wars, poverty, all these seemingly separate evils are rooted in one mother evil: U.S. capitalism.
We have a lot to learn from Dr. King, from Malcolm X, from the Black Panthers, from Fred Hampton Jr., from Assata Shakur, from Mumia and countless other heroes. They represent the Black Nation’s ongoing struggle for freedom for over 500 years. They represent the ongoing fight against white supremacy since its infancy. Those heroes are all here among us tonight, since we are here tonight to unite, to build a united front to fight that very same evil.
Let us also not forget, we, in the U.S., are in the belly of that evil. Any victory we score here against that evil would be an immense help to all the oppressed people around the world who are fighting for self-determination and liberation from the plunder and destruction of U.S. imperialism.
We must unite! We must…and we will!
Because divided we fall, united, we can defeat this evil once and for all!
The people united will never be defeated!
