Above photo: Fred Hampton, Illinois chairman of the Black Panthers, speaks during a press conference with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican civil and human rights group, on October 10, 1969, at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church in Chicago, Illinois. Dave Nystrom/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images.
“One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.” – #MLK “Remaining Awake During a Great Revolution.”
Do you know of anyone personally who has died of #TrumpFlu? Do you even know of anyone who has contracted it? Chances are you don’t. And if you don’t and you watch #FoxNews, who legally lies as much as #Trump, chances are you feel like a stranger in your own country. You may feel some economic insecurity, social anxiety, you may be out of work, not sure how you gonna make it, a victim of government overreach and a feeling of outrage and injustice. Or maybe you are a well-intended liberal without a racist bone in your body, except for a few relatives back home, and your greatest social challenge has been your card being declined in a restaurant, so you freaking out right now.
Well, take a backseat because Black people know these roads all too well and can offer some valuable insight into how to navigate them. Don’t mind the bourgeois, a few generations removed at the most, who will claim they have no reference point of struggle or the ignorant who deny even the existence of the 500-year-old institution of White Supremacy like Candace Owens who the Black delegation has tried unsuccessfully and repeatedly to trade to any other group.
Clutching your 2nd amendment rights, reciting passages from the book of revelations about the end of the world or binging on #Netflix is not going to save you. Black people been waiting on Jesus for centuries. Take it from us, if Obama didn’t save us, what makes you think Trump is going to save you? At least that bullshit that it’s not any Blue States or Red States, it’s only the United States can now finally be put to rest. Mitch the Bitch has made it clear that Blue States can go bankrupt for all he cares. He has refused to even bail out the Post Office that was put in financial crisis by an obscure congressional bill that requires them to pay benefits for employees 75 years in advance, which is now threatening to put the USPS out of business in the next 3 months. Just in time to make mail-in ballots an impossibility for the 2020 election. Nikki Haley even wants to cut your Social Security.
Maybe you have been injecting disinfectant spray into your body to ensure that you don’t contract the Trump Flu and die like my big cousin or my councilmember’s grandmother and it is now clouding your racist judgment so you think it is beneficial to you and your sense of superiority and deny benefits to “those people.“ Maybe you heard Rush Limbaugh praise Brian Kemp for reopening his Confederate state because 5 of the top 10 counties with the highest per capita death rates in U.S. are in Georgia and Black people are the largest racial group in all 5 of those counties.
You don’t even care that the White man in charge of running the Trump Flu task force is a dog breeder. You love dogs, but will send death threats to Dr. Fauci for having the integrity and the audacity to publicly disagree with your supreme leader. Michael Moore predicted this in 2016 and is making the same prediction in 2020. Trump will win because of the Midwest Math, the Rust Belt Brexit, the Last Stand of the Angry White Man which is attracted to his bigotry and ego.
In an effort to “save the economy” you would rather sacrifice lives because it is the “patriotic” thing to do. Especially when a disproportionate amount of those lives are people of color right? Here’s your chance to get rid of some of those undesirables without you having to use your assault rifle. You don’t have a Mexican built wall but you do have a brown immigration ban and a pandemic killing liberals in Blue States and people of color. Now it’s time to get back to work.
“If you can convince the lowest White man he’s better than the best Colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – Lyndon B. Johnson
There is a reason why Mitch McConnell is the 11th wealthiest person in the Senate while Kentucky is the 8th poorest state in the nation and Trump won Kentucky by the largest margin of any Republican since Nixon. You’ve been had. You’ve been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok! America has always used racism to divide the working class. You think you are a welcomed member of the White only club? Dave Chappelle said when there’s $50 million on the table the real White folks come out. You ain’t one of them.
Take it from Black people, “Everyone who is my skin folk ain’t my kinfolk.” In the great film “The Free State of Jones” with Matthew McConaughey, it tells the true story of Confederate deserters who joined runaway slaves to create liberated territories in the South during the Civil War. The late great revolutionary leader Fred Hampton preached solidarity by uniting White gangs, Latino Gangs and Black gang members and politicized them. The Black Panther Party and the White Weather Underground were all comrades. The first Civil War was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Now that capitalism is in crisis, the same slave masters are again depending on your racism to fight their war of economic exploitation for them. Don’t take it personally, Black people make the same mistake every time they join the military. #Staywoke
“’Where do we go from here?’ that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society… And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy… But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” – #MLK