Above photo: Twitter screenshot.
The ADOS and FBA movements have gained influence by advocating for reparations exclusively for Black Americans descended from U.S. slavery.
They are promoting a divisive, anti-immigrant, and reactionary ideology. ADOS/FBA’s ideology is a dangerous diversion from true liberation. To achieve justice, Black radicals must reject this reactionary faction and reaffirm anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and Pan-African solidarity.
We revolutionary Africans in the U.S. have to finally confront the internal contradiction that is the ADOS/FBA faction that has emerged and gained legitimacy and influence. Through the inexplicable support of noteworthy political figures like Dr. Cornel West, and despite the glaring, divisive, and deeply offensive contradictions in that movement, ADOS/FBA have become so influential that they have deeply confused and divided the already embattled Black masses with their counter-revolutionary, reactionary and racist ideology.
American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) is a reparations movement that advocates exclusively for Black Americans descended from enslaved people in the U.S. It was founded by journalist and commentator Yvette Carnell and filmmaker Antonio Moore. Filmmaker and internet personality Tariq Nasheed, who initially supported ADOS, later split from the movement and established Foundational Black Americans (FBA), whose ideology is not significantly different from ADOS.
ADOS/FBA believe that all immigrants, but particularly Black immigrants, are given preference over native-born Blacks by those in power because racism in the U.S. is not extended, in their estimation, to immigrants – at least not as much or in the same way as (so-called) Black Americans experience. This belief creates the basis for their advocacy for reparations only for native-born (i.e., U.S.-born) descendants of enslaved people. They say native-born Black people are not African, but American. Yes. They truly believe this, even though the enslaved persons in the U.S. are descendants of those trafficked from Africa. This argument against our connection to Africa is the basis for ADOS/FBA reparations advocacy, which is neither based in fact nor will it serve to advance their reparations cause. The truth is that “No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn’t become a crocodile.” Our connection to Africa through our lineage to the people trafficked here to be enslaved does not change because we were born here instead of in Africa. And there is no amount of time we and our descendants will be born here that severs that connection or transforms that connection from one to Africa to one only to America. Further, this sentiment only does what the state has been doing in its long history of attacks on Black Americans, which is to tell us that our fortunes and future lie with this country that enslaved our African ancestors in the first place, we are not products of Africa, and have no stake in the liberation of the Continent and its people from imperialist domination. I know. It makes no sense.
In narrowing the definition of “Black American,” ADOS/FBA proponents disregard people like Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and most revolutionary African proponents of reparations and liberation. They also reject any acknowledgment of the need for Black anti-imperialism and internationalism. They argue, for example, that Garvey’s views and contributions are illegitimate because he was an immigrant. And they dismiss Malcolm X because he believed in the necessity of solidarity with Africa and all oppressed people. In fact many have characterized Malcolm X and other African revolutionaries like him with an immigrant parent as a “tether,” a disgustingly racist term used to denigrate Black immigrants and demonize birthright citizenship. “Tethers,” according to ADOS/FBA, are babies born to immigrants in the US as what they characterize as a ploy to allow parents to immigrate here, or are also described as mostly Caribbean and African immigrants who they claim are carrying out a political agenda to “replace FBAs and undermine their efforts to pursue protections legislation…reparations…and other resources that were originally earmarked to benefit FBAs.” That sounds suspiciously similar to the right-wing Great Replacement Theory, which espouses the idea that non-European people are actively working to replace European-descended folks around the world. The adoption of this backward, reactionary, conspiratorial ideology by confused Africans to demonize immigrants in pursuit of reparations from the U.S. government is diabolical, but the connection is unmistakable. ADOS/FBA, in other words, do not consider the struggles of people outside of the U.S. Black “native” population worthy of their attention, time, or effort. They go further than rejecting international solidarity by especially vilifying immigrants as people whose existence in this country facilitates the social, political, and economic degradation of Black Americans. As such, ADOS/FBA supports the violent and inhumane anti-immigrant policies advanced by both the previous and current administrations.
In aligning their identity with the country that oppressed Africans brought here to be enslaved and all of their progeny, ADOS/FBA also supports the imperialist thuggery and demonic inhumanity that this country commits against people around the world, to the point that they are silent on genocide in Gaza, the atrocities committed in the Congo, the imperialist interventions in Haiti, and the ongoing US imperialist Islamaphobic butchery in the Middle East. They are only interested in getting reparations for themselves. Everybody else trying to survive or avoid genocide are on their own, which is a position that is light years outside of the Black moral framework and is a violation of our Black radical peace tradition in which internationalism is a core tenet.
If ADOS/FBA thinks that wrapping themselves in the Old Glory stars and stripes to cover their Blackness and make their adherents acceptable to white America, they are in for a surprise. They can only believe that this gambit will work by ignoring the history of white racist violence against, for example, Black military veterans in this country.. But much like the right in refusing to acknowledge the importance of history to current conditions, ADOS/FBA folks dismiss that same history out of arrogance and selfishness rather than a sense of supremacy. Simply put, these folks do not understand that the ideology at the foundation of this country is white nationalism, which promotes the belief that white people should maintain political, economic, and cultural dominance. This foundation is rooted in European colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and eugenics to establish and maintain a state controlled by white capitalist power. This is the ideology supported by every US president.
Much was made about Trump recently saying that immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” which folks had a grand time making jokes about. But from its inception, ADOS/FBA folks have insisted that: immigrants come to this country and benefit from the work of Black Americans; that they do not support or contribute to and steal our jobs; and that they look down on or outright hate Black Americans. ADOS/FBA adherents have recently expressed that Trump’s current deportation pogrom is a good thing because all those presumably high-minded job-stealing immigrants will be gone. When confronted with the non-immigrant documented and legally documented citizens , including Indigenous people , being swept up in these mass deportation raids, too many have expressed that their being “American” and having birth certificates and social security numbers will protect them from mistaken detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is as if they also do not recognize the racism baked into every aspect of law enforcement and policing in this country that regularly incarcerates Black people who have committed no crime or levied severe punishment against Black people who commit the same offenses that white defendants are punished much less severely for , alleged citizenship notwithstanding.
Despite the xenophobia espoused by the ADOS/FBA folks in their flimsy right-wing hijacking of the struggle for reparations, the facts are that immigrant workers take jobs that native-born workers do not want to take, such as grueling agricultural and food processing jobs. If immigrants are overrepresented in those industries, it is because of the corporate demands for the cheapest, most benefit-light, and easily exploitable labor among people who are so precarious in society that they dare not complain about abusively low pay or deplorably dangerous working and living conditions. And those jobs being held by immigrants pose no threat to the jobs native-born Black people are represented in , which are not agricultural or food processing and usually offer more legal protections, as limited as legal protections for workers in this country are, than what is available for immigrant workers. ADOS/FBA adherents’ hateful rhetoric about immigrants and immigration is no more logical, reasonable, or even accurate than the racist garbage the right spews about it. It is, in fact, the same racist and anti-worker drivel.
Because of their adoption of right wing ideology regarding immigration, ADOS/FBA adherents are effectively liberals with no revolutionary or even progressive analysis of this capitalist system domestically, and no analysis of colonialism or imperialism as the starting material for the rise of the so-called immigration problem. The Black radical position, on the other hand, centers capitalism and imperialism/colonialism in our analysis and is the basis for a common political program with other African people and the colonized peoples of the Global South. This guiding principle directs us to condemn the systems of oppression and exploitation that create the conditions that force people to leave their home countries under the horrifying duress of imperialist interference, destabilization, and violence. We understand that the majority of people who immigrate to this country through the so-called “southern border” particularly are largely victims of the same system of oppression we are fighting to survive here. We would no more condemn them as coming here to “take our jobs” than we would shame a few Black women for bringing disrespect to all Black women for wearing a bonnet in public.
While the current Trump Administration is rife with crude and obnoxious expressions of this racist rhetoric – especially what is focused on “DEI,” immigration, multiculturalism, diversity, and racial justice and equality – any honest assessment of the relationship between Black people and the U.S government throughout history would expose one which is consistently abusive, and one in which some expression of white nationalism has always been the response to Black liberation struggle.
Whether it was Obama unleashing federal and militarized local law enforcement to crush the Occupy Wall Street movement, refusing to do anything substantive to address the continued modern-day lynching of extrajudicial police murder while expanding the DoD 1033 Program that gives used military equipment to federal, state, local, and campus police forces by 2400%, effectively expanding the militarized police state he refused to hold accountable; Biden deporting more people than Trump’s first term that included uniquely racist targeting of Haitians and other Africans while welcoming Ukrainian refugees with open arms and no restrictions or requirements, or refusing to fight cuts to expanded safety net programs like SNAP under COVID that improved life for more poor Black people than any other group; or the myriad policies from every other US president that made the already desperate position of Black people in this country worse in so many ways — all this history show us that there has never been a time when this government and the people or party leading it have ever seen Black people as “American.” The white supremacists that run the US have been playing their own version of “They Not Like Us” for centuries.
Finally, that ADOS/FBA adherents identify with our oppressors in order to appeal to them for some capitalist crumbs that will not liberate any of us, is a reflection of the success of the organized efforts of finance capital to propagandize the exploited masses to accept and even desire their own exploitation. And it is a very real and sobering example of the accuracy and continued relevance of Assata Shakur’s famous quote: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” Yet, ADOS/FBA are doing exactly that. They are happy to beg massa for some red, white and blue capitalist crumbs they are calling reparations, while agreeing to stay within the cage of finance capital dictatorship and its international expression, imperialism, even if it eviscerates the rights and lives of every other group of oppressed people around the world. As long as this government cuts their check.
What the ADOS/FBA folks also seem not to understand is that capitalism will not provide them the liberation they believe reparations will give them as long as they are distributed in and through a capitalist system. The system will adjust upwards for any monetary windfall reparations produces for Black people, effectively limiting the ability of that windfall to significantly change the recipients’ conditions. As everything in this society will be made even more expensive, that money will quickly be absorbed back into this system: the cost of living will be inflated to offset any gains that windfall could make and, because recipients will still be committed to “Americanism” through their ADOS/FBA ideology, the relationship between the recipients and the state will remain the same. ADOS/FBA reparations will not produce liberation for Black people because this system will never do anything to produce true liberation from it for the people it exploits for profit.
The division and confusion the ADOS/FBA folks have caused among the African peoples with this illogical, ahistorical, and reactionary reasoning is a slap in the face to the long and heroic struggle for Black liberation and international solidarity against capitalism and imperialism that we must continue. This struggle is the only way to realize liberation for all oppressed people. But in order for us to win, we are going to have to contend with this internal contradiction head on, and make the crooked path ADOS/FBA has laid down straight to lead us back to genuine, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, international revolutionary liberation struggle. Entertaining this reactionary diversion has cost us enough ground. We are an African people and we are at war. ADOS/FBA and their equally right wing reactionary offshoots are in alignment with the enemy we are at war with. We cannot afford to concede any more ground to right wing opportunism from any corner of this movement.