“No matter what they say now about highways and hospitals and penicillin, whatever was done in those colonies was not done for the natives. And the Belgians may not know this, but the natives do. What happened was very simple.” “You cannot walk into a country and stay there as long as the Europeans did and dig coal and iron and gold out of the earth and use it for yourself…By and by, it’s inevitable that someone will make a connection between the machines you have and the power you have.” James Baldwin, 1961 Much attention is paid to the . . .
environmental justice
Black & Indigenous Solidarity Takes Root in Ecuador
Last week the Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement (BILM) organized a coalition congress between Black and Indigenous communities throughout Abya Yala, which includes the regions of North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean. BILM held the congress in Quito, Ecuador which has been the center of nationwide strikes throughout this year. This strike led by Indigenous and Black community leaders, against rising food and fuel costs, awakened a decades long issue of the Ecuadorian government excluding Indigenous and Black Ecuadorians politically, socially, and economically. The strikes brought together Black, Indigenous, student, and women groups, to bring the country to . . .
Lessons from the Pan-African Community Garden
Last summer the Southwest chapter of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party started the Pan-African Community Garden with the help of comrades, relatives, neighbors, and social justice organizations in Tiwa territory (Albuquerque, New Mexico). We did this without non-profit status, corporate sponsorship, grant funding, or financial backing of any kind – spending very little out of pocket when it came to the construction and maintenance of the garden. We also did this without any formal experience as a chapter undertaking such a project – meaning we had never built something like this together before. And yet in just a bit . . .
How Environmental Racism Perpetuates Over Policing
In 2022 New York City budgeted 10.7 billion dollars to the NYPD, continuing its presence as the largest police force in the United States, while allocating a mere 1.6 billion to the Department of Environmental Protection in a blatant act of ignorance to what real issues are facing New Yorkers. Predominantly Black Latine communities like the Bronx, Harlem, and central Brooklyn as well as the homeless population in New York, which is a combined 90% Black and Latine, are simultaneously on the forefront of inhuman policing policies and climate disasters. It’s of course no coincidence that these communities and populations . . .
Only Socialism Will Save Our Planet
Two important characteristics of socialism point to why it is the only process that will avert the march to environmental and human destruction that we are currently on. First, socialism is a system where people contribute based on their ability and receive based on their labor. Second, socialism eliminates the type of private ownership that allows individuals to own and control massive amounts of wealth. The first characteristic means that people across the planet will stop engaging in the crass consumerism that is particularly rampant in the most developed countries and amongst the most privileged in less developed countries. Today, . . .
Objective Facts
Objective Facts is poem from Darius Simpson about the necessity African resistance to the forces of exploitation and oppression. . . .
Unreading Colonial Food Systems
Originally published in the August 2021 Out of Print Newsletter by the Noname Reads Book Club ︎︎Like many people who went through U.S. public school systems, I am intimately familiar with institutional food; canned vegetables, square cut pizza, frozen & highly processed mystery meats, syrupy fruit cups, all of that. Institutional food is low-cost, low in nutritional value, and arguably pretty gross. I remember asking our school superintendent why our cafeteria wasn’t able to purchase food from the vibrant community of local farmers. He told me that our school was bound up in a large multi-year contract with a number . . .
Do or Die: Black Liberation and the Climate Apocalypse
The history of the European World, the history of the West, is a history of colonization and exploitation. Wherever they go, destruction, dehumanization, and degradation follow. As Indigenous and African civilizations have shown us, we are the land, and the land is a part of us. When the land dies, we do as well. . . .