“Amerika trips me and proceeds to ask me how I fell; whips me, then asks me how to stop the bleeding.” There is no conversation about the state of mental health in Amerika’s Black communities without discussing the violence wrought on them by racial capitalism—a term coined by Cedric Robinson. Robinson, a pioneer in the study of the Black Radical Tradition, argued that the “development, organization and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.”1 It is this pursuit that has helped shape many of today’s societal ills, including poor rates of Black mental health. Historical oppression, including slavery, sharecropping, . . .
racial capitalism
Class Struggle and Freedom Beyond Colonial Borders
The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief how truly interconnected our world is, how superficial colonial borders are, and thus how the struggle for freedom must link localized organizing to broader global insurgencies. Of course, this is not new. Though our epoch offers unique challenges, problems, and articulations of the dialectic between repression and resistance, history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. . . .
Anti-Communism, Anti-Blackness, and Imperialism
In this talk prepared for the Albuquerque Anti-War Coalition’s Anti-Communism & Imperialism panel discussion, Dr. Charisse Burden Stelley discusses how anti-communism and anti-Blackness are intrinsically intertwined structures of white supremacist and capitalist control. . . .
On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way
If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well. . . .