"We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Chains"
From Charlie Kirk's killing, to the Dallas shooting of ICE detainees and agents, to the Mormon church shooting in Michigan, white male gun violence has left the nation reeling. The politically violent rhetoric of Donald Trump's administration has ramped up tension, culminating in a bizarre executive order to crack down on "Antifa" and a call to deploy military forces permitted to use "full force" in the "hotbed of insurrection" known as Portland, Oregon.
Most mass shooters are white men. And yet, it is people of color, transgender people, and other marginalized communities who the white supremacist government is targeting in its bid to ethnically cleanse the United States.
The only response to this dire state of affairs is for people to speak out loud and clear, to proclaim their Antifa credentials and values as proudly as possible.
The Trump plan is to overwhelm and cow us into silence. The minute Americans start to appease fascists, the fascists have won. Any attempt to tone down political opposition to Trump and his ilk is an admission that their concerns are valid and an opening for white supremacists to demand greater obedience.
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Disobedience from the start is the only way to win against the forces arrayed against us. Democracy-loving believers in racial and gender equity and justice will only find safety in numbers if the numbers are large enough. White men make up less than 30% of the U.S. population, and not all of them are arrayed with white supremacists. People of color, women, and progressive-minded, democracy-loving white men can and should overwhelm the fascists.
On Thursday September 25, the great revolutionary Assata Shakur passed away at the age of 78 in Havana, Cuba, where she had lived in exile most of her adult life. Wanted by the FBI, she was among a generation of Black activists who had been persecuted for their political activism. In 2017, Trump demanded Cuba return Shakur to the U.S. for prosecution and the Cuban government refused. Her death as a woman free from the clutches of the U.S. government was a triumph.
One of the quotes Shakur is most famous for rings in my ears again and again. It is a mantra for our times:
Assata Shakur taught us, silence will not protect us from fascism. It will only pave the way for more silencing and before we know it, we will have given away all our power.
On Shakur, you may have read the obituaries of her, calling her a wanted woman, a cop-killer, and convicted criminal. I suggest reading her own words:
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
We need to create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. - Assata Shakur, Open Letter, 2013