From Deepa Kumar:
Looting=corporations pocketing billions in federal aid while the average person gets $1200

Rioting=police marching down residential streets throwing paint bombs at residents, unleashing violence of all sorts from snatching masks and driving SUVs into crowds.

Violence=a system that can in 24 hours equip the police to behave like an invading army, but cannot after nearly 5 months give nurses and doctors proper PPE.

Just so we are clear what these terms mean.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Beyond the misattributed quotes and bad memes and poor logic made in his name, the real tragedy of King’s legacy is that the white people who so frequently invoke it in the name of peace do so with a fundamental perversion of his message. Nonviolence — as it is discussed and fetishized in proximity to the poor and/or marginalized — is so often only dragged out in response to any uprising of those people.

The riot is a language, yes, but the response to a riot is also its own language; a language of doublespeak. The call is for peace and love, but the true demand is for complete silence altogether. An NFL player takes a knee without speaking, and is threatened and hated, called a violent thug and a racist. For those of certain skin colors, no protest can be peaceful enough. More here.

thank you.

Elizabeth Hinton: Arguably, the success of King’s brand of nonviolent direct political action—so often valorized by pundits over and against “destructive” “rioting”—depended on the presence of this violent direct political action. As King recognized, the coercive power of mass nonviolence arose in part from its ability to suggest the possibility of violent resistance should demands not be met. Therefore, we should endeavor to see violent and nonviolent expressions of black protest as entwined forces that shaped the decade. In addition, and more challenging perhaps, we should attempt to understand violent rebellion on its own terms, as a form of direct political action that was just as integral to the decade.

It can be a struggle to imagine some of the most overpoliced, marginalized, and isolated Americans as political actors, and this bias has influenced the writing of history. Even those of us interested in forms of resistance to structural racism have been reluctant to take seriously the political nature of midcentury black uprisings. Yet they were neither spontaneous nor “meaningless” eruptions. Just as much as nonviolent direct action, rebellion presented a way for the oppressed and disenfranchised to express collective solidarity in the face of punitive state forces, exploitative institutions, and calcified “democratic” institutions. More here.

“A writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Jalil requesting relief based on his heightened vulnerability to contract the virus was filed on Monday, April 13. On April 27, Judge Schick in Sullivan County granted Jalil Muntaqim’s release. But New York Attorney General Letitia James appealed the judge’s decision, preventing Jalil’s release.” #freejalil
More here.

Rather than glorify (or even dignify) war on Memorial Day, here’s a tribute to solidarity – the opposite of war. Let’s uphold Edward Said’s ‘internationalism and cosmopolitan humanism’ and remember the Black Bolsheviks.

Paul Heideman: Cyril Briggs held no illusions in the country’s ruling class, on whom he placed the vast bulk of responsibility for the oppression that Black people faced. But the call to interracial struggle against capital seemed to him a risk not worth betting Black lives for.

By late 1919 (around the time the African Blood Brotherhood was founded), however, Briggs had begun to take more of an interest in Marxism and socialism. Undoubtedly influenced by the lively intellectual milieu of Harlem radicalism, in which political giants like Hubert Harrison regularly lectured on Marxist theory on street corners, Briggs began reading more deeply in Marxism.

[…] Briggs and the other Black radicals who looked to Russia did so because they believed that racism and colonialism could not be defeated without a total remaking of their society.

They came to this conclusion by a number of routes. The sheer scale and brutality of American white supremacy in those years, crystalized during the Red Summer of 1919, dealt a serious blow to the idea that racism could be eliminated either through Black Americans reforming their own behavior, as the followers of Booker T. Washington suggested, or through a gradual process of changing laws and changing minds, as was the strategy of the NAACP.

At the same time, the explosion of class struggle across the globe, from Italy to Russia to the U.S. (which witnessed the biggest strike wave in its history in 1919), helped make concrete the hope that another world was possible. In this context, Black radicals like Briggs saw the liberation of Black people as part of a global insurrection against oppression everywhere.

In today’s world, these kinds of massive ambitions for liberation are rare. Several decades of neoliberal assault, and the parallel weakening of movements for liberation, have made it much harder to imagine a worldwide fight against all forms of oppression.
The story of the African Blood Brotherhood, which recruited and trained the first generation of Black socialist cadre in the U.S. More here.

‘…the bill was passed without being named, debated, or even discussed, even though it would set into law the largest such aid package in U.S. history. There has been no mention of the bill by most media in the United States.

The massive package is particularly noteworthy in light of the current devastation to the American taxpayers who will be footing the bill – over $10 million per day. In recent months approximately 30 million Americans have lost jobs, 100,000 small businesses have already closed forever, and over seven million are at risk of doing so.‘ More here.