Yusuf Nuruddin interviews veteran activist attorney, Muntu Matsimela, and veteran activist scholar, Sam Anderson, organizers of the Reparations Mobilization Coalition, for their analyses and candid impressions of the current status of the reparations movement. This interview was conducted on December 15, 2002 through the courtesy, and via the recording studios, of WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York City.
Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers' ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and money-lenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true.
When we engage W.E.B. Du Bois's work and thought to extract useful insights and develop intellectual and social initiatives based on these, we unavoidably must deal with his concept of the color line and the role he assigned it in African and human history (Butler, 2000; Fontenot, 2001; Juguo, 2001; Rabaka, 2001). The concept of the color-line refers essentially to the role of race and racism in history and society.
The events of September 11, 2001 did not begin, but accelerated, processes that have for some years been leading to the transformation of the US state and political system. These historic processes have culminated in the reconfiguration of the US state, establishing the hegemony of its military industrial/national security and police/domestic control sectors.
The hegemonic power of capital sometime visible, sometimes invisible propagates an increasing gravitation to English as the common global language. The spread of English seems to be analogous to the spread of capitalism. Within the United States the country most responsible for the global expansion of capital, following in the footsteps of imperial Britain resides the largest population of native English-speakers of any country.
William W. Sales, Jr.:
I
...And William Siren is going to commit suicide
when he finds out that Nat Turner
made love to his great great grandmother
And he has taken our most violent and militant leaders
and stuck lollipops up their ass to pacify
their black power farts
And he is beginning to assume that all of us
were born under the sign Taurus the Bull
Because all we do is
Bullshit...
"This is Madness"
Umar Bin Hassan of
The Last Poets
Since September 11, 2001 the racialization of Arabs in the US has assumed the particularly invidious form of racial profiling, which serves as the unstated foundation of a new security regime that operates under the heading of "the war on terror." While the administration denies an official policy of racial profiling, the current domestic and foreign policy initiatives are implicitly premised on the belief that any Arab may be a terrorist; this belief was reinforced by the post-September 11 theories of sleeper cells, which presumably are concealed within the fabric of nation.
The purpose here is to present a critique of the current political trends of the different factions of the Almighty Latin Kings y Queens Nations, hereinafter the "ALKQN," which is a Chicago- based so-called "street gang." Considering the radical political potential of this type of formation, the Left has a clear interest in helping the ALKQN develop a theory of transformation from illegitimate capitalism (criminal mentality and activity) into an approach that revisits and expands upon their egalitarian, implicitly Marxist roots.