U.S. society

Undiscussed Dimensions of Mass Killings: Transforming A Profoundly Sick Society

We don’t have to be familiar with Frantz Fanon to concede that social conditions create, shape and even determine social consciousness. Nor do we have to be conversant with Kawaida philosophy to realize that ideas do not drop from the sky, grow from the ground or float in from the sea. They come from the society in which we live and learn to be and become the persons and peoples we are. Moreover, although there are numerous ideas which exist in society from which we may choose, the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of those races, ethnicities, classes and elites which rule. And if we find them oppressive and unacceptable, we have the right and responsibility to resist and radically change them.

The Reluctance to Come Forward After Being Sexually Harassed

The debates that have unfolded in connection with the campaign to appoint Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court increasingly centered on charges of alleged sexual assault by him against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. The attacks on Dr. Ford have come to represent everything that is so blatantly misogynistic about current U.S. society. The political Right has pulled out all of the stops to demean her character. One of the critical ‘arrows’ that is being fired is one that goes like this: why didn’t she come forward sooner?

Choosing to Be African: Struggling and Striving Ever Upward

Again, this is in sankofa remembrance for our 53rd anniversary of our organization Us in righteous and relentless resistance. And thus, it is about reaching back, retrieving, reflecting, reconstructing and recommitting ourselves to a radical and righteous reconception and transformation of ourselves, society and ultimately the world as was our founding mission in those turbulent and transformative years of the Sixties. In the 60’s when we first collectively declared that we are an African people, we did not do so simply to reaffirm our historical source of origin and reclaim a history as old as humanity itself. We did it also as an act of self-determination, a reaffirmation of our right as the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles, say, “to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.”