We take you back, Fannie Lou, because we are sick and tired of being sick and tired…

The banners and posters and signs read: “Occupation is a Crime - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,” “We Need Jobs and Schools: Not War,” “End the Occupation: Justice for Palestine.” The banners, posters, and signs were held mainly by white, Black, Brown, and Yellow students from all over the country who come to Washington, D.C. on March 21, 2009, to protest sixth year anniversary of the occupation in Iraq and U.S. domestic and foreign policies.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm before him called for the Civil Rights Movement to broaden its opposition to domestic policies to include opposition to the moral and financial bankruptcy of oppression and war. “Any kind of movement for freedom of Black people based solely within the confines of America is absolutely doomed to fail,” Malcolm warned. King, in his Beyond Vietnam speech, spoke of a “shining moment” in the struggle against oppression:

King called for Black Americans to recognize the theoretical link with the struggles for freedom at home and the struggle for freedom abroad. In practical terms, King pointed to the struggle against racism, sexism, classism under the thumb of the American Empire and those struggles by other dark-skinned oppressed people under the warring forces of the American militarism.

The freedom movement is an anti-war movement. In short, King called for opposition to white supremacy, to conquest and pillage, to the theft of material resources from other peoples, to the domination of cultural representations of the “us” and “them,” to the devastation and destruction of those attempting to establish democratic societies and have a voice in world politics.

The Black Left, pre-President Obama’s ascendancy to the throne of Empire, was anti-war.

The call, then, was to centralize the freedom movement within the anti-war campaign as a core component of the anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism movement. To have transformed the Black civil rights struggle for justice, political, economic, and cultural self-determination into the anti-war movement would have legitimized and substantiated the claims of anti-war participants in their identification with the oppressed.

Forty-one years later, we witness still a scattering of participants from the Black community in anti-war campaigns.

While Black organizations may be included and the issue of “racism” may be a topic on a list of issues, both the Black participants and the issue of racism are “tokenized” and relegated to the “margins” of anti-war campaigns dominated and controlled by white Americans.

Racism, as bell hooks explains, keeps white people at the center of the discussion and doesn’t allow for a discussion of colonialism and slavery. The perpetrators, as we now understand the development of “racism,” in a post-racial era, don’t exist. If the perpetrators don’t exist, the “victims” of “racism” don’t exist either - unless the “victim,” one-at-a-time, is shot and killed by one or two possibility - only possibly - racist police. Maybe the perpetrator is racist or maybe not - that’s the debate that is worked into media spectacle and a story on a TV crime program.

In the meantime, white anti-war organizations, claiming to battle “racism,” seem to be battling a phantom with no perpetrators or victims. To “battle racism” then becomes recruiting certain “minority” voices to speak or pass out flyers. The privilege of whites to call the shots, to determine the agenda, and to select the players is left unchallenged. Generally, absence of Black Americans at these marches in the last 15 to 20 years is barely noticed by white Americans and, in my experience, I have found whites surprised by my presence, as if the marginal and “minority” status of Black Americans is a permanent because innate condition.

This effort to appropriate “racism,” appropriates marginalized voices. In turn, as hooks notes in Talking Back, the “appropriation of the marginalized voice threatens the very core of self-determination and free self-expression for exploited and oppressed peoples.” Black Americans can’t speak back directly, without a mediator, to the forces of oppression. Black Americans can’t organize to help themselves to theorize and practice resistance and maintain the struggle for freedom.

This lock on the anti-racism - too - campaign, however, serves to silence a real debate on racism because those in control who by virtue of their organizations have eliminated themselves as “perpetrators,” while controlling the kind of narrative and representation that defines the “victims.” Furthermore, and most important, the phantom focus on “racism” impedes the advancement of Black Americans in the struggle against white supremacy. Control the “victims’” attempt to confront white supremacy and you can control the nation’s confrontation with white supremacy.

The dialogue on white supremacy is oppressed!

Friendships and camaraderie with the Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow is one thing, but denouncing white supremacy is another matter for white America.

White supremacy, bell hooks explains “evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relationship to; the ideology of white supremacy allows for the collusion of black people with the forces of racism; it refers to an institutional structure and not individual beliefs.” White supremacy means, hooks writes in Killing Rage, “talking about imperialism, colonialism…genocide…the white colonizers’ exploitation and betrayal of Native Americans. [It’s] about ways the legal and governmental structures of this society from the Constitution on supported and upheld slavery, apartheid.”

Today an “all-pervasive white supremacy,” hooks explains, is in this society an ideology and behavior. “Folks will insist that they are not racist, and then simultaneously argue that everyone knows property values will diminish if too many black people enter the neighborhood,” writes hooks in Class Matters. “Black people,” she writes in Killing Rage, “working or socializing in predominantly white settings whose very structures are informed by the principles of white supremacy who dare to affirm blackness, love of black culture and identity, do so at great risk.” White supremacy speaks to a structure of racist domination and oppression. The conservative and liberal commitment to white supremacy permits the huge discrepancies in quality of life between white and Black Americans. White supremacy is about the way foreign policy and capitalism are controlled by the fraternity of men on Wall Street and in Washington and how that policy of “free-trade,” torture, rendition, regime change, invasion for material resources builds capital for corporations which in term maintains a system dependent on oppressing the many, the majority of the Earth’s planet.

Now, the middle class in the U.S. is waking up to the lived experiences many Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow people have known for so long: the ideology that privileges whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism has been acceptable to white Americans. Until now, white Americans have refused to hear Martin Luther King and question the morals of this system and its explanation for poverty, inequality, and injustice. While white liberals and progressives attack the establishment of military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have refused to speak out on the implementation of white supremacy in Black and Brown communities where a virtual police state exist. On the ground, away from Washington D.C. and Wall Street, the aggressive forces against the rage of injustice often wears a friendly liberal mask!

I attended this anti-war march in Washington knowing why Malcolm, King, the Black Panthers were demonized and killed. I attended knowing where we have been, who we were as a people and where we are now and what has happened to us and our struggle for freedom. I attended knowing that Malcolm knew that.

Many people in this country who want to see us the minority and who don’t want to see us taking too militant or too uncompromising a stand are absolutely against the successful regrouping or organizing of any faction of this country whose thought and whose thinking patterns are international, rather than national. Whose thought patterns, whose hopes and aspirations are worldly rather than just within the context of the United States border.

I attended knowing I would be seen by some as a “guest,” not so worldly or knowledgeable, at an event held by “regular” and “liberal” Americans in support of more acceptable groups of dark-skinned people beyond the U.S. borders.

Two buses left out of Philadelphia. I took a seat up front behind the first seat occupied by the bus captain (and one of the organizers) on the first bus. Another organizer sat next to me. The captain passed a clipboard to the organizer next to me and asked him to make sure everyone signs in. He passed the clipboard across the aisle where he saw people. Eventually the clipboard made its way back to this organizer and he asked if everyone had signed. I said I had not signed, to which the bus captain said, “We can’t miss the most important person.” I was the only Black. The “most important person” was visible just long enough to then render me “invisible” for the comfort of the majority.

And I am asked to repress my rage!

It was good to see the number of Blacks, Muslims, Arabs, Latino/as who spoke at the rally, and it was even better to see the number of Black students among student groups and organizations. But how much time and energy I spent looking particularly for those Black marchers? I can say I saw an improvement - more Black marchers sprinkled in an anti-war march. But this is the year 2009! The mechanisms of white supremacy have forestalled our vision of an international struggle in league with people of color against it!

Midway, the march toward the Pentagon and the headquarters of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and KBR, a group of young people began unfurling a banner, effectively splitting. The group of young women, Black, Brown, and Muslim had the attention of many of us who turned around to watch them. Then a young Black woman with a microphone began to speak. They were excluded from speaking at the rally. But they have a statement.

Here is some of what the group’s representatives had to say:

The group participated in the march to “stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Palestine in our common struggle against white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and oppression in all its forms and make our presence felt outside of what is conventionally allowed by the racist anti-war movement.”

I turned to notice two older Black women in the vicinity. They were nodding, and I caught one who said, “They said what they had to say.” The young people, as it turns out, representing a people of color anarchist grassroots group based in Washington and Philadelphia, stood around to answer questions from other marchers while the march itself continued on. Since the march, an organizer of the march told me that he was sure the group were agent provocateurs! They broke a window! Criminals, now!

I didn’t see a broken window. I asked others if they had heard about a “broken window.” No. I did see as did everyone, the army of police and Virginia State Police in riot gear lined up shoulder to shoulder for the bulk of the march and the army itself. I did see tasers, rifles, and state police tanks on either side of us all down the march route. If a brick was thrown by these young women of color, I am sure I wouldn’t be here at my desk writing this article. I was close enough to them to ask for a copy of the speech. The state police didn’t move and there was no arrest of an individuals or individuals. But there was an attempt to arrest the group’s message: white supremacy has “subjected people of color to lifetimes of enslavement, torture, occupation, internment, police brutality, poverty, drug abuse and so on.”

This isn’t about any particular group, or their label, or even about Left in-fighting. It is about the exclusion of a discourse on white supremacy. The exclusion of young people of color who want to be heard! There’s no getting around the experience of recognizing the fear of some organizers and participants for me and then witnessing the resistance by the young people to that fear during the march.

The late Palestinian thinker and cultural theorist Edward Said referred to a “legacy of connections” as a result of colonial conquest and practice of enslavement. That “legacy of connections” is evident in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, as it is in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans. Colonial conquest is the U.S. government-corporate business in places once colonized by European nations, and those places are occupied by Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people! Outsourcing business to these places has created the modern-day experience of enslavement for many workers, mainly women of color. Yet, we witness what Said called “strategic deafness” when the message of white supremacy is uttered, particularly from the mouths of Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow people.

Like Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Malcolm, Lumumba, Steve Biko, King, Huey Newton - people who lived and died - who didn’t compromise for the right of Blacks and other people of color to be free of conquest and enslavement, their descendents are demonized. The rage of the oppressed, as bell hooks has noted in Killing Rage, “is never the same as the rage of the privileged.” The oppressed “can only change their lot only by changing the system; the other hopes to be rewarded within the system.”

White supremacy is the mechanism by which the rage of the oppressed is demonized and repressed in order to kill resistance.

A “democracy” shouldn’t have anything to fear except the tyranny of white supremacy!

The use of words like “greed” and “racism” limits the perpetrators to a few bad apple types and removes personal and collective responsibility from the average American citizen. Fear and hatred of Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, the centuries of capitalizing on this fear and hatred led to the greed and arrogance of this government’s corporate - lead to domestic, i.e. prison industrial industry policies and foreign, i.e. military industrial complex policies.

What made Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer sick and tired? White supremacy!

We may be able to engage in an expanded dialogue on democratic socialism in the U.S. if the peoples’ movement to end the war against the oppression of Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow people is not obstructed by the “rage” of those with investments in capitalism!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.