Led by the African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) and Operation Stop CPS, organizers included JMAC for Families, Movement for Family Power, The Life Recovery Project, and Family Justice Tribe, with logistical support from MVMT Catalyst. 

The weekend started with a Know Your Rights Teach-In on Saturday at the Anacostia Arts Center in SE Washington, D.C. with featured discussions from lawyers and former social workers educating attendees about the problem and how we can protect ourselves against it through organizing and knowledge of basic rights. 

Pre-March Rally 

The main event started on the morning of Sunday, May 8.  Under an overcast sky that threatened rain, nearly 100 people assembled in Lafayette Square Park located across from the White House. The mood was upbeat with music played by DJ Shakey flooding the park. As the pre-march rally began, protesters danced to Archie Eversole’s song, “We Ready”.  

Protesters came from as far away as California, Pennsylvania, New York, Kansas, Florida and Georgia. 

MC Demetria Hester enthusiastically welcomed supporters and introduced the speakers. Organizer Amanda Wallace from Operation Stop CPS opened up the rally acknowledging the moment and significance of the march. President Yejide Orunmila of ANWO spoke next, connecting the kidnapping of African children to the separation of black families on the slave auction blocks which laid the foundation of colonial capitalism. Like our African foreparents we may have to “rescue our children under the dark of night”.

Chairman Omali Yeshitela, the featured speaker, gave a dynamic presentation defining colonialism as the reason why black families have to contend with child protective services, saying, “They kidnap our children in the name of protecting our children from us, but the reality is that we wouldn’t be in this country if somebody hadn’t kidnapped us.  Every problem we have as a people has been imposed on us by this system [colonialism].”

Joyce McMillan of JMAC for Families and Erin Miles-Cloud of Movement for Family Power took to the stage giving impactful speeches condemning the family regulation system.

Impacted parent Tamara Summers, one of the mothers that inspired the launch of ANWO’s #ArrestCPS campaign, gave an emotional testimony of her experience that resulted in the removal of her parental rights. She hasn’t seen her children in six years. 

The March Begins

The mobilization stepped off at 1:30 PM, moving through the streets of downtown D.C as protesters chanted, “CPS you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” and “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!, CPS has got to go,” carrying signs that said, “A Black Child Was Kidnapped Today, Stop CPS Now!”

Passing cars showed their support for the march by honking their horns, while people on the streets took pictures. 

As the final leg of the march rounded 16th Street NW, down Black Lives Matter Plaza, with the White House in the distance, the chants got louder, “When Black Families are under attack, what do we do? Stand Up Fight Back!”

The march ended in front of the White House, with a group shot and words from Chairman Omali Yeshitela. 

Post Rally

The protest reconvened in Lafayette Square Park at 2:30 PM for final speeches from organizers and mothers, cultural performances, and a Mother’s Day basket raffle. 

After packing up, march organizers transitioned to the invite-only Big Table Talk, to develop a collective strategy toward building a national black-led movement against CPS. 

Next Steps

The Black Mothers March will happen annually. The organizations pledged to stay connected over the next 365 days. We will find opportunities to align our work and continue to grow this burgeoning anti-colonial network against the State-sponsored kidnapping of African children. Stay connected at blackmothersmarch.com and Black Mothers March on Instagram

To volunteer with ANWO contact us at arrestcps@anwouhuru.org find out more about our campaign #ArrestCPS and The Black Mothers March on the White House was a ground-breaking success.  

We are winning! 

Vanguard Up! 

Markedly this is an achievement for white power imperialism who are bolstering her as an African and a woman whose entire personal, educational, and professional history has been groomed by capitalist imperialism. 

Groomed by capitalism

The bourgeois propaganda machine has portrayed her appointment as an achievement for African women.

Let’s be clear, she did not come up from the slums of Lagos fighting everyday obstacles such as poverty, class, violence to be where she is. Instead, she has been groomed to be a neo-colonialist. 

As the daughter of a doctor (mother)  and economist and king (father) who worked for the U.N., she was born into Nigeria’s petty bourgeoisie.  Her primary and secondary education was spent at private schools that were established by English colonizers with the purpose of indoctrinating the “natives.”  From there she attended top white ruling class institutions of higher learning,  Harvard and MIT, earning degrees in economics.   She then went to work for the World Bank where she rose to the position of Vice President before becoming Nigeria’s first female Finance Minister; a position she held twice under two different Nigerian presidents, Goodluck Jonathan and Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga. 

This, of course, is not the path that 97 million Africans in Nigeria can take, who represent the total number of the population who live below the poverty line.  It is this population and their participation in the informal (not directly tied to capitalist production) economy, that  contributes greatly to the actual working class social and political economy. 

Capitalism attempts to absorb African women’s labor  

According to a 2011 World Bank report, 57% of women in Nigeria ages 16-57 were in some form of employment.  However,  the report laments at the fact that the employment is primarily in the informal sector, which it argues prevents women from benefiting from gender and equity laws.

Make no mistake, the World Bank’s interest in gender equality in Africa is the same as it has been since  Europe first attacked Africa, which is to use African labor and resources for the complete benefit of white power and to uphold the worldwide system of capitalism.  

 The desire to ensure African women have the same pathway into the capitalist economic system as African men,  strengthens the stranglehold that capitalism has on the economy and controls the labor value of the African workers. 

Since Africa is still colonized, using black faces, all of its economies benefit the warring tribes of Europe who are once again scrambling to save themselves by maintaining control of Africa’s rich resources which include its people; access to which is being challenged by China.

The fight against capitalist economy 

What Okonjo-Iweala and her ilk contribute to Africa is the ongoing disruption to the emerging African economies that develop out of the needs of the African working class, some of whom are the street vendors, local farmers, tailors,  and builders.

In her new role at the WTO, her first priorities are to broker trade negotiations between the U.S. and China, two countries who represent an increasing threat to economic self-determination in Africa. 

Clearly, representation is not enough.   African women neo-colonial agents have to be disarmed through an examination of who they are and what they represent.  It’s not good to appreciate a black woman’s face on white policy, particularly when the policy robs us of our self-determination.  We must see a track record of substantive examples of how their policies contribute to the destruction of the colonialists’ shackles that imprison the majority of African women, relegating us to a life of subsistence and violence.   

“Representation Matters” pushes the capitalist agenda

And while it may be easy to center the African continent in this article, I want to be clear that the strategies to inculcate bourgeois representations of progress in the African masses are everywhere, particularly in the U.S. where Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are clear examples of bourgeois propaganda in electoral politics.  Their black faces erase their criminal history against African and other oppressed people in the U.S. and in the case of Obama, Africa too.  

“Representation Matters” forces us to consume the idea that the more the African petty- bourgeoisie accomplishes in the white ruling class arena, the more we have progressed.  Nothing can be further from the truth, particularly in the U.S. as Africans have experienced the devastating impact of COVID-19. 

Representation in Africa, however, is centered around gender and ethnic identity, something that Okonjo-Iweala has used to deflect criticism of her policies. But when it comes to African women’s representation in government, Africa is actually leading more than any other place in the world.  Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first female President of Liberia in 2006; Joyce Banda became the first female President in Malawi in 2012. In Rwanda, 64% of the seats in parliament are held by African women. Yet, in none of these places have the special oppression of African women been lifted. 

Defend African liberated economies and the African working class

What we continue to fight for in the African People’s Socialist Party is a clear unapologetic defense of the African working class which includes the full participation of African women who have a selfish interest in African liberation. It is only with the destruction of capitalist colonialism will we begin to change the conditions for African poor and working-class women.  Having  African women petty-bourgeois representation does not and will not ever overturn the special oppression of African women.

Okonjo-Iweala and others like her do not have a selfish desire to free Africa from the grips of capitalism. They have been groomed by capitalism and launched as a weapon into the African colony to further wed African economies to the capitalist system.  

African women must join the revolution through the African People’s Socialist Party. We have to build a dynamic legion of African women revolutionaries who can contribute to the growing numbers of people building for a liberated Africa by dismantling capitalist colonialism.   The time is now!

 Down with the petty boo! 

Up with African working class! 

Join the African National Womens Organization

DeColonaise will put the discussion of colonization in the hands of everyone who purchases from us. With quotes on our labels, like “take the kinks out of your mind instead of your hair – Marcus Garvey” and marketing that targets the effects of colonialism with messages like “has colonialism snatched your edges?”  we will market high quality natural products that will improve the condition of our hair and skin, while providing political education on each package.

Different than other hair and body brands, that focus on acceptable African beauty, we will challenge people’s conception of beauty by highlighting models with thick nappy hair, bold cuts, and individualized beauty in our marketing campaigns.  The idea being that twist-outs and rod-sets aren’t an aspiration for all and that African women are beautiful no matter how we wear our hair and put on our skin (sans skin bleaching).

At DeColonaise we will introduce a new concept, to the world of beauty,  about why we are losing hair, why we bleach our skin; which is colonialism. It causes the contradictions such as stress, anti-African beauty practices, capitalist exploitation, environmental anomalies, that contribute to how we view ourselves and how we treat beauty issues.  The answer is to decolonize and use products that celebrate who we are naturally.   So while we are decolonizing our hair and body with natural products that destroy free-radicals, and eliminate toxins – which come as a result of capitalist exploitation – we will also use the way we market to encourage conversations about freedom and decolonization.

Over the past few months, we have been working to bring DeColonaise from conception to reality.   We have started our product line with a few body butters:

Imperialism is Dying Puddin‘ contains organic sulfur-containing compound Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) which helps repair skin and treat skin problems like rosacea, allergies and wounds, it also restores hair growth in addition to helping the body adapt to stress. A unique attribute of this butter is its high water content that unleashes itself on your skin and hair for complete conditioning.

Black Berry is our smooth hair and body balm, great for conditioning the skin using ingredients like shea and avocado butters and coconut oil.

The Blacker the Berry is a slightly more rigid formula than Black Berry, but is packed with more therapeutic essential oils for those of us that need that extra “umph” for our bodies.

When we introduced the products at the 2017 APSP Plenary we sold out of our 18 jars in just under 2-days.   Good for us, but bad for others who wanted more.   But rest assured we are back in the kitchen making more of these butters.

DeColonaise is just a baby and we have more to do to make this a full brand that will sustain the work of our organization, which is why we are calling on our members and other African women to join ANWO to work on developing this concept.  Joining shows your unity with our work to organize other African women to challenge the conditions that come as a result of being colonized AND with the necessity of the project to fund the work of ANWO.

DeColonaise needs members who could function in the capacity of:

• Product Developers
• Distribution Coordinator
• Marketing & Promotion Coordinator
• Sales Coordinator
• Budget Specialist

Join our economic work to bring in the resources that will free up our women so that we can be bigger, badder and bolder against imperialism.

Uhuru!

Get a jar of DECOLONAISE here

The March, also known as the  white women’s march, in some black women circles, burst onto the scene claiming to come to the defense of marginalized women who were targeted by the “rhetoric  of the past election cycle.”

Like me, you might be asking yourself how the Women’s March organizers intend to come to the defense of the black, Arab, other oppressed nation women and LGBTQIA communities.

According to their mission statement, they are coming together to show the new administration their “presence.”  THAT’S IT.  They want the Trump administration to see them.

The white women’s march does not even have demands, which speaks volumes about its class interests.  Any action rooted in the struggle of oppressed communities would have demands if they intended to hold anyone accountable.

Clearly there isn’t a working class character to this event because if there were, oppressed women confronted with the violence of gentrification, drone bombings, child theft, mass incarceration, deportation, kidnapping and police violence, would not be in solidarity with the gentrifiers, bombers, kidnappers and state agents and they most certainly would make demands of the State.

The fact that there aren’t any demands, isn’t surprising since the organizing team has known ties to the Democratic Party, which is just one side of the imperialist coin.

Imperialism never demands anything of itself;  it just jostles power, but always in favor of the ruling class.

Oppressed nation women cape for White Power

Similar to a racially utopic United Colors of Benetton ads,  the co-chairs of the white women’s march appear to be a diverse group of women: 1 black, 1 latinx, 1 Arab, and 1 trans white woman, but when you scratch the surface, their diversity becomes more homogeneous through their links to the imperialist Democratic Party.

Two of the four co-chairs came from one of Harry Belafonte’s organizations. Belafonte is a known Obama supporter, who initially supported anti-reparations candidate Bernie Sanders but ultimately switched his support to Hillary Clinton; who is an enemy of black people.

The black co-chair, worked directly with the Obama Administration and led communications for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), an organization that functions primarily to squash black resistance.

The rest of the “organizers” are a hodgepodge of women who have ties to NAN and the White House.

So, without publicly saying so, the white women’s march is a strategy of the Democratic Party to win the demoralized oppressed masses back into the clutches of the U.S. democratic process.

What’s wrong with the Democratic Party organizing protest against Trump, you ask?

African Internationalism helps us understand that no matter who you vote for, Democrat or Republican, you are voting for imperialism. Both parties maintain the status quo which exploits and oppresses African and other nations of people.

Additionally, the insidiousness of this March is that white power is using it as a strategy to lump in the struggles of oppressed women with the issues of the oppressor (white women and trans white) women.

Until we end the parasitic relationship the oppressor nation has with the oppressed, there can’t  be a reconciliation.

Oppressed women must “accept suffering without retaliation”

Oppressed women must “accept suffering without retaliation” according to principle 4 of the group’s guiding principles.  In fact, all of the points highlight nonviolence as the path forward.

Listen, I understand that violence, anti-oppressive violence, violence to liberate, is not the choice of many; but how can a march for oppressed women dare ask the women who suffer through violent attacks, not to destroy the cause of our suffering. It doesn’t make sense.

No demands plus a nonviolent call to action, against an administration that is stacking the deck with known white nationalists and other oppressive characters, equals a recipe for more oppression.

The African National Women’s Organization (ANWO), has never called on African women to be defenseless.  We are clear that colonialism is  the  violent oppression of our people; therefore, we have mobilized women to challenge and expose the State, conducted community forums on state violence and how to fight back, and organized self-defense classes because we understand that African women have to be built up to push back the colonial violence we are confronted with on a daily basis.

Without an organization like ANWO,  African women are susceptible to these anti-self-determination movements that continue to lead our people into a burning house.

Don’t fall for the okey doke

The march is a big piece of propaganda that confirms for Trump and others in the ruling class, that we are not going to do anything.

It’s soft and doesn’t speak to the issues that oppressed women are confronted with.

Women who attend should expect a lot of peace signs, healing circles and calls to redeem your faith in U.S. Imperialism through a false sisterhood.

That’s ok though, because once you’ve OD’d on “make America great again”  ANWO will be there to recruit you.

Join ANWO!

End the oppression of African women!

In Republican Donald Trump’s camp were the likely open white nationalist “good ole’ girls” and the unlikely African supporters like YouTubers Diamond and Silk and Omarosa Manigault.

In Democrat Hillary Clinton’s camp were the so-called progressives, entertainers like Beyoncé and feminists, some of whom were left with her as their ONLY candidate for a chance at presidency, after fake socialist Bernie Sanders failed to win the Democratic Party primary.

Though Clinton presented herself as the most stable option to lead U.S. imperialism, by pandering to women and Africans, she still lost the presidency to Donald Trump.

Election exit polls show that white people overwhelmingly voted to elect Trump as president: 53 percent of white women voters and 63 percent of white men voters.

This is despite Trump’s oppressive attitude and treatment of women and his position on women’s issues.

The shattering of “women in general”

It is clearer now to African women, who hoped to coax white women into caring about us through intersectional coalitions, that white women are part of the oppressor nation and as such, have a vested interest in the exploitation and oppression of people internationally and inside the U.S., just like their male counterparts.

That’s why we say that “there is no such thing as women in general”—the idea that all women are oppressed by patriarchy—is a false concept that obscures the colonial question by equating the experiences of white women of the oppressor nation to the oppression experienced by African women. There is no commonality.

The oppressor white nation, which includes white women, acquires what they have at the expense of African and other oppressed people.

African women’s primary enemy has always been our colonial oppressor—the white imperialist nation—that has held the power over our lives since it first attacked Africa.

White women’s votes for Trump is indicative of their opportunist relationships with oppressed women. This is mainly expressed through feminism which was never meant to solve the contradictions faced by African women.

While black feminists are doing the “important” work to help white women be less opportunistic through the development of intersectional feminism, white women are using intersectional feminism to shield themselves from criticism for their exploitative behavior.

Feminist, Melissa Harris Perry’s defense of the so-called “transracial” identity of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who led a branch of the NAACP under the false pretense of being an African, is a perfect example.

What votes for Trump really say about Clinton

Donald Trump made no attempts to win over the hearts and minds of women. In fact, his remarks did more to upset bourgeois white women, more than any other sector of the population.

Yet 45 percent of college-educated white women voted for him instead of Hillary Clinton, which speaks volumes about the relationship that white women have with one another.

White women couldn’t even hold true their own “women power” line when it came down to voting for one of their own. They abandoned the whole woman question in order to align themselves with a white man.

They supported blatant white nationalism, misogyny and exploitative white male dominance as exemplified in Donald Trump’s campaign.

White women had no confidence in a white woman at the helm of U.S. imperialism.

Trump’s selection pulled the scab off the white nationalism intrinsic in capitalism, which would have been obscured had Clinton been selected.

She continued in the cloak and dagger styled politics of her predecessors. She pandered to the “black vote” by minstrelizing African people on one hand, while on the other hand she was erecting policy that harmed Africans and Indigenous people.

Trump did not care about black people or women. Instead, he had more confidence in the ability of the general white population to get him elected. They didn’t let him down.

With this crisis happening among the white women of the ruling class, African women must seize the time to break free from the “women in general” centered politics associated with white women’s aspirations to be recognized as equal to white men.

Safety pins and white women’s march on Washington

Now that white women are confronted with the concrete data of their white nationalism, they are doing everything they can to reassure so-called “women of color” that white people are not the enemy.

In the days following the selection of Donald Trump, liberal white women apologized profusely for their role in electing Trump; writing scathing self-criticisms framed as op-eds, chastising one another, and taking to the streets to protest against the outcome of the election.

They’ve come up with gimmicks to show black people that they are “allies,” such as wearing safety pins in public, as a message to oppressed people that they are safe to be around.

Wearing safety pins, however, does more to keep white people safe, in the center and included, because it is an expression of fear caused by the threat of oppressed people fighting back.

They can only hope that this symbolic gesture of safety keeps them from becoming victims of anti-colonial violence.

White women have even scurried to organize a white women’s march on Washington planned for the day after Trump’s inauguration.

The organizers have described the event as a way to combat “the rhetoric of the past election cycle [which] has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—women, immigrants of all statuses, those with diverse religious faiths particularly Muslim, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native and Indigenous people, black and brown people, people with disabilities, the economically impoverished and survivors of sexual assault.”

While, in theory, the premise for the march is righteous, we have to ask where were all these white women when Africans were being murdered in the streets? How about when African women were being raped by the police or when our children were being taken by the State?

We know where.

They were in McKinney, Texas siccing police on black teenagers leaving a pool party. They were in Tulsa, Oklahoma shooting unarmed Terrence Crutcher, and wearing black face at college Halloween parties.

The truth is that all of these upset white women weren’t upset until their freedoms were threatened.

Now they seek to cloak themselves in the issues of the struggling colonized African, Arab, and Indigenous women as a way to win solidarity with the masses of our people through this white women’s march. This is the ultimate show of opportunism.

Trump’s selection exposes white America’s loyalty to white power and has created a groundswell of fear in liberals of the white oppressor nation. There isn’t a dancing Negro or a woman as president to veil the white nationalism of U.S. policy.

We can only deduce that white people’s frantic response is informed by the knowledge that African and other oppressed people are no longer fooled by their claims of being white allies.

If white people were truly here to “protect” the marginalized communities they purport to show solidarity with, then they would just join the African People’s Solidarity Committee or Uhuru Solidarity Movement who are under the leadership of the African poor and working class.

Ultimately, we have data that reflects the opportunism of white women and we shouldn’t be fooled by their attempts to dig their claws into the flesh of our people.

African women must reject this “all-women” rhetoric and organize in our own interests by joining the African National Women’s organization.

There have also been numerous blog posts about the circumstances of Eric’s death, but none more strikingly condescending than “Why I Will Not March for Eric Garner,” a blog post on the black feminist website For Harriet, written by its founder Kimberly Foster.

The title itself was enough for me to delay reading beyond the first two lines. I did not want to read another self-absorbed validation of “black womanhood” pitted against the idea of the “black man.”

I did not want to read about another African woman who felt like her victimization was justification for her indictment of African men.

I did not want to be upset by the words of an African woman who saw herself and our gender as separate from the African nation as a whole.

I had to read it, however, just because I knew it had all of those things trapped inside its paragraphs. I also realized it was necessary to expose her petty-bourgeois positions.

Foster writes, “I’m not settling for anything less than reciprocity. If you refuse to hear our calls for help, then I cannot respond to yours. I have no desire, as a black woman, to be placed on a pedestal, but I will not allow myself to become a footstool. Do not ask me for empathy if you are content to deny it in return.”

Feminism, a skewed worldview for Africans

The “pedestal” Foster claims she doesn’t want is exactly what her article calls for, a place high at the top as a glorious example of double oppression that everyone must learn to listen to.

The reality is that her calls will continue to go unanswered because she has no understanding of the material conditions of our people. She and African women like her do not understand that we are still colonized—as part of the oppressed African nation—which is why their worldview is so skewed.

They are fighting for “recognition” within a capitalist society that devalues the life of African people, period.

Everything in this society minimizes us and there is no pocket to which we can escape while imperialism continues to exist.

Feminism leads people to believe that there is a safe place for African women, that the devaluation of the African woman can be solved if we get African men to understand and stand in solidarity with our struggles.

This is politically backward because it makes the assumption that African women have it all together, like we have nothing to overcome.

The fact is that some African women are still not clear on who our oppressor is and do not recognize it when colonialism is staring them right in their face. They are therefore ill-prepared to take on struggle toward freedom and liberation.

Violence on one of us is violence on all of us

Foster says that “Black people, both men and women, experience coercive, violent and often deadly interactions with law enforcement.”

To Foster, the “coercive” and “deadly interactions” are merely inconsequential words that take up space on the way to her main point about African men being absent on issues concerning African women.

She continues to convey her feelings of being left out of the mainstream discourse on violence and she attacks African men who she believes benefit from the support of the entire African community.

Her veiled attempt at acknowledging African repression by colonial forces does little to expose the fundamental contradiction of imperialism, which creates the violent conditions we are exposed to. Foster writes that “watching black men show up for Garner after seeing so many derail conversations about Black women’s well-being leaves me with little more than a sinking feeling of despair upon recognition that the understanding so many of us crave will not come.”

I don’t pretend to understand how it is that we can measure and compare stats on our deaths or our experiences of violence.

Some of us seem to think that the factors that cause our misery are cut from two different cloths; as if African women are somehow subjected to a harsher oppressor than African men.

If you look at some of these feminist writings, it would seem that African women came out of the entire experience unscathed and capable of putting out analysis that should not be challenged, no matter how backwards it is.

African men, just like African women have been subjected to some of the worst conditions imaginable. Under colonialism our education, health, security, family and food have been compromised.

Colonialism is the problem

Colonialism brings with it the ideals of the oppressor nation and imposes them on the oppressed nation.

The white nationalist ideals were carried over to the oppressed and enforced through policy and action.

And yes! Colonialism interrupts the natural dynamics between men and women based on the idea that men are superior, women are objects and our lives are valueless.

However, if we do not understand that we are still colonized then the only way some African women will know how to struggle is against African men, who they believe benefit from the oppression of African women.

To them I ask, in what ways do African men benefit? And who do they benefit from? And if you think there is a benefit, do you want that benefit bestowed upon you?

When Foster writes, ”but we are told that unless we are murdered or raped, we are not truly in distress because black women’s bodies are instruments upon which black men can play out their fantasies of domination without reprisal. But the illusion of power crumbles when black men face the police state.” She seems to be having an “I told you so” moment, almost tickled by the idea that African men are taken down a notch when they meet up with the pigs.

She disingenuously attempts to correlate the powerlessness felt by African women at the hands of African men to the powerlessness of African men at the hands of the “police state.”

African women and men must fight imperialism together

What Foster fails to realize is that the violence brought to us by the police is systemic and antagonistic, which is different from the violence within our own communities which is interpersonal and non-antagonistic.

Within our communities we can fix each others behavior, but we cannot fix the behavior of a parasitic system whose existence is dependent upon our continued oppression. We have to destroy the system and we have to struggle like hell together to do it.

If violence against African women by African men is a problem, let’s fix it through discussion or baseball bats to the kneecaps; either way we are going to find a way to struggle through it so that we can work together to cut down imperialism.

“In recent weeks,” writes Foster, “black women have launched campaigns to ensure that we can exist in public without experiencing harassment and have presidential endorsement of policy that addresses our specific needs. And though these petitions seem common sense to me, black women’s mere desire to take up space is met with push back. And then we are caught in a cycle of perpetually asserting our humanity.”

Asserting our humanity to whom? Here is where we discover what perceived benefit African men are being afforded—the attention of reigning imperialist Barack Obama.

Earlier this year the white house announced My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative to highlight the challenges faced by “young men of color” which set off a chain reaction of funding for nonprofits who wanted to get into the business of figuring out the black male’s condition.

Is this the recognition Foster and other women like her are aiming for? They are vying for a seat at the imperialist table or at least the money that sits on it.

Never mind that under the Obama regime, unemployment for Africans has increased, public education has been on the decline and black removal from major cities, including Washington DC, has been on a steady increase.

Instead of making a struggle against these glaring attacks on our people, Foster and other black feminists are scrambling for recognition inside a dying system.

Feminism –worldview of the African petty bourgeoisie

Ms. Foster, your priorities are in disarray. Eric Garner wasn’t even cold in the ground before you fired off this self-absorbed indictment of African men, which left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, including some black feminists.

Herein lies the problem with feminism—it is the worldview of the African petty bourgeoisie whose class aspirations align them with the interest of the oppressor and not with the African workers. Clearly the ideas offered up here by Foster are not reflective of the views of the African working class—mothers, wives and sisters of those being murdered daily in our communities.

Under the banner of feminism, African women align themselves with petty-bourgeois, colonial and oppressive forces, because it identifies patriarchy as the enemy instead of colonialism.

This is a primary reason why Africans continue to be conflicted about how to struggle against oppression.

Feminism ain’t the solution—revolution is!

African Internationalism is clear in that there are two nations—the oppressor and the oppressed—the former benefits from the latter.

The men and women of the oppressor nation benefit from the subjugation of the men and women of the oppressed nation.

Africans of the oppressed nation have to struggle together to bust up the power the oppressor nation has over our lives, and we will not do that by targeting each other.

My intention is not to downplay the conditions that plague African women at the hands of the oppressor and from African men. It’s a huge contradiction.

The resolve, however, cannot be the malicious attacks of African men rooted in victim self-aggrandizement because then the question becomes “Who do we want to recognize us as victims?”

If the answer is “society” then we are talking about a bourgeois capitalist society that not only causes our misery but benefits from it as well.

The solution to our problems is revolution—a principled objective revolution. It is through the revolutionary process that we will see the withering away of these backward ideals imposed on us through colonialism.

Under the leadership of the African proletariat, the struggle that we make amongst ourselves will be a step towards consolidating the African nation and enhancing our ability to overturn imperialism and free ourselves.

We will win!
We are winning!