Our Struggle is Global
Time and time have shown us that the struggles of Palestine, the Black Diaspora and the Global South are linked. At the core, it's always: Free the Land, Free the People.
Ella Baker, pivotal leader of SNCC and movement organizer, gave this speech, Making the Struggle Every Day, at the 1974 Puerto Rico Solidarity Rally. Though the context of this speech related to Puerto Rico, like Palestine, both have a history laced with occupations from the US to Israel. Making the Struggle Every Day, globally, still rings true in our unending fight towards destroying capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and all death-making systems.
What is the struggle? For “human dignity and freedom.” We have to “understand that they — as well as you and I — cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day, in the year, every year until they [we] win it.”1
Baker’s words align us with the growing witness of the multiple genocidal atrocities that have been ongoing in occupied Palestine, occupied Haiti, the coup in Sudan, and the Global South resistance for freedom and liberation from Western imperial powers — which doesn’t stop there alone.
In “What Ella Baker Taught Us About Ferguson and Gaza,” written by Dorothy Zellner (former SNCC staff member and co-founder of Jews Say No!), Baker notes,
In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed… It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.1
Fast forward to today, it’s apparent more than ever that to change the existing systems and be free means to end these systems entirely.
Not to reform it, not to have a seat at the table, not to diversify it – end it and create anew.
Doing so explicitly looks like joining a revolutionary political organization committed to the liberation of all oppressed people under capitalism and imperialism, repeatedly making the connections of the interconnections of our lived realities – locally and globally, collectively organizing, studying our revolutionary ancestors through political education with one another, and keeping steadfast in our dedication to this work.
The Web Traces Back to the Same Host
It’s Free Palestine, Free Haiti, Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Tigray, Free the Black Diaspora everywhere that we are, free the people and free the land. Why? Because, like a web, every struggle for liberation, every struggle for freedom, every struggle for self-determination and dignity links back to the same parasitic host – the Western imperial and capitalistic war-mongering project.
Collective history has shown time and time again how nation-states and settler colonial states will do all that they can and more to sustain themselves – especially through the dehumanization of our people, the demonization of all who do not fit into the white/Christian/patriarchal frame, and death - literally and socially.
Our families, forced out of their homes as migrants, as displaced people, as captured people and made enslaved, know all too well the reality that genocide never ends, that war never ends, the theft of land never ends, the destruction of our languages and rituals never ends, and, and, and.
This is the imperial world.
This is the settler colonial world.
This is the basis of the capitalistic world.
This is the antiBlack world.
This is the white cisheteropatriarchal world.2
We know this reality all too well because not only is our struggle every day towards the liberation of all of us, but in doing so, the police within our minds, within our bodies, within the ways we relate to one another — in loving and being loved in all forms — ends. Where gender binaries and social conformities no longer bind. Where our bodies, minds, and spirits are re-balanced and synced. Where our resistance to what kills truly gives us life.
All of us from the Global South and dispersed across the world face daily the threat of police and military violence, of gendered violence, of patriarchal violence, of reproductive violence, of having our schools/libraries/archival homes destroyed, of having our places of refuge and sanctuaries eliminated, of being forced out of our homes, of trying to make ends meet, of trying to place food on the table, of trying to reckon with a world that claims a post-slavery/post-war/post-genocide and realizing there never is a “post” to these atrocities.
So, to witness, most especially, the genocidal violence in Palestine brings me back to the question I asked in the last letter: who are the anti-colonial/revolutionary ancestors we call upon in our work and our being? As we live in their legacies, how and what are we crafting as future possibilities of a new world?
This global struggle is happening simultaneously on every level of this ecosystem. And, here, at this moment, to demand a ceasefire in Palestine and commit to boycotting these corporations who are fueling the Palestinian genocide and more. Still, we have a cloud of witnesses, those who transitioned and those present, who aid us and empower us to speak with vigor, to disrupt continuously through protests and direction, and to make our demands clear.
Our resistance work is communal and spiritual, leading us to engage our ancestors and Spirit as a technology to further dismantle Western imperialism and all death-making systems.
P.S. Part 2 of deathdoulasfortheliving is coming soon, and I’m looking forward to sharing more on re-membering our sacred practices through Spirit and our literary revolutionary feminist ancestors as an anti-colonial and resistance tool against this antiBlack genocidal world that we live in.
Additional Sources in Keeping with Sudan, Palestine, and Haiti:
bell hooks calls this intersecting system of domination as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy - watch full video with Laverne Cox here: bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue at The New School