Black Community Conversations🇺🇲

Did you ever watch the women on Living Single make fun of each other??? Regine is normally dressed fashionable in a traditional sense, so of course they mocked her dashiki. They would’ve mocked her if she’d walked in wearing a kimono too. We are #ADOS. We roast each other over everything. That ugly tie dyed dashiki got what it deserved. And “division” wasn’t pushed by the CIA or any else. The white media constantly fed us Pan Africanism. The Color Purple, Coming to America, Black Panther, Roots—where we were spoon fed the lie that Europeans captured African slaves with nets. Kwanzaa was started by an actual Fed. All of that was used to neuter our politics and replace political action with an imaginary African homeland. African identification was repeatedly celebrated and promoted in ADOS cultural life. We were hardly deprived of messages about diaspora unity. If you ask me, Pan Africanism is likely a CIA funded operation. It gutted our politics & left us psychologically confused.

I knew both Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon (RIP to both) of Black Agenda Report. Both supported my work during the Obama years. Bruce later criticized ADOS as too nationalist and anti-immigrant, but he respected me enough to CALL me before publishing his critique. That’s what intellectual integrity looked like. And both Glen and Bruce believed political people actually DID political things. They believed in organizing, building institutions, and confronting power. One of Bruce’s criticisms of ADOS was that he didn’t believe we would ever build real chapters or an organizational infrastructure. He was wrong. We did both. But even his criticism was rooted in the belief that politics demanded more than rhetoric. I hate saying how dead people would respond to anything, but both men’s essays are still available, and I suspect they would have had very little patience for FD Signifier’s milquetoast, sloppy, political commentary masquerading as radical analysis. So watching FD Signifier bastardize their work on the Black Misleadership Class is astonishing. Glen and Bruce were serious socialist radicals whose critique of capitalism was central to their politics. To watch FD “it’s lit over here” Signifier borrow their language while emptying it of its ideological substance, and then presenting that as some profound political analysis, is an insult to their intellectual legacy. I’m genuinely floored by it. You don’t get to appropriate the intellectual tradition of people who spent their lives challenging power while reducing politics to commentary, branding, and content creation. Y’all don’t despise FD enough. If you want to really understand this stuff, read Adolph Reed’s books, starting with “Class Notes”. He actually created the phrase “racial brokerage politics”. I’m a harsh critic of Booker T Washington, but you can’t criticize him selling out or ‘buying in’ without also seriously interrogating his funding of Black radical journalist T. Thomas Fortune, including secretly helping finance his newspaper, The New York Age. Go read Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and then the primary sources. FD Signifier is simply a hack.

This is so frustrating because #ADOS has long argued for building power by using our leverage to force the Democratic Party to be accountable to us—its base. A strategy to ultimately change who controls the Party and its priorities. Yet when we articulate that strategy, we’re dismissed as “Democratic shills”. Now we see the same strategy described by Piker as a path to political power. This is why political education matters. Our inability to pushback against the Democratic Party is directly tied to the lack of political education in our community. Organizing to capture power is not the same as organizing to protect those who already have it. People struggle with sophisticated political tactics because they don’t study politics or trust people who do.

If you don’t think we need to organize around improving our *SPECIFIC* material condition, then you are a part of the problem. You cannot culture your way out of this wealth crisis. Nor can simply recognizing our #ADOS lineage reverse generations of economic dispossession. Lineage tells us WHO we are. History tells us HOW we got here. Political ORGANIZING around our specific condition is how we pursue material redress.

I respect Native Americans, but we’re not the same either. Slaves built America, whereas Native Americans fought America, then separated. I respect that. But it means that the contributions of #ADOS & Native Americans are not equal.