Unity will be engine for liberation

John Parker WW photo

For most of our experience here in this country, people of African ethnicity born here were denied citizenship rights in the Constitution—from voting, to organizing in unions, to drinking from a damn water fountain, to being allowed to live with your children and loved ones—denied during slavery.

And after the unnatural disaster of Katrina, we are even more familiar with being forced from our homes to cities that appear and feel like foreign lands. Like our immigrant sisters and brothers, the Katrina survivors are victims of U.S. policies that lay bare their cities to natural and unnatural disasters—from hurricanes to real estate and Wall Street thieves acting like the IMF, stealing livelihoods and homes.

But our history also has great examples of solidarity. The annexation of Mexico and the issue of slavery in the United States were intertwined. And it was our Mexican sisters and brothers who provided us African slaves refuge when we escaped south across the border. It was our Mexican sisters and brothers who brought us in like family and refused, even under the threat of U.S. war, to throw us back into that bondage of hell.

We remember that solidarity and will respond in kind, be it legal or illegal.

Divide and conquer has been practiced and refined since the ruling class first stole this land; and when poor whites and Native people and African slaves were collaborating to fight their rich oppressors, the rulers developed methods to keep us all from uniting.

And more and more of our South Asian, Asian, Native and Arab sisters and brothers are joining and coming into the leadership of this struggle, providing more basis for unity amongst our working class.

Like the civil-rights movement lifted all working-class struggles for justice, this unity will become a major engine for the movement against war, poverty and racism and the liberation of our entire working class.

All we have to do is unite. The chains may have been physical for African slaves, yet economic for our immigrant sisters and brothers, but the chains still make us bleed. And we have nothing to lose but them, and a world to gain. All workers and oppressed people of the world unite.

—John Parker, West Coast Coordinator, International Action Center; May 1, Los Angeles organizer