Why the African People’s Socialist Party launched The People’s War campaign against “colonialvirus”

“It’s not a medical problem,” Chairman Omali Yeshitela declared of the COVID-19 epidemic ravaging our African communities around the world. “It’s a political problem. We call it the ‘colonialvirus!’”

This is why the best medicine is power over our lives. And we have to organize to fight for it. We have to fight a people’s war!

The two realities experienced in this country make this clear.

While many white people can work at home, have food, wine and supplies delivered, get apps to keep their children entertained and enjoy access to health care and virus testing, our African communities face a whole different life. Not just now but all the time.

If we have a job at all it’s not the kind you could do at home.

To be able to feed our kids many of us have to continue to work during the quarantines.

We’re either going on the job while sick or working in unsafe situations that guarantee we’re going to come down with this virus.

Our landlords and mortgage lenders are not friendly and understanding when we can’t pay the rent.

Free testing is in some white suburb somewhere far away and we don’t meet the qualifications according to them anyway.

While we are supposed to get some kind of check or unemployment “benefit” it’s not enough to meet what we need. We don’t have savings.

We don’t even live paycheck to paycheck; we’re several paychecks behind.

A whole lot of us are going to “fall through the proverbial cracks.”

We need power

For us the virus is not the problem. The problem is colonialism. The complete domination of our whole people by the oppressor (white) population.

Our problem is that we do not have power over our lives. Not in the U.S. or Africa or the Caribbean or anywhere we are.

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, 300,000 African people on the island died unnecessarily; millions more were homeless.

When San Francisco, CA has earthquakes very few people die because they have reinforced houses and buildings and nice bank accounts.

When the hurricane came to New Orleans in 2005, more than 2000 of us died, got stuffed into a filthy, overcrowded sports arena or stuck on our rooftops and attics with no rescue.

We didn’t have cars with the gas and hotel money to get out of town like the white people did.

They have money and power. Our money! The kidnapping and enslavement of African people for 500 years by Europeans created the greatest infusion of wealth into the world at that time.

They got their money and power by turning us into commodities for sale and human work machines, stealing our labor, our lands, our gold and silver, our genius and talents.

This is what birthed the whole system of capitalism. Parasitic capitalism, born and bred sucking our blood.

It happened then and it goes on today.

We need The People’s War

The U.S. government is saying they are going to give us a little pittance of a check, while the big corporations, Wall Street banks and real estate developers are getting trillions of OUR dollars.

We did the work, we paid the taxes, we slaved for you for hundreds of years, yet the rich get the money while we get gunned down on the streets and locked up in prison for life!

So our Party launched The People’s War campaign to act as our people’s own government by and for ourselves. We say what we need and how we’re going to do things.

In this crisis, our Party has laid out everything that we have to do to take care of ourselves.

We made our own recipe for hand sanitizer. We showed on videos how to make our own protective masks. We dropped brochures on people’s doors in our neighborhoods and put up big posters on poles.

We are calling all our friends and neighbors, supporters and members to make sure they are alright.

We created the Black Ankh under the leadership of AAPDEP, the All-African People’s Development and Empowerment Project.

Black Ankh is our own emergency response team of African medical workers and other volunteers who can serve our communities and meet our needs.

Black Ankh is unlike the red cross and other so-called relief agencies that rape us, shoot us down and rip us off when imposed on our lives.

The U.S. government will never help us. It was built at our expense.

African people are dying of this virus and our numbers are not even being counted.

We know that we have to solve our problems for ourselves.

We can do it under the leadership of the Vanguard Party.

We have taken care of them for hundreds of years. Now we do it for ourselves.

This is The People’s War. The Black Power Blueprint is part of this—building political and economic power in the hands of the African working class.

This is the more than 50 economic institutions of the Uhuru Movement by and for African workers.

We need power over our lives. We need reparations, the return of our stolen resources.

It’s a war. White power is scared and vulnerable. We must bring them down by building power in our own hands, negating their power.

We do for ourselves. Self-determination.

Join the African People’s Socialist Party!

We are winning!