A Message to Students and Young People of ALL Nationalities
March 18, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a former prisoner who is now an emancipator of humanity:
People on the bottom of this society are being brutally oppressed, growing up with targets on their back, incarcerated in huge numbers, constantly fucked with, beaten, and murdered by the police. This is part of a whole program of repression that targets Black and Brown people, and it is on a genocidal trajectory. This program can and will escalate as this system gets into a deeper crisis and if the capitalist-imperialists who rule this society are able to get large sections of the population to go along with it. The ruling class and its enforcers expect you not to notice or to look the other way as they carry out their genocidal assault against Black and Brown people. But as murder after murder by the police and people’s righteous resistance to it makes this brutality harder and harder to ignore, they work hard to try to get you to go along with it, getting you to abandon all sense of morality and accept the racist justifications that say its okay to choke a Black man to death if he sells loose cigarettes, it’s okay to riddle a Mexican immigrant with bullets if he throws rocks at a car, and it’s okay to blow away a 12-year old Black child if he’s playing with a toy gun!
What this situation demands of you is not to focus on “doing good in school,” on increasing the economic and social distance between you and the people on the bottom so that you can become the “leaders of tomorrow” that will somehow magically change all this in the distant future, which is impossible as long as this system and its repressive institutions remain in place. No, the urgency of this situation demands that you stand with those people on the bottom and everyone who is willing to resist and fight back. What you do or don’t do matters a great deal, it matters for people in the lower sectors of this society who see no way of fighting back without getting crushed and it matters for the future of all of humanity.
Those of us who are committed to fighting back have already pledged that we will not go back, we will not accept the continual killing of our youth by the police as the new normal. Our resistance will continue and escalate as this system continues and escalates its fight for the freedom of its police to keep killing us and continue to carry out its vicious, genocidal program. “Calming down” is not a choice that we can afford to make because Black and Brown lives DO MATTER to us and those lives are at stake right now.
And especially for those of us who are revolutionaries, we are not in the streets registering people to vote, misleading them into thinking that turning in a ballot will change the violently repressive nature of the police, and we are not in the streets telling people to shop at Black-owned businesses, pretending that putting more money in a Black person’s pocket will stop a pig’s bullet from tearing through an unarmed youth’s body or skull. We are in the streets building a movement FOR REVOLUTION to STOP all this, organizing people as they fight back, introducing them to the leadership of Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, calling on others to get with and join this leadership, strengthening and increasing its reach so that when conditions are right millions can be led to go all out for an actual revolution, with a real chance to win. We have a scientifically developed strategy to carry out this revolution and we have a Constitution that lays out the kind of society we intend to bring into being if we’re successful. Our line is clear on how we intend to get rid of all this on revcom.us and in the pages of Revolution newspaper.
You don’t have to agree with everything that we have to say, even though you should engage it if you are serious about wanting a world where all lives DO matter, but the undeniable fact that there is an epidemic of police murdering Black and Brown people and an urgent need to resist this will be a reality that you’ll continually be confronted with. The challenge will continue to pose itself, “What are you going to do about this?” If what you want is to leave behind a better world when you die, then you need to join the fight against what is happening to Black and Brown people and not let the social divisions that this system relies on determine whether or not you stand against any injustice. Regardless of your nationality or social position your place is in this struggle, not on the sidelines. On April 14 you have to be in the streets, shutting down your campuses, taking over freeways and taking over buildings, sending a clear message to everybody in society that you will not let people down here be continually brutalized and murdered then demonized and isolated as this shit goes on. The actions on April 14 must let these people know they are not alone, and that the fight against what is being done to them will be joined by youth from different strata and many different nationalities. That message needs to be made clear to those on the top as well as those on the bottom.
As someone who has never stepped foot in a university classroom and only caught glimpses of what life is like outside ghettos and prisons, I can tell you that when you’re cast off and counted as nothing, you often see yourself as the least able to change anything. But when you rise up against the conditions that you didn’t choose but were born into, and you see people stand with you, who come from sections of society that you learned to assume could never give a fuck, then that defeatism begins to break down and the possibility of getting rid of all this shit begins to come to life.
That’s why unity in righteous struggle between people coming from many different backgrounds is not just a beautiful thing to see, that unity represents nothing less than a way out for the oppressed throughout the world and a nightmare for their oppressors. When people begin to break out of the divisions and the accompanying outlook that have worked so well for this system, when Black, Brown, and white people stand with each other, when so-called “thugs” from the inner cities and suburban youth from college campuses are coming together to get organized to fight the power, they can have tremendous impact on all of society. You can not only shake the whole country awake to what is happening, but also break open possibilities to changing the whole world, bringing forward fighters with nothing to lose but their chains.
The problem is real. The challenge is real. The role you choose to play in the face of this will also be real.
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