The Hand Grenade
No to the Biden-Harris 2024 National Ticket
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 01/19/23On November 12, 2022, New Black Nationalists urged the Black Commons and Black Democrats to dump the Biden-Harris national ticket in 2024. With last week's revelations that classified government documents were found in Joe Biden's former vice-presidential offices and his home, we are renewing our call with increased urgency.
?As the Democrats most unified and determinative voting bloc, Black communities have the power to underwrite the 2024 ticket. We encourage the Commons to begin discussions now to draft an alternative presidential and vice-presidential ticket.
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Black Caucus and Black Democrat leaders will not challenge Biden. Quite the opposite, on January 18, 2023, (D-SC) Rep. James Clyburn, whose endorsement of Biden in the South Carolina's 2020 presidential primary, rescued his campaign languishing on life-support, told CBS New's Robert Costa "I am all in for Biden" in 2024.
?If Clyburn's wants to endorse Biden that is certainly his choice. But Clyburn clearly had a larger agenda. Asked if Biden will face a primary challenge, Clyburn told Costa, "I don't think he will, and I don't think he should. The history is very clear on what happens when you challenge a sitting president like this." Clyburn was referencing Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1980 primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter: a campaign he concluded led to Carter's loss to Ronald Reagen.
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Notwithstanding Clyburn's revisionist history of the 1980 presidential campaign, his warning off challengers to Biden in 2024, is blunt intimidation. In effect, the totality of his endorsement and commentary attempts to saddle the Black Commons with an 80-year-old President with an approval rating of 36 percent.
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Worse still, Clyburn is asking the Black Commons to risk staining its storied history that insist moral rectitude matters before the GOP Congressional and Justice Department's investigations of Biden's sons' unsavory business practices and his own sprawling scandal for possession of classified government documents.
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With the recent appointment of a Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate Biden's classified document scandal, will certainly be followed by a second Republican congressional investigation. Biden is going to be skewered for the next two years and probably impeached. Should Democrats continue to cleave to Biden their only hope is hoping for the wacko conspiracy theory Republican sedition caucus to overplay its hand. That is tantamount to no strategy at all.
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Rep. Clyburn has thrown down the gauntlet to Black Democrats and the Black Commons to fall in line, even though Biden hasn't even announced his candidacy. Unless the Black Commons is "all-in" with Biden in 2024 they should pick up that gauntlet and demonstrate its independence and veto power over the party leadership.
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Then as now, New Black Nationalists are forgoing any specific political criticism of the Biden-Harris ticket. We continue to assert there is little enthusiasm in Black communities for a Biden-Harris ticket in 2024. Further, we previously stated after the 2022 midterms that Biden's approval then hovered slightly north of 40 percent wasn't likely to improve. Two months later it has already plummeted below 40 percent and could go lower.
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Those splitting hairs about the difference between Trump's stealing and concealing classified documents from the Feds, and Biden's staff 'accidentally' packing up classified materials when he left office in 2016, miss the point entirely. To many people, especially independent voters, it's a distinction without a difference. Dems making excuses for Biden will only make matters worse, and it reeks of base hypocrisy.
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The Black Commons, and the electorate that are willing to support a Democrat presidential candidate in 2024 want new blood and substantive change. They are weary with "Biden fatigue."
The combination of Biden as a dated political quantity with low approval ratings, and his inability to generate enthusiasm among the Black Commons spells certain defeat in 2024.
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Simply put, the Biden-Harris ticket in 2024 is toast. The Black Commons cannot go down with Biden's sinking ship. Nor should the Commons stain its historical reputation as a moral tour de force in a wayward nation. Moral rectitude like moral hazard matters. There is too much as stake.
Free The Land by Edward Onaci: A Critical Reading
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 07/10/22
Welcome to the Notebook. Today, New Black Nationalists [NBN] began a critical reading of 'Free the Land: The Republic of New Africa and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State' [2020] by Edward Onaci.
Free the Land [FTL] advances an account of the Republic of New Africa's [RNA] remarkable 53-year journey as the provisional government of a Black nation within America's settler state. It is the only comprehensive scholarly work dedicated to a critical analysis of the 'territorial' or 'nation-state' Black nationalist trend emerging out of the 1960s Black Power movement.
For New Black Nationalists engaged in renovating our theoretical house with a 5-G philosophical and political configuration to supplant the Black Power era's aging analog architecture, 'Free the Land' hit the streets at a timely and fortuitous moment.
The Trump-led, Republican Party and white nationalist militia alliance marks the acceleration of American Empire's decline, existential crisis, and a coming civil war in the 2020s. The January 6 Capitol Coup validated NBN's Crisis Theory predictive model, and the need to deploy new theoretical arms to convert the crisis into a revolutionary struggle to create an independent, black-led polity.
Free The Land's publication coincides with NBN's current project to complete a Draft Program for a New Black Nation-State," that will outline its principles, aims, tasks and structure for a new government.
More importantly, FTL fills in previously unexplained political and ideological gaps in the RNA and New Afrikan Independence Movement [NAIM] experience. Accordingly, Onaci's work helps build the roadmap to create a sovereign Black polity in the 2020s, at a time when Black Nationalists are struggling to maintain contact with the confluence of events leading to a governmental collapse and new revolutionary possibilities.
'Free the Land' excavates the RNA's genealogy, cultivated by the fevered minds of Detroit's Black activists, led by Gaidi and Amari Obadeli. Along with Detroit's civil right leaders, Black Muslims, local politicians, ministers, socialists, and radical factory workers, they collaborated with national Black activists to elevate the 'nationalist ideal' to a call for a Black government convention in 1968.
Onaci's backgrounding of the RNA's genesis is pivotal to understanding the unique strand of nationalist source-coding which continues to ideologically drive the PG-RNA today, and its conceptual framework that guided the formation of a provisional government.
FTL's document production dissects the RNA's Declaration of Independence, New Afrikan Creed, New Afrikan Oath, and the RNA Constitutional and Organizational Structure of the PG-RNA. Onaci provides us with a clear window into the RNA's ideological constructs of Black identity, nationhood, citizenship, the centrality of land, and the Black Commons relationship to wave of nationalist revolutions sweeping the planet.
Over five hundred participants gathered in Detroit the last weekend in March 1968 for the Black government convention. The devastation and tension from Detroit's 1967 insurrection, the fiercest urban rising against the state in American history hung over the convention. Onaci's account notes that many participants called themselves New Afrikans--members of an oppressed internal colony searching for a strategy to secure a UN-monitored plebiscite for Blacks to exercise self-determination. When the three-day convention ended several dozen participants lead by "Queen Mother" Audley Moore, signed the RNA's Declaration of Independence.
The convention declared the existence of a new Black nation-state called the Republic of New Afrika, in the five southern states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. They agreed to create a Provisional Government of the RNA.
Convention participants elected Robert Williams, Chair of the Revolutionary Action Movement [RAM] as the RNA President. Betty Shabazz was elected First-Vice President, and Gaidi Obadeli was elected as Second Vice President, Maulana 'Ron' Karenga of the US Organization and Amiri Baraka founding member of the Black Arts Movement were elected as Co-Ministers of Culture." Amari Obadeli was elected Minister of Information and served as the RNA's chief theorist.
Great Replacement Theory's American Variant: The Language of Civil War
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 06/11/22
05.29.2020
?In the aftermath of Buffalo's May 14, 2022, mass execution of ten Black people, the specter of Great Replacement Theory looms over the Black Commons. Whether white nationalist terrorist attacks on Black communities in any place, at any time constitutes the new normal is a vexing issue.
The Buffalo massacre raises consequential questions concerning the scope and motivation of unbridled white nationalist violence directed against the Black Commons. What is to be made of the rise of Great Replacement Theory?
Is it merely another iteration of white supremist doctrine every generation of Anglo-Saxons are obliged to craft to stiffen the spine of its minions? We think not. What does its intersection with the broad-church of white nationalist forces portend for the future?
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?In our view: civil war.
New Black Nationalists loathe hypocrisy, so let us speak clearly. We're not just talking about violence that goes one way. Civil war is not and will not be a unilateral affair.
The April Sunset Park subway shooting this year in Brooklyn, and the November 2021, SUV attack at Waukesha, Wisconsin's Christmas parade that killed six people involved Black suspects. The growing body of these asymmetric attacks are pre-cursers of a wider civil conflagration to come.
Atavistic white nationalist ideology like the Great Replacement Theory [GRT] is a call to action as much as a doctrine of belief. Buffalo's depraved 18-year-old Neo-Nazi walked in the footprint of El Paso's 2019 Walmart massacre and Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue assassinations. Compelled by GRT, he inflicted mortal wounds on Black flesh in the service of white ?nationalism.
Buffalo's mass murderer was both a counter-revolutionary actor, and a metaphor. He was a disciple of Great Replacement Theory and an "accelerationist." White nationalist "accelerationists" believe American Empire is in terminal decay and spiraling into freefall. Terrorist attacks, spectacular killings, and half-baked coup attempts like January 6, at the U.S. Capitol are intended to shock and destabilize society, thereby speeding up or accelerating governmental collapse and civil war.
New Black Nationalists argue here that an American white nationalist variant of French philosopher Renaud Camus's 2011 Great Replacement Theory has congealed as a distinct construct. We call this variant Cathedral GRT. It charges Democrats, coastal elites, Jews, and Davos globalists with prosecuting a genocidal war against the white race.
The Cathedral variant of Great Replacement Theory haphazardly articulated by Donald Trump, Republican Party cretins, Alt-Right academics and stormfront militias is an inchoate fabrication that seeks to arrest this "genocidal war" against whites.
Accordingly, genocide against the white race can only be averted by creating an authoritarian white ruled American Apartheid state. As genocide constitutes an existential threat to whites, American Apartheid must be achieved and maintained by any means necessary; stolen elections, extraconstitutional coup d' tats, and civil war, just to name a few.
At this critical juncture, it's important that the Black Commons not simply dismiss Buffalo's assassin as a deranged white boy, who hated Blacks and went off the deep end believing another racist fantasy. Since Trump left 'The Apprentice" to play President of White America for Life, conspiracy theories have become the mother's milk of the Republican Party and the hard right.
But Great Replacement Theory is not the same as QAnon conspiracy theories alleging America is controlled by Satanic pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking operation. It's not wacky GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's fantasy that the Jewish Rothschild banking family built a space laser that started the 2018 California wildfires.
?Quite the opposite, GRT is metastasizing as the dominant theme uniting divergent white nationalist forces under the canard of 'preventing white genocide.' GRT is being injected into MAGASTAN's bloodstream on a weekly, daily, and hourly basis through a megaphone called Fox News.
Its staying power, however, is not derived from Tucker Carlson's carnival barking rants about white electoral displacement by black, brown, and yellow foreign-born immigrant voters. The animating force of the Cathedral GRT variant is that it's grounded in real racial, ethnic, national, and religious demographic shifts.
Seismic population transfers from Global South to Global North are overwhelming Europe and American Empire's capacity to process a new spatial, social, and political planetary configuration. That being said, New Black Nationalists are skeptical that the actual number of undocumented immigrants is the consensus calculation of 11 million. For years that mysterious unchanging number has been based on previous estimates of the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS).
A 2005 study by Bear Sterns analysts using remittances, housing permits, school enrollment in undocumented immigrant communities, and cross-border flows placed the number of undocumented immigrants between 20-30 million. Similarly, a Yale and Massachusetts Institute of Technology report by Fazel-Zarandi and Edwar Kaplan estimated there are 22.1 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
Whatever the real number is, NBN believes it's substantially higher than 11 million. Thus, we are past the point of no return for America Empire's ruling class to hit the pause button on legal and unauthorized immigration. There can be no reset.
Republican Party leaders' refusal to denounce GTR after the Buffalo massacre is a stark admission that the mythical immigration reform moment has passed. Better to board the GRT train before it leaves the station. That's why Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), now on Trump's short list for Vice-President in 2024, is leading the charge to push Cathedral GRT into the political mainstream.
Professor Melissa Murray on Clarence Thomas, Roe v. Wade, Race & Eugenics
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 05/07/22
Race-ing Roe: Reproductive Justice, Racial Justice, and the Battle for Roe v. Wade
by Melissa Murray
APR 12, 2021
134 Harv. L. Rev. 2025 [Harvard Law Review]
Amidst a raft of major Supreme Court decisions, a relatively quiet concurrence has planted the seeds for what may precipitate a major transformation in American constitutional law. Writing for himself in Box v. Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas chided the Court for declining to review a decision invalidating an Indiana law that prohibited abortions undertaken “solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics.” Arguing that the challenged law was merely Indiana’s modest attempt to prevent “abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” Justice Thomas proceeded to elaborate a misleading history in which he associated abortion with eugenics, racism, and a broader campaign to improve the human race by limiting Black reproduction.
While many decried his selective and inaccurate invocation of the history of eugenics, Justice Thomas’s ambitions for the concurrence likely went beyond the historical record. Indeed, in drafting the concurrence, Justice Thomas may have been less concerned with history than with the future — and specifically the future of abortion rights and the jurisprudence of race. As this Article explains, the concurrence’s misleading association of abortion and eugenics may well serve two purposes. First, it justifies trait-selection laws, an increasingly popular type of abortion restriction, on the ground that such measures serve the state’s interest in eliminating various forms of discrimination. But more importantly, and less obviously, by associating abortion with eugenic racism, the concurrence lays a foundation for discrediting — and overruling — Roe v. Wade on the alleged ground that the abortion right is rooted in, and tainted by, an effort to selectively target Black reproduction.
Under the principle of stare decisis, a past decision, like Roe v. Wade, cannot be overruled simply because a majority of the current Court disagrees with it. Instead, a “special justification” is required. Justice Thomas’s association of abortion with eugenics constructs the case that racial injustice is the “special justification” that warrants overruling Roe. In this regard, the Box concurrence builds on past decisions, like Brown v. Board of Education, as well as more recent cases, like Ramos v. Louisiana, in which the Court overruled past precedents, in part, to correct racial wrongs.
If undertaken, the Box concurrence’s latent strategy will be devastating to abortion rights, but as this Article explains, its deleterious impact goes beyond eviscerating Roe v. Wade. Under the concurrence’s logic, race may serve dual purposes in shaping the Court’s jurisprudence. As an initial matter, race — and the prospect of redressing racial injustice — furnishes the Court with a potent justification for reconsidering settled precedent. But it also provides the Court with an opportunity to articulate new law that affirms and entrenches the Court’s preferred conception of race and racial harm. In this regard, the Box concurrence is not merely an invitation to recast abortion as an issue of racial injustice; it is an invitation to entirely reconceptualize the meaning of race, racial injury, and racism.
INTRODUCTION
In May 2019, the Supreme Court issued a per curiam decision in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., a challenge to two Indiana abortion restrictions — one that “makes it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in Indiana when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics,” and one that prescribed particular protocols for the disposal of fetal remains.
The Court’s disposition of the two challenges was not necessarily noteworthy. It granted certiorari in the challenge to the fetal disposal restriction, while denying certiorari as to the challenge to the trait-selection prohibition.
Erasing "Roe" - A Jane Crow and Hand Maid's Tale
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 05/04/22
Today, the New Black Nationalist Network condemned the May 2, 2022, draft opinion of the Supreme Court on Dobbs Vs. Mississippi Department of Health that held "Roe [v. Wade] was incorrectly decided," and egregiously wrong from the start. " If upheld, the majority opinion will effectively eliminate abortion protections for women by handing authority over abortion access to the states.
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Samuel Alito's opinion is an unbridled attack on women's independence and autonomy by denying their right to make life-sustaining decisions that are uniquely and singularly determined by childbearing.
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Striking down abortion rights will absolutely increase the mortality rate of Black women and teenage girls whose abortion rate of 25.1%, is already 3.8 times higher than white women (6.6%). Black women and teenagers' mortality rate is currently three times higher than their white counterparts [per 1,000 women ages 15-44, according to the CDC].
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Sending authority to decide abortion access to the states will increase black women's mortality rate and serious medical illnesses by pricing them out of access. For example, the average travel distance for 1.1 million women in Louisiana for legal abortion services is currently 33 miles one-way. Overturning Roe will increase one-way travel to 670 miles. It is a certainty that Black women will increasingly engage in back-alley procedures and home remedies to self-abort. Almost 70% of U.S. abortion recipients lived below the federal poverty level in 2018.
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Worse still, given the number of Black women and teenage abortion recipients, Alito's opinion criminalizes Black women in 13 states, effective immediately upon its adoption. In Michigan, Alito's opinion would re-instate its 1931 law that makes abortion a felony with no exceptions for rape or incest. In 2018, 55.8% of Michigan's abortions were performed on Black women.
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In Texas, women who are more than six weeks pregnant are not only criminalized but are subject to surveillance and targeting with a $10,000 reward on their heads by bounty hunters. One has to wonder what comes next: police roadblocks, porta-johns and rapid pregnancy test set up at state lines?
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But there is more. Once a woman becomes pregnant and seeks an abortion under Alito's decree in a Hand Maid's State, by default she and her unborn child become property and wards of the state. Raped teens will be forced to give birth to children.
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?Those who believe the Democrat congress and Biden can pass federal legislation to codify abortion rights are being gaslit. Democrats in Congress are impotent knaves who will do nothing. Should Republicans take control of both houses in November 2022, their first order of business will be passing a national abortion ban.
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Because Alito's opinion asserts "The Constitution makes no mention of abortion," therefore it is not grounded in constitutional jurisprudence, alarm bells are being sounded that birth control, gay marriage and even interracial marriage are on the chopping block. All that's true.
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But New Black Nationalists want to be clear: Alito's opinion is a white heteropatriarchal sledgehammer to bash women into submission, particularly the majority of Black women who live in Southern Hand Maid's states.
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It was thought that when Amy Coney-Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court, one of her tasks would be to write the majority opinion when the 6-3 conservative bench appointed the hour to overturn Roe. It didn't happen.
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It wasn't the brooding Defacto Chief Justice Clarence Thomas, or Coney Barrett, the cerebral intellectual and mother of five children who would wordsmith a softer and nuanced argument reversing Roe. No. Alito was the angry white man on the campaign stump, using blunt acerbic language that was punishing and designed to invoke terror. It was crafted in an Old Testament vernacular that any "four-square" southern preacher could roll with on Sunday service while his assistant pastor handled snakes and "cut a rug" at the same time.
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This should not be surprising as Alito was writing to an American public in which 60% support maintaining Roe. Alito was speaking on behalf of a White Nationalist Republican Party, and a reactionary white evangelical religious viewpoint.
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White evangelicals comprising 14% of America's population are the only religious group in the country whose majority supports a total abortion ban. Their world view is also the slavish submission of women to their God-anointed male masters.
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We are thus reminded of Supreme Court Justice Sonja Sotomayer's December 10, 2021, warning about the Supreme Court's decision to delay taking action on Texas Senate Bill 8 restriction of abortion rights.
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Sotomayor averred that "S. B. 8’s existing manipulation of state court procedures and defenses echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to “veto” or “nullify” any federal law with which they disagreed."
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Sotomayor's reference to "states' rights" and the slaveholding South conjures visions of a time-machine--a portal to transport women back to an era of Jane Crow, Hand Maid's States or even Fatimah Mernissi's "Time of Troubles." When the Caliphate was in crisis, women were locked in their homes.
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But Alito, the Republican Party, "Lost Cause" White Nationalists, and white evangelicals will surely reap the whirlwind of what they've sown, sooner rather than later. They have unleashed a force that is destined to overwhelm them.
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New Black Nationalist support women's right to choose, and to exercise sovereignty and agency over their bodies and lifestyles.
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We support the full liberation of women and look forward to American Empire's collapse and establishing a majority Black-led republic that eradicates the heteropatriarchal order.
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Commentary: The Black Lives Matter $6 Million Mansion Controversy
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 04/10/22
The recent reports of former BLM leaders secretly purchasing a $6 million mansion in California in 2020, marks yet another sad chapter in the ethical leadership challenges plaguing the organization since large contributions began flowing into their accounts in 2015.
In 2021, reports of Patrisse Cullors questionable $3 million purchases of homes in Georgia and California invited scrutiny. In January 2022, BLM members in Toronto released a statement to Twitter, complaining that “for BLM Canada to take money from BLM Global Network [Foundation] for a building without consulting the community was unethical.” The purchase was made by a Toronto-based non-profit operated by Janaya Chan, wife of BLM foundation co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
New Black Nationalists are not casting dispersion on the BLM founders, nor accuse them of being guilty of any wrongdoing. That said, we're not surprised that serious ethical issues continue to torment the founding members and some of their contemporary associates.
New Black Nationalists don't believe in taking cheap shots or piling on forces who aren't in the camp of the enemy when they're down.
Our critique of BLM's decentralized leadership model has been its continuous inability to provide competent leadership, training, and resources to its member organizations and local chapters.
In two articles "Black Lives Matters Demise and Questions of Black Feminism" and "Black Lives Matter 2.0, What Comes Next?"
New Black Nationalists clarified our political and ideological differences with BLM and our points of agreements. We did so because the future of Black Lives Matters as a diverse resistance movement really does matter.
BLM's lack of financial accountability and transparency in its operations and fetish for shadowy real estate acquisitions leave much to be desired. But these are not just bad faith actions of personalities. They also stem in part from a decentralized organizational structure that has allowed their virtual national office to freelance on the nightshift.
We are particularly struck by BLM leaders Cullors and Garcia's cavalier and at times arrogant responses to their own chapters and local leaders repeated requests for accountability. In this latest dust-up over the $6 million mansion, we did not find Cullors and Garcia's responses persuasive nor reassuring, not to mention the optics of sipping libations.
Black Lives Matter burst on the scene in 2013, as the face of a novel Black millennial force. Their new decentralized, inclusive grass-roots leadership model represented a decisive break from the vertically driven single Black male messianic leadership style of the 1960s Black Power Movement.
More importantly, their breakout was viewed as the first genuine mass-based movement led by radical Black Feminists. BLM seemed to vindicate all the sacrifices and industry of the first 1960s Black feminists two-front war against Black Liberation male chauvinism and exclusionary white feminists, the literary criticism battles with the Henry Louis Gates gang of post-structuralists, and the Intersectionality Theory wars with the academy and Womens Studies Departments.
Radical Black Feminists won all those wars decisively. They did so with serious on-the- ground organizing, path breaking theoretical work, and tenacious, principled, above-board struggle. And we might add, very little money.
It is BLM leader's failure to be open, honest, principled, and exemplify the highest ethical standards that truly troubles New Black Nationalists.
We are certain this handful of BLM leaders did not intend to tarnish the profound legacy radical Black Feminists built with decades of sweat and blood: but they have and continue to do so.
For the good of Black Lives Matter and the legacy of radical Black Feminism, perhaps it's time they consider stepping away.
Frantz Fanon's New Humanism and the Florentine Republic
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 03/12/22
Frantz Fanon was the radical exponent of a novel idea: a global insurgency of Black, brown, and yellow peasants purging the Third World of its European winter of colonial despotism.
Fanon's circulating concern was a replacement theory for the post-European colonial world. What then would constitute an alternative social arrangement capable of rupturing with Western imperialism he described as "teetering on the brink of atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration?" How could a new social model avoid the suffocating enclosure of Soviet-style statist socialism and kleptocracy?"
"Let us endeavor to invent a man in full," said Fanon, "something which Europe has been incapable of achieving." The genetic coding of the Fanonian Project was the philosophy of "New Humanism."
In Frantz Fanon's New Humanism and the Florentine Republic, New Black Nationalists trace the genealogy of Humanism's ascent. Its philosophical underpinnings that evolved over six-hundred-years leading to Fanon's construct of New Humanism is excavated.
The republican filaments of Fanon's nation-building model in Algeria's liberation war and Africa's newly independent nations are contrasted with the dominant themes of the Florentine variant of city-state Civic Humanism. Thus, the condominium of theory and praxis so vital to the synthesis of Fanon's oeuvre is preserved in this analysis.
New Humanist Philosophy
New Humanism and the Florentine Republic argues that secular humanism as a philosophical concept was consistent with Fanon's materialist, existential, and phenomenological world view. New Humanism flowed
to the rhythms of Fanon's of analysis that rejected Leopold Senghor's ancient African theories of Vitalism and Animist cosmologies that asserted the existence of a single Black diasporic personality.
Humanism's originalist articulation during the 1300s of Italy's Early Renaissance period attached primacy to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Its first thinkers emphasized the value and goodness of human beings in a manner reminiscent of Fanon's maxim that "Man is a 'yes' resounding from cosmic harmonies...Man is propelled toward the world and his kind. We want to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other."
The first humanists were invested in solving problems through reason, scientific inquiry and contemplating Greek and Roman classics in philosophy and rhetoric. The explosion of Mediterranean trade in the late 1300s, along with the rise of merchants, bankers, and guilds as transformative social actors, infected Italy with the contagion of social change. Constantinople's fall to the Ottomans in 1453 sent Eastern scholars scurrying to Italy and Spain with their libraries of ancient Greek classics. Plato's Republic was translated from Greek to Latin by no less a luminary than Florentine banker Cosimo de Medici.
Resurrecting ancient Greek and Roman republican government archives, Civic Humanism emerged as the subversive language of Florence and Venice, two of Italy's most powerful city-states. These urban centers sought to sever the umbilical cord yoking them to the Dark Ages of Rome and Milan, the Pope, atavistic nobles, and the hierarchal Medieval order.
It will be argued here that although Fanon's philosophical engagement with humanism is not directly connected to Florentine historical antecedents, his political vison of a New Humanist Republic is embedded with numerous concepts consonant with Florentine Civic Humanism of the early 1400's.
?Fanon's philosophical attachment to humanism is linked to two variants that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950's. French philosopher-playwright Jean Paul Sartre's 1945 "Existentialism and Humanism" lecture was a seminal work debated across Europe among left-wing radicals, academics, and progressive artists. However, New Black Nationalists' reading suggests French Trotskyite humanists led by Reya Dunayevskaya--founder of the Marxist- Humanism school--had a significant impact on Fanon's theoretical migration to humanist thought.
Ukraine: Lessons for Black Nationalists: Winning the Coming U.S. Civil War
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 02/28/22
Against all odds, the tenacity of Ukraine's armed rising has stalled Russia's murderous land, sea, and air invasion. All predictions of Ukraine's quick collapse under Russia's massive invasion were wrong. Ukraine's resistance tilted the international security architecture off its axis.
We are not surprised. Before the February 24 invasion we stated, "New Black Nationalists living in American Empire express our support for the Ukrainian people to rise, resist, and defeat any armed invasion and occupation by the Russian Federation." Even if Russia goes all out to capture and impose a blood-soaked occupation of Ukraine, we hold to our projection that "Russia’s imperial death march on Ukraine will mark the beginning of the end of Putin’s criminal regime. " Even if Putin win's the short-term battle, he will lose the war.
Ukraine's people are teaching Black Nationalists in America's Settler State, invaluable lessons about what it will take to create a Black nation-state when American Empire collapses and Trump's Republican Party -White Nationalist civil war is launched. This article briefly outlines these critical lessons.
1. The decisive nature of nationalist consciousness.
From New Black Nationalists perspective, a distinct Ukrainian nationality has existed for hundreds of years. Ukraine' national sense of identity is rooted in historically developed relations between different ethnic groups that comprised a majority population on a common geographical space. Over time they developed a common Ukrainian language and culture. We believe the process of a modernist Ukrainian identity is still maturing and continues to develop a narrative of its national destiny.
Putin's invasion to erase Ukraine's republic and deny the "Ukrainian National Ideal" has deepened and enriched the fabric of Ukrainian identity, which is inclusive of millions of Russian-speaking people currently living in Ukraine.
Ironically, the most intense bombing and desperate street-to-street combat is occurring in Kharkiv-- Ukraine's second largest city, with the largest ethnic Russian-speaking majority. Thus, Ukraine's liberation war against Russia's imperial occupation also takes on the character of a civil war between families and friends.
This enhanced strand of Ukrainian nationalist consciousness that is being forged amid existential crisis and war, has been galvanized by President Zelensky's refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression and the United States and Europe's efforts to throw Ukraine under the bus. Ukrainians in untold numbers, civilian and military, are arming themselves for a fight to finish.
The Lesson: From slavery to provisional citizenship of the 1960's Civil Rights Acts, Black people in America's settler state have always had an ambivalent and contradictory relationship with America. The Black majority's fealty to the American ideal has ebbed and flowed with the tide of the most intense struggles for democratic rights. Black slaves in the War of 1812 joined the British Navy and burned down Washington, D.C. before earning their freedom and exiting the country. During World War 2, record numbers of Blacks enlisted to fight against Hitler to save democracy they never enjoyed.
Historically, Black attachment to racial consciousness and solidarity has always been stronger than national affinity to the American ideal. There is a reason American flags rarely fly in Black communities on Independence Day. Black indifference to American identification is widespread, at the same time that few Blacks are consciously anti-American. An even smaller number see themselves as part of a Black nation entitled to self-determination.
Frantz Fanon's Quarrel With Negritude
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 01/30/22
Introduction:
Following ten days of CIA interrogations and emergency surgery for late-stage leukemia, Frantz Fanon died in December 1961, in Bethesda, Maryland. Four days later The Wretched of the Earth was published, prompting the French government to ban the book and seize copies from Paris bookstores. When Aime Césaire passed in 2008, the Negritude movement’s 94 year-old co-founder was interred in a state funeral presided over by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He called Césaire a ‘great humanist and poet.’
Logic and history concur that the substantive difference between Fanon and his former teacher was one of revolution versus accommodation. “I condemn any idea of Antillean independence” said Aime Cesaire. "I only know of one single France. That of the revolution. That of Toussaint Louverture.” But the philosophical polarities between these two Martinicans: between Fanonian theory and Negritude’s sprawling oeuvre, was anything but a simple equation. Rather, it was a thick and complex intellectual confrontation with profound ramifications for the future.
Fanon and the Negritude Question revisits Frantz Fanon’s extended polemic with the Negritude movements' leading intellectuals. In many respects their discourses framed the quintessential philosophical arguments that dominated the African diaspora’s anti-colonial awakening.
From 1949 to 1961, Frantz Fanon crafted a critique of Negritude’s foundational constructs. In doing so, he bequeathed to future generations a cipher more so than a philosophical blueprint that responded to the problematic Césaire put before his friend Léopold Senghor in the 1930s: “Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?”
New Black Nationalists assert Fanon’s rejoinder to Césaire on the construction of the Black subject emerged as the locus of the philosophical dispute with the Negritude movement.
Fanon’s skirmish with Negritudists traversed a galaxy of issues and produced an algorithm that hummed to the source codes of being, identity, culture, and epistemology. Leavened with the grammar of Fanon’s psychoanalysis of the colonized, NBN posits that Fanon's critique of Negritude in the aggregate created a coherent and unified philosophical system.
The cryptology of the Fanon/Negritude exchange is rich. Arguably, Negritude’s philosophical polyglot probed, embraced, or foreshadowed virtually every intellectual strand enrooted in the African diaspora experience. Thus, NBN holds that Negritude’s centrality to the African diaspora intellectual tradition merits critical reevaluation. This is especially important in the United States, where Negritude's African and Caribbean roots relegated it to the periphery of Black thought.
Within America’s settler state, New Black Nationalists argue that the derivative philosophies of the following intellectual currents were addressed substantively or tangentially by the Fanon/Negritude arguments.
Negro/American Double Consciousness– WEB DuBois, M.L. King
Black Marxism – ABB, Blacks/CPUSA, Cedric Robinson
Marxist Nationalism – BWC, League of Revolutionary Workers,
Pan-Africanism- The Garvey Movement
Pan-African Socialism – All African People’s Revolutionary Party
Cultural Nationalism – Ron Karenga – US (United Slaves)
Religious Nationalism – NOI, Black Moors, Black Hebrew Israelites
Afrocentrism – Molefe Asante
Afropessimism – Jared Sexton and Frank Wilder
Radical Black Nationalism – Malcolm X, RAM, BAM, BPP
Nation-State Black Nationalism – RNA, New Black Nationalists
Negritudists were well versed in the sciences of Vitalism, Marxism, Pan-Africanism, Créolité, Caribbeanness, Black Surrealism, liberal republicanism, and nationalism. In the lycées and lecture halls of the French academy, they were bred by the Fourth and Fifth Republics to become the native elites of the home colonies and exemplars of French cultural assimilation policy.
It’s no accident that Black Francophone intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Leon Dumas, Paulette and Jane Nardal, Rene Maran, Suzanne Lacascade, Alioune Diop, Suzanne Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, and Achille Mbembe exercised disproportionate influence in the African Diaspora’s philosophical solar system.
Philosophy was a baccalaureate requirement in France’s educational system, and the national pastime for French elites and the popular masses. They consumed the works of Descartes, Rousseau, Sartre, Camus, Foucault, and Derrida with brio. French Empire also took its "mission civilisatrice," to enlighten its beleaguered colonial natives seriously. The production of Black intellectuals whose anti-colonialism maintained French identity was a strategic consideration of the Caribbean and Africa Desk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
New Black Nationalists contend that the writings of scientific racism theorist Count Arthur de Gobineau also had a decisive impact on the development of Black Francophone philosophy in the arenas of art, culture, and aesthetics.
Negritude's fealty to French Identify was also shaped by a seismic event that remains seared into the Black Francophone collective memory. We speak of the Haitian Revolution, the world's only slave uprising that led to the founding of a nation-state ruled by non-whites. Despite Toussaint Louverture's brilliant leadership in defeating Napolean Bonaparte--the planet's most formidable military general--he never lost his sense of French identity, thereby creating a legacy that exist to this day in the Antilles.
Louverture's 1801 constitution for a free Haitian state unconditionally banned slavery. Seeking to rid Haiti of French colonial rule, Louverture's constitution read "Slaves cannot exist in this territory and servitude is forever abolished. Here, all men are born, live, and die, free and French.” While Louverture believed Haiti could forge an autonomous republic, he concluded independence wasn't desirable or possible in the short-run, and he wanted rebuild Haiti under French protection. After forcing the French to call for a peace treaty, Toussiant's misplaced trust in Bonaparte to honor the terms of the peace agreement led to his imprisonment and death shortly thereafter in France.
When Cesaire exclaimed "I only know of one single France. That of the revolution. That of Toussaint Louverture.” he evoked Louverture's decision not to break from France but lead a Black autonomous republic within French Empire. Cesaire's appropriation of Louverture to justify his accommodationist path of Martinique's becoming an overseas department when independence was achievable without bloodshed was the height of opportunism. Lest we forget General Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated the French on the battlefield a year after Louverture's death to consolidate Haiti's revolution. The Louverture Predicament continues to cast a long, contradictory, and anxiety-filled shadow across the Caribbean. For all his revolutionary heat and writings, Fanon was silent on the historic armed Haitian revolutionary struggle and the legacy of Toussaint Louverture.
The Origins of Frantz Fanon's Philosophical System
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 12/12/21
Introduction:
In February 2021, New Black Nationalists [NBN] adopted Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s corpus of theories as its guiding philosophical system. As we approach the 60th anniversary of his death on December 6, 2021,"Fanonism," has come to embody the authoritative text undergirding originalist Decolonial Theory.
Notions of a Fanonian philosophical system may unsettle deconstructionists,' who long ago proclaimed the death of the Nationalist-Humanist project and grand theory. Others will decry a “cult of personality” or insist there is nothing more to learn about Fanon that hasn’t already been written.
But with intensifying anti-Black violence, the rise of Necropolitics, and war as the sacraments to forestall American Empire’s imminent collapse in the 2020's, Fanon's canon grows increasingly relevant. As a network generating analytical products to support creating a Black-led nation-state, NBN is compelled to make the argument affirming the existence of a Fanonian philosophical system.
Recalibrating Fanon’s philosophical coordinates to match the extraordinary contemporary moment and envisioning a national destiny for a prospective Black republic is New Black Nationalists’ urgent writ.
As Frantz Fanon's philosophical writings center our adoption of his compendium of works, NBN is releasing this opening paper, “The Origins of Fanon’s Philosophy” and the following thought documents to interrogate the boundaries of his philosophical universe.
* Fanon's Quarrel with Negritude
* Fanon's Philosophical Bricolage: Existential Phenomenology
* Fanon's Liberation Philosophy and Black Nationalism in American Empire.
“Origins,” frames the argument that a Fanonian philosophical system exist and outlines a matrix containing its essential elements. “Origins” concludes with a brief narrative concerning the importance of locating the genesis of Fanon's philosophical system in the Afro-Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Philosophy asks the celestial questions that elevate the human project: Who are we? How do we understand fundamental truths about ourselves and our relationships with others? How do we comprehend the world we live in, and does mankind have the capacity to change society for the greater good?
The Argument
New Black Nationalists assert that Frantz Fanon engaged these profound philosophical questions and crafted an interlocking assemblage of concepts on existentialism, ontology, ethics, phenomenology, and epistemology that constitute the touchstones of a Fanonian philosophical system. These constructs were largely enumerated in his publication of Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
In author Lewis R. Gordon's words, the vexing question compelling Fanon to summon the weapons of philosophy to service was simple: How to explain the Black?
As exploring Black subjectivity and identity is the locus of Fanon's philosophical work, it's imperative that New Black Nationalists provide its working definition of Blackness as a baseline to underpin our analytical framework.
New Black Nationalists Definition of Blackness
New Black Nationalists concept of Blackness builds on the scholarly work of feminist author Michelle Wright in “The Physics of Blackness.” We assert that Blackness operates as a construct implicitly and explicitly, defined by phenotype and behavioral characteristics. Blackness exists phenomenologically as a collective and individual identity, defined by perceptions and performance at any given time. Thus, Blackness is subject to interpretation in the past, present, or future tense. The phenomenology of Blackness focuses on the why, when, and where it is being interpreted. Blackness as a collective identity intersects with other identities, inclusive of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, and performance.
While New Black Nationalists embrace the cornerstone of Fanon’s widely accepted philosophical condominium of “existential-phenomenology,” our analysis bends toward epiphenomenalism that incorporates a broader concept of time and space and departs from the enclosures of the linear progress narratives marking Black Atlantic thought.
Trump Coup Watch 2024: The Trump-Bannon Regime Change Project
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 10/17/21
Donald Trump's publicly orchestrated coup is visiting comprehensive destruction on American Empire's core institutions.
Unchecked, Trump's bid for extra-constitutional regime-change could collapse the government by the 2024 elections, thereby opening a path for a determined Black nationalist insurgency to create an independent republic.
Trump Coup Watch 2024 [TCW24] was initiated to monitor and assess how Trump's rolling coup could reposition Black nationalists and its allies to leverage an existential crisis.
Trump Coup Theory is a proliferating cottage industry. New Black Nationalists, however are not newcomers or bandwagoners to the escalating frenzy of autocracy formation theory. Our 2018 Crisis Theory predictive model envisioned an existential crisis befalling American Empire in the 2020s.
We've long held that an existential crises can be triggered by environmental catastrophe, financial collapse, war, nuclear and cyber attacks, pandemics, constitutional crisis or more likely, some combination thereof.
While all these contingencies are dynamic and in play, it is the Trump-Bannon Regime Change Model that is the most significant vector accelerating the deterioration of American Empire and propelling the system towards a existential crisis.
Thus, Trump Coup Theory is a subset of New Black Nationalists' overall crisis modeling that must be evaluated and gamed out with specificity. Robert Kagan's Short Telegram, was the NBN's first polemic defining our differences with Kagan's theorem. Undoubtedly, there will be more.
In this regard, two stark realities stand out in TCW24's field of vison. Trump, Republicans, and their white nationalists lemmings have not only trampled Congress underfoot, subverted the courts, eviscerated the constitution, and spearheaded widespread elections nullification, they have irreparably tarnished what little legitimacy remained of these bedrock institutions.
In as much as the state's authority is not principally derived from coercion, but legitimacy, the damage exacted by Trump's forces on American Empire's durability to withstand existential crises has been severely diminished. Legitimacy, no matter under what pretense, is statecraft's coin of the realm. Second, TCW24 holds that the evolving plot to install an authoritarian white nationalist government over American Empire is increasingly being shaped by the ideological and political architectural designs of Steve Bannon. There now exist a Trump-Bannon Regime Change Model.
Despite the helter-skelter conspiracy theories, and QAnon satanic verses, there is a method to the madness that increasingly Steve Bannon is bringing to the criminal enterprise of Trump Inc. Indeed, the cornerstone of the TBCRM contemplates a three-stage civil war.
Stage one dictated winning the civil war inside the Republican Party, to convert the GOP into a Trump controlled white-nationalist authoritarian party. Stage one has been achieved.
Stage two called for winning the civil war amongst white people who aren't self-identified Democrats or Liberals. Among independents achieving relative political neutrality or indifference to American Apartheid, was an acceptable outcome. Through the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump-Bannon axis largely accomplished this goal.
Stage three calls for the staging and launch of extra-constitutional regime-change through election nullification, states illegally declaring Trump the president-elect and forming a succession pact to create a MAGAstan nation, and/or an assault on the federal complex in Washington, D.C., to seize power. Going into the 2022 mid-term elections, we are now in the preparatory phase of stage three.
From the perspective of New Black Nationalist, the Trump-Bannon Regime Change Model, has done more to create favorable conditions to create an independent Black republic than any scenario we could have imagined.
TBRCM took a wrecking ball to American Empire's governance structure and institutions, exposed the hypocrisy and fecklessness of corporate managed democracy, and revealed the profound racism, psychological madness, and moral bankruptcy of the white nationalist majority and Republican Party.
Moreover, after Black voters led the charge to defeat Trump and the Republican Party in the 2020 elections, the Democratic Party is selling out Black people's voting rights and struggle against security-state anti-Black violence. These despicable acts of cowardice and treachery will not be forgotten when reckoning day comes. Republican hacks like Candace Owens don't have to rail about Blacks leaving the plantation. The Democratic Party's own actions portend mass exit, which is a relative pre-condition for the creation of a new Black republic.
In so many ways, the Trump-Bannon Regime Change Model is "doing much of the work" that is creating a path to create a Black nation-state amid an existential crisis.
If NBN's analytics continue to be "on point," as indicated in our September "Update to the NBN's 2021 Action Plan", it means we're now on a tight timeline, and the clock is ticking. Our reference to "A Quarter to Nation Time," in the Fanon Arguments signals that we could be in the midst of a revolutionary struggle for power as early as 2024.
Similarly, if an unintended consequence of the Trump-Bannon Regime Change Model, is opening a back door that reveals a pathway to nationhood, NBN must ensure that our analysis pinpoints the critical opportunities and vulnerabilities we must exploit to win.
2021 New Black Nationalist Action Plan Update: On Theory & the Revolutionary Process
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 09/19/21
Introduction
Greetings. This interim report mapping our progress to implement the 2021 Action Plan, is in keeping with New Black Nationalists' commitment to self-regulating accountability, and fidelity to the communities we serve.
This communique updates our readers and guests on important developments that have occurred since the action plan was released in February 2021.
The update backgrounds the following issues: 1) emerging trends and increases in our website traffic, 2) the implications of our adoption of Womanism as a free-standing concept, 3) the decision to transition from the Black Diaspora Movement to the Fanon Global movement, 4) strategic Black liberation struggles on the global chessboard, 5) completing the critical reading of Fanon's works and the final adoption as New Black Nationalists philosophy.
Before addressing these issues, we would like to share are two significant dates we are pointing to in the near future.
December 6, 2021 - The 60th Anniversary of Frantz Fanon's death
We are anxious to hear ideas from our readers about ways we can commemorate Fanon's life on and around December 6, 2021, which falls on a Monday. Before the end of the month we will post a short statement on the website calling for an international day of observance to honor Frantz Fanon and his wife Josie. We hope to connect with the Fanon Fondation in France, which is directed by Frantz Fanon's daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendes-France. Stay tuned.
Coming in 2022: Draft Program for a New Black-led Republic
The new year will be upon us in three months. The enormity of our next project and the galloping tempo of developments have prompted us to announce our central project for 2022, in advance of New Year's Day.
New Black Nationalists' central focus in 2022, will be a 16-month project to write and release the Draft Program for a New Black-led Republic. The timetable calls for releasing the program to the public on Juneteenth 2023.
Thus, by Juneteenth 2023, the New Black Nationalist Movement will possess
- A declaration of principles of nation-state Black Nationalism
- The articulation and framework of a Fanonian philosophical system.
- A program/constitution to establish an independent Black-led republic in Americas' settler state
The draft program for the new Black-led republic, will elaborate a proposed governmental structure and articulate a full-spectrum of policies and programs to stand-up a new Black-led post-heteropatriarchal republic. The draft program will address but not be limited to the following areas;
The Economy
The Environment
Justice
The Rights of the People
Education
Defense and Security
International Relations
Health and Medicine
Science
The Arts and Culture
This is a major undertaking that must be completed. To be taken seriously, increasingly New Black Nationalists will have to answer the question: What do I/we get in a new Black republic?
Our answers have to make sense, be realistic, and clearly demonstrate real personal, family, community, and national benefits for the overwhelming majority of our people. Our republic must stand on the highest ethics, and be imbued with a sense of national purpose and destiny.
The key to drafting a representative program that is forward-leaning and revolutionary is soliciting input from as many people and organizations as possible. Conceiving a new Black republic will require more than thinking outside the box. In many respects, we will have to break the box to think anew.
Now is the time to ponder the best methods to pursue this task so we can hit the ground running in January 2022. Our republic needs a name: a good name. Tweet your suggestions. This project will likely require the construction of a stand-alone website outfitted with robust interactive functionalities. Please tweet us your thoughts and suggestions @WBBrooksIII
From Race-based Cultural Warfare to the Pre-Revolutionary Period
Since George Floyd's assassination in May 2020, we've lived in a different world. The seismic political and biological convulsions that erupted with the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, carried over to 2021, with profound implications. The NBN's 2021 Action Plan reflects both the global turmoil attendant to the decline of American Empire and new revolutionary opportunities that mark shifting political topographies.
The unprecedented 2020 global Lavender Revolution in which 20 million people protested security-state violence visited on Black flesh, culminated in the largest presidential election in U.S. history. That election temporarily stemmed the tide of Trump's white nationalist autocratic takeover of American Empire. The defeat also provoked the deadly January 6, 2021 Capitol Coup.
The failed re-enactment of Hitler's 1923, Beer Hall Putsch on the Potomac, has since resulted in repeated calls by Trump's white nationalist militias and Republican Party dolts to prepare for civil war. New Black Nationalists take those calls seriously.
Amid these escalations, New Black Nationalists hold that America's settler state has now transitioned from a period of intense race-based cultural warfare to a pre-revolutionary period.
This new pre-revolutionary period, is characterized by active measures to prepare for civil war and renewed white nationalist-based ploys to topple the government in Washington, D.C. Trump, the Republican Party, and their alliance with white nationalist militias seek to take power through a combination of election theft, destabilizing terrorist actions, and renewed coup attempts.
Navigating the short-term period ahead.
To new readers and guests, let us restate that our network is purposed to develop analytical and theoretical products to support the creation of a Black nation-state, as well as supporting Black diaspora and Global South liberation movements. That being said, the 2021 Action Plan modified our ongoing plans to incorporate contingencies scaled to match the changing circumstances we now confront.
Progress then, in the context of this report, is envisioned in two ways. First, we must objectively evaluate the veracity of our analysis, relative to changing social and political conditions. Second, we need to assess whether our theoretical production is aligned with the cardinal issues that are germane to identifying the strategic path to seize political power.
We are not operating on an indeterminate timetable, but the establishment of an independent Black nation-state in the 2020s, per our analysis of the collapse of American Empire outlined in Crisis Theory. Our predictive modeling in 2019, posited that America Empire is in decline and spiraling toward an existential governance crisis, in the 2020s. We believe that analysis is being borne out by events like the January 6, Capitol Coup d Etat.
On this basis, we believe the New Black Nationalist movement is making significant headway. On balance, we are engaging the heady matters that must be contemplated, debated, and resolved with active measures on the ground to vie for power.
Nevertheless, we continue to lag behind the quickening pace of events. How to narrow the gap between accelerating objective conditions and the limited number Black Nationalists forces and potential allies is the essential problematic in this pre-revolutionary period.
Increasing the influence and reach of our website is one critical component to help close the gap. We are experiencing real advances in this regard. In September 2021, NewBlackNationalism.com, surpassed the total number of visitors to our website in 2020. In the past three months, our traffic has quadrupled. This is an encouraging development, given that Twitter and the website are the only social media platforms we utilize.
Just as important as increasing traffic to the website, is continuing to improve the site's content and expanded fields of coverage. We believe these gains are directly linked to the four goals we set in the 21-AP.
Before delving into the update, one final point should be made. We spent a considerable amount of time demarcating the New Black Nationalist trend from Cultural Nationalists, Black Social- Democrats, Black Marxists, African Socialists, Afrocentrists, Black Separatists, Religious Nationalists, and Afropessimists trends.
This was a serious problem in the 1960s, with many of these forces constituting an amalgam in the broad church of Black Nationalism. In reality, nation-state Black Nationalists were a very small political strand within the 1960s Black liberation movement tradition.
NBN's early days were spent studying the 1960s Black Power experience, particularly the political programs, ideology, and philosophies of Black liberation forces. In our Culture Theory series, we articulated what New Black Nationalists are not. In January 2020, we transitioned to defining and affirming what New Black Nationalism represents in our Statement of Principles.
The New Black Nationalist trend is now embedded with three foundational source codes: nation-state Black Nationalism, Fanonist philosophy, and Womanism as a free-standing construct to facilitate the transition to a post-heteropatriarchal society. This political, ideological, and philosophical triad constitutes the distinct branding of the New Black Nationalist movement's identity--something we feel was not sufficiently articulated in the 1960s Black Power Era.
The New Apartheid Book Forum: Call for a Critical Reading
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 08/12/21
Introduction:
The July 2021, publication of 'The New Apartheid' by Dr. Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh hit South Africa's streets as mass uprisings by supporters of imprisoned former President Jacob Zuma forced President Cyril Ramaphosa to call out the South African National Defence Force.
When the tear gas cleared and the steel tipped bayonets were sheathed, 337 South Africans lay dead. Over R3.5 billion in property losses were reported in Gauteng Province alone.
The primal screams that echoed amid the tumult visited on Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, condemning the African National Congress-led government cried out for an explanation.
How could the party of Mandela, that guided South Africa's iconic national liberation struggle to power in 1994, over the white-minority's barbarous rule, disintegrate into such chaos, comprehensive corruption, and despair?
The New Apartheid answers that question.
"Apartheid did not die:" said Mpofu-Walsh, "It was privatized. In this book, I pursue this single, simple thesis."
Mpofu-Walsh's analysis will unsettle those who proclaimed apartheid's death. It will be resisted by others whose political and business fortunes rest on sustaining the myth. The honest will feel embarrassment and shame that 27 years of Black-majority rule not only fell short of fulfilling its promise but betrayed the national trust paid for in the blood of the fallen.
Nevertheless, the scholarship of Mpofu- Walsh's critique, inveighing against apartheid's particularisms and transformation into a matrix of capital appropriation and wealth creation for South Africa's white-minority, foreign corporations, and corrupt ANC officials is unimpeachable. Its voluminous references and footnotes alone constitute a second narrative.
Unless South Africans embrace a Trumpian post-factual reality, The New Apartheid's bitter truths offers them a portal to exit a stage-managed kleptocracy that is ultimately not sustainable.
The genius of TNA is also how its text simultaneously addresses a larger suite of dilemmas that have vexed national liberation movements seeking to eradicate imperialist domination--from the short lived Burkina Faso Sankarist revolution to the island of Grenada's New Jewell republic.
Transforming imperialist-based economies, instituting real land reform, redefining the state's role in the economy and its relationship to its citizens, liberating women, confronting gender challenges, re-aligning tribal and traditional institutions with political and economic imperatives are problematics Mpofu-Walsh grapples with in The New Apartheid writ large.
In April 2021, New Black Nationalists' Fanon Global section initiated its South Africa Study Project [SASP] to open a dialogue with South African activists and support South Africa' continuing revolutionary project.
From our perspective, the ANC's 110 year history defined case studies of national liberation movements. The ANC deployed peaceful and armed tactics, existed as a legal and banned organization, operated both inside and outside South Africa's borders. More than a political party, the ANC was a way of life that flowed in South Africa's bloodstream.
Beyond the ANC, few if any countries have battlefield-tested activists that match the diversity of South Africa's radical Feminists, Afropessimists, Nationalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxist-Leninists-Maoists, Social-Democrats, Communists, Black Consciousness and Fanonists adherents.
Not only did New Black Nationalists hold that the length, scale, nuance, complexity, and strategic depth of the South African experience is without peer in Black liberation movements, we sensed the country was on the precipice of a major social upsurge.
The confluence of events in South Africa that erupted this year confirmed our belief that the global Black Lives Matter 2.0 Lavender Revolution that began last summer is metastasizing and gathering momentum.
So too, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh's novel analysis that bolts from the conventions of contemporary Decolonial Theory, affirms our hope that new theories are emerging to match the moment and the new realities.
Accordingly, for the next five months, the South Africa Study Project [SASP] will host a critical reading, review, and open forum on The New Apartheid's thesis.
What follows is an abbreviated introduction of what we consider to be the heart of Dr. Mpofu-Walsh's argument. We offer the following passages from the book in his words to help frame our reading.
First, in describing the components of apartheid Walsh says the following,
"In this book, I understand apartheid along five interlocking dimensions, as ideology, state project, economic order, technology, and emotional landscape.
“As ideology, apartheid was a set of beliefs and creeds which combined in a particularly Afrikaner-centric, White supremacist world view. This mingled with an Anglo-Saxon White supremacist foundation built in the colonial period. Like other ideologies of racial superiority of the period--in Britain, Australia, Germany, and the United States-apartheid was consumed with White purity and total dominance. Unlike these other ideologies, however, apartheid was an ideology of minority supremacy. In this way, apartheid balanced White supremacy against the numerical supremacy....
As a state project, apartheid was a system of legally defined and governmentally enforced binary categorizations emphasizing, but not limited to, racial oppression. As an economic order, it was a system of economic production, distribution and exchange which benefitted from, and reinforced, these oppressive binaries. As a technology, apartheid was a method of governance in the public and private spheres that controlled everyday life.”
... I refer to apartheid ‘binaries,’ I do not refer only to racial binaries, but also to binaries in sexual orientation, gender, ability, religion, culture and political belief. These other binaries were not always legislatively inscribed, but they nonetheless rooted apartheid, as they do the new apartheid. "
The other half of Mpofu-Walsh's theoretical condominium of The New Apartheid is privatization. On privatization," he thus asserts,
"Privatization occurs when state assets or functions are transferred into private hands for private purposes... I extend this idea to the system of apartheid itself—and not just its assets or functions. I claim that apartheid has retreated into the private sphere, despite the inauguration of a democratic republic. While the burdensome management of the South African state remains public, power itself has increasingly devolved to the private realm, exempt from democratic control.... For apartheid to be privatized it also has to be marketized, de-legislated, denationalized, digitized, fractalized, deracialized, and de-territorialized."
Further, Walsh avers, "When the liberation movement was nationalized, it assumed apartheid's debts. These debts further constrained ANC policy choices and limited fundamental reform. The ANC became financially responsible for land reform, the welfare state, and the provision of basic services like water, electricity and housing. Theses initiatives would at worst bankrupt the new state or at best fundamentally constrain it. "
Of the ANC, Mpofu-Walsh writes, "Wittingly or unwittingly, the ANC assumed sole and simultaneous financial responsibility for apartheid's failures and its own extravagant promises. Each was a tall order, and it failed at achieving both. Quite apart, then, from the ANC governments considerable self-inflicted defeats in governance, its options were bounded from the outset. When institutions are nationalized within a market context, the discipline of the market often prevails over ambitions for social gain. And this is the paradoxical story of the ANC since 1994: it was nationalized to serve private interests.
Having provided a brief overview of Mpofu-Walsh's main argument on the existence and features of the new apartheid and manifestations of privatization, we will outline a few major outcomes noted in the introduction that resulted from the new apartheid.
*"Whereas the state imposed legal barriers under apartheid, private actors increasingly enforce, or influence, the new apartheid's financial barriers."
*"The exchange of racial barriers for financial barriers benefitted apartheid interests. The policing of racial statutes is a costly business, morally and financially. By contrast, the erection of financial barriers carries neither moral shame nor financial costs."
*"As the economy became increasingly financialized and digitalized, so power was increasingly sucked from the new democratic government, and placed in international corporate hand. Apartheid thus became encrypted in new digitized forms. "
*"Unlike the Bantustans, the democratic dispensation freed White South Africans from economic sanction or moral condemnation after apartheid. White business was free to trade on international markets once more, and generous profits soon flowed. Thus, what White South Africans lost in centralized control, they gained in international legitimacy."
*"As oppression has morphed, so new precarities have emerged, and citizens' relationship to the state has altered. Whereas the state was once active in oppression, it is now merely unable to secure liberation. The state-citizen relationship has become ambiguous: the state promises solidarity with the oppressed while being complicit in their victimization."
On Bantustans and Neo-Liberation;
Mpofu-Walsh's introduction takes on one of apartheid's most dehumanizing inventions, first instituted in the 1960: the Bantustans. Mpofu-Walsh inveighed against Bantustans in the following passages,
"First, as apartheid was privatised, the new republic which replaced it became Bantustanised; second, the national liberation movement was nationalized; third, the neoliberal consensus solidified. As political independence swept Africa in the 1960s, Pretoria faced pressure to relax apartheid. "
In response, the Verwoerd administration inaugurated 'separate development' a devilish form of reverse decolonization. Instead of enfranchising Black people in "White South Africa" Verwoerd invented jumbled, ethnically exclusive and semi-autonomous 'Bantu homeland' (dubbed, Bantustans by their critics) within South Africa's Borders....Pretoria then stripped Black South Africans of their citizenship of South Africa.
Mpofu-Walsh further observed that, "Bantustans served a double purpose: on the one hand, they further concentrated, subjugated and divided Black people under the pretext of 'self-determination'; on the other, they temporarily deflected international attention from the draconian evil of apartheid."
The conclusion that Mpofu-Walsh reached about Bantunisation under the ANC was truly damning: ..."The new republic achieved all that was intended by the original Bantustans, only more effectively. It preserved White economic privilege by conceding Black political rights--just like the Bantustans. It reduced international condemnation of racial inequality in South Africa--just like the Bantustans. It pacified Black anger through the conferral of political rights--just like the Bantustans. And it assumed the administrative burdens of governance, without real economic control--just like the Bantustans."
Finally on Bantustanisation, Mpofu-Walsh notes that "Whereas White privilege was nationalised under apartheid, it became wholly privatised and geographically fragmented in the new dispensation. White South Africans receded into increasingly elaborate and decentralized Bantustans of privilege, spread throughout South Africa. Afrikaner nationalism itself became enclaved, now driven by private institutions with private aims.
On Women
We conclude this section on some of the consequences of the emergence of The New Apartheid , with Mpofu-Walsh's remarks on women and the workless class. "New forms of oppression" he said, "disproportionately affect certain people. Three groups illustrate this: Black women, the 'Black workless class', and poor African migrants. The position of Black women in the new apartheid is tragic. While wealthy Black men can benefit from the relaxation of racial laws and the poisonous fruits of patriarch, Black women still suffer under the yoke of White supremacy, on the one hand, and multiple patriarchies, on the other. South Africa is a society where the everyday experience of sexism is ubiquitous, and triple scourges of domestic violence, sexual violence and femicide (the large-scale murder of women) have reached unconscionable and epochal proportions."
Concluding Remarks by Mpofu-Walsh's On Competing Visions From the Introduction
"Two competing, and intertwining, visions clash in South Africa today: one, a democratic, egalitarian vision called the ' new South Africa'; the other, an oppressive and conservative vision, hidden in plain sight, that I call 'the new apartheid'. These clashing but entangled projects produce a society in contradiction, undergoing at once extraordinary change and frustrating stagnancy. "
"These two 'directions' can be traced back to the democratic negotiations which birthed the new republic. These negotiations occurred on two parallel tracks; one concerning its economic trajectory. While constitutional negotiations dominated local and international headlines, economic negotiations-which predated political talks--would profoundly influence the path of new apartheid. If the ANC won the constitutional talks, it lost the economics talks decisively."
"This is not simply to say that the ANC 'sold out' at the negotiations. Such a view unduly centres the ANC in a complex historical moment. Rather, I suggest that apartheid interests arrived at the negotiating table with priorities, and succeeded in achieving some of them. This means dispensing with the myth that the ANC outmaneuvered its apartheid counterparts at the negotiations."
"South Africa's democratic transition, and the mythology which surrounds it, may well be a rare example of history being written by the losers, at least on the economic front. The celebritisation of ANC leaders in the 1990s reinforces, rather than refutes, this point. South Africa's contemporary malaise is rooted in tis founding bargains."
The terminus of Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh's introduction to The New Apartheid is permeated by a poeticism that captures at once the a supreme irony and tragedy: the ANC were the rare losers who chronicled the history of their own demise.
Apartheid's inversion from the most vile and conspicuous system of white-minority racial domination to a system of racial subterfuge masking the continued oppression of South Africa's majority Black population by its own people conjures visions of a journey through a hall of mirrors.
But Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh's master work, The New Apartheid, assures us that mirrors are glass that can be shattered, and that South Africa's history will not be lies agreed upon by scholars. Nor will its history be viewed as an exercise of political ironies--a study of how men's action produce results other than those they intended.
New Black Nationalists in America's settler state are animated by the opportunity to share insights, analysis and viewpoints with our readership on the The New Apartheid and the future of South Africa's unfinished revolutionary project. We look forward to hearing from you.
New Black Nationalists Support the Afro-Cuban Inspired Revolt
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 07/21/21
The July 11 street revolt in cities across Cuba has unsettled the despotic regime of President Miguel Díaz-Canel. New Black Nationalists stand by all Cuban people who are rebelling to get Diaz-Canel's oppressive jackboot off their necks.
After blaming U.S. economic sanctions for the protests and all Cuba's maladies, "el presidente" summoned Cuba's "revolutionaries" into the streets to smash the protesters--as if this was a fight between paid foreign mercenaries and the people" defending "the revolution. "
Then he mobilized the police to sweep the streets and conduct mass arrests. That too did not go as planned. The police were met by angry protesters who engaged them in hand to hand combat, attacked them with bottles and rocks and overturned vehicles.
Exactly, what led to these unprecedented confrontations with the Cuban security state is a grab bag of grievances: shortages of food, medicine, COVID-19 vaccines, electricity, jobs, democratic rights, you name it.
What is not debatable is that the inspiration driving the July risings was the musical force of dissent echoing from the protesters voices chanting Patria y Vida--a hip-hop song by radicalized Afro-Cuban musicians in Cuba and Miami.
The song which dropped in February has taken the island by storm, and galvanized the Cuban street challenging the ruling class. "Patria y Vida," is a collaboration between Afro-Cuban musicians in exile: Alexander Delgado and Randy Malcom of the duo Gente De Zona, Cuban hip-hop band Orishas; and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno. Contributors Maykel Osboro (Castillo) and Eliécer "el Funky" Márquez are still on the island.
What is also not debatable is that the island's one million self-described Afro-Cubans and three million mixed-Black race Cubans (referred to as "mulatto" or "mestizo,) have endured systematic racism at the hands of the Castro brothers and now Díaz-Canel for decades.
Excluded from entire sectors of Cuba's economy, stereotyped and disappeared in visual media, under-represented in Cuba's political apparatus, Afro-Cubans and Blackness itself are regarded as a national security threat.
In-part this also explains the Western media's virtual erasure of this revolt as an Afro-Cuban inspired enterprise. The grinding oppression of Afro-Cubans is a non-issue and "Patria y Vida" is simply portrayed as a cultural youth phenomenon. After all, everyone knows Afro-Cubans are damned good musicians. Spare us the bullshit.
The American media dares not raise the issue of race, knowing the Cuban government would call them to book for the state-sanctioned murder of Black people at the hands of the police. You want to talk about the lack of democracy in Cuba or the Biden Administration standing idly by while White Nationalist Republicans strip Black people their voting rights. Best to leave those stones unturned.
The legacy of erasure of Afro-Cubans is also a feature of the left and right-wing responses to the revolt. So called pro-democracy, right-wing Cubans decry the nation's "economic disaster" and "democracy deficit" as the sins of communism.
On the left, far too many defend Cuba as a beleaguered and isolated outpost of socialism victimized by Yankee Imperialism's economic blockade. And how, we ask, will lifting economic sanctions eradicate anti-Afro-Cuban racism? Both groups have little to say about the oppression of Afro-Cuban communities, and even less to say about a solution.
In the meantime, the Little Havana's and Little Haiti's in South Florida are teeming with right-wing reactionaries and wanna-bee dictators hatching plots and pushing buttons to trigger regime change in the Caribbean.
Two weeks ago, we witnessed the motley coup attempt and assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moises by the nefarious guns for hire supposedly associated with Haitian businessman Christian Emmanuel Sanon.
NewBlackNaitonalism.com, in South Florida, is alert to the street chatter that right-wing money and operatives circling around Magastan Headquarters in Mar a Lago, have been floating funds and resources to Afro-Cuban dissidents, musicians, and artists to undermine President Miguel Díaz-Canel's government.
The CIA appears to have ramped is covert operations that began a decade ago to deploy young Afro-Cuban artists and musicians as a cultural trojan horse to foment regime change on the island. Those operations were run through the USAid program. We hope Afro-Cuban artists and musicians aren't taking the bait but can't be naïve about the escalating geo-political stakes at play in the Caribbean Basin.
This special issue on July's "Patria y Vida" Cuba Rising seeks to give our readers a few different perspectives on the unfolding crisis on the island. Afro-Cubans are destined to play a decisive role in Cuba's future when the so-called socialist government in Havana disintegrates and collapses. Then as now, New Black Nationalists and Fanon Global will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Afro-Cuban community.
South Africa and the ANC's Future Are Up Grabs - The Zuma Effect
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 07/15/21
07.14.2021
The last five days of looting, violence, 72 deaths, attacks on government installations, and vigilantes establishing armed no-go zones have thrown South Africa into chaos.
Simply put, President Cyril Ramaphosa has lost control of the country. Few can say where South Africa goes from here.
Since Nelson Mandela was elected president in May of 1994, his ruling African National Congress Party [ANC] and three successors have never confronted a governing crisis this grave.
The ANC weathered South Africa's devastating HIV-Aids epidemic, the white National Party's abandonment of the Government of National Unity [GNU], the minor's massacre in Marikana, the ongoing border crisis with Zimbabwe, and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
But the crisis of the present is different. The African National Congress is the crisis.
South Africa's post-Mandela presidents, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa have been less than stellar leaders whose helmsmanship steered the nation's ship of state into troubled waters and then a tsunami.
True, Nelson Mandela brokered a peace that spared South Africa a long bloody racial civil war that neither side could decisively win. We understand that.
We can be less forgiving about the ANC's decision to tether its economy to the neoliberal globalist fantasies of strategic foreign investments, privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization.
The point is that those policies could have changed had ANC leaders and the party had an alternative vision to close the enormous economic inequality gap between privileged white Afrikaners and the Black majority. They did not.
Whites still own of 72% of the country's land. Crime and foreign interests run riot over the nation, and even now the COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging the country.
However, none of these failures compare to the internal rot and comprehensive corruption of the ANC. The culture of grifting has seeped into every pore of party life. The 109-year old organization has been totally captured by foreign monied interests, mob bosses, and white collar criminals like the Gupta Brothers and Adriano Mazzotti.
Worse still, the ANC's corruption has metastasized through South Africa's government, infecting it with a deadly virus that has paralyzed its ability to function of behalf of its people. No one embodies the ANC's corruption more than Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president from 2009-2018.
It was a long time coming but the ANC's day of reckoning has arrived. The party is at now openly at war with itself as the Zuma and Ramaphosa camps vie for control of the party and the country.
Zuma directly challenged Cyril Ramaphosa's presidency by refusing to appear before the Constitutional Court on corruption charges.
Zuma' son, who wants to run for president, his daughter, and a group of ANC military wing veterans all called for violent reprisals if Zuma was arrested. In the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces they delivered on their threats. On July 6, 2021, ANC Deputy General Secretary Jesse Duarte was forced to order the uMkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) to disband.
The debasement of the ANC is so pervasive that both youth breakaway organizations: Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] and Andile Mngxitama' s Black Land Black First organizations have both pledged fealty to Zuma at one time or another. New Black Nationalists are hopeful that both these organizations will display the leadership timbre of their self-professed "Sankarist" impulses. It is sorely needed in South
Africa today.
Zuma is a man never to be underestimated. He is a populist with a base, in KwaZulu-Natal. More so than the cerebral if not aloof Mbeke, and the accommodationist bureaucrat Ramaphosa, Zuma has receipts as a "man of the people. "
In the short-run Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC will likely survive, but only at the point of the South African National Defense Force's bayonet's. The question is has ANC rule entered into an irreversible death spiral? If so, what will the collateral damage entail? Civil war and race war are real possibilities that cannot be dismissed.
Mandela's dream is now a nightmare.
New Black Nationalists started the South Africa Study Project five months ago. We did so because the history of its liberation movements, winning Black majority rule, and the diversity of its forces and programs that have contested for leadership makes the South African experience an invaluable resource to international revolutionary movements.
As a study project of the Global Fanon Movement, we support the ongoing struggle of the South African people to free themselves from the albatross of neocolonial rule.
We invite you to be a part of the project and follow the analysis, commentary, and news posted on the site. We welcome all feedback and analysis from our readers. Tweet us @WBBrooksIII
