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Ferguson and Resistance Against the Black Holocaust

Will you stand with the people of Ferguson, by directing your pain and outrage at the real enemies?

The people fighting back in Ferguson are heroes, who deserve our respect, gratitude, prayers, and acts of solidarity. The people of Ferguson who are fighting back, in many different ways, have forced the country to look into the face of the enduring reality of the Black holocaust that began with the first Africans kidnapped and sold into the slave system.

The choice everyone must make is whether or not we will be Hitler’s “Good Germans” who tacitly gave their support to the Nazis and decried the animalistic Jews who fought back in Warsaw? Will we be the Slave Society’s “Good Americans” who may have quietly and privately thought slavery was immoral but spit venom decrying the “irrational” and “counter-productive actions” of Nat Turner and slave uprisings from the 1600s-1800s? Will we be the well-intentioned, and often unintentional, defenders of violence who decry those who fight back when they are being assaulted?

The people fighting back in Ferguson are, right now, provided the greatest hope for winning and creating a society in which Black families and communities are no longer – routinely and devastatingly – subjugated to daily structural inequality in every sphere of life, appalling racist violence by the state and individuals, and the degradation of white condescension and indifference.

Will you stand with the people of Ferguson, by directing your pain and outrage at the real enemies (the Ferguson police department, and all levels of government backing them) and do all you can to support the fight for racial and economic justice? Or will you choose, through actions or in-actions, to continue the shameful history of those who have let evil reign and only condemn those who oppose it – because it isn’t the right time or being done the right way?

The people of Ferguson did not create this crisis. Centuries of white supremacy, a police system evolved out of the slave patrols, unchecked state violence against communities of color, mass incarceration of over two million, epidemic poverty, and the murder of a teenage boy named Michael Brown created this crisis. The people of Ferguson have created hope and possibility, through their resistance against the nightmare of the Black holocaust, that another world is possible. Do you stand with them? Or do you give your support, well intentioned or unintentionally as it may be, to the enduring reality of the Black holocaust?

Ways to support the resistance in Ferguson:

#MichaelBrown #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #JusticeforMikeBrown #collectiveliberation

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