A federal crackdown in Washington, D.C., is escalating a bipartisan war against the Black working class. This assault, enabled by local Black misleadership, exposes the colonial nature of policing.
Since August, federal mandates carried out against Washington D.C. and intensified policing have been escalating with both the federal and local governments making it clear that they are waging a domestic war on African (Black) working class and migrant diaspora people. This imposition is not only in the form of increased National Guard troops. Arrests, deportations, and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surged in Washington, D.C. as part of the federal crackdown, leading to high levels of fear in immigrant communities and has emboldened the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to harass and make more arrests, especially of Africa {Black} youth..
Pan-African Community Action (PACA) and the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) D.C. City Wide Alliance (BAP-DC), of which PACA is a member, reaffirm that these events are all the logical endpoints of a political system that prioritizes property over people and repression over community safety. With every passing week the U.S. settler colonial state, currently presided over by the Trump administration, intensifies its naked aggression.
Mobilizations of resistance have been met with unabated policies of repression. On September 17th, the House voted to expand MPD’s powers to pursue suspects in high-speed chases, further endangering life and limb of D.C. residents. Several deaths and injuries in D.C. have occurred due to high-speed police chases. Recent legislation also mandates that D.C. judges strictly comply with mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for youth, requires the DC attorney general to release a website with juvenile crime statistics, and lowers the age at which youth can be tried as adults to the age of 14. It should go without saying that such policies in the U.S. are inherently racist and will disproportionately impact African (Black) youth.
But PACA and BAP-DC do not reduce the problem to a Trump presidency. The Black misleadership class – a.k.a. compradors – is the primary impediment to organizing the masses of African people, a reality in all major Democratic Party-led cities targeted by the Trump administration. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. City Council recently approved a new labor agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that includes a 13% pay raise for D.C. police officers, starting October 1st. This agreement also includes retroactive cost-of-living increases and other incentives for police officers. The council voted to extend Bowser’s expanded youth curfew into the fall, granting police the power to declare designated zones with earlier curfews. The criminalization of working-class African people by the DC city government preceded the federal imposition. These recent policies must be viewed as complementary to Trump’s takeover, rather than resistant to it.
The trend in most of the cities targeted by the federal militarization is for Black misleaders to respond to the Trump administration's threats by expanding policing on their own. PACA and BAP-DC will not allow the squabbles among the ruling class and its political lackeys to distract us and the people. We cannot become spectators of bipartisan power struggles and infighting, while our communities remain targets of both camps.
We reject under no uncertain terms the false framing and claims that these actions are about public safety. It is a shift toward domestic lawfare – legal actions undertaken as part of a hostile campaign against the African (Black) working class and migrant diaspora. Under capitalism, law does not serve as a remedy for the people's needs or concerns. Invariably, it is used by the rich and powerful to wage war on marginalized people. PACA and BAP-DC caution against the tendency to confine the narratives to local framing and understand that local resistance must see itself clearly as part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggle of the global south.
The heinous U.S. attacks on Venezuelan boats in international waters under the guise of carrying out a war on drugs are a counterpart to the domestic war on the people in this country. The brazen and unmitigated genocide against Palestine is being committed by the same enemies of humanity currently targeting our communities. The military occupation of Africa in the form of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), is an affront to African (Black) people everywhere in the world and is a counterpart to militarized police occupations of our working-class communities across the U.S.
After returning the so-called Department of Defense to its original name of War Department, Donald Trump, the current president of imperialism, threatened Chicago on a social media post, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.” While this may be seen by some as the antics of a megalomaniac, we are clear that at the root of this is the U.S. capitalist, imperialist system desperately trying to hold on to power. This is why its lawfare is also taking aim at organized resistance. Recent rhetoric and proposals from the Trump administration target "far-left" organizations and non-profits it accuses of fomenting political violence. The Liberal tendency is to double down on expressions of allegiance to the U.S settler colonial project, a white supremacist extension of Western Europe, instead of opposing repression.
In D.C., this takes the masked form of advocating for D.C. statehood, a reform that misguides the people’s indignation toward a nonsolution, a goal that will only add another layer of state structure for compradors to occupy. Statehood has done nothing for African (Black), indigenous, and immigrant communities facing oppression and repression in cities that are part of states across the U.S. Preserving the political autonomy and independence of D.C.’s current political process is inconsequential if local leaders continue to wage an unrelenting war against the African (Black) working-class people in D.C. Long before Trump entered the scene, the D.C. local government had already pioneered a “tough on crime” agenda that included the passage of the D.C. Secure Omnibus Crime Bill, widespread criminalization of fare evasion, and approving the construction of a new D.C. jail. Further, statehood has not increased safety or improved the lives of working-class people in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Chicago, whose populations are subjected to relentless police occupation, widespread surveillance, increased deportations, and crackdowns against civil disobedience and resistance.
The criminalization, police occupation, surveillance, crackdowns on any resistance, and all such forms of repression are reflections of an ailing and inherently fascist U.S settler colonialism and cannot be remedied through reformism.
The only logical response of the colonized to its colonization is to organize for decolonization and liberation. The unavoidable first step is community control over public safety. As we have said, “the debate over federal takeover versus local government control is a distraction. In practice, both levels of this state have committed to deepening policing, expanding surveillance, and protecting the interests of capital over the needs of the people. The difference lies in style, not substance.”
The struggle must be to organize for power. Not reform. The people most subjected to the machinations of the system must organize against the U.S. settler colonialist system upheld by a synthesis of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. PACA and BAP-DC declare that the right to self-determination must be won through building radical political alternatives that prove poverty stems not from lack of resources but from their organized theft. And that sovereignty is never granted – it is seized.
Pan-African Community Action (PACA) is a D.C based grassroots group of African/Black people organizing for community-based power as part of a historic and global movement for Pan-Africanism and is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace.
BAP-DC is a Black Alliance for Peace City-Wide Alliance.
The ongoing hybrid war against Venezuela exemplifies imperialism’s evolving tactics for regime change used against Global South nations.
A fifth African state, the Republic of Ghana, has been subjected to widespread criticism and legal actions for its participation in illegal deportations from the United States.
In this week’s segment, we discuss a new book that analyzes the latest iteration of fascism currently emerging in the United States. But first, we are joined by a journalist and activist who has…
Our guest is Rosa Clemente, who is an activist, independent journalist, and currently a Doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst…
A new anthology, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, was recently published by OR Books. We're joined by co-editor Michael Steven Smith, a retired attorney, former board member of the…
