Justice or Else: Direct Action and Economic Withdrawal by Shakaboona.
On October the 10th, 2015, African American, Latino and Latina, and Indigenous peoples gather over one million strong in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., demanding “Justice or Else,” in response to the United States government’s nationwide police murders of unarmed Black and Latino peoples, institutionalized and structural white supremacy, systemic poverty and marginalization, mass incarceration and a carceral state, and the war on Black people.
On a bright and clear Saturday morning, community activists and religious leaders stood at the podium, one after the other; delivered moving radical statements of justice or else, to America and the nations of the world, and revealing a common solution to the injustice, a solution of direct action and economic withdrawal. At the “Justice or Else” demonstration, the philosophies of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s militant civil disobedience and economic withdrawal, and of Minister Malcolm X’s “By Any Means Necessary,” permeated the air and fervently poured from the mouths of Black, Latino, and Indigenous leaders to the participants. like a Black church’s Sunday sermon.
The general sentiment of the masses of people and leaders appeared to be one and the same: to redistribute the pain, since all avenues of receiving justice has been denied. The “Justice or Else” demonstrators seem to be very familiar with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968 where he told the people, “…we have to redistribute the pain.” When we’re in pain, we’ve got to make them feel the pain. And where Reverend King further instructed Black people to, “Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal.”
The Million Man March/Justice or Else demonstrators expressed a clear understanding that Black people and other oppressed ethnic groups will not get justice or any meaningful concessions from the white majoritarian American government unless they create a crisis for the system of governance itself. This crisis must shut down America, make it ungovernable, and sustain it for decades if need be. They must create a crisis for the government that turns every major city in America into a Palestine intifada. From the belly of the beast, this is Shakaboona. Thank you for listening.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio
