Blacks are being incarcerated at disturbingly high rates for seemingly minor infractions in the United States. The cost of posting bail is often relatively exorbitant for indigent blacks, who end up remaining in jail, as their rights are further infringed on. Despite the disproportionately high incidence of black arrests, African Americans do not necessarily violate the law more than other ethnic groups, but may in fact, be victims of over-policing and prejudice exhibited by rogue members of law enforcement. Having more black lawyers may save black men from jail.

Black America needs a peace movement to confront militarism and the global structures of white supremacy. “We are calling for a new alliance to help revive the black anti-war and peace movement in the black community as an essential component of a revived broader anti-war and pro-peace movement,” says human rights activist and former Green Party VP candidate Ajamu Baraka.

Videos depicting the senseless murders of unarmed people of colour have given birth to a new social movement, #BlackLivesMatter, while bringing to light a reality incomprehensible to white communities; the lives of people of colour have systemically been deemed disposable.

Where is the Pan-African spirit? The absence of African solidarity with African Americans who are being killed in US cities by state security forces driven by white supremacy is deeply saddening. From all over Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, Black people must rise up to condemn the killing of our sisters and brothers in the US and offer any support we can to the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

#BlackLivesMatter has illuminated the crisis of contemporary whiteness in its full flesh by giving white people a glimpse into some of the worst excesses of white supremacy: the execution of people of colour by state actors with impunity.

The pervasiveness of anti-blackness across the globe suggests that whiteness is not only spread through white people’s bodies but is also a system that survives on consuming and destroying other bodies. The only truly human body is the white body. Capitalism is the logical consequence of this. The challenge for societies across the globe is to nurture and defend alternative versions of being human.

Regardless of where in the world Black people are killed or brutalized, the violence is rooted in the white man’s diminution of African life. With their long history of struggle, the people of Biafra who seek to break away from neo-colonial Nigeria want to build for themselves a new civilisation where African life, all human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct.

Entrenched racism going back to the days of slavery is the reason behind frequent killings of Black men by White policemen in America. White officers see themselves as slave masters who must be obeyed without question by the Black slave.

Black people in the US are a domestic colony. The contradictions arising from this status can only be resolved through explicit, conscious class struggle.  The class struggle in this period will take the form of a fight for community control of institutions and demanding more than the minimum civil rights advanced by the Black Liberal Establishment.