Versión en español

We’ve done an interview for Prensa Obrera with Bilal Mafundi Ali, a veteran militant in the black liberation movement. Bilal is currently part of the Organizing Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and part of projects to assist the homeless in the Oakland-San Francisco area, as well as a speaker in several Universities and political education projects in the area.

-First I would like to extend my appreciation to the people in Argentina who have expressed their solidarity with the masses in the streets here in America, and to say your international solidarity is exemplary. I saw the videos from Argentina [of the Left Front act in support of the rebellion], I disseminated that to my comrades here. And they were very happy to see that. We’re internationalists, so we understand that the struggle is not just a local struggle. It’s a global struggle and it’s going to take global solidarity to dismantle this terrorist, capitalist, imperialist system that plagues all of humanity.

– How has the conflict evolved in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area these days?

 – The ongoing street demonstrations and protests, that had been sparked by the – we say “lynching” – , the murder of George Floyd. This was not an isolated event. We see that the masses in the street represent the culmination of over four hundred years of black people’s oppressed experiences in America. That experience has been political oppression, economic exploitation and social denigration. That has not only affected black people here but black people abroad. So are we seeing that the state of what is going on here, this response, to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was weaponized and being policed. We’ve seen black people dying out of the proportion of their representation in the population. They are dying two and a half times to three times more than whites. This is based on the racism in the health care in this country.

So there is tension around that, also there was another tensions around this brother who was killed by some whites in the South, Ahmaud Arbery. And then this current thing with the police in Minneapolis. So this all has culminated because of the simmering tensions because of the conditions in which we are living in this so-called free country, the richest country in the world. And it just came to a head. It’s been simmering for a long time. It’s like a powder keg. And the police action is just the wick. Historically in this country, in any civil outrage the police has always been the catalyst, the wick to the poder keg, right? The police has provided that spark. So we are seeing people out in the streets, they imposed curfews, people have broken the curfews. That was a mistake, people defied the curfews. We are going to go out there. You are not going to limit our participation in protests and demonstrations. So we are seeing all of this that is going on right now. And like I said, this has been years in the making and finally that spark hit. I have gone through this, I’m sixty eight years old, I have lived two thirds of this century and in my lifetime have seen the 1965 Watts Rebellion which was sparked by police terror, I lived the what they call the 1992 Rodney King riots- we don’t call it that, we call them uprisings and rebellions and now, here we are again. The 2014 it was a mass demonstration behind the killing of Mike Brown and Eric Gardener and those folks and here we are again. Back at this moment. But what’s going on now, which is kind of unique. What we are seeing in the mobilizations today reflects the United States security state’s greatest nightmare. We are seeing multiracial actions, initiated by black people, with black leadership. So we are not just seeing black people like it was in 1965 in the street but we are seeing multinational, multiethnic groups, organizations in the streets right now. Like I said, this is their greatest nightmare.

-What effect do you think the attempt to crush the current rebellion through repression has had?

– It hasn’t had any effect. Like I said, they issued curfews and we have defied those curfews. People have been beaten, have been even shot but, as we are speaking, people are back on the streets today. And it is constantly expanding, we are looking around in this country, around 500 cities are out in the streets in one form or another, rebelling in something like 20 states. So we are seeing something that we hadn’t seen before with this scope and breadth and people are out there demanding change. A lot of people are focusing on police brutality, – I don’t like that term though because it emphasizes that the problem is that there are a few rotten apples in the orchard and we say that the whole fucking orchard (excuse my language) is rotten. So people have become aware and there’s talk now of defunding police. That’s kind of vague. We don’t just want to defund the police, we want to disempower, disarm and disband the police. We are abolitionists.

Now we are seeing some of the same politicians, and what I want to talk about is the black misleadership class in this country. These are black politicians who have capitalized on those ancestors like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer, people like that. They have walked over their graves and are basically neocolonialist puppets. They have been put in place to steer us away from any real resistance to dismantle this system. So now  they are coming out saying “yeah we need to defund the police”. We have the mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of Los Angeles saying this. “We are going to take 150 million dollars from the LAPD”, which leads the numbers in this country in the killing of black people. That’s only 5% of the budget for the LAPD, it’s a spit in the bucket. But the black mayors that are also on the Democratic Party are now coming out. These same mayors that have always supported the police, have had the police doing homeless sweeps, and right now they are coming out as if they were champions of the cause.

But we understand that this system, capitalism, is resilient because it has the ability to coopt popular resistance. So we are seeing the enemy, it’s nothing new. I teach my students “this is historically what they’ll do, beware of this”. So now they are coming out like this, and being in the forefront. We say that if there’s any defunding of the police it has to come from the people of the bottom of society to make the decision of how that is done. Not the same people who have been in power and have done nothing to better the living conditions of their constituents here, in this country. The jury is still out for a lot of us about what this defunding the police looks like. We want to not just defund, we want to demolish the police because we understand the police is an occupying force in our communities and they are here not to enforce the law, but to enforce white supremacy. So this is where a lot of us are at and this is what we are talking about so, you know, people do not get fooled and get coopted, which is going to happen, they will try to do that.

We have the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress and Nancy Pelosi, who is the leader of the democrats. She has told the Congressional Black Caucus that they need to come out with reforms. And one of those reforms is a better training for the police. What better training do they need? But the Congressional Black Caucus are the same who voted in 2014, two weeks before the murder of Mike Brown by the cop in Ferguson, they voted 80% for what’s called the 1033 Program and that gives the local police forces the access to military grade weapons, 80% of the Congress voted for this.

Recently, last year I believe, 75% of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to give the police in this country a protective status when major federal crimes are committed by law enforcement officers. So now these people are being pushed out and saying, “we are going to take care of this”, “we are going to make the reforms and so on and so forth”. Many of us are not going for that and we are educating our people on why we are not supporting that. You cannot trust the people that have given the police the right to use military weapons on our communities and given the police a protective status. They cannot come out and jump ahead of this movement that’s going on right now. So this is the other battle. The comprador class.

So people are asking to defund the police, they are demanding to abolish the qualified immunity the police have that protects them from any liability when they are out killing and beating us, and so we are saying no. We need much more, but any movement, any decision on how we are going to deal with this problem has to come from the bottom, not from the top. Those days are over with. The people that are mostly affected by these conditions are the ones who have to be making these decisions and determine where we’re going to go from here.

–What social or political groups are influential in the movement?

– Well the groups that are involved here in Oakland are the Anti Police-Terror Project which was formed in 2014 and there are other groups involved that may not work exclusively in anti police terror projects, groups that are working on housing, work on the homeless community. These people are also out on the streets. People who fight eviction of tenants. So we have a multi-issue collaboration that’s happening. I don’t know how much attention you have on what they call the left here. A friend of mine used to say, “The problem with the left is that it has left here”. The left is very fragmented, you know, they narrow in on one particular issue, they don’t connect that issue with other issues. So we are seeing that it is being changed now with the rebellions and the protests, and demonstrations.

I’m a member of the Organizing Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and we have since 2014 our inception. We have made those connection with imperialism aboard and imperialism right here at home, we made those connections with militarization in the bases in Africa, and what happens here with the police. So we are making those connections and through that work, people now are seeing those connections. There is no such a thing as a single issue action because we don’t live a single issue lives, right?

I came from the black liberation movement, I was a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense when I was sixteen years old and we’ve seen how this country made that type of activity illegal and it gave concessions to a particular class. The civil rights movement was a collaboration of elements of the black petty bourgeoisie and elements of the liberal bourgeoisie of the Democratic Party. That collaboration created this comprador class, and steered our people away from righteous resistance. And now that’s being put on its head, because people are seeing the hypocrisy of their elected officials.

I don’t know if you know about this, but I’ve been needling a lot of the folks here that were supporting Bernie Sanders and his latest statement is that he wants to give the police a raise. He says that’s one of the solutions. Well somehow he relates police terrorism with police wages but the police are some of the best payed public employees. Right here in San Francisco, in Oakland, the police make over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. So a lot of people are upset with Bernie for that. And we say “hey, we told about this guy”.

I explained to a student the difference between democratic socialist and socialist democrat and I told him Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, he is not for abolishing the economic order here. He wants to tweak it. He’s like Roosevelt, he wants to save capitalism. You know, like, capitalism itself is not the problem. There are some things wrong that we have to correct. So I gave him an example: when Bernie Sanders proposed a 15 dollar minimum wage, I said, in socialism, the workers will determine their wages. 15 dollars is not much here, you can’t live in the Bay area with that. A one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is four thousand dollars… and then how can he determine the wages of those producing the wealth, right? So, you know, is bullshit. In my group we call him a sheep dog, herding people back into the Democratic Party.

So, yes. A lot of people are disappointed with him. There is a new party formed with Bernie’s people. They split and started a new party but they are not a revolutionary radical party, they are more like Democratic Socialists. They are socialist on paper but their practice is not really about socialism.

–The rebellion is obviously centered on the racism of the state and police killings but what role do you think social and economic concerns play in this upraising?

– Well, a lot of people are upset. They focus on the police and George Floyd’s murder. We try to get people to understand to not individualize this. Do not individualize his death, this has been happening for over four hundred years for black people. There has not been a time on this earth, since I’ve been on this country that the police have not killed black people. So we don’t want to let this individualize, it is not about him. We have Breonna Taylor, the black woman that has been killed in her apartment and we have had another killings since up to that. So we don’t want people to individualize and take this to reform again, right? Reform keeps us in this bullshit reform, in this trick bag. So we have different elements there, we have situation which unequal development and growth and people are understanding how economic and political apparatus is in play. But people are putting it together, there is a lot of political education going on. The police are there for economic reasons so we say politics is basically concentrated economics, right? Police are there to uphold the status quo, to protect the corporations, and the businessman and the developer. These are the same people who are causing gentrification. The same people who have caused the homeless situation. That the police are there to enforce those economic arrangements. They are also there to enforce the social arrangements of white supremacy.

So we are putting information out, we’ve been talking about this for a long time and some of the people that are on the streets now, they have been the reading and they have been hearing. A lot of people are addressing the situation to social and economic situation that is affecting our communities. So like I said, it is not about him, yes, we are hurt that it happened, because we had to witness that on video. But we don’t want this to be about him, it’s about all of us. Not only locally, nationally but internationally. We have seen the same happening in Haiti, in Venezuela. We see this hegemon. This paneuropean project to continue to dominate the rest of us, even though they are in a crisis. We have been predicting this was going to happen sooner or later because capitalism is in a crisis. The Black Alliance for Peace says because it is in a crisis we are going to see the heightening of the repressive apparatus of this country. We are going to see more shootings and more killings. We want people to understand that and put those variables together. We want to dismount the system, not just the police. We went it all totally gone.

–Are there any initiatives to coordinate the protests, write common platforms, political deliberations among those who are struggling in order to have their voices heard on the national scenario?

– In Oakland the platform has been written during the Covid-19 before George Floyd’s killing but it is a part of that and is called the Black New Deal Platform. It is a very long platform but it is a platform that address issues that we have been talking about. There is also The Black is Back Coalition, with Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party. He is the chair of the Black is Back Coalition but it also has members of the Black Alliance for Peace and they have developed a Black Agenda for the XXI Century. Both these documents, that one and the one here in Oakland, the Black New Deal, address a lot of these issues we’ve talked about. We’ve been able to use this documents to organize our people and do political education. So people do connect all these issues together and see that they are all emanating from the same source. So that is where our work is really focused on, we will continue to focus on radicalizing our people and saying that Democratic Party is not going to save them, that the police is definitely not going to help them and this country as it is constituted was never for us, right? And we need real fundamental change by any means necessary but first we have to understand and articulate what those exact means will be. So this is where we are at now.

So we say that conditions radicalize people. I tell my students that white supremacy and imperialism will create more revolutionaries than I ever could. I asked my students who was the greatest recruiter to the Black Panther Party and they say, you guys did radical education on the street and I said, well that was part of it but the major recruiter to the Black Panther Party was the police because a lot of people had experiences with the police and that’s how they came. The best example is Mumia Abu Jamal, he was a Black Panther in Philadelphia at fifteen. And it was the racist Philadelphia police under the racist Frank Rizzo, who’s statue just got taken down, he was beaten and after that he joined the Black Panther Party. So that’s dialectial, right?

I could stay here and talk till I’m blue, but it’s those conditions that create the revolutionaries. And now people are seeing the police and their true character and nature. Especially on all these videos that have come out showing the police brutality, how they treat people who have the so-called right to demonstrate in this “free country”. They are seeing the police knocking down a 75 year old man unconscious, they are seeing children being tear gassed and shot in the face with rubber bullets. So that is going to radicalize people more than me, my organization or any other organization have been able to. Again, dialectics. It proves the dialectial statement that where there’s oppression, there is resistance.