Which Side Are You On?
STATEMENT OF SUPPORT FOR UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI STUDENTS FROM CARL DIX

November 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

Everybody must support the actions of the students at the University of Missouri who have stood up and said NO MORE to the unrelenting string of racist outrages they have been forced to endure on their campus. The actions of #ConcernedStudent1950, the courageous hunger striker Jonathan Butler, and the extraordinary and bold stand taken by the football players are things that we all need to support and learn from.  All this indicates that there is a new generation that is not going to take the racism constantly hammered on people by this white supremacist society, that they are willing to put things on the line to stop it, and that when this kind of bold stand is taken it attracts, and compels, others to support it and also step into the fight.  This is a very important moment in relation to the struggle throughout the society against the oppression of Black people and other oppressed peoples, and it is part of focusing the thinking of millions to what is fundamental in this society. 

The resignations of University president Timothy Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin represent a great victory, one which should be celebrated and built off of.  As the struggle goes forward, people should ask themselves and ask all of society, “What kind of a system breeds, supports and defends the kind of racism that the Black students at Missouri—as well as students at every college—have to face?   Racism that finds expression in millions of other ways in this society?  And what do we intend to do about it?”

The question must be posed to everyone throughout society: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
                                                                                                                                               
The outrages endured by Black students on campuses across this country are not “isolated.”  They are linked to the slow genocide of mass incarceration, the locking in cages of millions of our youth and the relentless terror and illegitimate violence inflicted on them by police day after day, year after year.  Unarmed Black and Brown people being tased to death, beaten to death, choked to death, shot in the back... and over and over again the courts and the media back up the killers and the police walk free.  The long and bloody history of slavery, the equally bloody history of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-mob terror, and now the genocidal assault of mass incarceration and police terror: these are all forms of the white supremacy that has been built into the fabric of U.S. society from the very beginning.

It is a basic truth that this SYSTEM has no future for Black youth.

And that: We need a whole different system, one in which the oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities, as well as all the other outrages of this system—its rampant violence against women and LGBT people, its brutal wars for empire, its destruction of the environment, its war on immigrants—are eliminated.  This requires an actual revolution, nothing less!  This revolution is real and it is possible, but it won’t be easy, and the way out of this madness is not obvious.  Truly getting free, after so many centuries of oppression and horror, requires science and leadership.  We have this science. And we have this leadership in Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party.  I call on everybody who has taken part in this struggle and everyone who has been inspired by this struggle—to get with this revolution and to deeply check out the work of Bob Avakian, who has actually shown the way forward on the most critical problems facing the movement for revolution.  To learn more on this, people need to go to revcom.us (in print—REVOLUTION newspaper), as well as check out the book BAsics, the DVDs BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, and the Dialogue between Avakian and Cornel West, REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion.

And right now—as part of hastening and preparing for this revolution, as well as taking further the extremely just and broadly felt urgent demand that the racist terror of the police stop now—students and others must go into the streets in a major way on November 22, one year since the murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black child playing with a toy gun who was shot down by a marauding cop in Cleveland.  The system has been working to grease the skids to exonerate the cops who murdered Tamir, and this must not be tolerated.  We must join those nationwide who will be saying on that day: “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail.  The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”

Thru acting on November 22 and thru carrying forward the struggle that has erupted on the Mizzou campus, we will be posing the question to all of society: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

 

 

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