Still Dreaming: A revolutionary response to the 2012 State of the Dream report

The newspaper of the bourgeois nationalist Nation of Islam, The Final Call, recently ran an article titled, “Powerless Majority? State of the Dream 2012 says non-Whites will still suffer as largest U.S. group.” (1)

The article was an overview of the annual report written by United for a Fair Economy, a Boston-based economic think tank, which does a yearly assessment of progress on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of justice and equality since Dr. King was assassinated by the imperialists.

The 2012 report, the ninth such report, analyzes 30 years of public policy on the “racial” [national - BORO] divide and how it impacted economics, poverty, education, home ownership, healthcare and incarceration. The conclusion: although oppressed semi-colonies will be the population majority by 2042, they will also be the poorest, least educated, most unemployed and most incarcerated, with at least five million New Afrikans being held kaptive in state and federal prisons.

BORO does not find it strange that such a bleak future is being predicted for oppressed nations under the current system, especially the projected incarceration figures considering the fact that in 2012 there are more New Afrikans in prisyn than were in slavery in 1850.(2)

In the conclusion of the “Dream” article, one of the co-authors of the Dream report is quoted as saying, “we have a nation that has a history of ‘racial inequality’ [national oppression - BORO] and white supremacy, all the things that have been put in place 50 years ago, 100 years ago, are still together, intact. If you break down all these institutional structures and start looking at things in a different way, we’ll continue talking about disparities because we’re not fighting the real thing.”(1)

The dreamer is correct that it is the “structures” of this system that are hindering oppressed nations from self-determination and national development. Yet he/she failed to identify the capitalist-imperialist system as the “real thing” that is the impediment to national independence and how we were to fight it. As a result, he/she implies that we can reform the system and do not need revolution to put an end to imperialism.

Amerikkkan Nightmare

Malcolm X once said that for New Afrikans (and other oppressed nations), the Amerikan dream was nothing but an Amerikan nightmare. Not much has changed to alter the validity of that statement.

If oppressed nations are to defeat imperialism and attain self-determination and national independence, they must come to understand, in a more scientific way, that the political structure and social institutions which make up the superstructure of society have to be understood in relation to the underlying economic base (substructure) and to all of the contradictions within the economic base.

Why? Because it is the capitalist-imperialist economic system that gives rise to the contradictions we call poverty, mass incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, etc. in this society. The resolution of the former, will be the beginning of the resolution of the latter. That is why we stress that we must build institutions of the oppressed to address these contradictions and prepare for a new society. But as we say in the hood and barrio, “don’t nothing come to a sleeper, but a dream!”

Wake Up

What the State of the Dream report did accomplish, was to provide the poor and oppressed with an outlook of how their future is being predicted based on concrete analysis of concrete conditions. The other is that either the imperialists are unwilling or do not have the power or capability of solving the problems we face. Thus, they are unfit to be in positions of power and influence over the people.

Conversely,

“… every struggle that we engage in must have the dual purpose of undermining U.S. power, and of transferring that power to the people. We must gradually dismantle the oppressive state apparatus, and begin to build a new people’s state apparatus, creating its embryonic structures in our communities, as we build people’s organizations and institutions that end the violence, house the homeless, heal the sick and educate and train our people for their responsibilities in a new society. Each time the people themselves create and develop an idea, build an organization, solve a problem, we show through practice that we can create new structures, and new ways, that satisfy our needs. Otherwise, our needs will go unsatisfied.”(3)

Justice and equality in imperialist Amerikkka?? Dream on!!!