African-americans Oppose War On Terror

Black Leaders Call For War On The 'War On Drugs'

Black Leaders Call For War On The 'War On Drugs'
by Hazel Trice Edney
TriceEdneyWire
Originally posted 6/22/2011

WASHINGTON - A national forum aimed to declare war on the 40-year-long �war on drugs� has culminated into an enlistment of quasi soldiers to push Congress and the White House to end the campaign that � according to statistics - has wreaked havoc on and destroyed Black communities nationwide.

�This is a crime against humanity. War on drugs is a war on Black and Brown and must be challenged by the highest levels of our government in the war for justice,� said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., keynote speaker at a forum commemorating the 40th anniversary of the �War on Drugs.�

�This is government-sponsored terrorism,� Jackson said to applause in the packed room at the National Press Club. �It raised the price on Black existence; it is an attack on the Black family; it has destroyed a generation. Those who are the least users have paid the most price because of race; those with money and attorneys have paid the least price. Those without attorneys remain behind bars today.�

More than 200 gathered at the forum, sponsored by the New York City-based Institute of the Black World � 21st Century, led by its president and CEO, Dr. Ron Daniels, a veteran human and civil rights activist. It was 40 years ago that President Richard M. Nixon began the �War on Drugs�.

It was said to be aimed at illegal importation as well as the street-level demand for illegal drugs. But, four decades later, the most visible results from a Black perspective have been intensified police focus in Black communities, resulting in astronomical rates of Black males in prisons; hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Latinos dead from gun violence; and police corruption, including profiling, brutality, and abuse of power.

From seasoned activists and organizational leaders to people formerly incarcerated on drug offenses, the outcry at the forum appeared to be the same: �The war on drugs is a war on us!� That was a phrase repeated several times during the three-hour forum, which was televised live on C-SPAN.

�I�m here to tell you that one of the most fundamental pillars of what we see going on in our communities, this combustible caldron of genocide and death, is this war on drugs,� says Daniels. �Why?

Thinking Africa: Mahmood Mamdani's 'Saviours and Survivors: Darfur ...

In 2002, Mamdani wrote an essay entitled 'Making sense of political violence in Africa', in which he argued that to distinguish between cultural and political identities is to differentiate between self-identification and state-identification. He further pointed out that to historicise political identity through linking it to political power, is to acknowledge that all political identities are historically transitory and all require a form of the state to be reproduced. Furthermore, "when the raw material of political identity is drawn from the domain of culture, as in ethnic or religious identity, it is the link between identity and power that allows us to understand how cultural identities are translated into political identities and thus to distinguish between them" (p. 7). Mamdani's (2009) understanding of the political dynamics of Darfur as well as his reading of the history of Darfur is informed and premised on this thesis. Mamdani writes that in the Sultanate of Darfur, the spread of Islam was due to the expansion and centralisation of the Sultanate. "In the seventeen and eighteen century, when the sultanate of Dar Fur centralised, the spread of Islam was closely associated with Arabic culture, which provided a crucial resources for both state formation and market expansion" (p. 120). Written Arabic served as an administrative language for communication among the functionaries of the centralising state, and it also offered membership in a broader Muslim community, and the possibility of 'co-opting traders and teachers from the wider Muslim world.' O'Fahey (2006) adds that the 'founding legends' of the Funj and the Fur are premised on the notion of 'wise strangers' that bring with them the religion of Islam. Upon arrival, these 'wise strangers' intermarry with local dynasts, they claim Arab descent, and thus relate their communities to a wider Arab/Muslim world. And, whatever substratum of socio-cultural reality that lies behind these traditions gets lost in the process, writes O'Fahey. Agreeing with O'Fahey's analysis, Mamdani (2009) argues that the migration of different social groups into Darfur led to acculturation. He explains that the history of migration into Darfur involved three groups; namely: Arab nomads, West African peasant and slaves from the South. According to Mamdani, the first significant West African migration into Darfur occurred towards the end of the 17th century.

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