Portside

What does a decolonization movement look like, and how is it informed by both Black and Indigenous traditions of resistance?

Black undocumented immigrants have been at the unfortunate intersection of the Trump Administration’s anti-black, Islamophobic and xenophobic agenda. The issues surrounding immigration do not only live within the Latinx, Muslim and Asian communities. We need to stop working in silos and change the narrative to be more inclusive, concentrating on ALL communities in need of our attention. Immigration is a black issue.

Six months after the FBI issued a report inventing from whole cloth the term Black Identity Extremists — claiming this group poses a terrorist threat to police — the first apparent case of the prosecution of a BIE has emerged. The BIE designation has created concern in the Black community that the FBI is launching a new COINTELPRO program targeting Black activists who have committed no crimes, with more arrests and prosecutions of those involved in racial justice movements to follow.

The power of black rage was what was so amazing about the Charlotte Uprising. The destruction occurred in an area of concentrated wealth accumulation, the kind of accumulation that drives inequality and necessitates a brutal policing force to maintain that inequality—a policing enacted on black bodies that oftentimes leads to our death.

Before launching The Next System Project, we sat down with historian and economic activist Jessica Gordon Nembhard to learn what the tradition of Black cooperative economic development and the long struggle for civil rights could teach us about system change and system models. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.