Nooses at Columbia: Enough is Enough!

2006: A noose is hung from a “Whites Only” tree in a Jena, Louisiana high school.

September 20th, 2007: Tens of thousands descend on Jena in an outraged and joyful protest.

October 9, 2007: A noose is hung at Columbia Teacher’s College as part of a spate of nooses, racist threats and brutality lashing back across the country.  A white supremacist website has published the home addresses of the Jena Six, encouraging people to take “justice” into their own hands.

TODAY: Time for everyone who refuses to go backwards and worse to stand up, resist, and take the future into OUR hands!

What are NOOSES?

NOOSES -- are an open threat of racist terror rooted in generations of slavery: children auctioned out of their mother’s arms, feet mutilated to prevent against escape, backs scarred with welts from whips.

NOOSES – are in line with a whole system of white supremacy enforced by courts that have warehoused nearly a million Black people into prison, carried out by brutal police who see “driving while Black” as a crime punishable by death, and reinforced through countless daily insults and discrimination large and small.

NOOSES – are a message to Black people as a whole, but particularly Black youth, that the U.S., the so-called “leader of the free world,” has no future for them other than massive criminalization, gangs, dead-end and disappearing jobs, imprisonment, early death or know-nothing-bible-banging.

The hanging of this noose at Columbia also takes place after the appearance of racist graffiti lashing out at communists and advocating “nuk[ing] Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa,” and a whole atmosphere of fascist intimidation and thuggery being whipped up and mobilized in the upcoming “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” October 22 – 26th initiated by David Horowitz.  This week involves over 100 campuses, speakers like Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum and is ominously being called “the biggest conservative protest ever.”  Invoking progressive themes like “free-speech” and combating “the oppression of women in Islam” as a cover, they plan to harass Muslim Student Associations and Women’s Studies departments, and silence anyone that questions the Bush regime’s official narrative, including even those concerned about global warming.

The people planning this week are the ideological foot-soldiers of a whole fascist clamp-down on society right at a time when the Bush regime is neck-deep into a deeply unpopular and genocidal war in Iraq and is preparing a new potential war against Iran.  David Horowitz himself waged a campaign against reparations by crowing that Black people should be grateful for slavery!  Horowitz is planning to come and speak at Columbia, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity on October 26th.

This fascist assault will not “just go away” and cannot be ignored.  It must be exposed, confronted with the truth about who the real fascists are, and politically defeated.

If anything cried out with urgency for a revolutionary movement and massive political resistance it is the world today: the nooses, the legalized torture, the wars for empire, the moves towards a dark ages theocracy for women and gays and science, and the massive grinding up of human lives and human potential in the vast sweatshops, swelling shanty-towns slums, and whole regions left to waste in disease and disaster.

We have learned from the righteous history of rising up and fighting against the oppression of Black people, against unjust wars, the oppression of women and from revolutionary struggles for emancipation the world over – power concedes nothing without a struggle!

Two futures are being posed for this generation...what will you do?  The direction of the whole world is being fought over – campus life cannot go back to normal.

It is time for a new generation to wake up and fight for a whole different world!

 1  |  2