Editors’ Note: The National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, after years of excellent work, in recent years was reduced in scope to little more than its Chicago Chapter, which carried on valiantly . In this current period of intensifying racism and racist violence, we at MLToday welcome its declared ambition to re-establish itself throughout the country. For more information on how to endorse and support its plans, go to <<www.naarpr.org>>.
We issue this Call in a sense of outrage in the face of increasing racist violence and political repression towards working class and Black and Brown communities.
We are currently facing a national epidemic of state-sponsored violence perpetrated by police and vigilantes targeting the oppressed Black, Latinx, immigrant, indigenous, LGBTQ, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and gender fluid communities. Black Trans women are also being harassed and killed at record rates.
We are outraged that a detainment-to-deportation pipeline persists and grows, featuring local police working side-by-side with ICE to racially profile, hunt, and detain immigrants and then subject them to unlawful deportation with impunity. An unprecedented level of state violence has been unleashed on our Southern border with Mexico forcing masses of children, their parents and all adults to live in wretched concentration camp like conditions. Trans asylum-seekers and members of LGBTQ caravans have also been hurt and killed by border patrol police.
We see blatant police occupation in such major urban areas as Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, St. Paul, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. with police being permitted by city government to commit unspeakable crimes against the people. Murders by the police, even when video-recorded, go unpunished.
We are witnessing and fighting against the institutionalization of a U.S. police state fusing local, state and federal law enforcement in the name of countering terror under the so-called “Patriot Act”. More money goes toward police budgets while the Black community suffers from severe underdevelopment.
We continue to struggle for our comrades who still languish in U.S. prisons after 40 years of incarceration or in exile, including: Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim, Mutulu Shakur, Assata Shakur and Pete O’Neal, among others.
We continue to fight for the pardoning of all torture survivors who were framed and kidnaped by Chicago Police officers, tortured into “confessing” and wrongfully convicted.
In our forty-six years of existence, we have never dropped our banner demanding an end to police crimes and terror. In Chicago, our campaign for an all elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) has become a mass demand of the people advancing the struggle for community control of the police like never before. In the City-wide elections recently held in the winter, we had 68 candidates running with a plank in their platform for community control of the police. In total, 17 pro-CPAC candidates were elected.
We continue to stand in unconditional solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, who is currently facing blatant racist repression through the attacks by the Department of Justice branding them “Black Identity Extremists.”
The Islamophobia unleashed across the country after September 11th is now being ramped up to new heights under Trump. His presidency is the domestic reflection of the so-called War on Terror. We have stood together with Arabs and Muslims here, including in defense of our Palestinian sister, Rasmea Odeh, against deportation; at the airports against the Muslim Ban; and we have rallied around Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib as they speak out against racism and Zionism.
Militarization of our Southern border with Mexico is no longer a question of policy debated back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. It is an accomplished fact that must be confronted and changed by our movement.
We continue to stand in unconditional solidarity with the national liberation movements of Palestine, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as well as the anti-imperialist struggles of South Africa, Venezuela, and all progressive, democratic forces against imperialism.
Consequently, we are reaching out to you, our comrades in struggle, to join us in our renewed effort to create a Black-led, Left-led, multi-racial, multi-national movement to stop police crimes, mass incarceration and to end racist and political repression.