WWP CANDIDATE MOOREHEAD: PRIORITY #1--FIGHT RACIST REPRESSION [Workers World Party 2000 presidential candidate Monica Moorehead issued the following statement to protesters at the Republican Convention.] What should the main focus of the 2000 presidential elections be? Depending on who you ask and what the person's social status is, a variety of issues might be raised. Some people think the economy should be the top issue. The super-rich bankers and CEOs might say the economy is booming and thriving. But many workers have to take on two or even three jobs just to make ends meet, if they can find jobs. There are those who would like to discuss Social Security and whether pensions should be invested into the stock market. And what about the health-care crisis, AIDS in Africa, the environment, homelessness, oppression of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans communities, and assaults on women's reproductive rights? The list could go on and on. Of course these issues and many others warrant special attention. They all reflect the kind of society we live in and the system we live under. Capitalism puts making profits for big business before meeting the needs of the people. But there is another important issue that strategically stands out head and shoulders above the others. In fact, this issue impacts in one way or another on every aspect of class society and the class struggle. What is it? Racism. The masses are not engaged in the elections. And for good reason. There's nothing distinguishable between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Both are rich white male capitalist politicians cut from the same cloth. And when it comes to racism, they skirt the issue or talk about it only when forced to. In reality, both Bush and Gore had hoped they wouldn't be confronted with the issue of racism until after Nov. 7. It's not as though they think racism doesn't exist. Rather, they understand that both big-business parties are dependent on racism, just as plants need water and sunlight to survive. Of course, racist white supremacy has existed in the United States for centuries and has taken many economic and political forms. The victims have mainly been the descendants of African slaves, Indigenous nations or colonized peoples who were forced to flee their homelands by the imperialist super-exploitation of their labor and resources. Many of the latter came here hoping to find better lives for themselves and their loved ones. Unfortunately, what they have faced is an intensification and deepening of racist repression. DEAFENING SILENCE ON RACISM Take racial profiling. Cops consider driving while Black or Latino to be a crime. It's the norm, not the exception. People of color are actually being schooled on how to deal with cops when they are stopped for looking like a "suspect" so they will not end up in the hospital or the morgue. Police brutality has reached epidemic proportions. Just a week after the February debate between Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, four white cops were acquitted for the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, the young West African vendor, in the Bronx, N.Y. There was Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old Black woman, who was sprayed with bullets by police as she sat in her car in Riverside, Calif. There was also the tragic slaughter of Patrick Dorismond, a young Haitian man. Dorismond was shot by a New York undercover cop who tried to entrap him with drugs. And there were the two recent incidents in Philadelphia. A television videotape captured more than a dozen cops beating a Black man, Thomas Jones, right after he'd been shot five times. Six days later, an Amtrak cop shot and killed another Black man, Robert Brown, in a train station. Where were Gore and Bush during all of this? Did they make a big deal out of these atrocities? They said nothing. In fact, their silence is deafening. What about the growth of the prison-industrial complex? The prisons are overflowing with more than two million poor and oppressed people while Wall Street is raking in profits. SANKOFA COVER-UP The biggest public legal lynching since the Rosenberg execution took place in June. Shaka Sankofa, also known as Gary Graham, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas--under the orders of none other than Gov. George W. Bush. For weeks, the major corporate media carried major expos‚s on how all the suppressed evidence from the original two- day trial pointed to Sankofa's innocence. They exposed his incompetent lawyer. Sankofa instantly became the face of the 3,600 faceless people on death row. Major television networks went to the Huntsville death chamber to carry live coverage leading up to the execution. This was unprecedented. But even with all the publicity showing Sankofa's innocence, Bush told the media to go to hell. He gave his go-ahead and the execution was carried out. And the media obediently shut up. You would have thought that in Philadelphia, where the Republican Convention is taking place, the local newspapers would have headlines warning that a mass murderer is coming to town. Instead they welcome Governor Death and his millionaire and billionaire friends with open arms. In fact, you might think that Shaka Sankofa never existed. Since his execution, there has not been one mention of him or his innocence except during disruptions of Bush campaign speeches by Millions for Mumia/International Action Center activists and others. Then and only then was Sankofa's case thrust into the national media once again. Besides presiding over the executions of nearly 140 people, more than any other governor, Bush has embraced "states' rights" in response to South Carolina's flying the Confederate flag. He spoke at the racist Bob Jones University in North Carolina, which until recently forbid interracial dating. Al Gore should not be let off the hook either. Gore has come out flatly against a national moratorium on executions, even after a recent Columbia University study showed a 67 percent error rate in capital punishment convictions. Gore wants to be known as the "law enforcement president." These are code words for putting more poor and oppressed youths behind bars and throwing away the key. If elected, Gore plans to hire 10,000 more prosecutors to achieve his goal. MAKE RACIST REPRESSION THE ISSUE It's more than just a good idea for those of us demonstrating against the Democratic and Republican conventions to make racist repression the main issue this year, independent of both capitalist parties. It's essential. Banners, placards, direct action, and so on can help expose this important weakness of the capitalist politicians. Many demonstrators in Philadelphia will see placards with the pictures of Shaka Sankofa and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Why are some groups putting so much emphasis on their cases? The last face Bush wants to see in Philadelphia is the face of an innocent man that he killed. Linking Shaka's case to Mumia Abu-Jamal's is more critical now than ever. Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing a police officer. In the United States, being found guilty of killing a cop is virtually an automatic death sentence. The repressive state apparatus has more at stake politically in killing Mumia than it did with Shaka. Mumia is a revolutionary, a MOVE supporter and an award- winning Black journalist who exposed Philadelphia police brutality before he was railroaded to death row. His writings in solidarity with the workers, the poor and the oppressed earned him the fitting title of "voice of the voiceless." Mumia stated that Shaka was not murdered by one big business political party but by a political system. Mumia was referring to the capitalist system. Its caretakers are a handful of millionaires and billionaires who impose their backward ideas and policies on the multinational working class to keep generating profits for themselves. Racism is the ruling class's trump card. It is a bourgeois ideology that divides people along racial and national lines, in many instances regardless of social status. It helps to preserve the status quo for big business. Racism cuts to the heart of class divisions. It is the antithesis of class unity. Election year or no election year, it's imperative for the progressive movement to popularize, in theory and practice, the struggle against racism and national oppression at every demonstration and rally. Then and only then will the working class understand that in order to win economic justice, it must fight for anti- racist unity and solidarity independent from the bourgeois elections. This is one of the important ways the progressive movement can keep Shaka's revolutionary spirit alive and fight for Mumia's freedom. - END - (Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://www.workers.org) ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Stop the execution! New trial for Mumia! Youth & Students for Mumia http://www.mumia2000.org To subscribe or unsubscribe email: youth-4-mumia-owner@egroups.com