Black Agenda Radio - 10.15.18

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: A new book makes the connection between mass Black incarceration, the growing police state apparatus besieging non-white immigrants, and the legacy of slavery in the United States: and, Ajamu Baraka says it’s time for a revival – of the Black American peace movement.

Bobi Wine, the wildly popular Ugandan entertainer and national legislator who was hospitalized in the United States after being viciously beaten by President Yoweri Museveni’s police, plans to hold a giant concert in the central African nation’s capital city, Kampala. Wine says Museveni is “drunk on power” after more than three decades in office, and is worse than former dictator Idi Amin. In Brooklyn, New York, Ugandan native Milton Allimadi, publisher of Black Star News, agrees with Bobi Wine’s assessment.

Four decades ago, Black politicians and grassroots activists could be counted on to at least pay lip-service to the cause of international peace. But nowadays, most Black elected officials behave much like other Democrats on foreign policy issues, and the Black peace movement is in disrepair. Veteran human rights activist Ajamu Baraka, who was the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in 2016, is trying to revive the Black movement against imperialist wars. Baraka is director of the Black Alliance for Peace.  

In the Black Radical Tradition, there is no fine line between foreign and domestic policy. Much the same can be said of the politics of Latin American  immigrant activists. Martha Escobar is an associate professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, at Northridge.” She’s author of the new book, “Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina Immigrants.” Escobar says the U.S. mass incarceration system can only be understood as an extension of slavery.