Children and youth lead a march organized by Take ‘Em Down NOLA in 2018.
Letter To My Young Brothers and Sisters:
By Enigma E
First off, much love and respect to you, my young brothers and sisters. Secondly f*ck this white supremacist/capitalist system we live under. I know you’re frustrated. I know what it means to not feel accepted in mainstream society. What it means to not be given the benefit of the doubt, what it means to constantly be judged, constantly be thought of as the one that did something wrong and whatnot. This system is set up for us to fail: look at it historically from us being declared 3/5ths of a human being, to chattel slavery, to the convict-leasing system, to Jim Crow, to the mass incarceration state presently.
We have and always will be the biggest threat to overthrowing this system. We have to turn the justifiable rage within us into a mass organized movement. Imagine if we had all the youth from every ward and part of the city clicked up on one page, united under one cause. That’s thousands of us in the street demanding what we deserve from a city that makes over $8 billion dollars annually off the culture and labor of the people that suffer the most. It shouldn’t be that way, where the rich live comfortably, and the large majority of Black and Brown people have to live check to check and never have time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
We outnumber the police, the wealthy and all the crooked ass politicians. I know we look at those people as having power, but they have a false system-based power. But we the people have a REAL POWER. The power to shut down all factors of production of the system by not participating in it. Once organized, we can decide what we want from the schools rather than these multi-million-dollar charter networks that steal money from us. We can decide what we deserve to be paid for our labor rather than shareholders dictating what we get. We can decide what we want our neighborhoods to look like rather than letting gentrifiers and land consultants decide. Every aspect of life can be radically changed with us being on the same page and exerting our power.
Some ways we can accomplish that is: 1) Reading, writing, distributing this newspaper and joining the New Orleans Workers Group, which organizes to uplift the working class and youth in and around the city; 2) Listening to audiobooks and YouTube speeches of Malcolm X and The Black Panthers as you’re playing video games or simply walking somewhere. You can pay homage and learn from the powerful speeches of the revolutionaries that came before you; 3) Organize people you know already: people around your house, at school and family members. We have to shift conversations into radical political thinking, slowly but surely; And lastly 4) stay committed to the cause. We are in a battle for our livelihood every day. We must stay committed to fighting for the freedom of all poor and oppressed peoples. We are the ones that make up everything around us, so we should be the ones enjoying it, too.
All Power my Peoples! The ancestors live through US!
