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Students Stand Up, Fight Back!

Across the country, students are standing up to “hoodie bans” and other oppressive rules.

By Enigma E

This past November students at Helen Cox High School in Harvey, LA walked out of class to protest the injustice done to a female Muslim student, who was harassed and violated by the school administration for wearing a hooded jacket. She was asked to take off her hoodie, which she was using to protect against the cold weather and as a covering for her body as she respectfully practices her faith of Islam. When the administrator tried to forcibly remove the hoodie from the young woman, students came to her defense, which led to the walk-out. As the students protested the oppressive hoodie rule and the mistreatment of one of their peers, the administration called the cops which only escalated the situation. Six cop cars and two firetrucks showed up to the school. The cops arrested a sixteen-year-old student and charged him with battery of a police officer in addition to other charges.

The students were reacting to the over policing of their bodies and culture. Jefferson Parish School District started enforcing the “hoodie rule” after the murder of Trayvon Martin, while the racist, capitalist-owned media was busy blaming Trayvon for his own murder. This campaign went hard criminalizing young Black people for their choice of clothing.

The way the police handled the youth at their school is indicative of how the police handle poor people on the streets. The police don’t handle rich white people the way they handle poor people of color. It’s been like that for the entire history of AmeriKKKa. Across the globe, capitalist white supremacist rule holds back the masses of the global working class.

The ruling class news sold the students’ righteous protest as “Muslim student’s refusal to remove hoodie leads to chaos at Helen Cox High School.” This oppressive headline implies to the reader that some crazy non-white, non-Christian students were acting violently. The Workers Voice says the students have the right to stand up against oppression!

More actions like this are needed in schools and cities across the country. The world is waiting for the U.S. working class to rise up and revolt against their oppressors. If we don’t, the rich ruling class will continue to make things worse for us. We have to fight back. The youth are some of the most fearless fighters the working class has got.

Young people are justified in their frustration with the capitalist system. They just have to direct that rage towards revolution! Let the youth be free! All power to the people!

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How We Normalize the Evils of Capitalism

By Enigma E

Capitalism creates a world of haves and have-nots. The many suffer, while the few prosper—that’s the way of capitalist AmeriKKKa. Stop and think: Why do people go hungry? Why doesn’t everyone have a home? Why isn’t there universal quality education & healthcare? Why are more and more privately owned prisons popping up? Why does the economic inequality gap widen year after year? All this in the self-proclaimed “richest/most powerful nation the world has ever seen!” Why do people regard the rich as if they’re so much more deserving of nice things than we are?

I want us to rethink how we approach the world. Think about why you do what you do daily. We do it to fit into the structure of capitalist society. Our labor generates much more value than the portion we get as wages. But since the rich privately own the land and the factories where we work, they take the bulk of that value for themselves. We as the working class are literally working ourselves to death. People are more stressed, and they have little if any leisure time. We have to get rid of the false notion that economically poor people “don’t work hard” and that’s why they are poor. That notion is bullshit, perpetuated by the ruling class and their media henchmen. Working class people are the hardest workers that do the most crucial work for the betterment of society. Shout-out to the sanitation workers, the school cafeteria workers, bus drivers, service workers and day laborers. They deserve vacations, sick days, livable wages, time to spend with their children and much more.

The working class masses pay the salaries of the cops, judges, and politicians at every level of government. We have to get rid of the notion that they’re better or do more than us! Politicians are crooks that get bankrolled by the capitalist class to do their bidding, repressing the masses of people economically and socially. Electoral politics was best described by Karl Marx who said, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

This is a pattern of programming that must end! We are the vast majority, we create everything, we deserve to live a rewarding life. We deserve livable wages, good housing, education and healthcare. Through mass struggle these goals are more than attainable. This planet is full of resources for every living creature to coexist in harmony. We, the majority, MUST rise up—it is the only salvation for this planet. We, the workers of the world, are powerful beyond measure. It is our duty to fight to win the class struggle. All Power to the Proletarians!

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Indict the System, Not the Youth!

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!

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I Am a Proud Black Man

We as Black folks in this country have lived and survived under AmeriKKKan Apartheid for centuries now. From first being kidnapped from mother Africa and shipped here in chains like an Amazon package, to being declared as 3/5ths of a human being, the Black man in this country has been marked to be the most used and abused commodity in AmeriKKKa. You can look at The Dred Scott Decision, the Fugitive Slave Act, The Civil War, Jim Crow laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, Anti-lynching laws, Miscegenation Laws, Red Lining Laws, “War on Drugs”, “War on Terrorism”, Mass Incarceration, to the white-washed history and curriculum in schools.

Despite any and all that, I am a proud Black man in AmeriKKKa because I don’t conform or assimilate to the white male capitalist standard this country has set before us. I stand strong in the face of adversity and oppression, I fight for my people on a daily basis with the righteous intentions of decolonizing their minds to liberate their body and spirit. I wear my locs proudly, I wear my own clothing line proudly, I speak my native 7th w/d New Orleans dialect proudly, I proudly break down any and all lies the oppressor class has convinced or forced my people to believe. Like I tell folks, the greatest insult I can tell someone of the ruling class is “I can go into your world, you can NEVER come into mine”. That’s because we’ve created something from the funk and hurt we’ve endured as a people. I am proud, proud of the language we’ve created as we were outlawed from being able to read and write. Now EVERYTHING Black folks have created is commoditized or white-washed into the mainstream of society for profits. Whether it’s the music, the artwork, the dances, the slang, the way we greet, style of dress, way we rock our hair, we could go on and on. Under this white supremacy capitalist system, it’s not Black people they care about, it’s the money they can make off of Black people they care about, as it has always been in this country.

Peep game my people, don’t assimilate to the system, be proud of your existence, be proud of your culture, be proud of your creativity, be proud of your endurance, be proud of your uniqueness, be proud as you learn YOUR peoples’ history, and lastly be proud of US. This white supremacist capitalist system has attempted to beat Black folks into submission time after time and still we stand. State sanctioned oppression vs. the power of the people. Proletarian vs. Pig. Soul Brother vs soul sucker. Continue to educate, agitate and organize! And remember, the beauty is in the struggle, and it’s the working class people of New Orleans that make this place so desirable. We are the soul and essence of New Orleans. We are the food, the dance, the music, the rhythm, the talk, the flavor, we are all that and some jazz ya’ dig. Till next time, love & solidarity my peoples. #AllPower

With celestial luv, Enigma E.

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The Bourgeois Media Spin Cycle

By Enigma E

The Bourgeois media is blood thirsty and totally one sided. “If it leads it bleeds” is the motto they subscribe to. They barely come to Black neighborhoods to report on the positive things happening, they only show up after somebody got shot, then deem our neighborhoods as “troubled”.

They use menacing mug shots when it’s black folks accused of a crime, but whenever it’s a white terrorist that has shot up a bunch of innocent people, his mug shot is nowhere to be found and/or he is deemed a victim of mental health problems.

None of the main news stations was around when the Black owned businesses “Jazz Daiquiris” and “Chicken & Watermelon” on S. Claiborne gave out bikes, school supplies, Christmas gifts, health care screenings, a summer youth program, all for free for the kids and families in the neighborhood. But those same news stations were all over those Black-owned businesses once there was a tragic violent shooting. It goes to show just what they think about the Black community. It’s either they are covering crimes that’s happening or politicians talking about how they’re going to solve the crime problem. Black life doesn’t matter to the elitist press, their purpose is to oppress and control narratives.

To quote Doughboy from Boyz-N-Da-Hood, “Either they don’t know, don’t show or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood”.

This is by design. The television and radio stations spew the talking points of the two monopoly political parties in this country, that’s all funded by the ruling class. It’s troubling because most oppressed people in New Orleans just go along with the programmed talking points.

The problem of perception comes into play, because of the fact that other groups that never interact with economically poor neighborhoods deem us as unworthy of a good quality of life. That misconception occurs because the elitist media attacks poor communities and sell-out politicians enact laws or cut programs that cause an even deeper oppression in the community.

We as the working class need to keep communicating with one another, actually speaking and spending time in community, not just on the internet. This is the way we kill off the false narratives the media spews as an attempt to keep the people from uniting. As Brother Malcolm once said, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Not this newspaper though. We say All Power to the people and continue to Educate! Agitate! and Organize!

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Parading in Inequality

By Enigma E

Mardi Gras is a Billion-dollar busine$$, but who’s benefiting from it? It’s not the Flambeaux walkers, High school marching bands or Black Mardi Gras Indians. Nor is it any of the working class people that are the lifeblood of the city and the creators of the unique culture that makes New Orleans so desirable. The people that make the big $$ during MG are the big hotel chains, advertisement industry, beer/liquor companies and police/security forces. Progress has been made in the sense we’ve went from Quadroon balls to the modern-day festiveness, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I must say that this Mardi Gras season I really learned a lot. It was my first go around marching with my high school’s band & performance groups. The volume of lucid drunken people that’s out in the streets of New Orleans is crazy. I always knew it was bad, but once you out hitting ‘dem streets with yo Squad and all eyes on y’all, then you really feel and take on that “Us against the world” mentality. People tell ‘ya all kind of dumb reckless shit as you diligently pace that pavement, you gotta put in your head that they just full of that liquid courage and don’t respond to the bullshit they say.

There were people that would try and cut through the band, just for their own childish giggles, there were people that would throw those dam beads and trinkets over our heads, which a few hit us, and I would then have to restrain myself from going after them as I saw our students upset by this buffoonery. There is a lot of overt racism during Mardi Gras as well, such as the Krewe of Chaos having anti-Black Lives Matter floats, Endymion handing out sambo dolls to Black kids, and Rex masking in their Klanish masks, robes and horses.

There is a lot of drunken white privilege out there too. The people entertaining and cleaning was Black & Latino, while majority of the people reveling in the festivities was white. This was especially evident as we went into the Convention Center after the Bacchus parade, for their grandiose ball. It costs thousands of dollars to ride on the floats and thousands of dollars to be a tourist down here during MG.

I did love seeing my beautiful Black folk out there and getting some daps & hugs from them. I’m just glad I was able to be out there, because I mean it when I say the Assata Shakur chant and the part about “It is OUR duty to love & protect each other”. The students work hard at their craft and I felt proud to make sure nothing happened to any of them as we marched in them streets.