The more I study the ideological sources of such leftwing politicians as Pamela Price, Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Cat Brooks, the more deeply I understand just how radical they are. They’ll never admit it publicly, but what these people want is a revolution in America, no less thorough than our original Revolutionary War, in which our nation’s entire structure is overturned, to be replaced by a Black-led dictatorship in which Whiteness is considered at best a disease, at worst a crime.
And if this revolution has to be violent, well, so be it.
To fully comprehend this, you have to travel back in time to the heyday of the original Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly known as Black Muslims).
People my age are old enough to remember when the NOI was a sort of big deal in American culture, or at least, in the news. Its leaders, Elijah Mohammed and, later, Louis Farrakhan, had made a name by hating White people, especially Jews, and calling for their destruction. Most Americans considered Farrakhan a fool, but to his determined Black followers, he was the supreme leader and a prophet—a sort of early incarnation of Donald Trump.
From the Black Muslims’ paranoid ranting came messages that Blacks ought to separate themselves from White society; that Blacks were intellectually superior to Whites, that ancient African society had invented culture (and possibly television and the airplane), and that American society was founded on the premise of Black inferiority and slavery. From there, it’s not a big jump to today’s woke allegations of “systemic racism.”
One historian, Christopher Rufo, has described the Black pedagogical strategy as an effort to “pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently repressive, and to radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed.” This was viewed by Black radicals as a form of “decolonization,” which entailed ridding all American institutions of the repressive influence of whiteness. Schools, law enforcement, corporations, government, nonprofits and philanthropies--virtually every collective organization that makes America run was deemed to be racist. All had to be torn down and reorganized according to the tenets of Black nationalists.
Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks and Pamela Price are all roughly the same age. They all came up heavily under the influence of this Black nationalist agenda. Oakland in particular was a hotbed of the Nation of Islam, and later of the Black Panthers and its descendant groupings. It’s hard for a younger generation to imagine the grip the Black Muslims and Black Panthers had on our town “back in the day.” For decades Oakland had been a rather conservative working class city, but following the 1970s “progressives” gradually infiltrated every city agency, until we ended up with what we have now: the wokest city in America.
Its politics remain slanted toward Black revolutionary struggle, but its advocates have had to tone down their rhetoric, which is another way of saying they can no longer scream about “kill the pig” and “white satan.” But the emotion behind the notion has never changed. Now, it’s “defund the police.” Left-leaning advocates always have hated the police and wished to rid Oakland of them. It was in this atmosphere that Fife, Brooks and Price raised their consciousness and came of age. There is a direct line between Price’s campaign to prosecute cops instead of criminals and to its antecedents rooted in Black nationalist “off the pig.”
Let there be no mistake: Price, Fife, Brooks and their allies (including the pathetic Nikki Bas, a sniveling wannabe Black nationalist) are determined to make a revolution—and revolutions involve body bags. These people have struggled all their adult lives to make the revolution happen. They’re not about to give up without a fight. Neither are we.
Steve Heimoff