What Jamil al-Amin said 57 years ago is as relevant as if said today.
Still using his government name, H Rap Brown, the former chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, made the case in 1968 for why US elections don’t matter for Black people.
Despite the oppressed having the right to vote, Amin said none of the candidates in the 1968 US presidential election represented their interests, a case that is just as true today. Take the previous elections, where the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump only represented two sides of the same imperialist coin. None of them pushed pro-people policies. Plus, after Trump’s election, he reneged on campaign promises, such as ending endless wars, as seen in his attack on Somalia and Yemen while supplying Israel with more arms for its military onslaught in Gaza.
Now, what if the president was Black? Amin raised the hypothetical situation in 1968, but it became a reality in 2008. Again, Amin’s premonition stood the test of time. Despite Barack Obama being the first Black US president, he bailed out big banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis, doing nothing for the victims of subprime mortgages, many of them Black.
Since this interview, the US government has imprisoned the 81-year-old Amin twice. A movement is helping to liberate this elder who’s been behind bars since 2000. Visit imamjamilactionnetwork.org and its social media accounts, @FreeImamJamil (IG and X).
Video credit: @hamptonthink (IG and X)
Sources
https://jacobin.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality
https://jacobin.com/2021/06/barack-obama-ezra-klein-nyt-wall-street-bailouts
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2008-financial-bailout-809731