Confederate flag represents slavery, genocide: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Jesse Nevel, with the African People’s Solidarity Committee, in St. Petersburg, to discuss calls for the removal of the Confederate flag in the United States.

A rough transcription of the interview follows.

Press TV: Why did it have to take nine people, African-Americans, to be killed in a church for this debate regarding the Confederate flag to reach the point that it has today?

Nevel:  Greetings to Press TV on behalf of the African People Solidarity Committee, the organization I’m a member of, [which] works under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and Chairman Omali Yeshitela, to organize the white community in solidarity with African liberation movement.

I think what we saw in Charleston, South Carolina, was nothing new when you look at the history of how the United States was formed. That white people carrying out violence against African or black people in this country, is as old as the United States of America itself. The fact of the matter is that the Confederate flag represents slavery and genocide as much as the American flag does. There are many people who defend the Confederate flag by saying that it represents their heritage and it is true. Slavery, murder, genocide, theft of this land from the indigenous people, and the enslavement and lynching of African people is the heritage of every white person in the United States. That is why we have to do more than tearing down the flags.

We have to stand in solidarity with the struggle of the black community and oppressed people everywhere, to have genuine freedom and self-determination and independence from this violent system.

Press TV: Why is it that, as you just mentioned, this terrorist attack has been boiled down to gun control and a flag?

Nevel: Well, chairman Omali Yeshitela pointed out that if gun control was the problem then we would also need rope control, bomb control and control of every other weapon that white people have used historically to terrorize the black community.

The gun control is not the issue, the issue is that there is colonialism against African people in this country and Africans are colonized by the US government, the US imperialism, in the same way the Palestinian people are colonized by… Israel.

Only when African people have genuine political and economic power over their own lives will we see an end to that. Much deeper than racism and ideas in the minds of the white people, it’s the whole social and economic system of colonialism built on slavery and genocide at the expense of the African people and it has always required violence like we just saw in Charleston for the system to exist.

MTM/KA

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