For Lil’ Jazmine.

Jazmine Barnes. Add this 7 year old innocent black child’s name to the list of victims of the genocide of New Afrikan people in the United States. Yes, genocide.

James Yaki Sayles correctly points out in Meditations that every time a member of the New Afrikan nation dies under this imperialist order, it is a genocide. When grandma dies after having her leg amputated from complications of diabetes, it’s genocide. When a black elder keels over at 65 on their job folding sheets at a hospital, it’s genocide. When a black man or woman gets the needle after spending 20 years on death row, that’s genocide. When a black youth of 16 overdoses on heroin cut with fentanyl, that’s genocide. When a black baby swallows lead paint, that’s genocide. When a black youth is gunned down by any white person, for any reason, that is genocide. When a black youth is gunned down by another black youth over drugs, that is genocide. We have to understand that these attacks and deaths of our people from 1 to 100 are coldly planned, calculated, and with the deliberate intention of wiping us off the face of the Earth. If you are black in America, you are born to die. This is why the lunatic settler Daniel Willis Taylor, who grabbed and pulled sister Yasmine James over a straw in a Saint Petersburg, Florida, McDonalds on New Year’s Day, could demand her firing after she righteously defended herself. This is why pig George Zimmerman is still wandering around free in that same state after murdering Trayvon Martin. To America, our lives simply don’t matter, and these settlers know it and act accordingly.

Jazmine Barnes was a 7 year old girl out and about with her family, enjoying the holidays, going to get coffee with her mother, LaPorsha Washington, and sisters in Houston, Texas, early on the morning of December 30. They were looking forward to preparing Sunday dinner, together, as the year 2018 drew to a close. This was all shattered as a barrage of bullets fired by a middle aged settler in a red hoodie, driving a red pickup truck, came barreling down on this family for absolutely no legitimate, rational reason. Ms. Washington threw her body over one of her daughters and soon realized that Jazmine had been struck in the head by one of the settler’s bullets. The police claim there was no motive, yet every black person who is in any way familiar with the bloodthirsty and vicious settler psyche knows that this was a lynching, a murder. This family was targeted because they were black. This is the same state where James Byrd was coaxed by two settlers and dragged behind a vehicle until his body fell to pieces. This is the same state where the deserts and plains hold untold bodies, corpses of murdered indigenous, Chicano, and New Afrikan people. This is the state that people of my grandparents’ generation avoided like the plague because of its reputation for vicious and cruel settler violence. Texas murdered Jazmine Barnes because she was a young New Afrikan life and that spark is something that this evil country seeks to stomp out and extinguish from the cradle.

Yet, Texas has a thriving mass movement, an armed movement of New Afrikan people. The cities of this state are home to formations such as Black Women’s Self Defense League, organized in the very finest Panther and maroon tradition, drawing on the centuries of struggle our ancestors, many of whom were fighting women and non binary people, waged against this wickedness. Black people have always sought revenge and vented our antagonism through armed struggle. We have always carried the dream of a new and better world in our hearts and have sought to make it a reality. The maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp and Jamaica, the rebels led by Nat Turner and Dessalines, Harriet Tubman armed with astronomical knowledge, an iron will, and a pistol, Malcolm X — reformed criminal turned unrepentant, unyielding freedom fighter — Huey Newton, Robert F. Williams, James Yaki Sayles, Queen Mother Moore, all of these ancestors guide us still as the settlers prepare for another year of murder. And we assure you, our blood will gain a steeper and steeper price and the white hot rage of four hundred years of fascism, slavery, deprivation and simple evil will be avenged with blood, bullets, and fire. You seek our blood — better be ready to spill ten times your own. My grandmother has a saying , " Dig one ditch, better dig two." The grave you dig for my people is your own. The protracted people’s war in the United States that will ultimately destroy it will undoubtedly start in the New Afrikan nation, led by the Jazmines and Mike-Mikes and Trayvons and Emmett Tills that you did not kill, for we are too many. More and more of us prepare revolution every day. More and more of us will be born and more and more of us will pick up the book and the gun and seriously study liberation. For lil’ Jazmine.

Happy New Year.