If you’ve heard the classic dead prez album ‘Let’s Get Free’, then you’ve heard Chairman Omali Yeshitela. A part of one of his speeches laced with a great analytical analogy of a hunter/wolf and imperialism/crack is used in the opening of the cd. Whether you are familiar with his works a lot, a little, or none at all, this summation of a speech he made in Minneapolis on May 17^th is a must-read for all people who care about the past, the present, or the future state of the society that we live in.

Malcolm X “wanted us to recognize the world as it is, just as it is, because if you don’t understand it as it is, you can’t change it. You don’t even have an incentive to change it, Malcolm X was about change and transformation, that’s why the United States government had to kill him.” Chairman Omali’s voice inflects emotion and angst in the captivated crowd during his near hour long speech at Minnesota’s 1^st Annual Malcolm X Conference at North High School.

The fact that we were sitting in this very auditorium, the auditorium of Minnesota’s most African American high school, North High, is a testament to the ‘Power of the People’ as the Minneapolis Public Schools, which has the worst “achievement gap” {white-privilege gap} in the country, made a full-fledged effort to close it down in 2010 but a massive ground up movement prompted the school board to eventually ‘vote no’ on closing it.

On May 17^th, 2014 the Malcolm X Conference was paneled by the ever insightful and reading specialist Ezra Hyland, distinguished author and professor of African and African American Studies, Dr. Rose Brewer, a young college student and fervent admirer of Malcolm X, Sara Osman, and longtime social justice activist and Socialist, Ty Moore. The admirably radical guest speakers were the great revolutionary, African Internationalism theorist, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party Omali Yeshitela, and famed broadcaster and elder of Black journalism, Glen Ford. The day went from ten a.m. to five fifteen p.m. and we would’ve been there all night had there not been another conference {Still Separate, Still Unequal: Brown v Board 60 Years Later} starting at six, with Glen Ford as a panelist. Their contributions and knowledge from the panel to the Q & A’s and Glen Ford’s speech, which was a fabulous rebuttal of Manning Marable’s Reinvention of Malcolm X also found here, aren’t meant to be overlooked. Nor is the fact that just a handful of people like Mel Reeves and others (sorry I’m leaving people out) managed to organize this event.

This is not a journalistic run-down of the conference. This is more of an effort to disseminate the information that I felt was of such importance that it must be detailed and apologetically to the reader, halfway, or almost all the way, transcribed. I thought of the options of posting the many voice recordings I made during the day into one mash-up, but the quality is lacking any enjoyment as I was at the back. The message and oration of Chairman Omali Yeshitela was too incredible to summarize it in a quick article, or to just tweet about it a few times, tell a few friends, and barely think about later. The insight and angst at which he speaks is incredibly endearing to revolutionary ears. He is the prototype of Malcolm X with his own glorious past and historical, as well as present and future importance. For me personally, the connection of Chairman Omali and Malcolm X ties into the reason why I care enough to spend the time during these busy days and nights to articulate this information. I first saw the movie Malcolm X when I was twelve and I never believed anything could be better. Then I read the The Autobiography of Malcolm X a year later as I sat in a juvenile detention center and realized that although the movie was one of the best ever, the book was even better. The lessons and realities stay with me to this day. About seven years later dead prez came on the scene with arguably one of the best hip hop albums of all time and introduced me and many others to Omali.

Beyond that, I must say that I, as a white-American (well…Greek, Russian, Jewish, etc) born citizen of the U.S.A., implore those within the same category as I, to learn as much history as we can. This will bring us in the white community to understand “that the fundamental contradictions existing on the planet earth today is the contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nations”, and with this understanding most other contradictions can start to be broken down. From the onset of the invent of ‘race’, us white people have enjoyed incredible privilege. It’s time each one of us takes a real look at our everyday activities and start to understand how privilege provides a safety and comfort unfelt by other communities. It’s time we “end the segregation within the white race towards others (O. Yeshitela)”.

Understanding history is an important and too-often over looked aspect in the lives of everyday humans. Truth is a word that’s not all the time rightfully understood and too often times unused. If historians speak with truth, then the ears of intelligent people will perk up to certain understandings of this complex society that to some of us is common sense, as we may have known these things for some time. There are so many clichés that are spoken of why you should know history, but the most important thing that every citizen should know is that with an understanding of history you acquire an understanding of how to change the future. Understanding history was essential in Malcolm X’s life, as well as Chairman Omali’s, who spoke in the spirit of Malcolm X throughout this day.

The last time that Chairman Omali was in Minneapolis is interestingly directly related to Malcolm X. Malcolm’s daughter, Qubalih, who birthed the recently deceased Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X’s first male descendant), was living in Minneapolis and quickly became a victim of a grimy FBI informant in a recording trying to plot to kill Louis Farrakhan. In 1995, a grand jury indicted her but she later accepted a plea deal. Chairman Omali was here, in Minneapolis, to help provide a committee of solidarity to free her. He also shared with us an incident that destroyed “any myth about this wonderful liberal, non-racial Minneapolis” when he went to the theater to watch the movie Black Panther and the police had surrounded the theater and were checking ID’s of the people attending the Black Panther movie.

Chairman Omali intelligently and seamlessly sifted through different quotes and topics from speeches that Malcolm made and provided relevance to the presence. He spoke on the reality that we need to contextualize the history and era of Malcolm X. He said we should focus on the similarity of the struggles of oppressed people all over the world, on the need to not fear what needs to be done and the realities of what created the current “parasitic” system. He is captivating and his steady delivery is sermon like. He has a stage presence of an elder warrior, strong as an ox and wearing a dashiki with his bodybuilding bodyguard behind him to the left. Chairman Omali is ultra-intelligent, very witty and he easily makes jokes, raising his voice with inflection at just the right time. Most importantly he is entertaining with the truth.

“Malcolm X was killed not because he made good speeches…not because he was talking about being morally upright or because he prayed to the East. Malcolm X was killed because he was a part of a revolutionary movement that shook the whole system of imperialism to its very foundation. He was saying, ‘there was something similar to the struggles of African people in this country and the struggle of African people in Kenya…There was something similar about the struggle of African people in the United States and the struggle of the people of Vietnam, who were fighting against an imperial power there’…this is the context that Malcolm X lived in, he talked about Cuba…he said ‘the Cuban Revolution, that’s a revolution!’”

“He {Malcolm X} wasn’t just somebody who popped up and talked about how good it is to be Black -even though it was important to say that- because the empire, Europe, imperialism, white power, defined itself as the antithesis of who we are, it defined our existence, ourselves as an extraordinary negative because it had to do that to justify to itself and to everybody else the brutality that was being imposed on Africans and everybody else in the world. So Malcolm X was a critical force at a critical moment in history where masses of oppressed people around the world were rising up to change our relationship to an unjust social system.”

“Malcolm X struggled to bring a level of science to our understanding of the real world…to try and understand the world just as it is. That was his contest with the notion of having a dream… he said ‘you know people are talking about a dream he said this is a nightmare, that the masses of Black people are living in nightmare!’He wanted us to recognize the world as it is, just as it is, because if you don’t understand it as it is, you can’t change it. You don’t even have an incentive to change it. Malcolm X was about change and transformation, that’s why the United States government had to kill him. They had to kill him just like they were trying to kill people in Vietnam, just like the British were trying to kill people in Kenya, just like the US was involved in invading Cuba to try to overturn that revolutionary movement because it was a movement of oppressed people trying to change their relationship to white power/imperialism.”

“For a thousand years Europe existed under feudal terror, feudal domination, where the nobility owned all the land and the majority of the people were peasants and serfs and they worked on the land that was owned by the nobility…they had no rights. That’s where the whole myth of Robinhood comes from, who would rob from the rich to give to the poor. A lot of people like Robinhood, but actually I think he had a racket going. Because the objective is not to rob from the rich and give to the poor, the objective is to overturn this social system based on rich and poverty that’s the objective. Under the system that Robinhood was dealing with, Robinhood was the only one who had a job. He was a poverty pimp! {laughter} And if you don’t have poverty, these pimps don’t have anything to do, do they? You had a system of feudalism, so there was no such thing as ‘white-wealth’. This notion that somehow, and this is what you and I are taught, that Europeans having some intellectual itch that had to be scratched, decide to sail off to see what was on the other side of the world, that they wanted to find out if the earth was really round. The Arabs and Africans could of gave them that answer, it’s not like nobody knew.”

“The reality is this; that between the four short years of 1347 and 1351, half the white people on the earth died. A plague, they called it the Black Plague, but that was before Malcolm X even showed up {laughter}, can’t blame it on Malcolm…it’s four years, think about this, half the white people on the planet earth die of the plague, you cannot have a viable political economy if half the white people die in four years…after that four years and for the next hundred years, that and other plagues decimated Europe. So it wasn’t this nonsense that we got fed. That Europeans left Europe because they had a surplus of civilization and Christianity that they had to share with the rest of us is absolute nonsense…Europe left Europe because of poverty.” He spoke about Kipling and ‘the white-man’s burden’ and how they, white people, “shoved this nonsense down our throat at gunpoint”.

He continues into what would be a statement that would rouse a standing ovation. “What we have is a world; a political, economic, and social configuration on the planet earth today that’s something that owes its existence to a form of parasitism, capitalist parasitism, where Europe set out against the rest of the world and rescued itself from poverty, starvation, and ignorance at the expense of the life, freedom, and resources of Africans and oppressed people around the world! That’s the world we live in.”

“What we see today, just as we saw during the period of Malcolm X, is peoples around the world are challenging this arrangement. People in Afghanistan are saying that the bread that we produce will have to go to feed our own children and not end up in a supermarket in Minneapolis. That’s what Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was about; to capture the oil to use it for our own people! Why do you think it is that when African people go on strike or attack an oil refinery in Nigeria that the price of gasoline will go up in Tampa, Florida? It reveals a parasitic relationship between Europe and the white world and the rest of us. You don’t believe it’s parasitic? Even this land that we are on today has come into possession of white people and Europe as a consequence of a parasitic attack on the Indigenous population here who live in concentration camps and nobody even mentions themcause they are not present! That’s the reality that we are living in. That’s the reality that Malcolm X was talking about! That’s why he said it’s time to stop dreaming and look at this nightmare we are living in! So the whole social system came into existence off of this attack against the rest of us. It’s a foul social system; it has no redeeming values at all. People like to tell us about all the progress, the leap in human progress that was made as a consequence of the advent of capitalism in the world. Progress for whom? We live in a world today, brothers and sisters, where half the people on earth try to survive off less than three us dollars per day. If you’re in Africa, you’re talking about trying to survive off of a dollar a day. If you’re in Africa, you’re talking about people who will work all day, all day, all day, just for one single meal, then get up early the next morning to go to work again for one meal. Where eighty percent of the people on earth try to live off less than ten dollars a day, don’t tell me something about a ninety nine percent. What ninety nine percent?At best your probably twenty percent. I’m talking about white folks who discovered the struggle with the so-called occupation {Occupy} movement. And I want everybody to fight against imperialism but I don’t want to b.s. You gon’ discover imperialism the moment you lose your student loans. {laughter} You gon’ discover capitalism and oppression at the moment you find out your retirement fund has been eaten up.  No. The reality is that the vast majority of people are oppressed by a social system that sucks the resources and blood from most of the people on earth.”

Chairman Omali continues his diatribe from the podium with the audience’s full attention. A continual “teach” is shouted from the crowd and commotion and laughter bellow in the air regarding his humorous intelligence. He goes into speaking about “if you’re an African when you got on the ship then you’re an African when you got off. You don’t have to go to school to learn that, you have to go to school to UNLEARN that” and the false nationalism that is imposed upon African people throughout the world and here in America. “What I love about Malcolm X, he said people would come to us and whisper in our ear, ‘you know, ah, we been here long time, I was born and my grand momma was born here in America’, he {X} said ‘well chickens are sometimes born in ovens, that don’t make them biscuits,’ and just because you were born here doesn’t mean that you are an American. They just start letting you call yourself an American a couple years ago. Remember what you were before you were an American? Or you don’t want to talk about that? Understand? Well, there’s a man name STERLING who will help you understand, and a whole bunch of other folks. So, we are not Americans, we are Africans. They like to talk about this country being so-called, a nation of immigrants. We say American is not a nation; it is a prison of nations. Not only is that the case, but I am not an immigrant, I am a CAPTIVE and I have never forgot and will never forget! I came here at gunpoint! And guess what, African people are the ONLY people who did not come here looking for a better way of life but lost a better of way life as a consequence of having come here!”

“We have a world economy that came to existence through parasitism. Karl Marx talked about, he asks the question how capitalism -remember some leftists used to like Karl Marx- about how to explain the arrival of capitalism in human history…Marx talked about a thing that he characterized as a primitive accumulation of capital. Because to start up anything in capitalism you got to have startup money don’t you, you’ve got to have startup money. Marx characterized it as a primitive accumulation of capital. He said if you’re going to have capitalist accumulation you’ve got to have capitalist production but in order to have capitalist production you’ve got to have accumulation of capital to side with it. So how do we get out of this circle? He said, in order to do this you have to assume that there was an accumulation of capital that was not the consequence of capitalist production but a starting point. Then he described what primitive accumulation means to him and among the things he said, he said ‘it was England, the British, attacking China in 1841-42.” He continues with the topic of the Opium Wars and how Europe didn’t have specific goods and would force trade at gunpoint in turn bringing riches to Europe. Back to Marx, who he literally quotes a few times, “he said, it was in turn the so-called Indians in the Americas into the mines, who brought up gold and silver that went into an impoverished Europe. They brought so much silver at one time out of Peru into Spain that it disrupted an economy that was based on silver. This is how Europe rescued itself from poverty and barbarism. I should say from poverty. {laughter} Then he {Marx} said, it was transforming ‘Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skin’. This is what created capitalism in the world, this is what rescued Europe from feudalism and starvation.This is parasitism. It is an economy that was created, and continues up to this moment, to rely on sucking the blood and resources of the oppressed people around the world. That is why eighty percent of the people on Earth try to exist off of less than ten us dollars a day. That is why Obama is sending drones and assassinating people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and parts of Africa today. That is the basis for the existence of NATO and all those other entities, to keep the world just like it is so that the oppressed people throughout the world will not take back what rightfully belongs to us, including all our resources, including our freedom, including our dignity, including our integrity as a people!”

“We’re living in a crisis today…everywhere you look there’s crisis. Everything they do is done to justify trying to put the world back under lock and key. They got a so-called AFRICOM, a US military command that centers in Africa. They got a Negro chief of state. Imma say something about this Negro. I know it disturbs a lot of people because I’ve been told that he’s got a pretty good left hand jump shot.{laughter} But you’re looking at a crisis of imperialism. George Bush attempted to solve the problem of imperialism by shooting the people back into submission; he’s going to bomb everybody, blow everybody up, shoot everybody up into submission. You remember George Bush don’t you? George Bush was an American president is what he was, I think that’s what’s important to understand, he represented white power, capitalism. So, George Bush was going to shoot people back into oppression. What happened was Bush radicalized more people than Che Guevara. The actions of Bush served to radicalize people all around the world, not only did it radicalized people around the world, Bush’s method, Bush’s stance was not just to salvage and protect white power, Bush’s method and his intent was to protect white power under the absolute non-questioning domination of American white power. That’s what Bush was about, so he didn’t just upset people in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Venezuela, he upset people in England too, they were mad at George Bush.”

He then provides a summation of the O-bomb dropped on all of us in 2008. “They reached a point where it was clear that the crisis of imperialism was so pronounced, so profound, that something had to be done to protect the social system itself, so they decided to seduce the people into submission, since you can’t shoot the people into submission, seduce the people into submission. So now it’s so bad that white power cannot represent itself in the world in its own face. It cannot represent itself in the world in its own face. The point is that the people have reached a place now where they say ‘kill the white man, destroy him, get him out here’. And now, we have white power with a black face.They resurrect somebody- think about this brothers and sisters- I’m sorry if I offend your sensibilities, but don’t blame me, I didn’t do it to ya’. The ones who did it to ya’ are the ones who created this entity. That you never even heard of in your life before his audition in, what was that, the 2004 Democratic Convention. Who the hell is this guy? Never heard of him before, wasn’t like he was in your community struggling for the interests of black people, wasn’t that he was on the FBI hit list, wasn’t that he was somebody who was trying to do something for you. No, never heard of him before. Think about this, here we have a situation in the Unites States of America with its own history, went through all this trouble to take away your own name, so now you’re James and Charles and Marvin and Algernon and all these other things. Went through all this trouble to take your name so you will not have any relationship with your history, with your people, with your struggle, with your AFRICA, and suddenly the first Negro who’s going to be the president of the United States is not Marvin, is not Jesse, is not Al, NO! It’s Barack, Ba-what? Barack, which is Jewish and Arab, Hussein, and they just lynched Hussein, you know that, in Iraq they lynched him, they went there and overthrew the government and lynched him right, Obama. What in the hell is this? I mean, you can’t even find this in a Hollywood script, nobody in Hollywood would have dared to come up with a script like this, this is so dang ridiculous there’s no way in hell that something like this would happen. But Hitler and his people said, you tell the big lie, tell the big lie, don’t tell the easy lie, tell the big lie. They might not believe it with Algernon but Barack Hussein Obama. Please!”

“What they’ve done of course is to get somebody who looks like us, who looks like the slave and who will not only do that but create a new template of behavior for the oppressed.You can’t struggle; you have to be like Obama. The only way you can talk about power now is to get elected. There’s seven hundred million dollars waiting right away the corner for you, too. This is the nonsense that they pump into our communities, it’s a problem and it’s something they’re using to try to solve the contradiction of imperialism itself. You don’t believe me, and I understand it, because you really wanted, you needed to believe, you needed, needed, needed and they KNEW you needed to believe. They knew you needed to believe, because they’ve told you for so long, that you can’t speak good English, that you’re not smart, that you’re catching hell because of all these terrible attributes that you have. And to see this slick talking silver tongue Negro up there looking just like you, outbidding all them white folks, made you feel so good, it was like watching Joe Louis beat up the white people when you couldn’t hit ‘em. You needed to believe it. They played on that. They created a need in you so deep for some kind of self-respect. They create a need in you so deep that you just want to see something that reflects the dignity of Black people, and then they give you this Negro, WHITE POWER IN A BLACK FACE. The first presidential so-called debate they had, held where, in Harlem, New York when he ran the first time. The first question that was asked in that debate -because this was a crying issue in our communities- is what is your position on reparations? And the first person to say that he was opposed to reparations was Barack Hussein Obama, opposed to reparations, which gave all of the white people permission to be opposed to reparations. Do you understand this? It’s Obama, who had his Sister Souljah moment in Chicago, on Father’s Day, where he went, in Chicago, to an NAACP meeting -quite appropriately- and made an assault on Black fathers. He didn’t make an assault on the prison system that is responsible for one out of every eight human beings on earth being in prison being a Black man in this country, he didn’t assault that. He didn’t make an assault on the fact that we’re living in a country today that even though the economy is supposed to be bad, that the amount of wealth in the White household is 22 times greater than that existing in a black house. He didn’t make an assault on the fact that the largest prison system in the world exists in this country and that the majority of the people who are in those prisons are Africans and Mexicans and Latinos, he didn’t assault that. He assaulted Black fathers.” Chairman Omali roars loudly to get heard over the claps and hysterics of the crowd.

“He went to Accra in Ghana, the place where Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah lived and worked to try and unite Africa and African people around the world to overturn this relationship that we have with imperialism. He went there and said ‘you can no longer blame our conditions of existence on colonialism and the white man’. That’s what Obama said. It’s self-inflicted. Yes they love Obama. It’s not ‘cause his momma’s White. It’s not ‘cause he’s light-skinned, he could black as shoe polish, if he carried out this mission, if he looks like the slave. That’s why you follow him. They did the same thing with Indian Scouts.They did the same thing over and over again all over the world, use somebody that looks just like the oppressed…He plays basketball like you play basketball. He knows how to dance like you know how to dance and he can even imitate Al Green. It wouldn’t work if he didn’t do all those things, if he couldn’t do all those things. So, this is the statement of the crisis of the social system, but the people around the world have clearly awakened, struggle is happening everywhere, and the parasitic social system is in severe distress. We see the decline of White power right before our very eyes. We see the decline of American power right before our very eyes. People who yesterday wouldn’t have dared challenge imperialism are doing it today. Our responsibility is to recognize that. I’m not scared. I’m not afraid of this changing world. I know what we are looking at in this changing world is a shift in the balance of power in the world today. It is a shift in the balance of power in the world today and increasingly that shift of balance of power is favoring the oppressed peoplesof the world.{massive applause has been going on for last ten seconds or so and continues for another twenty} They favor the people of Afghanistan. They favor the people of Iraq. They favor the people of South America. They favor the people on the Indian Reservations. They favor the people living in the barrios and the ghettos of the Americas. That’s what history is looking at in favor of today. So I’m not afraid of this, I’m glad to see this thing being shaken up.”

“Every Negro ain’t on your side…there is a class difference, everybody ain’t on your side”, Chairman Omali talks about Marcus Garvey referring to the NAACP as the “National Association of Certain People” and Malcolm X speaking of the class difference within communities, specifically the “house Negro” and “field Negro”. “There are some people, in our communities, throughout the world, that America and imperialism and Europe have given a piece of the action, they have linked them up to the system in such a fashion that if the system comes down they lose everything they got. So they fight harder than the White man to keep the rest of us oppressed. Malcolm was trying to teach us about that.”

“The assassination of Malcolm X did not happen in a vacuum. They killed Malcolm. They killed King. They killed thirty (30) members of the Black Panther Party in 1968 alone.They overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, They killed Patrice Lumumba. They shot and wounded Che Guevara in Bolivia and murdered him after they did that. It was a whole sweep up to crush the revolutionary movement.”

“So now, you have a situation where two generations of our people have gone without any evidence, anything that represents revolutionary struggle, revolutionary change, and the only thing that we get as an example of what we should be doing, is an Obama, is a Negro who is running for office, is somebody who is trying to integrate into the system, is a Facebook where you ‘like’ this ‘like’ that etc., that now is passing for political struggle political activism. That’s not good enough. We have to become organized. I am a revolutionary. My objective is to overturn this foul social system {inaudible, crowd was too loud}I’m an organizer because I want YOU to be an organizer, YOU to be a revolutionary…{inaudible}…join any revolutionary movement that’s bent on overturning this social system so that OUR people and the people on this earth have an opportunity to live…{inaudible…crowd was clapping and yelling too loud}…Uhuru!”

The revolutionary angst and insight, anti-capitalist sentiments, the fervor in which Chairman Omali spoke was inspiring. The conference continued with even more greatness after this main speech but I will save your time. If you have read until now, it’s been a long haul, but incredibly worth it I hope. Chairman Omali Yeshitela is a giant channeling Malcolm X’s spirit. He needs to be a household name. His theories, his internationalism, need to be household thoughts and worldwide realities. He is an excellent orator of the only solution to this “parasitic capitalism”, that being revolution. Its up to us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We must Organize, Organize, Organize.