We Charge Genocide at 75 - Incite at Columbia University

On the 75th anniversary of We Charge Genocide, this course will contemplate that strategy which took the struggle of Black folks out of the realm of the national and placed it on an international stage. We will look to the goals of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU), which also viewed Black people in the U.S. as part of a global majority. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass, when the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho defeated the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry, killing Lieutenant Colonel Custer. We will read about Lakota resistance and think together about this call by Malcolm to withdraw from the Imperial settle colonial project and wonder about what this kind of mass abandonment what mass abandonment by the dispossessed could do.

This event is the second in our reading series, Counter-narratives at 250. This fall, The Walter Rodney / Flores Magón Library & Commons will lead two guided reading discussions centered on works whose anniversaries offer an opportunity to challenge the exclusionary logics of the United States as a settler-colonial state and examine the experiences of minoritized communities. These discussions are part of a four-session series spanning the academic year that responds to the U.S. semiquincentenial and its accompanying officially sanctioned celebratory accounts of the past. The program offers a counternarrative to these accounts through study sessions dedicated to alternative anniversaries that undertake a critical appraisal of history and historical struggles, considering the insights and strategies already available to us in navigating the horrors of the present and asking how we might carry them forward not only survive but live in complicated, meaningful ways.

The reading sessions are open to all, but registration is required; readings will be shared with all registrants in advance of each session.

Readings:

William L. Patterson, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, “The Opening Statement,” pg. 3-24.

Filiberto Ojeda Rios, Statement to the Court, “Terrorism?” pg. 4-9.

Malcolm X, The Last Speeches, “Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem,” pg. 153-183.

Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, “War,” pg. 89- 131.