“Organizing black people is recognizing that a lot of the systems that have historically oppressed us has not gone anywhere”

Interview of Krys Cerisier, member of the Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti America's team, based in the Bronx, New York

Conférence Non à l'OTAN, Oui à la Paix, Washington 5 juillet 2024
By the editors
Published on 28 juillet 2024
Reading Time : 4 minutes

You are demonstrating today against NATO, can you explain to us what is important for you?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is not just in the North Atlantic. We understand that this is a project that has intentions to be spread across the globe, in Asia, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in South America, in Central America. And so we really want to shed light on the false narrative that this is just Europe, that this is just Russia. It isn’t just Europe, it isn’t just Russia, but it’s a plan to militarize the entire world.

The United States has a goal of putting military bases across the globe and having the power to activate it whenever they see fit. And we say no, we say no to the building of more military bases.

People live on these lands, wherever they plan on building military bases, people already live there. And it takes massive displacement to do this, it takes massive displacement to test nuclear weapons, it takes massive displacement to build these bases. And we say no, we say no to the continued displacement, we say no to the permanent destruction of the environment that this military testing has. It destroys water, it destroys land, and these are people’s livelihoods. So we acknowledge all these impacts that the U.S. refuses to acknowledge, and we say no to NATO.

There have been massive demonstrations a few weeks ago on campuses against the genocide in Gaza. There have been also important demonstrations during the Black Lives Matter movement.And right now, Biden has the guts during his debate to explain that black people are not disappointed of him. What, in your opinion, is missing in terms of political representation of the black people, of the majority in general, but in particular of the black people in the U.S.?

That’s a tough question. The U.S. government, Biden in particular, they think black people are just one type of people. But in reality, we have Haitians, we have Colombians, we have West Africans, Nigerians, Senegalese, Brazilians. There are so many different types of black, you know what I’m saying? And right now, black people are disproportionately being impacted by the migration crisis happening in the United States. There’s a lot in that question, but even protesting the genocide in Gaza right now. In New York City, Eric Adams, a black mayor, keeps releasing the SRG. The SRG is called the Strategic Response Group. This was a group that was created in response to Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that is now being used to repress anti-genocide protests and pro-Palestine protests in New York. So these struggles are very tied together, and the impacts and the resistance being used to oppress these protests have the same origins. So I just think it’s important to acknowledge that, that it’s the same strategies being used to attack both protests, both pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter protests, are both being repressed by the same group.

As towards Biden saying that the black community is pro-him, that’s not true. Right now at the border, it’s disproportionately black people at the border right now trying to get into the United States because of U.S. foreign policy that Biden has pushed. Biden is the one that approved a $300 million invasion of Haiti, a black island.

That is Biden. And so I think Biden has a very uneducated perspective of black people, and he is using this illiterate, uneducated narrative that all black people are just one type of people to say that black people support him, which is not true. Black people continue to be 70% of the prison population while being 13% of the country’s population. That is such a disgusting statistic that goes to show how much Biden actually hates black people. And so I say that to say that our struggles are tied together. Blackness is not a monolith. It’s a diverse community that is all over the globe, that the policies of Biden and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have a very anti-black policy. And I think it takes a lot of ignorance to ignore all of those facts.

But black people right now are organizing for our rights, and our rights are in direct contradiction to the agenda of the United States. And it’s directly tied to NATO. NATO is a military power that is going to be used to follow through on American agenda. Right now, the core group that is causing instability in Haiti, that military agenda will be followed through by NATO. That isn’t just in the North Atlantic, but is all over the world, not just Europe, not just Russia.

Regarding organizing black people, how do you see the situation today and how to get forward with organizing black people?

The black community isn’t that different from any other type of community. In the Asian community, you have South Korean people who are elitist and pro-fascist, pro-United States, the same way you have black people who are pro-US, pro-elitist. So I think every group has that division. And it’s not just black people, it’s everywhere. Imperialism has permeated the minds of every single corner of this world. But black people have such a foundational struggle in which all other struggles are born out of. Anti-blackness was spread across the globe by not just the United States, but Europe as well. And it’s that anti-blackness that justifies every other type of discriminatory, every other type of racism comes from anti-blackness. So I think it’s a matter of just tying the black struggle to struggles across the globe, to U.S. out of South Korea, U.S. out of the Philippines. All of that is foundationally tied to anti-blackness, racism against black people. And black people are aware of this. Whether you’re a black cop, whether you’re a black person that makes a million dollars, you know racism is real in this country. That is something you know, despite how successful you were able to be. And so it’s just a matter of acknowledging that struggle, acknowledging the foundational racism in the United States and how it has manifested itself today.

The structures of racism, the structures of slavery have not gone away. The push to make homelessness illegal and to imprison people for being homeless is directly tied to slavery. The fact that this is the foundation of organizing black people is recognizing that a lot of the systems that have historically oppressed us has not gone anywhere.