Green party presidential hopeful Jill Stein announced this week that she’d picked Ajamu Baraka, a human-rights activist and death penalty opponent, as her running mate.
“Ajamu Baraka is a powerful, eloquent spokesperson for the transformative, radical agenda whose time has come,” Stein said in a statement. “An agenda of economic, social, racial, gender, climate, indigenous and immigrant justice.”
But his brand of far-left progressive politics is way more radical than many people might think.
To nobody’s surprise, Baraka is vocal supporter of the black liberation movement. Before joining the political arena, he worked as an activist on the board of Africa Action, led the Black Left Unity Network’s Committee on International Affairs, and contributed to publications including the Black Agenda Report.
For the past six years, he has also kept a fairly active political blog, where he muses about political affairs, popular culture and race relations. Aptly described as “a site of radical possibility” and “resistance,” the blog takes issue with pretty much everything anyone (including fellow black progressives) has ever done in the “corrupt, degenerate, white supremacist monstrosity that is the United States.” His list of targets ranges from Barack Obama and Ta Neishi Coates, to Béyonce, Bernie Sanders and Bill Clinton. Here’s a taste of Baraka’s radical agenda.
In a post dated June 2016, Baraka makes the curious argument that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to push for death penalty in case of Dylann Roof (the white supremacist suspected of killing nine black people in the Charleston church shooting) is a poorly disguised attempt by the U.S. government to brainwash black folks.
According to Baraka, “state propagandists” like Lynch (who, remember, is black) are merely pandering to African Americans to make them forget that the same DOJ only indicted one police officer responsible for the death of an unarmed black man during the eight years that Barack Obama has been president.
Earlier in the post, Baraka denounces the choice of Bill Clinton—whom he calls a “rapist” and “petty opportunist politician”—to deliver Muhammad Ali’s eulogy at his funeral. He also deplores the media’s attempt to whitewash the boxer’s radical political agenda in the wake of his death.
“With the passing of Muhammad Ali, we are witnessing a phenomenon similar to what we saw with Dr. King, when the family allowed the state to define the meaning of Dr. King’s activism and the movement that created him,” Baraka wrote.
President Obama, Loretta Lynch and other members of the “black petit bourgeoisie” are not role models, in his view. They are merely puppets—living proof that the white supremacist machine has successfully hijacked the minds of black people.
Unlike Obama and Lynch, he says, “Muhammad Ali and the black liberation movement […] stands as counter-narratives to those attempts by the state to “Americanize” the Africans in the territory called the U.S.”
In another post titled “Paris Attacks and the White Lives Matter movement,” Baraka argues that France, Belgium and others nations marred by terrorism in recent months got their just desserts.
“While the victims of the violence in Paris may have been innocent, France was not,” he writes. For him, the crimes committed against Arabs, Muslims and Africans, the horrors of colonialism and the concerted efforts by French and U.S. authorities to fund extremist groups in the Middle East are to blame for the woes of Western societies, including the blowback in November.
“Although a number of the dead in Paris are young Arabs, Muslims and Africans, in the global popular imagination, France, like the U.S. (even under a black president), is still white,” he adds.
Much like the social activist bell hooks, Baraka does not see Beyonce as a progressive force in black politics. Who cares that thousands of African Americans might feel empowered when a song like “Formation” plays at the SuperBowl? Denouncing police brutality and singing about collard greens doesn’t make Queen Bey a revolutionary worthy of the title. By Baraka’s standards, she’s merely pandering to “white men” and their capitalist interests.
He then launches in a shameless display of colorism: “I cannot for the life of me understand how Beyonce’s commodified caricature of black opposition was in any way progressive” […] “I didn’t see opposition; I saw the imagery and symbols of authentic black radicalism grotesquely transformed into a de-politicized spectacle by gyrating, light-skinned booty-short-clad sisters.”
You would think that an anti-capitalist radical thinker like Ajamu Baraka would be “feeling the Bern”—but you would be wrong. His opinions on the former civil rights protest organizers and his Bernie “Bros” are far from glowing.
According to Baraka, the Sanders’ campaign did not offer a genuine program for radical change (apparently, free education and free health care aren’t radical enough) because it was tacitly committed to “Eurocentrism” and “normalized white supremacy.”
“As much as the ‘Sandernistas’ attempt to disarticulate Sanders ‘progressive’ domestic policies from his documented support for empire,” Baraka said, “it should be obvious that his campaign is an ideological prop … of the logic and interests of the capitalist-imperialist settler state.”
If you’re looking for Ajamu Baraka this summer, you’ll find him in the Johnson-Forest looking for DuBois.