Linked with Institute for Anarchist Studies IAS.
Ashanti Alston Omowali is an anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, and former member of the Black Panther Party. Even though the party no longer exists, Alston sometimes refers to himself as a Black Panther, and sometimes as « the @narchist Panther », a term he coined in his popular @narchist Panther Zine series. He was also member of the Black Liberation Army, and spent more than a decade in prison after government forces captured him and the official court system convicted him of armed robbery.
Alston, like most anarchists, disputes the moral issues of property and terms his activity in the BLA « bank expropriation ». Alston is the former northeast coordinator for Critical Resistance, a current co-chair of the National Jericho Movement (to free U.S. political prisoners), a member of pro-Zapatista people-of-color U.S.-based Estación Libre, and is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies … (full text).
See his personal website ‘@narchist Panther‘.
He says: « Either you respect people’s capacities to think for themselves, to govern themselves, to creatively devise their own best ways to make decisions, to be accountable, to relate, problem-solve, break-down isolation and commune in a thousand different ways … OR: you dis-respect them. You dis-respect ALL of us » (on his Homepage).
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Ashanti Alston Omowali – USA
Listen to his video of 2004, 2.03 min. (strange, if you search videos on YouTube or Google with his name, the search-result shows ‘no video found’ !?!).
He says also: « Many classical anarchists regarded anarchism as a body of elemental truths that merely needed to be revealed to the world and believed, people would become anarchists once exposed to the irresistible logic of the idea. This is one of the reasons they tended to be didactic.
Fortunately the lived practice of the anarchist movement is much richer than that. Few ‘convert’ in such a way: it is much more common for people to embrace anarchism slowly, as they discover that it is relevant to their lived experience and amenable to their own insights and concerns.
The richness of the anarchist tradition lay precisely in the long history of encounters between non-anarchist dissidents and the anarchist framework that we inherited from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anarchism has grown through such encounters and now confronts social contradictions that were previously marginal to the movement. For example, a century ago the struggle against patriarchy was a relatively minor concern for most anarchists and yet it is now widely accepted as an integral part of our struggle against domination.
It is only within the last 10 or 15 years that anarchists in North America have begun to seriously explore what it means to develop an anarchism that can both fight white supremacy and articulate a positive vision of cultural diversity and cultural exchange » … (full long text, transcript of a speech given at Hunter College, NYC, on October 24th, 2003).
Find him on Google blog-search; .
Download the book: ‘Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth /Page 224‘, by Anthony J. Nocella, Steven Best – History, 2006 – 441 pages … Ashanti Alston Omowali is mentionned there on Page 224.
Read: Anarcho-Indigenism, 10-04-07.
And he says: « We have to find ways to love and support each other through tough times. It is more than just believing that we can win: we need to have structures in place that can carry us through when we feel like we cannot go another step… This system has got to come down. It hurts us every day and we can’t give up. We have to get there. We have to find new ways… Anarchism, if it means anything, means being open to whatever it takes in thinking, living, and in our relationships—to live fully and win. In some ways, I think they are both the same: living to the fullest is to win. Of course we will and must clash with our oppressors and we need to find good ways of doing it ». – Ashanti Alston Omowali, NYC, 2003.
links:
Global Project, see their Homepage in italiano and in english;
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, an American writer, activist, and Black anarchist;
The Institute for Anarchist Studies, a non-profit organization founded in 1996;
Critical Resistance, an organization that aims to dismantle the ‘ »prison industrial complex »‘, a term coined by Dwight D. Eisenhauer;
Estación Libre, an activist group founded in 1997;
No One Is Illegal MONTRÉAL, a blog.