Becoming a Black communist in rural Saskatchewan

How does a half-Black kid raised on country music and cucumber sandwiches in rural Saskatchewan become a communist? Let’s get into it. 

Writer and poet Ian Williams calls burgeoning racial awareness disorientation, writing: “‘Disorientation’ refers to the effect of racial encounters on racialized people, the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s business.” My first moment of disorientation happened at the age of seven at my great aunt’s dinner table with members of my extended family. I’m sitting on my grandpa’s knee and taking in the scene. People are laughing and telling jokes and, though I don’t always understand what everyone is talking about, I feel happy to be included. Like most conversations with family, eventually we start talking about how everyone is related. We have a big family, so it’s not as easy as it sounds. After a while, my grandpa, into whose chest I’ve been nuzzling my head, turns me around to face the table like a presentation and says, “Then there was a nigger born in the family.” Everyone laughs and though I don’t fully understand why I’m so hurt, I begin to hit my grandpa until he wraps his arms around me, rendering me unable to move. Later, I’m told to apologize for my outburst. I do, but secretly I’m glad I hit him.

What’s so radical about seeing injustice in the world and wanting to end it by any means necessary?

Growing up in small-town Saskatchewan, I was typically the only Black kid in school and racial slurs were a common occurrence. Being in that type of environment beats a person down, but it also instills an unbending sense of morality and justice. As a student at the University of Saskatchewan I got involved in electoral politics, and those progressive values led to me joining the New Democratic Party (NDP). I spent my early twenties volunteering on campaigns and working as an organizer. I even moved to Alberta to work for a young Member of the Legislation Assembly. This changed by the end of 2019, when I left the party: I found myself let down looking for those progressive values. That is, until on a cold January day when I finally started reading Frantz Fanon.

Reading Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was a life-changing experience for me. It marks the moment I say my politics became radical. That word, radical, may sound scary to some, but who is it scary for? I view it as an expression with immense liberatory power. Besides, what’s so radical about seeing injustice in the world and wanting to end it by any means necessary? Isn’t it more radical to say that things should stay relatively the same, and we should only tweak and make slow adjustments to our violently unjust society at the expense of the marginalized?

Finally, my soul was ignited with a sense of meaning that I had never felt while knocking on doors for NDP candidates or organizing fundraisers. When COVID-19 shut everything down, I spent that time reading everything I could get my hands on that pertained to anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. Fanon was a Marxist, so I started with Marx and Engels. From there, I moved on to the Bolsheviks, where I encountered the work that made me a committed Marxist: Marxism and the National Question. There was no turning back once I read that pamphlet from 1913, as it gave the clearest explanation of what constitutes a nation I’ve read before or since.

It became obvious to me that colonialism has an unbreakable link with capitalism and eliminating the latter must accompany liberation from the former. 

I became invested in learning about liberation in Africa and how they conducted their struggles. I quickly put together that whether it was in Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, or South Africa, it was Marxists who led anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. It became obvious to me that colonialism has an unbreakable link with capitalism and eliminating the latter must accompany liberation from the former. 

I became particularly influenced and energized by Thomas Sankara and the revolution in what was then called Upper Volta. I saw in him someone totally committed to liberation and in government he undertook a wide-ranging set of reforms to support his people. These included land redistribution from landlords; outlawing female genital mutilation and forced marriage; vaccinating two million people for a number of infectious diseases; establishing People’s Revolutionary Tribunals to try corrupt former officials and Committees for the Defence of the Revolution so people could fully participate in governance; and renaming his country Burkina Faso, “Land of Upright Men.” For standing up and demanding dignity, he was assassinated in 1987 with the help of imperialists in France and the West.

I read more Black Marxists and learned about people like Harry Haywood, who was a leading figure in the Communist Party of the United States and lived and studied in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1930. During that time, he theorized that Black people in the United States constituted a nation that must be liberated, and in his 1948 book Negro Liberation, he argued that the root of Black oppression in America starts with agrarian issues in the South. I couldn’t help drawing parallels to issues of race, Indigenous Land Back movements and capitalism in rural Saskatchewan. Just like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other groups in the American South, it’s white landowners who control the productive forces and wield power in Saskatchewan. Let’s not forget that at one point the KKK had over 25,000 members in Saskatchewan and included the likes of member of Parliament (MP) and Regina mayor Walter Davy Cowan.

He taught me that to challenge capitalism you must organize with people on the ground, and it’s a process of working-class people coming together for the cause of revolutionary socialism.

I started to investigate Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. In them, I saw Black people fighting against oppression in the way Harry Haywood described. Though their theories slightly differed, both Haywood and Hampton were communists active in the revolutionary struggle in the United States. In his short life, Hampton was a threat to American capitalism. He organized across racial lines and on the basis of class, led political education sessions introducing people to Mao and Lenin, and brokered a non-aggression pact among rival gangs in Chicago. More than anyone else, he taught me that to challenge capitalism you must organize with people on the ground, and it’s a process of working-class people coming together for the cause of revolutionary socialism. Hampton said it best: “We’re not gonna fight fire with fire, we’re gonna fight fire with water. We’re not gonna fight racism with racism, we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism […] we’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism.”

Hampton’s profile rose quickly and he was in line to become chief of staff of the Black Panther Party when he was assassinated on December 4, 1969. Just two weeks prior, he had been invited to the Regina campus of the University of Saskatchewan (now the University of Regina), where he had met with students and then-head of the Saskatchewan Métis Society Harry Daniels. Over time his message of revolutionary socialism has been watered down to the point that Hollywood can make a movie about his murder and skip over the fact that Hampton was a Marxist-Leninist. What’s happened to Hampton isn’t unique among those with radical politics, especially if you’re Black. In fact, over 100 years ago, Lenin described the process of besmirching and then defanging revolutionaries in The State and Revolution: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say.” In 1966, only 33 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. terrorist list until 2008, but now we proudly remember them and their struggles as heroic. 

After all of this reading and thinking, I reached a number of conclusions that I feel are crucial for Black radicals in order to move our politics forward.

What does this mean for Black radicals today?

First, what we say won’t be popular. Nobody likes the person who turns over the apple cart, even if the apples are rotten. 

Second, resistance will be immense, and everything possible will be done to disrupt our work, even if that work is giving children breakfast, like Hampton did. If you’re successful enough, like Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, or the seemingly never-ending list of assassinated Black radicals, then either colonialists, imperialists, or the state will eventually act to eliminate you.

Third, we must support, learn from, form coalitions with, and work alongside those also fighting for their liberation – like the Palestinian resistance, for example. In so-called Canada, the first contradiction that must be contended with is that of Indigenous liberation and Land Back. We must have endless solidarity with land defenders and those on the front lines of colonialism, and join wherever we can to support those struggles.

They’ll say we’re too angry, too pushy and ungrateful, a little condescending. They’ll say we must slow down. They’ll say this because they recognize that their power and privilege are being challenged.

Fourth, realize that representation is not the same as liberation. Currently, there are nine Black MPs, but what has that representation done for the material conditions of working-class Black Canadians? According to the 2021 census, 12.4 per cent of Black Canadians live in poverty compared to 6.6 per cent of the population that isn’t a visible minority, and those numbers only get worse on the Prairies. Representation only matters if it leads to material improvements. Otherwise, it’s just a shallow bid to get us to shut up. When dehumanization and disenfranchisement become commonplace, any amount of acknowledgment can seem like freedom, but if we take a second to look at our conditions, we’ll notice that we’ve only painted the walls while the house is crumbling on top of us. Let’s not suffocate under the weight of the rubble.

Fifth, white people will be uncomfortable. They’ll say we’re too angry, too pushy and ungrateful, a little condescending. They’ll say we must slow down. They’ll say this because they recognize that their power and privilege are being challenged. We’ll learn who our real allies are, and it won’t be the person who posts about Black Lives Matter on Instagram only to preach non-violence to those who are being inundated by a violent system – because they haven’t really chosen non-violence. They’ve chosen to maintain the violence the oppressed face. Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s a response to that system. For the marginalized, we know it means defence. It means protection. It means resistance. It means liberation!

That is how a mixed kid on the Prairies gets radicalized, and the lessons he learns in the process. As embarrassing as it is to admit, what finally caused me to start down this path – to start seriously reading Fanon, and everything that followed from there – was watching the film Luce. It’s about a high school athlete adopted from Eritrea to white American parents who writes a paper about Fanon, arguing that colonialism can be overthrown only through violence. I had always been taught that violence was never the answer, and after the incident with my grandfather, that message was further pushed on me by my white mom and stepdad. Watching Luce, I couldn’t help identifying with the main character and I saw how Fanon gave him the answer I had been looking for: how to deal with injustice in a tangible and material way. Not just by words, or denunciations, or even legislation, but how to make real, concrete change. This is what led me to develop a deeper analysis of the need to fight the capitalist system, the system that governs our lives and is the culprit of the ills we face. Not only for Black liberation, but for everyone, we must fight together in the struggle for a better world.