By Julia Wright
My response to the Guardian letter and other similar trending attempts to re-think Black international solidarity
1 – We hear a lot of trending talk about international solidarity. The Guardian letter is but one instance of the attempt to twist the historicity and the roots of Black radical international solidarity.
The Black Panther Party tradition of international solidarity to which vet Panthers including Mumia adhere today was publicly honored in 1969 at the first cultural Pan African Festival in Algiers – an event Mumia covered in the Panther journal.
That tradition of international solidarity was grounded in the thought and practice of the founding fathers of Pan Africanism, from T.R. Makonnen and George Padmore to Kwame Nkrumah , Frantz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba, in the awareness that US imperialism is the major contradiction. The survival of US vassals in Europe and what was then called the third world is subordinate to that main contradiction.
Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 book “Neo-colonialism – the last stage of imperialism” made this so crystal clear that as Vijay Prashad has shown, its publication was one of the causes of the coup d’etat instigated by the CIA with the help of a US vassal, the UK’s Mi6.
2 – So we would revise the image of the scissors thus: a pair of scissors with only one operable all powerful high tech blade – the US and Israeli genocidal planetary onslaught – while the other blade, the Iranian blade, is unsuccessfully attacked by the termites of agents, informers and shadow liberation movements trained and sent to destroy the sharpness of its sovereignty by the hubristic powers of the first blade.
And it is disingenuous and cruel to imply that those who denounce the Guardian letter are not denouncing the death penalty. On the contrary : those who oppose the Guardian rhetoric denounce the institutionalization of mass death penalty through AI-assisted US and Israeli imperialist war and genocide.
3 – Statement analysis of the Guardian letter text reveals that the term ” hollow anti-imperialism” is a slip of the pen.
The authors of the statement have indeed been trying to hollow out an Iranian anti-imperialism that has been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarallah (the Houthis) and in a lesser known instance co-drafted a UN resolution in 2020 requesting that the UN Human Rights Council send an investigative commission directly on US soil to collect evidence of US racist police brutality after George Floyd’s murder. That Iran / Burkina Faso/ State of Palestine draft was out voted by Trump’s allies in the UN and replaced by a milder one saving the US from the embarrassment of a commission of inquiry at its front door. However Assata’s lawyer, Lennox Hinds, set up an International Inquiry Commission which did send Commissioners to investigate white supremacist police brutality on US soil – thus honoring the spirit of the Iran/ Burkina Faso/ Palestine draft. And the international solidarity with our Black Lives shown by those three states even as they were fighting for their own national sovereignty against US imperialism (and the vassal French) was made as clear then as it is forgotten today.
Let us remember this history.*
4 – We are now being asked to re-define international solidarity as if it did not exist before and out of context.
This is a typical tactic of those who are busy deleting and erasing our history so that they can rewrite it – writing our thought and our practice out.
It is also an admission of the fear our international solidarity and its historical momentum have created in the white supremacist mindset today.
The axis of international solidarity that has enabled Iran to survive the US/ Israeli onslaught has created fear of defeat among those who earn billions with the war.
The growing admission that the world’s future cannot co-exist with a genocide in Gaza – or anywhere – has finally come home to roost in spite of a denial stronger than the iron dome.
Let us not forget the momentum we have created – the very momentum texts like the Guardian letter try to eviscerate.
5 – So let us beware of efforts to erase ancestral thought and practice of winning international solidarity that began with W.E.B. DuBois, William Patterson, Claudia Jones taking “We charge genocide” to the UN, was carried on by Richard Wright in his “Black Power” when he coined that term in 1954 and was later quoted by an overthrown Kwame Nkrumah in “Dark Days in Ghana”- continued at the 1955 Bandung Conference and culminated in Malcolm X’s taking our human rights’ cause to the Organization of African Unity not to speak of Kwame Nkrumah welcoming African Americans to Accra until the 1966 coup d’etat.
Those grounding and unforgettable manifestations of international solidarity had one thing in common – even among the non-aligned : the main contradiction to be fought so that lesser contradictions do not metastasize – was and still is US imperialism.
In fact now that US imperialism’s pedestal is shaking, the priority is clearer than ever.
(c) Julia Wright
September 11, 2026
* ANNEX:
The text of the draft resolution sponsored by Iran, Burkina Faso and the State of Palestine on June 17, 2020 – a testament of their international solidarity to the Black radical liberation movements in the belly of the beast – a document revisionist history and new trend definitions of international solidarity would have us forget.
