New Orleans DSA stands in solidarity with the uprisings in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Columbus, Louisville, Los Angeles, and beyond. We stand in solidarity with people everywhere who are demanding freedom from racist violence at the hands of the police. We stand in solidarity with the Black-led rebellions taking place across the nation. The police are one of the lethal tools of white supremacy, used to protect capital and property rights and to crush the powerful movements of working people.
In Louisiana, we can look back to the Thibodaux Massacre in 1887, where white supremacist militias massacred hundreds of Black people after an estimated 10,000 Black sugarcane workers went on strike. We can look to the 1970 storming of the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in the Desire Housing Projects. Or we can look to the present, where PeopleReady, a temp agency that contracts labor for Metro Service Group, fires striking sanitation workers (all of whom are Black men), and forces people who are imprisoned to replace them for pennies on the dollar.
This is how the carceral state works; this is what policing is. This is not unique to Minneapolis or to “a few bad apples.” The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis came just days before the police murder of Modesto Reyes here in Jefferson Parish and on the heels of Breonna Taylor’s murder in Louisville.
We uphold the right of Black communities to protect themselves against a murderous state, and we encourage all people to join the ongoing movement to end state violence and white supremacy.
As the events this week in Minneapolis have shown, we will only win this fight when we—the multiracial working class—come together to leverage our collective power and force the end of a system that relies on white supremacist violence to maintain the status quo. This system will not end because of a moral shift in the hearts of the ruling class or in individual white people’s conscience. It will only end when we all commit to stepping up now, joining the fight for the long-term, and building our power together.
This year, New Orleans will elect a district attorney and several criminal court judges—we demand that they hold officers accountable for misconduct and brutality. The city will pass a budget this fall in the midst of a pandemic and record unemployment. We demand the city divert our tax dollars away from NOPD and surveillance contractors to community health and social services. Orleans Parish Prison, which has killed about 50 people since 2006, is at its lowest population since the 1980s. We support the demands of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and call for a mass release of incarcerated people.
We are angry, and we are mourning, and we are ready to fight.
Take action with us:
- Direct Action
- This week, join Take Em Down Nola & Workers Group daily 6pm at Duncan Plaza.
- Donate
- Get Organized
Solidarity,
New Orleans DSA