When Chickens Come Home To Roost: On the Milwaukee Incident
Yesterday, an employee of Molson-Coors Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin entered his place of employment with murder, revenge and retaliation on his mind. The alleged shooter was a 51 year old New Afrikan male named Anthony Ferrill. Judging from media, on the ground, and family/acquaintance reports, Ferrill was an individual that was wracked with mental health issues. He supposedly accused co-workers of visiting his residence in the dark of night, bugging his computer, and moving around furniture — signs of paranoid delusions consistent with schizophrenia. Mental health is something that is rarely discussed or treated in New Afrikan communities, particularly among men of Mr. Ferrill’s age. We are conditioned by society, our families and our national community to be paragons of outward strength and immobility, mountains, even though we are crumbling inside from the stress that is inherent to living in a country and a society that wants us dead. This is why so many of us turn to fratricidal violence, drug abuse, and other antisocial behavior, because the pressures of this wicked and cruel society that abuses us so become simply too much for a mere vessel of flesh and blood and bone and brain to take.
Mr. Ferrill, according to unverified reports, filed a lawsuit against the company where he had worked as an electrician for several decades, alleging racist abuse and psychological torment. Mr. Ferrill was a journeyman electrician and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). He worked hard and long to provide for his family, and he was also incidentally a veteran of service to the country that eventually provoked him to homicide. Ferrill was a Coast Guard veteran, serving from 1987 to 1991 and earning honorable discharge. His neighbors speak of a man who worked hard and served the community, assisting the elderly with home repairs and whatever else was needed. The company at which Ferrill was employed has been subject to racial discrimination lawsuits in the past, with accounts of nooses hung on black employees’ lockers, racist graffiti, and various other depredations committed against nonwhite employees that contributed to a hostile work environment. An individual named Tony Muhammad said on Facebook: “The shooter at Millers Coors is reported to suffer racial discrimination and harassment from white co-workers. He recently filed a civil lawsuit against Miller Coors’s racist work environment. The racist co-workers had hung a hangman noose on his locker. He was rehired after the lawsuit five years ago. The white racist male harassment continue when he returned to work at Miller Coors..The racist coworkers this time humiliated the 51-year-old African American male by pasting spade cards on his work locker and making his workday unbearable with racist antics. The Brother evidently was forced over the edge of sanity to make a violent and act to end Miller Coors workforce racist harassment. Perhaps with this most recent reported incident of workforce white male racism against African American Miller Coors in the City of Milwaukee will make fair and equal employment for all a matter of private and public policy… Miller Coors has a long history of tolerating its white brewery worker racist behavior and acts against Black brewery workers.” Similar incidents have occurred at a variety of industrial plants over the past few years, most notably at Ford Motor Company.
This shows a few things. For one, regardless of colonizer leftist posturing about the class struggle being the main contradiction in imperialist countries like the US, the main contradiction, that which informs all others, is the contradiction between the colonizer nation and the colonized. White workers, who, generally, are paid more and receive more benefits from their labor due to the continued super exploitation of colonized labor, continue to be violently racist and do not see colonized people as their class siblings. They feel no affinity or solidarity with the masses of migrant workers, prisoners, or temp workers with felony convictions, nevermind the masses of the rest of the world who provide the bulk of the labor that makes their standard of living possible. They continue to see themselves as supreme. They drove Mr. Ferrill, a proud union man and colonized proletarian, to the brink, mentally and psychologically. Yesterday, they reaped the bitter and bloody harvest of their foolishness, just as the Dallas Police Department did when Micah X. Johnson was imbued with the spirit of Dessalines and Mark Essex and Nat Turner and painted the streets of that town built on my people’s bruised shoulders red with their blood.
What is the lesson? There must be a renewed, militant, New Afrikan labor movement in the vein of the DRUM, ELRUM and other revolutionary union movements that swept Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement must be guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with New Afrikan characteristics, meaning MLM being used as a framework but the experience and analysis derived from the New Afrikan revolutionary experience being taken into account. We must harness the lessons of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, and other great leaders in our history just as Mao channeled the spirit of Sun Tzu and synthesized it with Marxism. There must be revolutionary people’s mental health units, and semi-clandestine people’s fighting teams in every factory and place of employment to deal with racists, fascists, and other filth outside of the system. There must be solidarity built between all strata of workers, from temps to contractor employees to regular employees, with special emphasis built on strengthening lengths between colonized workers of different nations. When we strike, we must strike as one iron fist, not as separate fingers of the hand who take it until we snap.
