You come against me with hatred and oppression
and violence.
I come against you in the name of God.
This flag comes down today!
I consider myself as stepping into a movement
that existed long before I got here.
And I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have
done what I did in 2015, if I didn’t believe,
you know, if I didn’t believe in the power
of the people to work together and transform
the world.
So, the things that I’m seeing now, I mean,
that’s what I fight for.
I think that’s what everyone who participates
and takes action in social justice movement,
that is what we’re fighting for, and that’s
what we believe.
I think it reflects around the world an impatience
with the pace of incremental progress.
I think people want transformational change.
I think people are tired of centuries of colonialism
and white supremacist ideology.
As I mentioned before, I think the taking
down of monuments and symbology, specifically,
is also about challenging this idea that white
property and state property is more valuable
than our lives.
I mean, that was really the ideology that
informed colonialism, that it’s OK to exploit
people and lands for profit because profit
and property is worth more than lives and
natural resources.
And so, this groundswell that we’re seeing
now around the world is really about rejecting
that and about calling for a greater sense
of humanity, a greater sense of human citizenship,
a call for dignity and for a better future,
and a rejection of that kind of ideology of
the past.
I think there also needs to be an acknowledgment
of how mainstream white supremacist ideology is.
So, if we’re going to really have this process
of removing symbols, of renaming things, I
want us to also be careful that we don’t
just engage in a surface-level way of going
about it — right? — where we just simply change 
the names, but we don’t address the ideology.
Military bases, for instance, of course, are
a major part of United States imperialism.
United States imperialism is very much informed
by white supremacist ideology.
So, when Trump is making this claim that he
will never change the Confederate — the
names of the bases that are named after Confederates,
and people are saying, “Oh, that’s so
outrageous,” I think, yes, of course, it
is outrageous, but we also need to examine
why was it named after a Confederate to begin
with.
I mean, that clearly indicates how mainstream
the ideology of the Confederacy continued
to be and continues to be in the United States
of America, that we’re still having this
debate in 2020.
And then, secondly, like I said, we need to
make sure that we are also examining what
exactly is white supremacist ideology, because
the Confederacy was half of the United States.
And I think there tends to be this narrative
around the South being uniquely racist, it
is only the South that benefited and profited
from slavery, it is only the South that continues
to uphold white supremacist ideology.
This most recent spate of police killings
and a lot of the uprisings, these are happening
all over the nation.
Many of these uprisings are happening in cities
where the leadership is Black now, and we
even have like Black police chiefs and Black
mayors.
So we have to dig deeper in really understanding
what it means to uproot and root out white
supremacist ideology as we go through this
process of renaming things and changing symbols.
