Yellow Peril Supports Black Power: The Unification of Struggle

In an unprecedented act of solidarity on behalf of the Chinese people, in 1963, with the blessing of Robert F. Williams — Mao Tse-tung expressed unwavering support for Black peoples’ struggle for civil rights. In his statement he makes a call to action:

“I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colours in the world, whether white, black, yellow or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practised by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination.”

Robert F. Williams in Beijing with Chairman Mao

This statement, much to the dismay of the Kennedy administration, was a powerful one. It uniquely linked the struggles of Africans in amerikkka with those of poor, working-class, colonized individuals all over the world.

While the actual phrase was not coined until 1969, on a placard made by controversial Black Panther Party field marshall Richard Aoki, I believe that Mao’s statement was the true beginning of “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.”

Richard Aoki was known as the “Minister of Education” for the Berkeley, California chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Since then, there has been a long history of Asians in the imperial core supporting revolutionary Black Power movements. Asian revolutionaries such as Yuri Kochiyama worked alongside Malcolm X. Asian activist organizations played an important role in jail support of Huey P. Newton and other black radicals who were locked up on fallacious charges.

While it is important not to center any one colonized group in the struggle for liberation, it is much more important not to divide these struggles, but rather have them support each other.

This ideal has been all but lost to reactionary organizations such as “The New Black Panther Party,” who, in May, as a response to western media allegations of racism against African individuals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), saw it fit to call for a boycott of Chinese-American businesses across the country; Even going so far as to lead a demonstration at a Chinese restaurant in the Washington D.C. where they denounced the government of the PRC and even trampled a PRC flag. Ironically enough, the owners of the restaurant immigrated from Hong Kong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_JI37CPfB4

Unsurprisingly, this group has long-since been denounced by members of the original Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale called the organization “xenophobic” and “absurd.”

This was not an empty description by Seale. This reactionary, sinophobic action only serves the interest of the white power structure by creating an imaginary divide amongst the two colonized groups. Imperialist media knows this, and this action was picked up by far-right pundits, such sell-out Asian journalist Andy Ngô, to separate the struggles of Asians and Africans in the imperial core.

Crime statistics are often used to dissociate Asians from other colonized groups — by perpetuating the model minority myth. Even before the narrative existed, Mao would have realized it is just that — a myth. He would realize the perception of black and brown criminality is a result of colonialism and imperialism; that with the help of the East and its people, black people can be truly emancipated, and that those -isms can be purged from this earth. He even says so in his statement from 1963:

“The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

People of all Colonized nations are equal, and as a result, so are their struggles. In the realization that all these struggles are the result of colonialism and the neocolonialists that uphold white power’s dictatorship over Colonized peoples’ land, labor and resources; we must also realize that these contradictions can only be overturned by — not even solidarity — but unity.

Don’t let that historical act of solidarity by Mao die. Unify these struggles — fight back and get free!

Originally published in Black Hammer Times 6/19/20

Adapted for Portfolio purposes 6/15/21