Dispatches From Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies

Who killed the panthers? Who killed Malcolm x and king? Who has blacks and Latinos locked up in jails? Who has attacked sovereign nations all over the world, in Latin America and now the middle east? Who made a deal with Japan to colonize Korea in exchange for the Philippines? The US government, and it still walks out of the World Conference Against Racism, avoids confronting its past and present actions. If we don't fight and change this system, no one else will. If you want to begin to understand what we are up against and what we can do to confront it, Read Dispatches!

If you want to understand the origins of racism you should read Wretched of the earth, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton. If you want to understand capitalism, read Marx, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Africa, Capitalism and Slavery, The Open Veins of Latin America. If you want to understand US imperialist policies, read Lenin, Fidel Castro, Chomsky, or Che Guevara. If you want to fight against all of the above, then dispatches from Durban is a good place to start to understand the present problems that have the roots in the historical realities mentioned. Yet it is necessary to build a movement of resistance that will challenge the oppressive structures based on our understanding of the above and how they have shaped the reality that we face today. Dispathces is that book, in that it presents an argument for resistance within and to the US, and it¡¯s a good one.

Dispatches from Durban was great!! To think how such an important event like the World Conference Against Racism was given so little or no attention, especially in this country. Even though the US always makes a point to emphasizes how it is a free, democratic country of different races living together, it still will not acknowledge such a historic conference that began to discuss and go into the problems, past and present of Racism. For a government that tries to affirm its inclusiveness and tolerance, the US government delegation could not even stay in a conference that was put on by the United Nations and attended by the world. Not even the European colonizing countries that initiated the racist legacy we live in today did what the US did. What does the US have to Fear, if it has done right by the different racial groups and truly have a peaceful, harmonious multiracial society? Yet with the latest invasion of Iraq, racist propositions in California and actions in the US, it is ever more clear of the continual maintenance of Racist policies, at home and abroad. Dispatches analysis and describes this countries continual perpetration to its own people and those around the world, the importance of the World Conference Against Racism in leading the fight against Racism and how we can build from that event a new radical movement to challenge it.

In a time when the US government becomes more aggressive and destructive with people abroad and at home, it is important to read books like Dispatches from Durban that propose what we who live in the US can do to challenge this system. It was good to read a book that has ideas of how we fight today, and though Dispatches does not answer all or have an all encompassing plan, it's a good book that begins the dialog that all people, who fight for justice and freedom in this country, and in the world, can read and understand the problems that we face.