J. Sakai is a revolutionary intellectual with decades of experience as an activist in the U.S. As he explains,
“In the Fall 1961, i found myself with other militant Sit-In veterans in the reborn Oakland chapter of Congress of Racial Equality, picketing a major store which had refused to hire New Afrikans. Even in the Bay Area that was the custom and law back then. It had started years earlier for me in high school in L.A.’s 1950’s San Fernando Valley. Where as the lone uneducated leftist i had tried unsuccessfully to sell copies of the socialist labor party newspaper (the only one i could get) every week to my classmates. At the same time was working as an Asian houseboy for the family of a Jewish used car dealer (stereotypes abound for a reason). Was fired for taking a night off for my own high school graduation. The wife lost it and screamed, ” People like you don’t need graduations!” A month later was living in a different state to find a job and avoid the “colored” military draft. And active as the novice food drive coordinator in a long, bitter, ugly hospital workers’ strike, whose main public demand was pay raises up to the federal minimum wage (we lost badly).
Have been through a thousand campaigns and movement groups since then, and can’t believe i’ve been so dumb so often. In 1975, while mostly active doing Afrikan liberation movement support with radical exiles from various countries, i started writing a historical investigation into the puzzling class politics of euro-amerikan workers. Which i naively thought would only be a quick movement paper. Eight years later what became re-titled as Settlers was finished. Even then i didn’t believe there was any audience for it, and planned to only photocopy fifty copies of my typed draft for internal education in the underground black liberation army coordinating committee. Comrades with more sense than myself insisted that we publish it as a book if only for the liberation movement. Over the years, we took it through three editions, but finally it’s time to hand it on to new publishers. Remember only, i wrote this with my life.”
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern
SKU: 9781629630373
Author: J. Sakai
Publisher: PM Press/Kersplebedeb
ISBN: 9781629630373
Published: 9/2014
Format: Paperback, ePub, PDF, mobi
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 456
Subjects: History-US/Political Science-Colonialism and Post-Colonialism
Praise
“Settlers is a critical analysis of the colonization of the
Americas that overturns the ‘official’ narrative of poor and
dispossessed European settlers to reveal the true nature of genocidal
invasion and land theft that has occurred for over five hundred years.
If you want to understand the present, you must know the past, and this
book is a vital contribution to that effort.”
—Gord Hill, author of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance
“Great works measure up, inspire higher standards of intellectual and
moral honesty, and, when appreciated for what they are, serve as a
guide for those among us who intend a transformation of reality. Settlers
should serve as a reminder (to anyone who needs one) of the genocidal
tendencies of the empire, the traitorous interplay between
settler-capitalist, settler-nondescript, and colonial flunkies.”
—Kuwasi Balagoon, Black Liberation Army
“When Settlers hit the tiers of San Quentin, back in 1986,
it totally exploded our ideas about what we as a new class of
revolutionaries thought we knew about a so-called ‘united working class’
in amerika. And what’s more, it brought the actual contradictions of
national oppression and imperialism into sharp focus. It was my first,
and as such my truest, study of the actual mechanics behind the expertly
fabricated illusion of an amerikan proletariat.”
—Sanyika Shakur, author of Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member
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