“We greet you as comrades because it becomes increasingly clear to us each day that we share with you a common struggle; we have a common enemy. Our enemy is white Western imperialist society. Our struggle is to overthrow this system which feeds itself and expands itself through the economic and cultural
exploitation of nonwhite, non-Western peoples-the THIRD WORLD. Black people in the United States are a part of this Third World. Our people are a colony within the United States; you are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the black communities in America are the
victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation, This is in practical economic and political terms true. There are over thirty million of us in the United States. For the most part we live in sharply defined areas in the rural black belt areas and shantytowns of the South, and more and more in the slums of the northern
and western industrial cities. It is estimated that in another five to ten years, two-thirds of our thirty million will be in the ghettos-in the heart of the cities. Joining us are the hundreds and thousands of Puerto Rican, Mexican and American Indian populations. The American city is, in essence, populated by people of the Third World, while the white middle class flee the cities to the suburbs. In these cities we do not control our resources. We do not control the land, the houses or the stores. These are owned by whites who
live outside the community. These are very real colonies, as their capital and cheap labor are exploited by those who live outside the cities. White power makes the laws and enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks in the hands of white racist policemen and black mercenaries. The capitalist system gave birth to these black enclaves and formally articulated the terms of their colonial and dependent status.”
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