Coming up on Saturday, October 12, 2024 at the Temple of New African Thought (TNAT), the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC) will hold our third Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting of the year.  Our theme will be a look at the electoral process and how we are approaching it as a community, and we have named it the “Electoral Poly-Tricks Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting”.

We invite you to come out and join us for this free community event, and let others with whom you live, work and socialize to come out as well.  This event is for the entire Pan Afrikan Community as we continue our work to build more unity in Black Baltimore, Black Maryland and the larger Pan Afrikan World.

Important Details

“Electoral Poly-Tricks”
Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting
Saturday, October 12, 2024, 12:00 Noon – 5:00 PM
Temple of New African Thought (TNAT)
5525 Harford Road
Baltimore, Maryland 21214

Be sure to enjoy delicious, healthy food and snack items from TNAT’s Diasporan Soul kitchen, available for sale during the Town Hall.

See attached flyer for more details.

Our objectives

We plan to have a panel of local community activists from TNAT, the Ujima People’s Progress Party, the Baltimore UNIA-ACL Barca-Clarke, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and more, to discuss this election season with the community.  We also invite important organizers and activists from the Pan Afrikan Community across the US and the Diaspora to join in via Zoom as well (Zoom link is available by emailing Bro. Cliff at cliff@kuumbareport.com).  We hope to share diverse viewpoints, provide some progressive analysis of the political environment, and, we hope, generate ideas on how we can better organize our community from the ground up to stand up, make our voices heard, and work for our interests.

We hope to discuss how we look at the electoral process, what things we tell ourselves that motivate our voting decisions, and how we can move away from what seems to be a dysfunctional habit of waiting four years, holding our noses to vote between what are often two or more questionable candidates, and then waiting another four years to go through the same dance all over again.

This election season is considered to be more critical than most.  We have Kamala Harris, an incumbent Vice President who some of us have questioned with regard to her Blackness, even complaining that she has claimed to be pursuing no policies that will benefit our community.  Some of us criticize her record as a prosecutor in California, some have grown weary of what they say are a litany of broken promises from her Democratic Party, and there have even been concerns that some refuse to support her simply because she is a woman.  Then, there is her main opponent, Donald Trump, a Republican ex-President who has often made bombastic statements, and who many of us consider a sexist, a racist, a liar and a wannabe dictator, yet still seems to command the respect of a considerable percentage of the US electorate.  All the while, we ignore independent party candidates, from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to the Socialism and Liberation Party’s Claudia De La Cruz to the candidacy of Dr. Cornel West, all of whose policy platforms deserve more examination than they have gotten as most of us have become obsessed with the Democratic Donkey and the Republican Elephant.  There are those who see the Democrats and the Republicans as “two wings of the same buzzard” (a quote I have used myself), and see no difference between them.  Others point to issues from the death penalty to abortion to the environment and insist the differences couldn’t be starker.  Still others see no value in the electoral process and choose not to participate in voting at all.

Some of us see this election as the most critical in history, and thus look at non-voters with disdain or even disgust.  Some of us see those who continue to participate in what they see as a broken system that was never meant to serve our interests as suckers for the system.  Still others see our participation, or not, as doomed to failure as long as we continue to behave the way we do without thinking and without strategy, influenced by innuendo, rumor, gaslighting, base lies and appeals to our emotions and prejudices.

This Town Hall Meeting is not intended to tell you who to vote for, or even whether to vote at all.  It is to present an opportunity for us to discuss, as a community, what feelings we have regarding voting, why we vote (or don’t vote) the way we do, and how we might be able to move from a community that waits for political aspirants to come to us telling us what they are willing to “give” us to a community that has developed our own Black Agenda that we can take to political aspirants and challenge them to meet our needs.  It all starts with our making a commitment to listen to each other, to think instead of simply react to what we hear and see, and to organize our communities on the ground, because no matter who becomes the next President of the United States, we as a community must learn to better organize and fight for our interests as a people.

We invite you to come out and join us. 

Again, that’s Saturday, October 12, 2024, 12:00 Noon – 5:00 PM at the Temple of New African Thought, 5525 Harford Road in East Baltimore.  If there are any questions, feel free to contact Bro. Cliff by email at cliff@kuumbareport.com.