(Mathewos Samson, Georgia House District 58 Representative-elect with his parents.)
Before I do another happy dance over the victory of Democratic Socialist Mathewos Samson who, as of this writing, is the state of Georgia’s House Representative-elect of District 58, let me quickly share a few things about Democratic Socialism’s growing appeal.
The Democratic Socialist Association’s membership is now roughly and only 100,000 members give or take a few. There are now over 250 Democratic Socialists currently holding public office. And roughly 60% of Americans under the age of 30 view socialism favorably. The uptick in interest in Democratic Socialists began in 2016, with over 90% of them elected after 2019.
Just last year in 2025 after my euphoria over Zohran Mamdani’s win as the newly elected Mayor of New York city, the Washington Examiner published an article titled “Democratic Socialists quietly capture city councils across America” giving credence to the old adage that “All Politics is Local.” It is. And you should pay attention to it.
Yet the point of and the work of the United States’ Democratic Socialists is to build from the ground up—local politics and local accountability are where the people can see the work and the attempts to get the work done.
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Atlanta’s first elected Democratic Socialist Liliana Bakhtiari, a native Atlantan elected to the Atlanta City Council in 2022. A native Atlantan of Iranian descent who was raised in Southeast Atlanta, who was also the first Queer and nonbinary Muslim elected. “She/They” was followed by Kelsea Bond as the second nonbinary Democratic Socialist elected to the Atlanta City Council in November 2025. What does this mean? It means that grassroots activism is back. Mathewos Samson campaigned for her (or I should say “they/them”) back in November 2025 and Bond won.
My first introduction to the concept of Democratic Socialism came when I was in my early teens. Salvador Allende of Chile won the presidency as a socialist devoted to democracy. When he was assassinated the talk ranged from him committing suicide (not at all likely) to his being eliminated in a U.S.-backed military coup (completely likely).
Salvador Allende’s nephew Dr. Juan Allende was my Political Science professor at Agnes Scott College. He never flinched in his moral and ethical convictions. Dr. Allende (who had a Master’s degree in theology) often called himself a “failed preacher.” It was Dr. Allende who not only introduced me to the many African syncretic religions of the Caribbean and Latin America brought here via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but also to the philosophy and ethics of Afro-American theologian James Cone. Dr. Allende stood firm in his belief in the sanctity of every human being having the right to live the life they saw fit.
As for the old cynics: You have every right to be cynical and to be discouraged. We are living in some very troubling times. Yet, let me remind you what young people are for. They are here to remind you that when we elders put down our batons for the last time that someone else will pick it up.
If you are Afro-American, Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean and all others in the great Afro dispersion you have a duty to your ancestors to place your efforts and your faith in the young, to sit down and let them do the work, and to answer the damned telephone when they call and say “I hit a brick wall, what do you think I should do?” Your wisdom, as well as your restraint, should kick in if you have not indulged yourself in your ego and your own victimization to the point where you no longer understand that you were never intended to finish the race, only to hand over the baton.
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The following below that is written in italics is partially a meditation on Cuba. It is a response I wrote to a piece about Cuba’s current crisis exacerbated by American neglect and cruelty that was written by Arturo Dominguez. A link to his exceptional article is at the very end of this essay. What’s in italics is a rumination I wrote to Arturo:
“I still remember reading that when Afro-Cuban musical artists came to perform in the United States that they had to perform in the U.S. for free. When asked why they were willing to perform for nothing, the answer was always the same: “We want to see where Dizzy Gillespie was born.”
Thanks for this report Arturo Dominguez because every time there is a sanction, a deprivation, I am reminded that no one suffers in Cuba but the people themselves. I still remember the heinous and wretched Helms-Burton Act which banned ships who docked in Cuba’s ports from docking in the United States for several months.
I remember my professors having to fly out of Atlanta to Canada and then taking a flight from some airport in Canada to Havana to do whatever research they were performing on their visits.
The United States has done nothing but made an example of Cuba as a message to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that says “This is how far we’ll go; this is how bad we’ll treat you, if you don’t fall in line.”
I might just turn this comment into a meditation.”
A few moments after reading Arturo’s essay I stumbled on one of my favorite thinkers Vijay Prashad who also was offering his thoughts on the viciousness of the United States government against the Cuban people because it is the people that suffer—No one else. (A link to Vijay’s essay is at the end.)
I don’t have the strength to comment on Prashad’s piece right now except that it is brilliant and accurate. I will leave it to you dear reader to examine both his and Arturo’s essays at your leisure. I have only one thing to say.
One line of my paternal family was sold as slaves from Santiago de Cuba to the mainland United States during the period of slavery in this Western hemisphere. My paternal great grandmother was born a slave named Mollie Laws. Her previous family surname was Layende.
Like most people during the 1700s and 1800s, when one moved (or was sold) some place else the last name was changed to adapt to the new culture one was inhabiting. In the United States, it was typically expected that you Anglicize your name to something that English speakers could pronounce. So “Layende” became “Laws.”
Anyhow I used to relay my personal history to my History students in an effort to make sure that they understood that Chattel slavery took place throughout the Western world. Importantly, what we now call the United States received less than 6 percent of all the Africans transported to this hemisphere during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The majority of Africans (around 95 percent) landed in what is now named Latin America and the Caribbean.
I don’t have any deep analysis here about how difficult Afro-American genealogy can be. I don’t have any deep commentary about the many cultures and cultural differences that exist between all of the descendants of Africa who occupy this hemisphere except I have always known that for better or worse I belong to them.
Right after I read Arturo’s essay and then Vijay’s essay, I recalled a favorite memory from the classroom. A student whose name escapes me now came to class after Spring Break with a faded photograph he took while out on the Atlantic ocean.
He learned that I had roots in Cuba and so did he. He pulled out this faded photo taken on the water. Far off in the distance I saw something that looked like a line stretched across the water.
“What is that long line in the water that I see in the distance?,” I asked.
“That line across the water in the distance is Cuba, Ms. Allen. I hope you get there someday.”
I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.
The photo below of Don Warden is from the archives of Khalid and Jamila al Mansour. Don Warden was one of the founders of the Afro-American Association at the University of California at Berkeley. The other founding members were Donald Hopkins, Otho Green, and Henry Ramsey.
This organization formed in late 1961 and began as a student study group in 1962 at the University of California at Berkeley when there were literally no identifiable Afro-American and African Studies programs on any U. S. college and university campus. The group devoured works by Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois and other Black scholars that were left out of many colleges curricula. Study meetings of its members initially began at the off-campus home of a UC Berkeley student, and grew from there. In fact, chapters of this organization appeared on hundreds of college campuses in the United States with members numbering in the thousands by the mid-1960s.
The objective of the group was to read and study about the Afro-American, African, and Afro-Diasporic past in order to confront the institutional racism, colonialism and bigotry found in the United States and throughout the world.
Warden, a UC Berkeley law student, regularly went into Black neighborhoods and literally spoke to young Black citizens directly on street corners or wherever they were. He encouraged them to study about Afro-American and African history in order to fight against their feelings of worthlessness that often accompanied experiencing chronic racism.
He listened to them tell him about their problems of unemployment, poor housing, you name it. He, like most of his members, espoused that in order to change all systems of oppression, one needed to study about the past in order to do so. Warden eventually became a lawyer for the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense as well as granting legal assistance to the Nation of Islam when Malcolm X was still a member of the group.
The Afro-American Association was heavily influenced by the ideologies of Black American activists Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X. The AAA understood that only sustained study of Black people/s would foster the kind of thinking and strategies for combating systems that sought to suppress and control Black and Brown communities all over the world. Only deep research would correct the far-too-often feelings of inadequacy that came with being Black and oppressed.
In 1962 when this study group, that was soon named the Afro-American Association, began its study group meetings at UC Berkeley there were roughly only about 100 Black students out of 20,000 white students. And in 1962 there were only two members of the group that were not born in the United States. One was from Jamaica; the other was from India.
In 1962 this tall, skinny, young Black man from Orange Hill, Jamaica and this petite and short, very brown young woman from Chennai, Tamil Nadu (in Southern India) dressed in her Sari and sandals met in an AAA group meeting.
The young man from Jamaica gave a pristine evaluation of how Great Britain had created a rather stiff and proper group of elite Black Jamaicans that often mimicked the mores and habits of British society. It was done, he said, to shield the world from knowing how racist the British empire actually was. The young man was calm, studious with very edgy ideas about the colonization of Black people/s around the world.
The young brown woman in her Sari and sandals was intrigued. She too had been a British subject in her native state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. She knew something about what this young man spoke of, but not all of it. Back then, the typical path for academically talented Indian and Jamaican students was to study in England, that is if they could secure a path to graduate school.
She rejected that path because there was no major in Biochemistry in India or in the UK that would have been available to a female. The skinny guy from Jamaica also rejected the educational path to the UK. His decision was so unusual that the approval for his exit from Jamaica took so long that he arrived at UC Berkeley two weeks after the Fall 1961 semester begun.
He, Dr. Donald Harris became a leading economist and she, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris became a leading biomedical scientist, a contributor to the identification of the function of rMNA, which greatly improved treatments for breast cancer.
The early members of the Afro-American Association described her as warm, funny, “down for the cause” of Civil Rights and an end to colonialism, and also a fiery debater. At first one member of the AAA noted that some of them thought she was royalty because of the way she carried herself. Yet, she fit right in, several members noted. He was described as professorial even though he was in his early 20s. While their eventual marriage didn’t last (they married roughly 10 months after meeting), their firstborn daughter Kamala noted that she knew they loved each other and felt that if they had been a bit older and a bit more emotionally mature they might have made it.
She cited them both as activists, and remembers going to protest marches with her parents in a stroller. The blueprint for their activism and for the creation of Afro-American and African Studies as disciplines were rooted in the activities in the Afro-American Association. While at UC Berkeley, Shyamala met and influenced arguably, one of Afro-America’s most important philosophers, Cedric Robinson.
Robinson’s book Black Marxism, first published in 1983, remains one of the most brilliant critiques and reassessments of the Eurocentric theories of Marxism. It has become a must-read in the literary canons of both Afro-American and African Studies.
It was Robinson who coined the phrase “Racial Capitalism.” He argued that capitalism was always based on race and race came before capitalism. Importantly there never was a clean break from European feudalism. He was one of the first Black scholars to identify “race,” as a component that European empires used when feudalism morphed into capitalism.
Any study he maintained had to be central to Black people/s’ lived experiences wherever they were in the world. When I first read him, it became apparent that European Marxist scholars either forgot or tried to ignore that the peoples of Europe were once considered “races,” races and national identities that were eventually erased in exchange for their being identified as “white” which served the interests of European countries in their quest to colonize and dominate large portions of the world.
In 1959, Shyamala Gopalan was standing in line behind Cedric Robinson while they were both registering for classes. Both became members of the Afro-American Association. In the first edition of Black Marxism, there was only one person who was not a Black American listed in his group of early friends that Robinson acknowledged as influential on the development of his ideas. That person was Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris.
So here’s a brief mini-history of the continuing of the Afro-American Association of University of California at Berkeley. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who founded the Black Panther Party became members. Huey dared to show up at a meeting of AAA without having read the book assigned for that session. The members sent him home. He never showed up again unprepared.
Future Congressman Ron Dellums was a member of the AAA at one time as was Kenny Freeman, a contributor to the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan. The AAA literally laid the academic groundwork for Afro-American and African Studies programs throughout the nation as underscored by historian and author Donna Jean Murch who traced the evolution and development of the Black Panther Party from its roots in the Afro-American Association. None of it began without the required reading and research and the on-the-ground grassroots activism that met Black communities in the Oakland area where they were.
I could go on about how police monitored the group’s members particularly when they spoke on street corners, or visited high schools to encourage reading and research among members of the Black community. Yet, I will not do that mainly because well-meaning, good people have started to use the internet like an online set of Cliffnotes.
If you’re old enough to remember Cliffnotes you also remember that occasionally they were used instead of reading the actual book or doing the actual research. Yet, your ass was grass when a teacher or professor asked you a highly specific question that Cliffnotes did not cover and you hadn’t bothered to read the whole book.
So there’s a small bibliography below with a list of books that are worth your time. The message is clear: Either you put in the time and read or you remain a dilettante on matters that you need to know both for your safety and your sanity.
This essay was previously posted on Substack on January 22, 2026.
I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.
Recommended Readings:
Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California by Donna Jean Murch
Fanon for Beginners by Deborah Baker Wyrick
Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era by Ashley D. Farmer
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson
Any belief that is based on distorted facts or on lies will eventually swallow you whole. Any weird science that has been used to perpetuate myths and half truths can get you injured or killed.
I read an abstract of an article from 2009 called Pedophilia, hebephilia and the DSM-V awhile back. DSM-V stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. This quote from its abstract stood out:
“One possibility would be to replace the diagnosis of Pedophilia with Pedohebephilia and allow the clinician to specify one of three subtypes: Sexually Attracted to Children Younger than 11 (Pedophilic Type), Sexually Attracted to Children Age 11-14 (Hebephilic Type), or Sexually Attracted to Both (Pedohebephilic Type). We further recommend that the DSM-V encourage users to record the typical age of children who most attract the patient sexually as well as the gender of children who most attract the patient sexually.”
The abstract noted in 2009 that the term “hebephilia,” which described an adult that had a sexual preference for pubescent children ages 11 to 14, had not caught on. That term still has not caught on.
Pedophilia, which describes someone who has a marked sexual preference for children who have not yet begun puberty is still the preferred term to designate adults who have a sexual preference for underage youth. I am going to play devil’s advocate here.
What is missing from these definitions is the alleged safety clauses for children aged 15 and older. What’s blatantly clear, at least it was in 2009, was that anyone aged 16 or older could be classified as a pedophile as long as their victim/s were at least 5 years younger. In other words a 16-year-old male classified as “pedophile” would necessarily be or attempt to be sexually active with a child/children 11-years-of-age or younger.
If you’re scratching your head, you should be. I can understand a grown man or grown woman looking at a 15 or 16 year old and thinking that those teenagers are awfully cute. Yet, propriety and ethics and morals and good old common sense should remind these same adults that these “teenagers” have no business climbing into bed with them for any reason. It’s called decency.
After I read the recent, pathetically weak reporting on what has been released so far from the Epstein Files, I knew I needed to revisit some of the data on pedophilia. Here’s why?
White Western science has a tendency to describe any and all rotten ass behavior as some form of mental disorder rather than defining certain behavior for what it is: the “I-do-what-I-do-when-it-suits-me-and-when-I-can-stay-in-control-when-I-do-it” syndrome. White male patriarchy, in all of its excesses and perversions, is protected by the science.
The white or Black guy that cannot get any woman to have sex with him because he doesn’t know how to talk to or court well-educated adult women might end up in a sexual tryst with a vulnerable and impressionable 16-year-old because he found her attractive because she’s physically well-developed, but mentally she’s still a kid—and his sick, predatory, control freak ass already knows it.
I am not willing to paint such men as “mentally ill” as much as I am willing to paint them as ethically and morally corrupt. In other words, they are rotten to the core.
The revelation that there is in excess of over 1.7 million documents in the Epstein Files and that there were at least 10 co-conspirators that aided and abetted Epstein and other men of his ilk ought to tell you something.
If the frontal cortex of your adult brain doesn’t reach full maturity until you are at least in your mid-to-late twenties, ask yourself the following questions:
Why is the average age of sexual consent across 30 states in the United States only 16-years-of-age? Why do only a handful of states place the age of consent at age 17, with a remaining 11 states placing the age of consent at age 18?
Do not tell yourself that lie that you were wise when you were between the ages of 16 and 18. It doesn’t matter if you remember that lovely moment when you and another 16 year old decided to do the deed because you were just a couple of horny teenagers. It does matter if that 35-year-old guy that you thought was so cool for being interested in you ran his hand up your dress and coerced you into a sexual scenario that you were not ready for.
The Supreme Court was established in March of 1789. Yet, it wasn’t until Ruth Bader Ginsberg (long before she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993), argued in 1977 in “Sex Bias in the U. S. Code” that she co-authored for the Commission on Civil Rights, that boys and men could be and often were raped and/or sexually exploited. So many men were so damned caught up in patriarchy and male sexual prowess that they didn’t even know to look out for themselves. They still don’t.
The young prosecutor Kamala Harris remembered her high school best friend as having been molested by her father. She pressed her friend to tell her what was going on. Young Kamala remembered that her friend often did not want to go home.
Kamala told her mother what was going on with her friend; they took this girl into their home. When Kamala made the decision to become a prosecutor she specialized in prosecuting pedophiles and rapists. Do you think if she were president we would be getting Epstein updates in dribs and drabs? I think not.
I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.
When I was an undergraduate History major at Agnes Scott College I took a course in Chinese History from Dr. Penelope Campbell. Dr. Campbell had literally created a program of study in Chinese History a while back to accommodate a student who was then named Mary Brown who later became ASC’s first alumna president as Mary Brown Bullock.
When I took Dr. Campbell’s class it became apparent that she and I were not exactly on the same page politically. We debated often but it was not contentious. It was rather intellectually stimulating.
One day at a reception that I attended with my mother on the Agnes Scott campus, I introduced Dr. Campbell. “Mama, I gave this lady a hard time when I took her class.”
Dr. Campbell stopped me. “No, Leslye you argued your points well. You stood your ground. You know, we professors and teachers live to see the success of our students.”
I thought about Dr. Campbell’s comments and compliment to me when former representative Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to block Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from assuming the position of ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
All I could think was there are very few people in the House of Representatives and the Senate like the majority of the people who taught me; or like myself.
I taught college History for seven years and it is always an absolute joy to hear about a former student’s success.
Unlike these bought and paid for politicians, the best educators not only want, but expect, their students to do well; and they are delighted when those students outdo them.
I could go on about my disappointment with Pelosi, but I won’t. I will only ask that you talk to educators.
Leslye Joy Allen 