FRSO Politically Lynched Me for Struggling Over the Oromo, Somali, and Other National Liberation Struggles in Ethiopia

Intro #

In early to mid 2025, I waged a political struggle within FRSO over the Oromo national liberation struggle. That struggle has been historically erased in the communist movement through folklore built around the exaltation of Ethiopia, the Oromo’s colonizer, dating back to the 19th century, which crystallized into the movement’s “defense” of Ethiopia against the Italian invasion of 1935.

Within that folklore, FRSO cadre Merawi Gerima made a film drawing a throughline from Ethiopia’s defeat of Italy at Adwa in 1896 to its resistance against Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941. The film erased the Oromos who were conquered in the lead-up to Adwa and the Oromos who rejected both Ethiopia and Italy in 1936 to form their own state, the Western Oromo Confederation. I concretely tied that historical “defense” of Ethiopia and subsequent erasure of the Oromo to Zionism.

Not even the discovery of being aligned with Zionism could deter FRSO. Because 1935 is especially exalted in its folklore, the organization did not respond by engaging my arguments. Instead, it deployed the same commandist machinery it used against the former members of FRSO Dallas in their struggle over the organization’s protection of abusers. Eventually, FRSO magnified misdeeds from my personal life while distorting and fabricating others to serve as a pretext for my expulsion in July 2025.

At the exact same time that it was criminalizing and expelling me, a Black woman, for naming a burning political question with direct bearing on the world struggle, it was covering for white men who committed rape and sexual misconduct. This gulf in treatment demonstrates that FRSO does not exist to respond to reality or to uphold the right to self-determination for oppressed people, but it exists only to maintain itself and its ossified outlook in spite of reality.

Commandism Defined #

Marxist-Leninists organize themselves along democratic centralist lines. In theory, this means that the leading bodies are elected by the membership on a democratic basis, and that the resolutions and policies of the organization are the crystallization of the ideas of the rank and file as expressed through democratic deliberation, then carried out by the elected leadership in conjunction with the rank and file. This interrelation and continuous synthesis between the rank and file and leadership is essential to ensuring that a democratic centralist organization continuously responds to the conditions the rank and file observe in their work, creating resolutions and policies on that basis.

An organization becomes commandist when leading bodies stop responding to the ideas within the rank and file and instead begin to command them from their own narrow viewpoint. In this development, the organization no longer responds to reality but increasingly becomes concerned with confirming its own ideas and political outlook whether or not they are true. Its priority then, becomes ensuring its own survival on that basis in spite of reality.

My ensuing struggle on the Oromo question then, was one of many attempts by the rank and file to be heard by leadership in general. The impetus of a FRSO member making a propagandistic film about Ethiopia, my ongoing study of Marxist theory and Ethiopian history, and my work among the masses in Chicago’s Black community made it clear that I needed to struggle on the Oromo question in particular. Thus, what ensued was both a struggle over the right to struggle in general and a particular struggle around the Oromo question to correct a 100-year-old error in the communist movement.

My Background #

I joined the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) in 2019 and was recruited to FRSO in 2022. I served as Press Secretary on the Executive Committee of CAARPR. In this role, I acted as the organization’s media spokesperson and coordinated international press coverage. I also was a leader in the 2020 uprisings and later the ongoing fight to hold police accountable, building an internal structure in CAARPR that coordinated with our members and supporters all over the city as they engaged in hyper-local police accountability struggles. In FRSO, I specialized in cadre development, where, through my day-to-day work in CAARPR, I recruited and trained new Marxist-Leninists through political education and group studies.

On Being an Oromo #

The Oromo Nation #

While I did the work in the organizations, I deeply studied Marxism and inevitably applied it, as any oppressed person would, to my own life.

Oromos are a nation of over 40 million people in Ethiopia with a millennium-long democratic history that precedes 150 years of struggle against Ethiopian occupation. Today, Oromos make up the majority of the country’s population. These facts might shock those who think of Ethiopia as homogeneous, uncolonized, or see Africa as solely oppressed by the US and Europeans. The Oromo condition, while not an exception, is the highest expression of Africa’s internal antagonisms that typical white race-oppressor frameworks cannot account for. To Oromos, Ethiopia was the colonizer.

Over time, I learned in growing detail how my own family for generations gave so much to the Oromo cause and how many were imprisoned, tortured, or killed for it. My grandmother and grandfather founded the first Lutheran church in Ethiopia in the 1930s under threat of severe repression by the Orthodox Christian state. There, they taught Oromos how to write in Afaan Oromo for the first time in history at a time when even speaking the language was punishable by death. They also founded the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Lutheran denomination in 1959, which became the beating heart of the Oromo nationalist movement, the vessel through which some of the brightest Oromo revolutionaries emerged. (1) (1)Øyvind M. Eide, Revolution & Religion in Ethiopia: The Growth & Persecution of the Mekane Yesus Church, 1974-85, 2nd ed., Eastern African Studies (Oxford: J. Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press; Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2000).

My other grandfather founded one of the first Adventist churches in Ethiopia. He and his children ran a clinic that provided free health care to the Oromo rural poor. Another relative was a hero of the Macha-Tulama movement in the 1960s, which used a loophole in Ethiopian law to organize Oromos politically for the first time in Ethiopian history. The Macha-Tulama movement fought for national development and dignity for Oromos. At the same time, it coordinated with the heroes of the Bale Revolt until it was crushed by the Ethiopian government with the help of British and American demolitions experts and Israeli counter-insurgency. This relative was poisoned. A staggering 700,000 Oromos and Somalis perished in the near decade-long Bale Revolt.

Then there is my uncle, an Oromo national hero whose name is still uttered by Oromos to this day. He co-founded the Marxist Oromo Liberation Front in 1973 and served on its Central Committee. He was later martyred as a field general in the Oromo armed struggle against the Derg military government. These are but some of my countless family members who risked or sacrificed their lives for a righteous cause of freedom and dignity for their people. Even then, such service to the cause is not a rarity for Oromos, given that our oppression in Ethiopia is so barbaric that the struggle becomes unavoidable.

The US Black Liberation Struggle as My Gateway to Oromo Consciousness #

Before entering the US Black liberation struggle, I was raised by my nuclear family as “Ethiopian,” a vague term for a state encompassing over 80 distinct peoples and many nations, each with their own territory, language, economic life, culture, and history. Many of these nations, including the Oromo and Somali, have waged continuous armed struggles for full separation from an empire they were violently integrated into. Also among them were Eritreans, who waged a three-decade liberation struggle against Ethiopian colonialism and liberated themselves in 1991.

As Ethiopia recovered from the Bale Revolt, Oromo Marxist Wollelign Mekonnen articulated in 1969 just what “Ethiopian” really meant:

What is this fake Nationalism? Is it not simply Amhara and to a certain extent Amhara-Tigre supremacy? Ask anybody what Ethiopian culture is? Ask anybody what Ethiopian language is? Ask anybody what Ethiopian music is? Ask anybody what the ‘national dress’ is? It is either Amhara or Amhara-Tigre!!

To be a “genuine Ethiopian” one has to speak Amharic, to listen to Amharic music, to accept the Amhara-Tigre religion, Orthodox Christianity and to wear the Amhara-Tigre Shamma in international conferences. In some cases to be an “Ethiopian”, you will even have to change your name. In short to be an Ethiopian, you will have to wear an Amhara mask (to use Fanon’s expression). Start asserting your national identity and you are automatically a tribalist, that is if you are not blessed to be born an Amhara. According to the constitution you will need Amharic to go to school, to get a job, to read books (however few) and even to listen to the news on Radio “Ethiopia” unless you are a Somali or an Eritrean in Asmara for obvious reasons. (2) (2)Wollelign Mekonnen, “On the Question of Nationalities in Ethiopia,” 1969, https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ethiopia/nationalities.pdf.

In sum, Ethiopian nationalism was not a pluralistic nationalism but it was the nationalism of the dominant oppressor nations within Ethiopia: the Amhara and Tigray.

Though I was Oromo on my father’s side, I was raised as an “Ethiopian” in the United States. I was forced to wear the mask. But by virtue of my skin color and being raised in the US, I was adopted into the Black American nation. I came into adulthood during the time of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and the countless other Black Americans killed by police. Eventually, through my work in the US Black liberation struggle with CAARPR, I was able to see firsthand the similarities between what I was experiencing in the Black community in Chicago and what my Oromo family members told me life was like back home. Through this, I began to move away from identifying as “Ethiopian” and began to consciously embrace my Oromo identity, learning the history in the process. To go the way I did and to learn the history in the way I did is profoundly taboo in the Ethiopian context.

Eventually, I concluded that race is not necessarily what connects Oromos to Black Americans. Rather, it was our common existence as historically constituted oppressed peoples. In fact, I found that focusing only on race could actually serve to hide Oromo oppression, given that our oppressors were historically other Black people and not Europeans.

Clearly, the stakes of the Oromo national struggle are both personal and existential for me. It was in this context that I was prepared to wage a struggle in FRSO on the Oromo question. The impetus came in March 2025. On Instagram, Ethiopian filmmaker and FRSO member Merawi Gerima shared a trailer for a film he was making with his father, a well-known Ethiopian filmmaker, about the so-called Ethiopian resistance against the Italian invasion of 1935. The film, called “Black Lions — Roman Wolves,” would later debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2026 as a nine-hour feature on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Italian colonialism, and Ethiopian resistance. In that early trailer, Black American interviewees proclaim that resistance as “a real victory where Africa is concerned,” “about the refusal of Ethiopians to submit to foreign invasion and colonialism,” and “the refusal of Black people to submit to total domination from Europeans.” Never mind the Africans within Ethiopia (the Oromo, the Somali, and others) being crushed under settler colonialism. Throughout the trailer, flashes of Emperor Haile Selassie portray him as an omniscient, heroic figure central to the resistance.

Up to that point, I had talked to Merawi substantively about Oromo history, so the trailer came as a shock. Almost all of my comrades, including many I had discussed the Oromo with, had liked the post. I felt betrayed. I knew the film was outright propaganda, in stark contradiction to the history I had learned. Before detailing my struggle within the organization, I see the need to correct the historical record.

Ethiopia, Zionism, and the History the Left Refuses to See #

Menelik’s Crusades, the Battle of Adwa, and Oromo Dispossession & Enslavement #

At the end of the 19th century, Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia and an emerging Ethiopian Empire, proclaiming himself a descendant of biblical Ancient Israel, went into Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other peoples’ lands with European weapons and conquered them, inflicting heinous atrocities. In one campaign, he wiped out two thirds of the population of the Kaffa Kingdom. A first-hand account by European observers of one of Menelik’s conquests in 1894 details the staggering violence of his campaigns, aided by his unrivalled access to state-of-the-art European weaponry:

From the evening of December 1, when the Shoans fought some preliminary skirmishes with the Wollamos (Oromos), the soldiers chanted war songs and songs of self-praise, “every day and every hour. These cries never ceased to resound and became a veritable obsession.” As the object of the campaign was to reduce the country into submission, there was, from the very beginning, “looting of houses and crops, slaughtering of animals, sacking of the country, [and] burning.” Every day the conquerors came back to camp with slaves and booty. With their superior weapons the Shoans slaughtered large numbers of Wollamos. “It was a terrible butchery, a debauchery of living or dead flesh…by the soldiers drunk from blood.” As the [Oromo] warriors left cover to throw their spears, they would be shot dead by the Shoan troops, armed with Remington or Gras rifles. By December 11, the resistance of the Wollamos had been broken, and on the march that day, “our mules turned aside continuously from recently killed corpses which encumbered the country. The wounded, horribly mutilated, were trampled by the cavalry men.” On that same day the seriously wounded King Tona of the Wollamos was captured. He was brought to Menelik the next day and severely reproached for not yielding until forced to do so in the face Menelik’s superior strength. Tona told Menilek, “It is the wickedness of my heart which made me resist such an enemy. The death of my compatriots falls upon me … guilty of having heard only my pride. I should have submitted myself to you before allowing the devastation of my country and the massacre of my subjects.” On December 18 and 19 Menelik divided up the rich booty, keeping eighteen thousand head of cattle and eighteen hundred slaves for himself. He then returned triumphantly to Addis Ababa, taking along King Tona. (3) (3)Harold Marcus, “Motives, Methods and Some Results of the Unification of Ethiopia during the Reign of Menelik II,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University, 1966), 269-280.

Once he had conquered most of Oromia, Menelik was advised by an Italian resident consul to “make an application to be recognized as a legitimate colonial power.” He completed this application based on “the terms of the agreements made at the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, specifically requiring ’effective occupation.’” (4) (4)Bonnie Holcomb and Sissai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 103. This means that Ethiopia was among the imperialist powers at the Berlin Conference as a participant in the Scramble for Africa. Ethiopia carved out its own colonial stake on the grounds that it, like the imperialist powers conquering the rest of the continent, effectively occupied the colonized territories of Oromia and other regions.

From there, the newly colonized were herded into slavery for the emperor or forced to work for the soldier-settlers from the north as “gebbar” on lands that were formerly theirs.

“Gebbar means he who pays tribute. Gebbar, besides being a tax, was associated with the peasant-servant relationships between the Oromo and the Amhara conquerors. The system involved the allotment of land and peasants by the Ethiopian government to the soldier-settler. The Oromo were obliged to perform forced labour as payment to those new masters imposed upon them as a result of conquest. Rases and dejazes received several thousand gebbars with their land, a fitaurari 300 gebbars and soldiers, between 10 and 20 gebbars, whose Amhara masters considered them their serfs.” (5) (5)Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985), 103, https://archive.org/details/ethiopiaundermus0000sbac/page/6/mode/2up.

One 1935 League of Nations report details the arrangement further:

“In certain conquered countries, notably in the territories of the [Oromos] and the Sidamas, which constituted republics and independent kingdoms until the era of Menelik…Each soldier receives a gabbar responsible for providing for his upkeep and that of his family. The soldier may settle on the land of his gabbar or live elsewhere; in any case, the gabbar with his family is required to build his hut, to fetch water and carry the necessary wood for the soldier and his family, to perform all the work imposed on him. He must provide, day by day, food and drink to his master, and supply him with the produce of the land he needs. The soldier controls the harvest and is not known for being discreet. The institution of gabbars is therefore a form of servage typical of Ethiopia, where an individual is obliged to work for another without the right to leave his service. It is a condition that closely resembles slavery.” (6) (6)League of Nations, “Perpetual Servitude Resulting from Defeat,” Report of the Committee of Experts on Slavery, C.240.M.171.1935.VI (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935).

Or to put in the most clearly, “…All this is done without remuneration, merely in the token of perpetual servitude resulting from defeat sustained 30 years ago.” (7) (7)Mekuria Bulcha, The Making of the Oromo Diaspora: A Historical Sociology of Forced Migration (Minneapolis: Kirk House Publishers, 2002).

Evidently, this was not merely class oppression arising naturally within the development of a society’s mode of production. It was the colonial imposition of one distinct people onto another into slavery, which meant the oppression had a national character. National oppression is resolved not through class struggle but primarily through national liberation, as embodied for instance in the struggle of the multi-class Palestinian nation against Israeli occupation. National liberation, according to FRSO’s own Marxist-Leninist tradition, is the struggle of a people for their right to self-determination, up to and including secession. It is the right to form a state. (8) (8)V. I. Lenin, “Theses on the National Question,” 1913, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/30.htm.

Note, then, who Oromos themselves name as their enemy. When they and Somalis came together for the Bale Revolt in the 1960s, Waaqo Guutuu, Oromo revolutionary and leader of the revolt, named primarily the oppressor nation of Ethiopia:

“Notice that when the Amhara occupied our country with the help of European imperialists in 1885-1891, many of our people were massacred. Then the survivors were allotted like slaves to the settlers, who also partitioned our lands amongst themselves …. Remember that they plundered and distorted our historical legacy that is widely known, that they have violated our dignity, calling us the filthy Galla. Do you realize how many times you have been denied justice in their court of law? You Muslims, your religion has been denigrated and you do not share equality with Christians.” (9) (9)G. Tareke, Ethiopia: Power and Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131.

Thus, Menelik’s conquest ensured that the emerging Ethiopia would, at its core and for the entirety of its history, be built on national oppression: conquered land and the superexploitation of the conquered people, including enslavement. Since then, Oromos, Somalis, Sidamas, and others have experienced continuous land theft, settlement, extreme poverty, state-sanctioned killings, torture, and language suppression. The oft-celebrated first Ethiopian “resistance” against Italy at Adwa in 1896 cannot be separated from Menelik’s imperialist drive. The land and labor shortages in Menelik’s northern homeland that impelled him south, where land and labor were plentiful, mean that Ethiopia’s first “defense” against Italy was not primarily a battle for the sovereignty of the colonized but a battle over colonial spoils between two imperial powers, much like the great powers in World War I. Any folklore saying otherwise is built on the corpses of those savagely slain by Menelik’s conquests before and after Adwa, including the Oromo.

The 1935 Dialectic of Ethiopia/Israel & Oromia/Palestine #

As demonstrated in a follow-up trailer posted in February 2026, Merawi’s film draws a historical throughline between Ethiopia’s “resistance” against Italy at Adwa in 1896 to its later one in 1935 against fascist Mussolini. Indeed, there was a connection, as evidenced by Mussolini proclaiming from the pulpit that he would avenge the Adwa defeat. However, the film conveniently leaves out both Ethiopia’s own conquest at the end of the 19th century and the historical context of 1935, resulting in further erasure of Oromo oppression.

During the second Italian invasion, Haile Selassie was the emperor and a “modernizer” of Ethiopian settler colonialism, armed and advised by Europeans. (10) (10)Holcomb and Ibssa, “State Consolidation under Haile Selassie, 1916-1944,” in The Invention of Ethiopia, 171-214. Only years before the “resistance” of 1935, he named the Ethiopian Empire and codified his descent from Ancient Israel on the front page of the 1931 Constitution, glancing toward the emerging Zionist entity in Palestine that was proclaiming similar religious relevance:

Art. 1. The territory of Ethiopia, in its entirety, is, from one end to the other, subject to the government of His Majesty the Emperor. All the natives of Ethiopia, subjects of the empire, form together the Ethiopian Empire.

…

Art. 3. The law determines that the imperial dignity shall remain perpetually attached to the line of His Majesty Haile Selassie I, descendant of King Sahle Selassie, whose line descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of King Solomon of Jerusalem and the Queen of Ethiopia, known as the Queen of Sheba. (11) (11)“The Constitution of Ethiopia,” 1931, https://ethcln.com/system/files/ethiopian-constitution-of-1931.pdf.

So while the Jewish political Zionists proclaimed Palestine as “Eretz Israel,” the holy land to which the world’s Jews must return, Selassie hit back by codifying his own descent from Ancient Israel in his constitution, naming Ethiopia as the real holy land and himself as an heir. He did this after crushing the Raya Azebo Oromo uprising in 1928 with the help of the Royal Air Force,(12) (12)Oromo Liberation Front, The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation (1975). which paved the way for his ascension to power and the codification of his holy descendance, whence came his nickname “the Lion of Judah.” (13) (13)James McCann, “The Political Economy of Rural Rebellion in Ethiopia: Northern Resistance to Imperial Expansion, 1928-1935,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1985). Underneath the boot of both of these Zionist entities were the masses of Oromo and Palestinians, united in struggle whether they were conscious of it or not.

The Simultaneity of Oromo & Palestinian Rebellion #

The most significant development in 1935, then, did not play out within the war itself but was among the oppressed as the oppressors were distracted. That year, throughout Ethiopia, Oromos, Somalis, and others took advantage of the war to fight for their self-determination with renewed vigor, rejecting Ethiopia. (14) (14)John Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers (Suffolk: James Currey, 2011), 112-114. Remarking to his wife by telegram about the Raya Azebo Oromo after the defeat to Italy at the Battle of Maichew, Selassie wrote, “the Oromo helped us only with shouts, not with their strong right arm.” (15) (15)Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini, 36. These were the same Raya Azebo Oromo he had crushed only years earlier on his way to taking power.

As internal rebellion roared, in West Oromia, Oromos rose up in rejection of both Ethiopia and Italy. In 1936, they declared their own nation, the West Oromo Confederation (WOC), and lobbied the League of Nations for recognition, with the aim of independence and uniting all of Oromia. (16) (16)Ezekiel Gebissa, “The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 75-96. Upon declaration, they formed a health office, a financial and commercial department, a political and foreign relations department, an army and police department, and a department of communication. (17) (17)Gebissa, “Italian Invasion,” 82. Witnessing this development, the British consul at Gore remarked that the WOC had “disarmed the Amhara officials and soldiery in their areas and the [Oromo] hereditary chiefs [had] assumed control of the government in their areas. The police and army of the WOC established firm control and the territories were spared the chaos that had engulfed the rest of Abyssinia.” (18) (18)Gebissa, “Italian Invasion,” 83. This was the machinery of a nascent Oromo state.

Ironically, within FRSO Central Committee member, elder of the Black liberation movement, and my former comrade and eventual antagonist Frank Chapman’s own canon is the time when Black Americans during Radical Reconstruction formed their own police forces and hunted the Ku Klux Klan out of existence. This, he often said, was Black Americans exercising their right to self-determination, and rightly so. Yet when it comes to the Oromo forming their own police forces to hunt down their own oppressors, there wasn’t so much as a peep. During my political struggle, not a single member involved in the discussions, including Frank, ever directly responded to the existence of the WOC. That is because its existence is a dagger to the framing that Ethiopia was an oppressed nation. On the contrary, it was the Oromo who rose up that were.

As the crisis in Ethiopia reached a tipping point in 1936, Haile Selassie fled. The first place he went was to Jerusalem, where he was received with open arms by the Zionists. (19) (19)Haggai Erlich, Alliance and Alienation: Ethiopia and Israel in the Days of Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2014), 35-40. At the same time that the Oromo revolt took place throughout Ethiopia, Palestinians and Arabs began their own revolt against Britain and the emerging Zionist entity, lasting from 1936 to 1939. It was a simultaneity of exploding struggles, demonstrated by the fact that when Selassie arrived in Jerusalem, the Palestinians had only just initiated their general strike and begun their armed struggle. (20) (20)Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 32.

Selassie would eventually go into hiding in Britain for a few years. Meanwhile, Orde Wingate, the same Christian Zionist British captain who formed the Haganah (the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces) that crushed the Arab revolt, (21) (21)Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1972), 58-59. went to Ethiopia in 1940 to lead the force that defeated the Italians and restored Selassie to the throne. (22) (22)Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate and the British Army (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 57-144. Wingate would go on to be hailed as the father of the Israeli Defense Forces by the most prominent Zionists, including the architect of the Palestinian Nakba and later Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

On that Ethiopian expedition, Wingate’s right hand man Avraham Akavia wrote:

"‘The Friend’ gave me a ‘Zionist speech’ as an introduction to my work in Ethiopia. He emphasized that the war for the liberation of Ethiopia is a war for oppressed peoples like the war for the Jews…It is therefore for the sake of Zion that you work here in Ethiopia.’” (23) (23)Avraham Akavia, “Orde Wingate,” in The Friends of Israel (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1950), 94.

In the midst of the crisis, David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of Israel, said in 1937 that the crisis in Ethiopia was also a crisis for the Zionists in occupied Palestine:

“We knew that what is going on in the world has an impact on what we do in the Land of Israel. That beginning of the crisis should be seen not as April 19th [the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, but in what happened a few months earlier in Ethiopia.” (24) (24)David Ben-Gurion, lecture to the Council of the Histadrut, February 1, 1937, Ben-Gurion Archives, Item #88003.

Any invocation that the defeat of Italy was a victory for African and Black people serves to hide the African and Black Oromo who were conquered, dispossessed, and enslaved within Ethiopia. We have humbly laid the groundwork and can say conclusively that by no measure could Ethiopia, a colonial slaver and national oppressor, be a “progressive force” in relation to Italy. The critical question becomes: is our purpose to celebrate one race prevailing over another, no matter the oppressive character of that state, or to oppose and fight to end oppression? The latter, opposing and ending oppression, would mean centering the Oromo rather than the Ethiopian Empire that violently occupied them.

Thus, the struggle I would eventually wage was not just about a film trailer or a book in isolation. It was about Zionism being exalted and allowed to fester in the organization unchallenged, while the heroic struggle of the Oromo, Somali, and others within Ethiopia were totally erased, serving to undermine Palestine from the rear. That this surfaced within FRSO was an artifact of a long, buried history, demonstrating how Zionism could continue to enter the movement through the entryway of Ethiopia and be re-entrenched in moments of crisis and intense political struggle through phenomena such as Merawi’s film or Frank’s book. My struggle, which resulted in my expulsion, would demonstrate that former comrades and the organization was complicit in Zionism, whether through willful ignorance or uncritical adherence to folklore.

The Comintern’s Racialism and FRSO’s Inheritance #

The Communist Movement’s Erasure of Oromo Nationhood #

Besides the blatant historical revisionism, Merawi’s film could operate uncontested within the organization because there is a basis for support of Ethiopia in the history of the communist movement. Though FRSO does not officially have a line on Ethiopia, its views are inherited from previous generations of the communist movement, unchecked, uncorrected, and metastasized. To orthodox Marxist-Leninists like the elders in FRSO and their hangers-on, the united front against fascism declared by the Communist International in 1935 was a high point of the world communist movement, culminating in fascism’s defeat. At the core of that folklore is the world and communists rising in “defense” of Ethiopia through their “Hands Off Abyssinia” campaigns in 1935 and 1936. In the orthodox view, that defense was one of the highest expressions of working and oppressed solidarity in world history.

The form the solidarity took makes such a conclusion understandable. Tens of millions of people all over the world, from Harlem to Chicago, Istanbul to Paris, London to Johannesburg, white and Black people in an era of Jim Crow and racist direct colonialism, spontaneously rose up in solidarity with Ethiopia. Organized labor around the world went on strike and blocked shipments to Italy, while street brawls broke out between Italian and Black neighborhoods in the United States.(25) (25)Joseph Fronczak, Local People’s Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Those involved in the uprising cast the war as a historic battle between oppressor and oppressed, never mind the reality of the Oromo who were being crushed under dispossession and abject slavery by Ethiopia at the time. The communists, tailing the frenzy, finally christened the moment with the declaration of the united front against fascism.

In its defense, the Comintern rejected a prevalent idea that the clash between Ethiopia and Italy was a race war. Instead, they framed it as a struggle for national liberation. Ethiopia, they argued, was an oppressed nation fighting for its independence from Italian imperialism. In doing so, they grounded their appeal in working class and oppressed nation solidarity, called for unity between the “Ethiopian” oppressed nation and workers in Italy against Italian fascism.

Ostensibly, this was a rejection of racialism, that being to organize and unite a struggle on the basis of solely race. However, racialism could sneak in the back door through Ethiopia. The Comintern could not decipher national oppression among Black people, nor could it see that Ethiopia itself was a prison-house of nations. They homogenized Ethiopia, and by doing so, they erased the Oromo, the Somali, the Sidama, and others. In turn, they classified the enslavement of the Oromo not as one nation colonizing another but as class oppression within a single, homogeneous Ethiopian nation: feudalism with remnants of slavery – not settler colonialism or national oppression. This is what opened the way for the Comintern to cast Ethiopia as a poor, backward oppressed nation being invaded by a monopoly capitalist power, Italy. So in form, the Comintern rejected racialism. But in practice, it stood with the oppressor nations of Ethiopia, and it stood against the conquered and enslaved Oromo oppressed nation. Thus, the Comintern’s anti-racialism in form (rejecting the race war) became racialism in practice by virtue of standing with a Black oppressor nation against a white oppressor nation, thereby gutting its own principle of upholding the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.

The Comintern’s internationalism, then, was ultimately racist – but not because it crudely hated Black people. Rather, its internationalism failed to take into account Black particularity, instead homogenizing painting Ethiopia as a single oppressed nation. To deny Black people particularity is a form of racism. Of course, it isn’t crude racial hatred, but it is a structural failure to see differentiation within Black peoples and that they can be both colonizers and colonized. Certainly, this isn’t to deny the outsize role of the US and Europeans in subjugating the world, but it is to inject the nuance that race, as Ethiopia proves, does not inherently signal status or virtue. Black people the world over are not a single political subject, but they make up hundreds of distinct peoples, each with their own history, language, territory, economic life, and culture. The logical conclusion, then, is that standing with Ethiopia, a colonizing entity, could objectively only be a racialist position no matter the intention. Nor is this to discredit the progressive content that racialist struggles can have – such as many abolition, decolonization, and anti-Apartheid struggles aimed against white colonizers and settlers. But it is to say that, in Ethiopia’s case, there is no progressive content. There is only reactionary racialism. Standing with the Oromo would have been the genuine revolutionary internationalist position.Given that the League of Nations was publishing reports on the gebbar system the same year the united front was called, the communists at the time very much had the capacity to see Oromo national oppression.

Consider how this played out in the words of James Ford, the CPUSA’s most prominent Black leader at the time:

“There are certain sections of the Negro people, however, who look upon the events in Ethiopia as a war of all black men against all white men, in other words a “race war”. This is incorrect! Ethiopia’s war is a national defensive war against an imperialist attack for plunder and should and must receive the support of all anti-fascist and anti-imperialist forces… Ethiopia is still in a feudal state, under the rule of powerful native feudal lords…Only the minimum of capitalist concessions and trade have been introduced. The government is ruled over by an emperor, known as Negus Negusi, ‘King of Kings.’ From ancient days slavery has existed in Ethiopia, but it is gradually being eliminated. The great mass of people are peasants, herders or handicraftsmen…Ethiopia fighting for its independence is objectively fighting the battle of the oppressed, imperialist-enslaved masses of Africa.” (26) (26)James W. Ford and Harry Gannes, “War in Africa: Italian Fascism Prepares to Enslave Ethiopia,” 1935, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/comintern/war-in-africa.pdf.

Notice what Ford does here. He correctly rejects a crude race war framing, but he then substitutes an equally crude framing of Ethiopia as a unified feudal nation fighting for independence against an oppressor on behalf of an Africa that he too racially homogenizes. So while racialism was blocked off at the frontier between Ethiopia and Italy, it could sneak in through the back door not just through Ethiopia but also Africa in general. But if we’re to follow Ford’s logic that Ethiopia was truly an oppressed nation, wouldn’t it have been fighting on behalf of the oppressed nations of the world and not just the African masses? Though it may seem minor, Ford relating Ethiopia to the African masses and not the multi-racial oppressed world is the very racialism he rejects but in a different form! The framing demonstrates that the Comintern’s emphasis on right to self-determination for oppressed nations is anchored by racialism, hence why it could stand with Ethiopia and thereby liquidate the Oromo national question.

Reality, of course, demonstrated that the Comintern’s framing was false. While surplus from crop produce flowed from the colonized Oromo to the soldier-settlers from the oppressor nations, rendering it national oppression, no surplus from crop produce flowed from the Amhara and Tigray peasantry in the north to the other imperialist powers. It flowed only to landlords, churches, and the emperor from their own nation. This rendered the north a site of traditional feudal extraction while the south was a site of colonial extraction of land and human labor.(27) (27)McCann, “Political Economy of Rural Rebellion,” 603-605.

Thus, in contradiction to the framing by communists at the time, the war between Italy and Ethiopia was a clash between two oppressor nations over spoils. That Ethiopia was more economically backwards does not render it a progressive force in relation to the other.

This history is so revered that Frank Chapman’s book, Marxist Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism, dedicates a section to this moment.(28) (28)Frank Chapman, “A Note on Mussolini Invading Ethiopia and Chicago Reds,” in Marxist Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism (Chicago: Freedom Road Socialist Organization, n.d.), 144. In the section, he inherits the error of his predecessors and uncritically celebrates the time the US Black liberation movement stood with Ethiopia. What’s left out of his book, Merawi’s trailer, and the analyses by communists in the 1930’s, is that Ethiopia’s position as a national oppressor meant that the so-called resistance was a war waged primarily over Oromo land in the south and Somali land in Ogaden in the east.(29) (29)Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini, 7-21. In fact, the surrender of Oromo land was the most inexcusable for Selassie in secret negotiations with Italy.(30) (30)Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini, 27-30

Indeed, there is no denying that there was an Ethiopian resistance to Italy, nor is there denying the heinous war crimes inflicted by Italy in using mustard gas on the battlefield. There is also no denying that many Oromos perished as soldiers of Ethiopia in the resistance against Italy. However, such realities do not negate Ethiopia’s denial of self-determination and national oppression of Oromos, just as Black Americans’ participation in the U.S. military does not negate the U.S. government’s denial of self-determination and national oppression of Black Americans. In fact, oppressed peoples’ participation in warfare often proves oppression, given that the oppressed, mired in poverty, are coerced into service and used as cannon fodder for their oppressors’ armies, then treated as subhuman upon returning home.

On Cult of Personalities #

Though Merawi’s film was the impetus for my more concerted political struggle within FRSO, and though there was a history of communists erasing Oromos, the film could be protected most of all because the historical error had its own living guardian within the ranks of FRSO. That guardian was Frank Chapman.

Since I had known him, Frank could not see me as an Oromo no matter how much I expressed otherwise. Well before the film trailer, Frank, seeing me as an “Ethiopian” and thinking it would induce feelings of warmth in me, would remark, “Ethiopia is a 3,000-year old Christian nation,” repeating the Zionist mythology Selassie codified in the 1931 constitution on a mountain of Oromo corpses. When I tried to correct him, his eyes would glaze over.

At one point, I obtained a 1975 Oromo Liberation Front Marxist text, “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation,” which detailed the history of the Oromo struggle. It is very likely that my martyred uncle had a direct hand in writing it. After reading it myself several times, I frantically urged Frank to read it. When he finally finished, he exclaimed, “I haven’t ever heard anything about colonialism in Ethiopia. Have you tried reading what the Pan-Africanists had to say?“Here was the supposed most respected revolutionary in the United States telling me to read what outsiders said, not what oppressed people said about their own oppression.

Frank wasn’t a villain, but he served a function. FRSO’s Black liberation line is built around his work and his book. He is also the Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) and was at the center of its refounding in 2019, which, subject to the line he molded in FRSO, aimed to build NAARPR chapters around the country to fight for community control of the police. Internally in FRSO, he carries a near messianic status as the living embodiment of national questions in general and the U.S. Black national question in particular.When I say national questions, I mean struggles for self-determination of historically constituted nations of people like Black Americans, Palestinians, and so on.

If you probe Frank and his work, you will find that his politics seek to restore the Communist Party USA’s heyday in the 1920s, when its line on the U.S. Black struggle saw it lead heroic fights in the Black Belt south against Jim Crow tyranny. Rather than tread new ground, his book and political views retroactively confirm the validity of the CPUSA’s approach in those days. However, that era, for all its heroism, eventually led the U.S. and international communist movement to stand with Ethiopia against Italy and against the Oromo, sowing the seeds of the eventual liquidation of the very U.S. Black national struggle he upholds.

Any revolutionary acting with rigor would surmise that a vulnerability within the exalted line itself could open the way for such a liquidation of the Black national struggle. However, all of the assessments I heard within the organization amounted to circular reasoning or voluntarism : that not enough will was exerted. These assessments, according to one conversation I had with a former comrade, pointed to revisionism, failure to address rising chauvinism, and rejection of democratic centralism as the source of that liquidation. To chalk failure up to these factors says nothing about the basis for such a slip, thereby lending to the idea that, through sheer will, failure can be prevented.

It bears mentioning that a cult of personality like the one that has emerged around Frank is not a sign of strength but a sign of weakness of an organization. When an organization has an incorrect line, ineffective practice from that line unconsciously induces the collective to elevate a cult figure whose authority substitutes for evidence, thereby becoming a deepening cudgel against re-examination of the line. It is made all the worse in this case because the organization cannot even see the very thing that could induce a re-examination of the line on Black liberation: the Oromo people, whose struggle would extricate the racialism endemic to FRSO’s Black liberation line which allows it to see Ethiopia as an oppressed nation.

Barring the Oromo, what ensues is an irreversible slip into the type of cult of personality where members absurdly place Frank’s face on banners alongside Martin Luther King Jr. And so long as the reality of the Oromo remains erased, organizations like FRSO, through Frank, can continue to overlook the basis of liquidation and merely insist on a return to the heyday of the 1920s but with a more feverish execution of its tenets, hoping that the results would be different the second time.

The Irreversible Slip and Death Spiral #

Within this irreversible slip is how an organization eventually abandons responding to reality and becomes increasingly oriented around confirming its outlook. As reality diverges further from the organization’s fixed outlook, it increasingly relies on exertion of will (voluntarism) in place of scientific analysis. In this framework, failure is summed up as not enough will exerted. In the process, the so-called revolutionaries use science only to confirm their constructed reality, where the Oromo do not exist, rather than allowing science to lead to inconvenient truths, such as the reality that Oromos do exist and must be taken into account.

As voluntarism deepens, at each stage the organization structurally consolidates around the enforcement of voluntarism. Democratic struggle over line is minimized or stamped out altogether. Losses must be framed to the masses as wins because the organization’s survival is more important than truth and self-criticism. Abusers and rapists who do “good work” are covered for, and those who threaten the line are politically lynched. The organization degenerates into a cult.

Underneath this deepening voluntarism and commandism, and excruciatingly weighing on it, is the Oromo. Totally erased by generations of folklore built around communist support of Ethiopia, the Oromo struggle evermore to break into the perception of the so-called revolutionaries directly and indirectly as those revolutionaries strain evermore not to see them. FRSO did not meet my political struggle on principle. It met it through the sheer will of avoidance.

Through my eventual expulsion, FRSO’s line on U.S. Black liberation showed that, in the final analysis, the communist movement could again abandon the Oromo in favor of Ethiopia. This, just like last time, will lay the basis for its own inevitable abandonment of the U.S. Black national struggle. The only difference is the scale at which liquidation played out this time. Regardless, the liquidation of one struggle leads to the eventual liquidation of all struggles.

Thus, the organization is structurally built on Oromo erasure. It has an incorrect line and an inability to see that incorrectness, given that it does not see the Oromo. In maintaining the erasure, the organization compensates through sheer will and the commandist enforcement of it, while increasingly relying on a cult figure to serve as the cudgel against re-examination. Frank’s willful ignorance and obstinance on the Oromo struggle, demonstrated by my years of fruitless struggle, made him a pillar of national chauvinism through Oromo erasure, shielded by the cult of personality. This became the specific mechanism through which the Oromo question was rendered unaskable. His status placed it beyond the reach of democratic struggle, meaning the Ethiopia error could never be corrected regardless of the evidence brought against it. But the cult of personality did not just protect Frank’s legacy. It protected the organization, which, as mentioned, is structurally built on the erasure of the Oromo. To name the inviolability of the Oromo right to self-determination, then, would topple the whole structure.

Intention versus Function #

It bears mentioning that no matter how grand the cult of personality, no matter how much meaning Merawi, Frank, or even the Comintern ascribe to a phenomenon, no matter how much they strain for a phenomenon to be something, it still has an objective expression. Celebrating the defense of Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936 is alignment with Zionism on one hand and alignment against Oromo and Palestinian national liberation on the other. To continue propagating this falsity as a revolutionary organization, especially in the face of my principled ideological struggle concretely demonstrating otherwise, is counter-revolutionary. The linkages between Ethiopia and Israel were quite clear, but willful amnesia has ignored the truth of the Oromo, the Somali, and other oppressed people who have continually rejected Ethiopia. That amnesia has risen to the level of folklore.

Witness Frank, the organization’s messianic leader, at his most triumphant when describing the “defense” of Ethiopia that took place in Chicago. Himself based in Chicago, he inherently places himself as a direct heir to this tendency:

“On the streets of Chicago’s Black community, in the dirt and blood of battle, a united front against fascist aggression and fascism was being forged. This was prior to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International being convened and Dimitrov giving his historic presentation calling for a United Front against fascism. History waits for no one and objective social relations are always prior to subjective evaluation. Consequently, Marxist-Leninists are always raising the banner of truth from the battlefield of awesome deeds, bearing witness to the fact that we continually practice our way into correct thinking.” (31) (31)Chapman, “A Note on Mussolini Invading Ethiopia and Chicago Reds,” 147.

That “awesome deed” Frank speaks of became the very basis around which the mere existence of Oromos and their seizure of self-determination in the West Oromo Confederation could be congealed and erased, relegating the communist movement to metaphysics and incorrect thinking lest it correct the Ethiopia error and topple everything resting on it – careers, legacies, and all. Oppressed people, however, have no use for folklore if its effect is to keep them barred behind prison doors. I had found myself in the center of this mechanism, within the ranks of those who proclaimed themselves the heirs of a tendency that erased Oromos while stowing such erasure in its most secure vault: its cult figure’s highest folklore. The Oromo question was their Ark of the Covenant, and Frank was their priest that stood guard. I would eventually see what resisting it would cost me.

Raising the Question #

The Political Struggle to Come #

The struggle I waged was first informal through conversations and group chats over years. And then, when Merawi’s film trailer broke in March 2025, I pursued more formal avenues, first proposing readings, then writing my own texts synthesizing what I knew about Ethiopia and the Oromo struggle, and then eventually pushing for unit-level discussions with the aim of issuing a historical correction and crafting a line based on that. Line is the term used for an organization’s view of the objective conditions at large.

Throughout this, the organization did not ever make it clear what the correct paths or methods of struggle were. Eventually, I pushed enough that my unit finally yielded in granting discussion in two unit meetings spaced two months apart. However, no avenue I tried, including the “official” discussions, truly met me in the arguments I was making. In fact, just as the former Dallas members concluded in their expose, I too found that FRSO was pathologically incapable of seriously assessing its mistakes.

Informal dismissal #

One time, early on in being in CAARPR, when I was on the phone with Frank, Ethiopia came up. I recommended Frank look into the Oromo struggle – to which he shrugged me off.

There was another time in a group chat when I shared a short video of my revolutionary uncle. In the video, my uncle speaks during the 1974 student uprising, a moment when Oromo and Eritrean national liberation fronts led the rebellion against Haile Selassie. The famous “land to the tiller” demand came from the Oromo masses, and my uncle and his comrades carried it forward in an uprising that eventually toppled the emperor that Merawi’s film celebrates. (32) (32)Mohammed Hassen, “A Short History of Oromo Colonial Experience: Part Two, Colonial Consolidation and Resistance 1935-2000,” Journal of Oromo Studies 7, no. 1-2 (2000): 132, https://zelalemkibret.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/jos-volume-7-numbers-12-2000.pdf.

Upon sharing the video of my uncle in a group chat, almost immediately Frank called me. Gleefully, and effectively barring off the national liberationist content of it, he emphasized that what happened in Ethiopia was a “great class struggle” to “complete the bourgeois revolution in feudal Ethiopia.” There he was replicating the racialism of his predecessors that could conveniently erase the Oromo national struggle behind a class struggle. I could hardly get in a word with the correction before the call ended.

Another time, I told Frank a story passed down to me about how my revolutionary uncle was imprisoned by the Derg military government. This was a military government that overthrew the emperor in 1974 and, making a calculation of events on the world stage, proclaimed itself Marxist in word while in deed it waged all-out war against the national liberation fronts, including the Oromo, Somali, and Eritreans. By proclaiming itself Marxist, it could win over the USSR and Cuba who tragically supported and armed it against the liberation fronts. It could also win over Frank and other elders of FRSO like Mick Kelly and Joe Iosbaker. When I tried to tell my story of my uncle, Frank cut me off to tell me a story he had told me countless times about how his friend traveled to Ethiopia and sat in on party meetings under the Derg.

Another time, at a CAARPR social event, I asked Joe Iosbaker, the FRSO Chicago District Organizer, something about Ethiopia. He literally ran away from me in the middle of my sentence. Other times, when I called Joe with narrow, information-based questions about the united front against fascism or African liberation struggles, he’d give long-winded answers that didn’t address my questions at all. Then, before I could follow up, he’d hurry off the phone.

I also tried speaking to Mick Kelly, the FRSO political secretary on the Standing Committee, which is the highest ranking position in the organization, in the months following the trailer as the official political struggle was happening. He was in Chicago in May 2025 for a FRSO Chicago awards dinner. After the event, I caught him on the way out and tried to pick his brain about Ethiopia and the Oromo. After a few minutes, he said it was cold and had to leave. He encouraged me to call him when he was back in Minneapolis. Later that week I called, and we got a few minutes before he said I wasn’t catching him at a good time. He told me to message him about officially scheduling a meeting.

Eventually, when I tried to pin down a time over message, he said he would get back to me. But then at the last minute, he told me that he couldn’t meet because he was going to spend time with his partner. No counter-offer ever came.

I later found out that the same week he blew me off, he was defending FRSO’s repeated cover-ups for former FRSO member and serial abuser Dustin Ponder when former members of the Dallas district confronted him.

Besides these attempts, other attempts I made included raising Oromo issues within group chats with other comrades. Those messages were repeatedly received with silence.

Procedural Containment #

Throughout all of this, the person I voiced my frustrations to most was Dod McColgan. Dod joined CAARPR in 2019 and is now the Recording Secretary on the Executive Committee. They also serve as Frank’s personal assistant. Dod’s personal assistant role was a symptom of the commandism. Even I, a dedicated cadre, was blocked from attending Frank and Dod’s daily meetings. In their private meetings, they worked out what should have been worked out with mass participation, where they would have had to struggle over the right ideas and be accountable to the masses. Instead, they aggregated instructions in their private calls and beamed it down in the weekly mass meetings. Dod joined FRSO in 2020 and are in the national liberation unit that I was in, focusing on Black liberation through their work in CAARPR. They are also on the District Committee (DCOM) of FRSO, which includes the District Organizer, unit heads, finance chair, general membership coordinator, as well as other roles.

Dod’s role in Chicago was the enforcer. As an enforcer, they were the person who held together the organization’s reproduction of itself despite mounting problems from its errors. That explains why Dod was a workhorse who was everywhere at once that took on a mountain of tasks, all while patching up interpersonal issues, or in my case, warding off the sort of principled struggle that could put the organization back in sync with reality to dislodge it from commandism. Dod’s role parallels the enforcer roles taken up by Dallas members who rallied to the defense of the FRSO Center as it was covering up sexual assault and misconduct.

When I raised my issues on the Oromo struggle to Dod, they would say things like, “Maybe you should talk to Frank,” even though I already had. Or in another case, after a comrade sent me an Instagram post of a revisionist Ethiopian superhero comic, they asked, “Is that really a big deal?” Or when I would tell them about the connections between the IDF’s establishment by Wingate and his later defense of Ethiopia, they would merely stare at me blankly. Their responses always cast me as an inconvenience. By casting me as an inconvenience, they erased what is the most explosive, conscious struggle for self-determination on the African continent.

Then, once Merawi’s trailer broke, I quickly began synthesizing what I’d learned over the years about the Oromo struggle for comrades to read. I’m certain some of my thoughts were underdeveloped. However, anyone operating in the spirit of principled struggle, as is supposed to be the case in a revolutionary organization, should have found kernels in my writing worth collective investigation. That never came.

While leaders dodged me, Dod read my texts and didn’t engage substantively with anything. Their responses picked things apart, whether certain words I used, the flow of the write-up, the way I structured my argument, or zeroed in on terminology. This all served to veer away from the heart of the text which was focused on the question of the Oromo people’s right to self-determination. The salt in the wound was that Dod as a white person was invoking such pedantry in a unit focused on Black liberation for a pending discussion on an African national question. The organization had dispatched white chauvinism as its defense mechanism to avoid line struggle.

At another point, Dod relied on a cult of personality of Frank and Joe to ice me out of inquiry into the basis of the liquidation of national struggles:

Dod: Those points are entry level from the perspective where the position you are taking is considered the most advanced position, which you are putting forward on the basis that you have read extremely deeply on the question.

Dod: And that is a huge claim that this position is what led to the liquidation of the national question in the CP. What led to that is a question that Frank, and Joe to a lesser extent, have spent years if not decades investigating and assessing. And which Frank was there for. Supplanting their assessment with your research would be a huge change.

Dod: You are saying that not the system of national oppression in the US, not the revisionism in the movement, not any failure to address rising chauvinism in the movement at the time, not the rejection of democratic centralism that happened at the time the liquidation took place, but the position on Ethiopia is what was the primary driving force causing national oppression to be reproduced in the US left?

Dod: I don’t see how you could expect that to be accepted based solely on your study, regardless of its depth.The cult of personality in action: Notice how they don’t say, “what new information are you learning that can help us re-examine?” Instead, it’s deference to elders. I pressed at the structural weak point of the organization and the enforcer deferred to the cult figure to bar off inquiry.

Eventually, though no one would engage me substantively, my persistence forced through a discussion on the Oromo question in the unit.

Substanceless Discussions #

“The opposition and struggle between different ideas within the Party occur frequently; this is a reflection of social class contradictions and the contradictions between new and old things within the Party. If there were no contradictions and ideological struggles to resolve contradictions within the Party, the Party’s life would cease.” (33) (33)Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, 1937, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm.

The ensuing discussions revealed the class character of the different ideas. I came prepared with historical analysis and openness to discuss and struggle. My former comrades brought only willful ignorance, distortions, dogma, and personality cults, with no intention to learn or struggle. The organization had degenerated, and I was fighting at an entry point through which it did.

First Unit Discussion #

For the first discussion, I wrote a text putting forward the Oromo question. The discussion was prepared mostly for Merawi, but he left town for months to work on his film while providing the group no clarity on when he would return, so he was not present. This was a common occurrence for him. The organization continued to look the other way.

In my writing, I took a patient approach. I didn’t propose a line. Instead, I shared about the historic Oromo uprising in Ethiopia and around the world in response to the state killing of Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa in summer 2020. In Washington DC, 10,000 Oromos marched to demand justice for Hachalu and the Oromo political prisoners kidnapped by the government to quell the uprisings. This Oromo uprising took place the exact same summer the US Black liberation movement was also exploding as it demanded justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The difference, however, was that the Oromo, who were totally unknown to the US movement, marched virtually alone. Simultaneity of the struggle of the oppressed is a recurring theme. When Black Americans were rising up in Ferguson in 2014 in response to the police killing of Michael Brown, Oromos too rose up against the Addis Ababa Master Plan that would have expanded the city limits of the capital and evicted Oromo farmers and residents in the surrounding towns and villages.

From there, I explained the basis of the uprising by laying out the nature of the unresolved land question in Ethiopia and how it has been the basis of a ceaseless Oromo struggle to encourage further collective investigation. Through this, I thought, I could get the unit to start to grasp the problem with members making films and writing texts in support of Ethiopia. From there, my aim was to get the group to collectively arrive at correcting the error of the 1930’s – the time when the communist movement sided with Ethiopia against the Oromo, Somali, and others. The problem was that having a discussion with people who don’t see the Oromo at all meant I had to fight for the most basic truths – such as whether Oromos existed at all.

Predictably, the discussion went nowhere. I was procedurally boxed out, able to speak only at the beginning and then respond at the end. Joe and Frank misrepresented my criticism of communist support for Ethiopia as me supporting fascism. At another point, Joe referred to Oromos as an “ethnicity,” which is a term that reduces national liberation struggles to genetic or cultural peculiarities while erasing the very land question at the heart of that struggle. The terminology is the commandist organization defending its moribund racialist framework. In using it, he abandoned a core Marxist Leninist principle of right to self-determination for oppressed nations.

At another point, Dod remarked, “you keep mentioning that the Oromo protested in 2020. Where are they now?” as if the Oromo disappeared. They didn’t disappear. They were erased by the very people who asked that question instead of asking ‘how can we link up with them in the struggle?’

Nonetheless, the most notable comment came in the brief dead space after the discussion. Brian Young Jr., a new cadre who I played a leading role in recruiting, mentioned part of my text: “Ethiopia, a dependent colonial entity, was born on the ashes of Menelik’s conquest, and at the center of its existence was the settler colonial system.”

Brian remarked, “That was really interesting. I’d never heard that Ethiopia operated on a settler-colonial system.” Immediately, Dod cut in to stamp them out. “Well this isn’t about what’s interesting!” Dod later self-criticized for interrupting Brian in that way, but the damage was already done. A self-criticism after the meeting cannot give Brian back the curiosity that was stomped out in front of everyone. If there was any excerpt to hone in on besides the direct connection I made between Wingate’s creation of the proto-IDF and his reinstallment of Selassie, it would have been that excerpt on Ethiopian settler colonialism. However, Dod barred it off with their usual enforcement. Meanwhile, none of the more experienced comrades like Frank or Joe discouraged it. Again, the organization had dispatched white chauvinism – this time to stamp out the curiosity of young Black cadre as they discussed Black national questions within a unit focused on Black liberation.

Second Unit Discussion #

For the second discussion, Frank proposed a text from Hakim Adi’s “Pan-Africanism and Communism,” pages 174-199. The cover was a photo of Black Americans holding a sign reading “Remember Abyssinia!” in reference to the moment the world rose up in defense of “Abyssinia,” what Ethiopia was called before its architects changed the name to align itself with Psalm 68:31: “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” From that cover alone, I knew the reading would base all of its analysis on the complete and total erasure of Oromos, much like how Zionist literature, declaring Palestine “A land without a people for a people without a land,” based its entire political outlook on the absence of Palestinians.

Merawi finally joined this discussion. I was again procedurally boxed out, directed to speak only at the beginning and end. In my opening, I brought thorough criticisms of the text. Most notably, I named that, besides a passing nod to “semi feudalism,” the text excluded any mention at all of settler colonialism in Ethiopia built primarily on the oppression of Oromos, who make up the vast majority of the population. That, I insisted, rendered the whole text moot.

The rest of the discussion didn’t cover any enlightening ground. Merawi came prepared with concrete items on Ethiopia, but the restrictive structure meant his ignorance could go unchallenged. In his portion, he downplayed the significance of the Oromo majority. He also downplayed the primary role of the national liberation struggles in the Ethiopian body politic, which have raged for the entirety of its history, and instead dogmatically emphasized the class struggle. Additionally, he made a point that the Oromo Liberation Front today is not Marxist – presumably to say that a national liberation struggle not being led by explicit Marxists delegitimizes the struggle for self-determination. It bears mentioning that his ignorance on Ethiopia is predictable given that he has a vested financial interest in maintaining it.

Then came the usual conflation of my position with support for fascism. At one point, Dod receded into a cult of personality deflection: “You’re talking about criticizing people like Stalin and Dimitrov, the very people we look up to and study so we can emulate.” Others like Brian, who had entered the first discussion with curiosity, uncritically accepted the text while paying no mind to my criticisms.

At one point, Frank frustratedly exclaimed, “There’s no dialectics in this discussion,” failing to look at himself in the mirror. At one point, exasperated, I forced my way into the discussion to correct glaring inaccuracies on the floor. Frank, chairing the meeting, did everything to maintain a negative order. Naively, I insisted to Frank that he and I do actually agree on things – I said it still thinking that he was just misguided and actually took the right of nations to self-determination seriously like me. He denied me. By the end, audibly angry, he directed everyone to come prepared for the next unit meeting with final recommendations to “put this to bed once and for all.” Is “put this to bed” the language of principled struggle, or is it the language of suppression? To Frank, the Oromo were a nuisance to put out.

No Space for Struggle #

In the period of the official political struggles, I had a number of exchanges with comrades revealing to me that there truly was not any space for struggle in the organization.

In one exchange, I messaged fellow unit member Omar Flores, who is also the chair of general membership in FRSO Chicago and Co-Chair of CAARPR’s Immigrants Rights Working Committee. In my initial message, I raised an issue I took with him reducing Merawi’s film to merely a personal project. His response was jarring.

Jitu: hey comrade. i thought about it some more and i think you going easy on the comrade who wasn’t present bc of something he chooses to do in his personal life is liberal. especially considering we’ve talked at length about being communists in all parts of our lives

Omar: In what way is he being undisciplined or not a communist according to our line? It’s considered personal because we don’t have a line on what people should practice around it. If the comrade was going around and making documentaries about Zionists when we have a line against them, that would be an issue because we have a line against them.

Omar: Or as another example, I don’t think comrades should be dating mass members. I think it’s undisciplined. There isn’t a guidance on this from the organization, so I can’t hold people accountable on behalf of the organization, it’s their personal life. So I don’t think there is currently something that I can be hard on of comrades that choose to do so. I do plan on drafting a policy against dating, or giving structure to dating as a communist.

Omar: I think there is a separate criticism to be made about absenteeism but not about his political line.

Jitu: fair. i’ll just say that his absenteeism is not separate from his politics on this question

The lack of a line should never be the basis for failing to correct an error. Besides the glaring false equivalence between one the most significant national liberation struggles in Africa and organizational dating policy, Omar’s logic reflects a fatal logic within FRSO that line is something to be declared by leadership, uncritically carried out by the rank and file, and not ever struggled over – unless it’s merely a drafted policy. This is commandist bureaucratization embodied. Line should be determined through struggle, not absent of it.

I also messaged Dod to express my displeasure in being patronized during our first discussion when they may as well have pat me on the head in saying “wow, you’re smart.” When I finally pushed, I was able to see what their niceties hid.

Note how Dod relies on dogma by deferring to how the organization typically engages in mass struggle. But if the organization doesn’t recognize the existence of a struggle, how could it ever engage the struggle? Here, the Oromo struggle, which has produced many massive protests even across the US, becomes locked in an impenetrable circular reasoning.

Also note how Dod says that the organization’s practice can be the only source of truth and not a member’s deep study and historic relation to the struggle. That which is not ordained by the organization is not valid.

Note also how Dod defers to procedure or feigning shock that I would dare raise the most explosive national struggle in Africa in response to a member’s Zionist propaganda film erasing that struggle. In their view, we should have used our time “analyzing our practical work” or “discussing something assigned by the center” – more commandist bureaucratization. Also, note how they too cast the film aside as merely “a personal project” to erase its Zionist political content.

In these exchanges, the question arises: where is the correct place to struggle for line within FRSO? The organization renders struggle outside of meetings taboo while also suppressing struggle in meetings. In sum, this means that there is no space for struggle in FRSO. Instead, everything is presumed to be prescribed from the center.

But struggles within the party organization are not divorced from struggles happening within the masses. And I, with my own history as an Oromo, and as one of the most deeply engaged cadre in Chicago at the time, wasn’t raising the Oromo struggle as a distraction. The mere fact that two antagonistic viewpoints in Merawi’s film and Frank’s text could exist alongside my Oromo nationalism should have spoken to the fact that there was an antagonism within the masses that needed to be resolved. And the only way to do it would have been careful study – not religious adherence to folklore.

In that context, I was merely a representative of an urgent question raging in the world that needed resolution. The resolution I pushed for, however, supporting Oromo right to self-determination, was antithetical to FRSO – structurally. If we’re to take the organization’s own voluntaristic assessment that the liquidation of the Black national question was caused by revisionism, failure to address rising chauvinism, and rejection of democratic centralism, those chain of events were taking place right in front of me. The organization could find it within itself to erase and abandon an oppressed nation (revisionism). It could find it within itself, as shown in the Dallas expose, to cover for sex abusers while threatening expulsion to those who sought to hold them accountable (failure to address rising chauvinism). And it could find it within itself to bar off principled struggle in uncritical deference to the center (rejection of democratic centralism).

I hadn’t pieced it together then, but looking back, I see that the vacuous discussions, stonewalling, and procedural deflections weren’t the mark of a revolutionary organization. They were the mark of a cult protecting its dogma. This cult ardently stuck by the corpse of 1930s Marxism despite reality screaming in its face to update itself – to take into account the Oromo and other indigenous struggles of the world. In the face of reality, it could only shut its ears, close its eyes, and invoke the most ghastly of metaphysics. Never mind that criticizing would have been the highest form of respect to our heroes. Through their actions, they were inherently saying, “If we go back to the era of Stalin but just focus more and try harder, we’ll do it right this time.” The first time was tragedy, the second time is farce.

Before that third unit meeting came, in July 2025, I was expelled from FRSO.

Expulsion #

This excerpt from Liu Shaoqi, written in the 1950’s nearly perfectly predicted what was to come for me and demonstrates that commandism is a structural tendency that repeats across time and place:

“They deliberately collect information about the shortcomings and mistakes of the target of struggle and jot down mechanically and piecemeal his not too appropriate words and deeds. Then they view in isolation such shortcomings and mistakes and his not too appropriate words and deeds and regard all these as representing the whole make-up of the comrade. They magnify the individual shortcomings and mistakes of this comrade and develop these into a system of opportunism, create an extremely unfavorable impression about this comrade among comrades in the Party and in-cite their hatred for opportunism in struggling against this comrade. Then, ’everybody can inflict blows on a dead tiger.’ The psychology of revenge on the part of some persons begins to gain ground and they expose all the shortcomings and mistakes of this comrade and arbitrarily raise these shortcomings and mistake to the level of principle. They even fabricate some story and on the basis of subjective suspicion and completely groundless rumors, accuse the comrade of various crimes. They will not stop until they drive him into mental confusion. With this done, they are still reluctant to allow the comrade who has been attacked to make any defense. If he makes any defense they would accuse him of deliberately defending his mistakes or of admitting mistakes with reservations. Then they would deal him further blows. They do not allow the comrade being attacked to reserve his opinions on condition of submission to the Party organization and do not allow him to appeal to the superiors but insist upon his admitting his mistakes on the spot. In case the comrade being attacked has admitted all his mistakes, then they do not bother whether the problem pertaining to principle or ideology has been solved or not.” (34) (34)Liu Shaoqi, “On Inner Party Struggle,” 1952, 22, https://www.commonprogram.science/documents/on%20inner%20party%20struggle.pdf.

A Supposed Pattern #

As the political struggle unfolded, I was having interpersonal conflicts with FRSO members in Chicago, whether through the work or in our personal relationships. Two of those conflicts became the basis of two complaints filed against me by my ex who was a FRSO member, M (name anonymized for privacy), and by a fellow CAARPR and FRSO Chicago national liberation unit member Tulsi McDaniels. From there, the organization dug up two other disputes with District Organizer Joe Iosbaker and Frank, fabricating or distorting the details to pile onto me. They also offhandedly mentioned other ongoing difficulties I had with people in the months prior. Taken together, their aim was to paint me as an intransigent, hysterical woman with a pattern of mistreatment.

The Interpersonal Context #

Given the recency of the conflict, I knew the complaints against me would be from M and Tulsi. Before the meeting where I would be provided the specifics of the complaints and be able to give “testimony,” I expressed concerns about Dod’s conflict of interest. Dod is Tulsi’s ex of 7+ years and current housemate, and they would be on the three-person committee collecting that testimony. Joe rebuffed my concerns. I just needed to “trust” the collective leadership, he urged me.

I arrived at the meeting. Only two of the three investigators showed. Omar, who was supposed to be the third, wasn’t feeling well, just as he hadn’t been well enough to attend our second Oromo discussion. My two investigators, then, were the two people who had been my opposition in stifling political discussion within the unit, one of whom was the ex and housemate of a complainant and the other of whom I would come to find had his own complaint against me which he heavily distorted.

Dod and Joe began by reading me the complaints from M, Tulsi, Frank, and Joe. They then gave me a chance to respond to those complaints. The following is not the testimony I gave them, but it is my side of the story:

M #

I met M at the end of 2019, and we quickly became best friends and partners. We dated for four years until we broke up in February 2024 after a period of irreconcilable differences. Following our break-up, out of our inability to let each other go, we continued to be friends for another year, but not without difficulties. I had genuine shortcomings in the relationship and mistreated them over the years. I deserved to be held accountable for it. Among those things, when our friendship ended and M requested no contact, I struggled to process it immediately and reflexively checked in with them a number of times when I should have respected their boundary. The most recent time, frantically done in the context of my conflict with Tulsi, was the basis of their complaint to FRSO.

When making their complaint about my contact, M also shared my transgressions from the relationship to the organization. Admittedly, these were things that I had apologized for before we took space from each other, and I had considered them resolved based on M’s own words. However, I can concede that my breaking no contact could have left the impression that my apology wasn’t genuine, which could have led them to believe they needed support from the organization. In any case, the organization cynically said that those transgressions from my private relationship had a political content which was why they were raising them in the organization’s disciplinary context. As demonstrated in the organization’s ability to chalk up Merawi’s Zionist film as a “personal project,” it’s clear they deemed something political not out of principle but when it served them. With this political justification, the organization tried me a second time. Even then, I didn’t protest and fully accepted M’s criticisms and said I would unconditionally self-criticize for them.

Tulsi #

Tulsi and I were close friends who engaged in creative projects and spent significant time together outside of organizing. In that time, our relationship was marked by years of ambiguity. Eventually, I sought clarity. Instead, she reacted with annoyance about my timing, then anger, and in the end provided me no clarity. In any case, this was an interpersonal saga that took place over years and had genuine shades of gray, the kind that should have been mediated organizationally through unity-struggle-unity.

Instead, the organization, needing to pile onto me, took the side of Tulsi when she complained that I, in response to her continued ambiguity and anger at me, said she refuses to be accountable to people including me. It bears mentioning that the organization itself had already communicated to her that she had a problem with being accountable to the collective. So I was merely extending that to our friendship because I felt that her actions juxtaposed with her persistence in providing no clarity was not fair to me as her friend.

The organization then feigned shock that I’d dare say such a thing to her, collapsing all nuance, while demanding I annihilate myself or face expulsion. When I raised concrete things she did or said to me over the years that I considered as advances and lent to the ambiguity, Joe an Dod, with their glaring conflict of interest, blamed me for not speaking up for myself at the moment. They conveniently ignored that speaking up is exactly what I eventually did, but I was punished for it. Not to mention, they attacked me for daring to interpret certain actions of hers as inappropriate or as advances, and at one point they even accused me of making things up.

Joe #

In Joe’s complaint, he said that I said he “infantilized” me. His complaint made it sound as if I, without context, burst out and said this. In reality, I used that phrase within a larger message about how inadequate the political discussions had been and how I felt the collective were infantilizing me by not engaging with any of my points at all. Here was an older white man painting a Black woman’s accurate criticism of the organization’s political failures as a personal transgression.By this point, you can see my anger rightfully bubbling after years of being silenced. Even despite Joe’s invocation of commandist dogmatism in his general principles and empty “I disagree,” I’m still able to avoid personal attacks and keep the conversation political.

Frank #

Frank and I had a conflict from November 2024 that had been formally resolved through the unit. It wasn’t the first conflict between us, but it was one of the more explosive ones in our years of working together. The backstory was that, at a protest when I was struggling with anxiety, I forgot to call him over for a spur-of-the-moment press conference. When I apologized to him afterwards, he cursed at me and told me to get out of his face. I left the protest early in tears. When I raised it at the following unit meeting, I was pressured by the entire group to accept his version of events: that he didn’t curse at me but merely said “I understand.” Me, outnumbered and doubting myself, accepted it, and the matter was settled. Months later, Frank resurrected this ostensibly resolved incident from November to dogpile onto the other complaints. It wasn’t until after my expulsion that I reclaimed my memory and my dignity and grasped that I was verbally attacked at that protest and later gaslit about whether it happened by my unit. Again, a Black woman speaking the truth had been smothered.Really, conflict between Frank and I only intesified the more I spoke up about the Oromo or what I saw to be the symptoms of Oromo liquidation in our work.

The Kangaroo Court #

Taken together, I expressed my desire to self-criticize for the complaints by M, Frank, and Joe. For the complaints by Frank and Joe, I agreed to self-criticize because at the moment I had not yet discovered that I was being disingenuously piled onto, so I assumed good faith. However, I refused to self-criticize for Tulsi because I felt that the framing of our conflict by the organization painted me as the singular problem.

Joe and Dod took my testimony back to the District Committee (DCOM). DCOM consists of each unit head, the District Organizer, the Finance Chair, the general membership chair, and some other roles I’m not sure of. In my case, it had at least eight members, possibly up to ten. Six had direct conflicts of interest: There were the complainants Frank, Joe, M, and Tulsi. Then there was Dod, the ex and housemate of Tulsi. And then there was Omar, who I’d had a number of conflicts with in the past and butted heads with during the political struggle. So between 60-75% of DCOM had a conflict of interest.

The irony was not lost on me: an organization that claims to be a leader in the Black liberation movement and freeing the wrongfully incarcerated fabricated evidence and stacked charges against me, and when I refused to take the plea deal for all of them, it held its own kangaroo court with gigantic conflicts of interest, collecting “testimonies” and guilty/not guilty pleas in a moment that required nuance. Despite their insistence otherwise, writing testimony is not neutral. Reading that testimony to a group is not neutral. Any further involvement in ensuing discussions is not neutral. But in their minds, they could simply will the process into fairness. “We’re only going to read exactly what you said and go from there!” they insisted — voluntarism was endemic to FRSO. Never mind that the arrangement was objectively crooked. All my political and interpersonal opponents could, with my ex as their moral core, take advantage of her to go on the offensive against me. Despite this crooked arrangement, I did not object to DCOM’s composition because I had been taught that the collective is always right. It took expulsion and time away to understand that the collective can be wrong, especially when it’s composed of your accusers.

Tragically, the people who judged me had their own skeletons. Some had engaged in misconduct in general or with other members of the organization – whether cheating, drunken physical altercations, or allowing their own communication boundaries to be breached in even more egregious ways. The organization knew about these things, and nobody was held accountable. If they were holding me to a standard of interpersonal conduct, they were hypocrites for not holding themselves to that same standard. I cannot explain the sheer absurdity of being lectured and judged by people who had done as much or worse and hadn’t been held accountable or looked the other way. Meanwhile, I was willing to be accountable for my mistakes. The difference was not the severity of the behavior. The difference was that I was a political threat and they were not.

This is to say nothing of the misconduct that had taken place outside of DCOM. One leader of CAARPR had been involved in a domestic violence dispute with their significant other. The organization could easily look away and in fact keep them in leadership roles and honor them at events because there was no political threat. Another CAARPR leader shared a post with Christian Zionist rapture theology stating that what was happening in Palestine was a sign of the end times, and for that reason, people needed to get right by God if they didn’t want to go to hell. Though this took place well after I left, the organization evidently opted to “struggle with them” as they did when I was in the organization given that that person continued to speak publicly as a representative of the organization.

Of course, I don’t share these incidents to diminish M’s need for accountability from me, but I say it to say that a commanding organization is simply incapable of bringing about accountability. I was willing to be accountable for my mistakes, but because I was a political threat, there was no nuance. What the organization wanted was to strip me of my voice and demand total submission. So in that moment, when my fate was being decided, the personal issues my jury could not face in their own lives merged with the political question nobody had an answer to. I became their scapegoat: I could either absorb everything or be banished for refusing.

In the end, I was politically lynched. I was found guilty and given the maximum penalty for not accepting the entire plea deal and was expelled to live a life that resembled solitary confinement. The deciding factor in my expulsion was that I refused to apologize for telling Tulsi, who had subjected me to years of ambiguity and advances, that she didn’t want to be accountable. It was ironic because the people who gave me, a Black woman, such cruel and unusual punishment claimed to be from an organization leading the fight for Black liberation in the US. Yet to dispose of me, they used the same tools the white supremacist legal system uses against Black people.

It bears mentioning that, subject to FRSO’s own rules, “an act of expulsion does not become effective until it has been endorsed by the member’s basic unit,” which would have been the national liberation unit I was in. Based on conversations with my former “comrades” around that time, the “evidence” of my “case,” which were text message screenshots of conflict, wasn’t presented to the unit until a few weeks after my expulsion. Details wouldn’t be provided until months later. This means that, at best, my unit’s approval of my expulsion was merely a rubber stamp to the kangaroo court, and at worst, FRSO did not even follow its own rules to expel me.

Upon being told of my expulsion, Joe and Dod asked if I had any response, presumably to give me one last chance to cave. Instead, I expressed regret for mistreating M and said she didn’t deserve it. I stood my ground on the Tulsi matter. From there, they confirmed I would be removed and could rejoin within a year if I self-criticized first. They noted I could continue working in CAARPR since it’s a separate organization. I said I would think about it.

On my way out, Frank, visibly distressed, emphasized, “It’s about your actions. Think about your actions.”

Over time, I learned that their emphasis on only actions would be something they’d continually repeat to keep me from analyzing the conditions that produced my actions. Because if I analyzed the conditions in which my behavior arose, as any serious Marxist should, it would point right back at them. My self-annihilation would have allowed them to neutralize me and bury the Oromo question, which would have afforded them the luxury of not having to examine their own rot.

What the Expulsion revealed #

The Double Standard #

Isolate the key variable that determines who gets protected and who gets punished within FRSO. Hold the behavior constant, and the outcome changes based on one thing only: where you situate yourself in relation to the center and its political line. In short, status determines protection.

Mick Kelly was proud to have defended Dustin Ponder, who was accused of sexually assaulting three people. Tom Burke threatened to expel cadres who tried to hold Dallas District Organizer Daniel Sullivan accountable for pushing a Black woman cadre to drink until she was hospitalized. Tom was aware that Dan did this, but he urged other cadre to “struggle with him.” Mantak Singh had an appalling trend of chauvinistic behavior and walked around a student conference with his genitals exposed, to which Tom lamented that the student was a good organizer. Later when faced with more inconvenient information about Mantak, Tom said, “you know how young men are with women.” For these grotesque male chauvinists, leadership had all the room for nuance.

Meanwhile, I had interpersonal conflicts with cadre that could have actually been struggled through, and I was willing to. Instead, the organization collapsed all nuance into a binary prosecution. And when I accepted some complaints while refusing total self-annihilation and instead insisted that my side be taken into account, I was expelled.

These two tracks were concurrent, not sequential. At the exact same time the FRSO Center was actively protecting Dan, it was actively suppressing my political struggle on the Oromo question and weaponizing interpersonal conflicts to purge me. There is no metric by which my actions were more deserving of expulsion than Dan’s. The difference cannot be explained by the severity of the behavior. Dan was useful and aligned. Thus, he could be protected because he didn’t threaten the line. I, however, pushed an Oromo national struggle that struck right at the foundation of the organization and its cult figure’s legitimacy. That was grounds for waging war against me.

Demonstrating that the organization was not at all interested in accountability, months after my expulsion, I was still re-litigating my relationship with M with my former best friend Gabe Miller. Gabe is a co-chair of CAARPR’s media committee and is in FRSO Chicago’s national liberation unit. For months, Gabe mined new transgressions until the whole relationship was rewritten to serve the organization’s needs. Any fondness I expressed about the most important relationship of my life was seen as an attack, a sign I wasn’t actually accountable. Never mind that I had already expressed willingness to self-criticize for the relationship months prior. During this re-litigation, the Dallas expose was released. In one of our last conversations, I asked Gabe point blank: “How do you square my mistreatment with how the org covered for the others?” Him, by then totally degenerated by his allegiance to the organization, insisted, “Those are two totally separate things!” The organization cannot allow such a comparison because it would reveal the political logic behind any expulsion.

Relegation to Mass Org #

The way FRSO operates is that its members mainly do their work through mass organizations that anybody can join. The idea is that, through the mass organizations, communists can work alongside the masses, win them over to the correct strategy and tactics, earn their trust and leadership, and in the process identify the most capable organizers to train into being communists. Whether this is how things actually play out in FRSO’s so called mass organizations (what many call front groups), is debatable. But in Chicago, categorically CAARPR was a front for FRSO. As mentioned, when FRSO expelled me, it said that since CAARPR was a different organization, I could continue to work in CAARPR. This wasn’t a kindness, but instead, my relegation was structural.

When a revolutionary organization degenerates, its priority is no longer responding to the needs of the masses but it’s in ensuring its own survival in spite of reality. The line becomes what the organization defends rather than the interests of the masses. In this, members become problems not when they engage in rampant misconduct like Dan or Dustin but when they threaten the organization’s line. Removal from FRSO conveniently ejects past the point of access to line struggle and onto the mass organization where roles are merely concerned with tactical questions – IE social media posting, phone banking, door knocking, etc. Thus, my relegation to CAARPR would mean I could give my labor without access to the line.

However, if the issue were truly harmful behavior, FRSO in theory should want a person out entirely. But instead, the punishment was surgically precise and was designed to remove my access to the line while retaining my labor. Dan Sullivan, by contrast, engaged in behavior that harmed people in the political spaces, but he was useful to the center. This meant he could keep his leadership role and his access to the line. I threatened the line but was a workhorse which meant I was stripped of line access and kept as labor. The design of the punishment reveals the motive. The organization was never concerned with accountability, but it was concerned with protecting the line and those who serve it while neutralizing those who threaten it, even if their labor remains valuable. My expulsion from FRSO but retention in CAARPR, then, was not a compromise or a kindness, but it was a structural solution to a political problem: remove the threat, keep the work.

That this relegation is understood by FRSO as a punishment reveals something else. The commandist structure does not stop at the FRSO’s borders, but it extends into how FRSO relates to the masses themselves. Proximity to the line is status, and distance from the line is punishment. The fact that being reduced to the status of an ordinary member of the public, someone who simply does the work without access to shaping strategy, is considered a loss says what the organization thinks of ordinary people. Thus, the same top-down logic that prevented me from challenging leadership within FRSO structures the relationship between FRSO and the masses it claims to serve. In practice, the masses become the means to reproducing the line.

So in the end, though I had deep attachment to the work in CAARPR, I realized that staying would only put me back in the same place of violent erasure while relieving FRSO of the structural reckoning it needed by providing my labor. So I walked away to start work among Oromos.

Isolation #

Self-Annihilation #

In a healthy revolutionary organization, individual deficiencies are seen as a failure of the collective. However, in a commandist organization, individual deficiencies become the absorber of errors of the collective. In this, organizational practices like criticism and self-criticism, which are meant to assess individual errors in relation to collective political errors, become weaponized to individualize political errors so that the organization’s line can remain untouched.

With this context, the organization made a concerted effort to get me to self-annihilate so that they could export the antagonism from the political questions I raised that they had no answer to back onto me. For refusing to unconditionally self-annihilate, the organization expelled me. They cut me off from my friends, including two best friends, my comrades, and my entire support system. Then they criminalized me in perpetuity, exporting the antagonism onto me unopposed. In the process, they became the bourgeoisie and its carceral punishment of Black people embodied, similarly relying on racism, criminalization, and incarceration to avoid examining its rot. Categorically, I did not deserve this.

The Aftermath #

The months after my removal were the most difficult of my life. Every day I awoke to an immediate barrage of excruciating anguish. My days, once buzzing with activity, became barren as I had lost my entire support network. It was a struggle to get from morning to night. People I used to hear from every day went silent. Even those who didn’t know exactly what happened slowly trickled out of my life as the organization’s whispers reached them. And for those who the whispers didn’t reach, they knew something was wrong but were too afraid to ask, so they too faded.

Upon expelling me, the organization threatened that if I shared what happened with people they worked with, they would have to share their side of the story. Internalizing their criminalization, for a while I remained totally silent, afraid to even talk aloud to myself about what happened. For months, I struggled to trust people in new friendships and relationships. I also struggled with relating to people as the trauma I experienced lingered like a dark cloud over me and made it hard to know how to talk about anything unrelated to it. In the overwhelming grief, I knew I only had two choices: wallow in misery and die, or continue fighting. I chose to fight. Yet to this day, I wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks as my body flashes back to that harrowing saga.

As my recovery unfolded, I often wondered if I’d end up like my deceased friend Jayda Van, a revolutionary who rose through CAARPR and FRSO during the 2020 uprisings. When CAARPR compromised with a rival coalition on police accountability through a decision that FRSO made, Jayda agitated internally against what she saw as a betrayal of principle. She was swiftly removed from FRSO and her CAARPR leadership position for failing to respect the collective decision. After her removal, Jayda was isolated like I was. Before she could write anything, she descended into mental health crisis and died by suicide. I’ll never forget Frank saying her politics were because she “wasn’t right between her ears.”

What pulled me through were the daily human things in life that I had lost sight of as a dedicated organizer: things like walking for pleasure, going to parks, riding my bicycle, and playing music again. What also pulled me through was that I began learning Afaan Oromo, the language taken from me by my nuclear family, and I made rapid progress in it. Another thing that helped me was meeting a Quechua woman from Peru who read some of my Oromo writings with fascination and told me about her peoples’ history of being erased by the Peruvian nation-state. Through that, I was able to see that Oromos weren’t the only indigenous people erased by nation-states but that this erasure was a process that took place all over the world. Most of all what helped me was the Oromo struggle beating in my heart and my duty to the people of Palestine who are suffering a genocide. I knew that Palestine could not be free until the Zionist stain of the Ethiopia folklore was extricated from our movement. And I also knew that a critical, non-vacillating unity between Oromos and Palestinians existed, but it had to be ruthlessly fought for. I pledged to myself that I would do that work.

As I healed, I began to grasp that I was at the center of a historical process of a long-erased nation seeking to make itself known within the halls of a movement that built itself on its erasure. My struggle took place at the sharpest point of contradiction, in the area most teeming with information, so I knew that I couldn’t just rest, but I had to theoretically make sense of what happened to me so that I could chart the path forward. I deepened my studies, and I deepened my writing about the Oromo struggle. I also started meeting other Oromos and became more publicly outspoken about the struggle. The more emboldened I became, the more people from my old life distanced themselves even more. In fact, I remember going to two Palestine protests with Oromos, and people from my old orgs who were there couldn’t even look at me. I accepted that it was the cost of the sovereign path I was charting to get Oromos to break into the movement. The blank stares I received were merely the defense mechanism of an organization with no more levers of control over me besides their subjective perception – in constructing a reality where I didn’t exist, their turn to metaphysics was complete. I knew that their blank stares could only ensure that they were making their bed for when the Oromo inevitably arose.

My recovery ultimately confirmed to me that what stood in the way of Oromo liberation wasn’t the ignorance of conscientious people, but it was the complicity of so-called vanguard groups like FRSO who possess the scientific tools to make sense of Black settler colonialism but instead hide behind religious allegiance to folklore. By refusing to take their own theory to its logical end while also diligently getting in front of every new political crisis so that everything must go through them, they become gatekeepers that quite literally hold the masses hostage from linking up with a gargantuan struggle at the entryway of Africa of over 40 million people that could help free them.

The most acute grief subsided around the three-month mark. Though I still struggled with culpability, I understood intellectually that I had been purged. I began meeting Oromos, conducting 1:1s, and building very early structures and relationships for the work. Simultaneously, I accepted there was life beyond my old organizations not as a functionary, but as a sovereign Oromo.

“Just Self Criticize” #

In the weeks following my expulsion, I met with several people from my unit. I initially thought these meetings were in good faith, but I soon realized everyone was there to urge me to “just self-criticize.

I met with Brian Young Jr., my comrade who during the political struggle expressed curiosity in the Oromo struggle but was stamped out. I gave them exhaustive testimony about the interpersonal conflict with Tulsi. With each word, they slunk lower in the grass, overwhelmed by the details. By the end, they mimed, “I think you should still self-criticize.” When I pushed back with even more detail, they asked, “Have you thought of going to therapy?” This is the left’s version of “I think you’re crazy.” I didn’t see Brian again until months later. When I updated them about my life and the connections I was making with Oromos, they abruptly stood up and said they needed to run to the store for a snack. They did what Joe did.

Then there was my conversation with Dod. Any word that came out of my mouth that wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing brought antagonism. They couldn’t bear my suggestion that I was pushed out for political reasons. They also pushed back on just about everything else I said, at one point accusing me of “retroactively making things up” and “externalizing everything and not taking internal responsibility.” When I brought up moments of ambiguity in mine and Tulsi’s friendship, Dod proceeded to blame me for not speaking up for myself or for being unreasonable in my interpretations that her actions were advances and that they were inappropriate.

Towards the end of our conversation, Dod asked, “But what about your actions? How are you changing your actions?” Here, they were doing what Frank did by telling me to isolate my actions from context. When I started giving the context that would help me change my actions, they stormed off, saying I was making excuses for my actions.

And for Gabe, my best friend and the one sympathetic person throughout my last days in FRSO, even that relationship soured. The irreconcilable differences between me and the org he was in meant that he would inevitably be cast into the same role of the arbiter of my accountability.

And though I had already unconditionally self-criticized for my relationship with M, Gabe for months proceeded to re-litigate only that relationship. It was as if he was my parole officer, checking in once a month about my accountability. In that, new details were mined until the whole relationship was rewritten to serve the organization’s needs. Any fondness I expressed about the most important relationship of my life was seen as an attack, a sign I wasn’t actually accountable. No answer I gave was enough. “Anyone could think of that,” he’d say as I poured my heart out. When I told him I’m open about my past in my new relationships, he retorted, “But are you telling everybody in your life about what you did?” As far as he was concerned, having “felon” on my record or wearing a scarlet letter wouldn’t have been enough. At another point, he did as the others and said, “just focus on your actions.” At another, he said I clearly wasn’t accountable if I didn’t go to therapy. I didn’t think it was his business whether or not I went.

Finally, after months of patiently answering all his questions honestly, he pulled a shocking move. He referenced a conversation from two years prior, when I was still in the fog of my relationship with M, and told me that because my account to him then was inaccurate, he couldn’t trust a thing I was saying in the more recent conversations. He conveniently moved the goalposts. Even then, out of duty to the friendship, I continued answering until he moved the goalposts further by saying we hadn’t even discussed the other complaints — after months of relitigating M. It was no coincidence that this happened after I shared with him an Oromo text I wrote. The permanent criminalization he and the organization needed to hold me in could no longer function the more my Oromo consciousness grew. In that, the re-litigation could no longer serve its purpose of exporting antagonism onto me, and so he ended the friendship altogether. That end confirmed, once and for all, that accountability was never the point. Containment and control was.

The most insulting part, however, were the people who pretended like nothing happened. Some people messaged me questions about the work as if I was still in the organization. Another kept sending me new episodes of FRSO’s drab podcasts. And one person even got me a gift card for Christmas, thinking I would accept it. The organization, even its most benevolent figures, could not comprehend the sheer violence they inflicted on me but could only see me as a sheep lost from the flock. They just could not fathom that I would chart out a new path beyond them because in their minds, they are the center of the movement.

Final Thoughts #

This memoir is about what happens when an organization that claims to fight for liberation becomes the thing it claims to oppose. And it’s about what happens when the liquidation of one struggle, the Oromo national liberation struggle, leads to the liquidation of all struggles.

The Oromo struggle is nearly 150 years old and is waged by over 40 million people against Ethiopian settler colonialism to this day. Generations of my family have bled for this struggle and were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. However, this struggle is one that the US anti-imperialist and communist movement hasn’t just ignored but actively erased, while building its folklore on the “defense” of Ethiopia while Oromos, Somalis, and others who were conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered rejected it.

That erasure found a home in FRSO, where it could serve as the most scientific, advanced vehicle for Oromo erasure – though in the end, for all its grandiosity, the erasure was based on a hollow religiosity. Through Frank Chapman joining the organization in 2014, the organization could inherit the communist movement’s uncritical celebration of Ethiopia without ever examining what that celebration rested on. The cult of personality around Frank, and the fact that Ethiopia was his most exalted moment in history would render the Oromo question absolutely unaskable. His status as the living embodiment of national liberation meant any challenge to the Ethiopia folklore was a challenge to his and the organization’s identity. The commandist structure ensured no democratic struggle could force the line to evolve – and especially as it pertained to the Oromo struggle.

Meanwhile, such religious allegiance to folklore is the very entry point through which mysticism can enter a revolutionary organization, leading it to degenerate from responding to reality to defending an organization, its cult figures, and a line and outlook based on a fable. Indeed, in times of high struggle as now, the organization must strain especially hard to keep the fable and itself intact in spite of a reality demonstrating otherwise – take how the organization could liquidate its most dedicated cadre making clear linkages between Zionism and the fable. They opted for a fable instead of the truth. Here begins the voluntarism (emphasis on will to compensate for a lack of forward movement due to incorrect line), the commandism (the organization’s structural consolidation around voluntarism), and the death spiral into liquidating the struggle altogether. The chauvinism calcified, unchallenged, for generations. And it’s here that harm can continue unabated so long as the culprits do “good work.”

Indeed, when I raised the question, I wasn’t met with political struggle. I was met with deflection, dismissal, and procedural containment. When I forced the question into official spaces, I was met with substanceless discussions, misrepresentation, strawmen, and the stamping out of curiosity in newer cadre. When I refused to let the question die, the organization dug up my personal life, fabricated and distorted disputes, and convened a kangaroo court where most adjudicators had direct conflicts of interest. When I refused to fully self-annihilate, I was politically lynched and expelled to endure a life that resembled solitary confinement.

I’m not the first. Jayda Van raised a principled objection to a political compromise and was removed, isolated, and driven to suicide. Frank dismissed her as “not right between her ears.” The same was undoubtedly said of me. The organization can’t afford to see us as political actors making political arguments, because that would require examining the conditions that produced our objections. It’s easier to criminalize us, to isolate us, to make us problems of individual psychology rather than symptoms of collective rot.

Meanwhile, white men like Dustin Ponder, who was accused of sexually assaulting three people, and Dan Sullivan, who hospitalized a Black woman comrade and sexually harassed students, were vehemently protected. The organization also protected Mantak Singh, who exposed his genitals at a student conference. In these cases, the center found infinite room for nuance. Those who pushed for accountability in these cases were threatened with expulsion. Some of the pushback received has been that the most recent assault by Dustin took place over 10 years ago. However, much of the leadership that buried Dustin’s case still serve on the central or standing committee – which are the highest ranking bodies in the organization. The only variable that explains the difference between my treatment and theirs was political alignment. Dustin, Dan, and Mantak were useful because they didn’t threaten the line. I, a Black woman who made mistakes in my long-term relationship, was eviscerated because I refused to be silent about my people’s struggle.

This is what commandism produces: an organization that exists not to serve the people but to protect itself. A structure where proximity to the line is status and distance from the line is punishment. A relationship to the masses where they’re doers, not thinkers, labor to be commanded, not comrades to be heard and fought alongside. A cult of personality that shields the line from any inquiry, no matter how much evidence is brought against it. And harm that continues unabated so long as the culprits do “good work.”

The liquidation of the Oromo struggle within FRSO wasn’t an isolated error. In fact, it is the entryway through which metaphysics enters the organization, laying the basis for a commandist structure that stops responding to reality and renders the organization increasingly divorced from the masses. And the full, conscious liquidation of this struggle – as demonstrated in my expulsion – means the organization is careening towards the eventual liquidation of all struggles. The first time this happened, in all its scale, was tragedy. The second time, pitifully played out in a struggle over a revisionist film depicting the first time, is farce. The same mechanism that erased Oromos protected sex abusers. The same logic that criminalized me will criminalize anyone who threatens the line.

Address #

To Oromos #

You are not crazy. Our erasure is intentional. We have a duty to fight for a place in this movement because, so long as our people remain isolated, the crimes against them can continue in the shadows. Our people back home depend on us. Band together. Don’t be afraid to face the world, because uniting with it is in our best interests. But in uniting, hold tight to our particular grievances. Anyone who tells you to let go of yourself as an Oromo is not your friend. Contact this site if you’d like to start building.

To Palestinians #

Oromos are inspired by your fierce, organized generations-long resistance to Israel. Well before the Palestinian struggle had the widespread support of the anti-imperialist movement, our heroes of the Oromo Liberation Front trained with your resistance in the aftermath of the Six Day War and our Bale Revolt. This was on the precipice of Black September as we were both in the height of our own respective crises. In that era of historic struggle, Oromos proclaimed themselves in full solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. And though we have not yet visibly come out in force for Palestine, our fight inherently strikes in the same direction. Now, we Oromos will fight tirelessly to bring conscious unity between our people.

To the left and progressive groups #

This is not an invitation to opportunistically pose your organization as an alternative to FRSO. The most immediate thing you can do is condemn FRSO for the actions listed here and elsewhere on the site. I also invite you and your organization to issue a statement that makes a historical correction by stating that the anti-imperialist movement siding with Ethiopia in 1935 & 1936 was an error in support of Zionism and in betrayal of the Oromo, Somali, and Palestinian people. And from there, I invite your org to state that you stand with the Oromo, Somali, and all oppressed peoples’ right to self determination in Ethiopia.

To pro-democratic forces within FRSO #

FRSO is ruled by a clique in the center who act through local enforcers. But the organization still possesses many principled comrades who work in spite of the commandism. I’m not making a value judgment on you. I know you do the work because you care. That being said, to those of you taking a head-down, just-get-the-work-done approach: you have a duty to either leave or struggle.

If you decide to stay, you have a duty to seek transparency into the sexual assault and misconduct cover-ups. You have a duty to seek transparency into my treatment and the gulf between it and the others. And most of all, you have a duty to struggle on the Oromo question with the aim of taking it all the way to the upcoming Congress. Struggle for the organization to issue a historical correction of 1935. Struggle for the organization to stand with the Oromo right to self determination in Ethiopia. Struggle to get Frank’s revisionist book pulled from circulation until he can issue a correction that centers the Oromo. Struggle to get the organization to condemn Merawi’s film. In this process, let the organization demonstrate if it can truly defend its position through dialectical materialism rather than the metaphysics it used against me. Let the struggle demonstrate whether FRSO really is a revolutionary organization that is equipped to handle democratic participation or if it has degenerated beyond repair. And if you struggle and don’t get anywhere, you have a duty to leave the organization and to share what happened to spare others who may be considering joining. One of the ways you can do that is by getting in contact with this site.

A New Line of Demarcation #

I wrote this text as a last resort, after exhausting goodwill and all avenues of struggle and after being savagely erased in explicit and implicit and all too dehumanizing ways. Even then, I stayed silent for quite some time, naively thinking reconciliation was possible. But the struggle for reconciliation itself was the process by which I could conclude that big truths never fall into place, but they have to be fought for every step of the way. At a certain point, I learned that my personal feelings about things must come second to the objective necessity of pushing forward a people’s struggle that could blow the lid on the world struggle.

I expect that in response to this text, people will attempt to dig up details from my past relationship or other interpersonal matters to discredit me. If that happens, it will only prove my point: the organization can wage total war against a Black woman who raised a political question, while it remains silent and protects white men who committed rape and sex abuse. Or while its front groups can’t even muster a direct condemnation of pedophiles and rapists like Cesar Chavez, instead hiding behind whataboutism aimed at Trump and Epstein, or hiding behind the identity of their Chicana leaders, rather than laying out clearly what it is doing to combat such conduct in its spaces.

As if my life being liquidated and facing nearly a year of isolation wasn’t enough, I have already taken accountability for my actions, and I will not be relitigating anything here or anywhere else. The question is whether this movement can face the Oromo struggle, or whether it will continue to bury it with attempts to character assassinate me.

Many will read this and find the organizational corruption comprehensible, maybe even familiar. That would be a positive result. Others may read the political aspect and still struggle to grasp the reality of the Oromo people. Support for the Ethiopian state is reflexive on the left, even when it doesn’t arise from a profound understanding of what Ethiopia materially is. The reflexiveness is both a danger and an opening. Any discomfort from long-silenced people like the Oromo and other indigenous people finally finding their voice to name their oppression is the very process by which the line of demarcation is being drawn. Time to get on the right side of the barricade.

Read the main expose’s demands at https://frso-accountability.org/posts/frso-sexual-assault-coverups/#iii-dot-what-is-to-be-done

Reach out at [email protected]

Learn about the Oromo struggle:

1. The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation - Oromo Liberation Front (1975) - PDF
2. The Invention of Ethiopia - Bonnie Holcomb, Sissai Ibssa (1991) - PDF
3. The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936 - Ezekiel Gebissa (2002) - PDF