It done got real UBF fam! Tomorrow (Sunday, August 18th ) our most recent addition to the organization, Cedric O’Bannon, informed he will be conducting a video interview with the following individuals for an international conference on socialism. On behalf of the organization, he requested UBF founder Ivan Kilgore submit the following questions to be asked of each speaker:

1. Barbara Becnel (author, writer, producer, Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story).

Ivan’s question: What impact, if any, do you see a socialist society having on the question of the death penalty?

2. Robbie Meeropol (Son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg).

Ivan’s question: How can we better develop proletariat (I.e., working class) consciousness to counter capital exploitation?

3. Alice Walker (Pulitzer Prize Novelist, author The Color Purple).

Ivan’s question: Whether in capitalist America or communist Cuba, the plight of the descendants of Africa continue to suffer under the social construct of race. Explain why it is we continue to witness the same discriminatory practices in socialist societies as with capitalist?

4. Cindy Sheehan (Organizer/Coordinator, Women’s March on the Pentagon).

Ivan’s question: Sexism and misogyny in their myriad destructive forms permeates every aspect of American life from the church to the workforce. As an African-American man, how do we get young brothers (and sisters) in the hood to recognize the deep-seated culture of hatred and prejudice towards women is also propagated by the white supremacist structure?

5. Pam Africa (Chair, International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal).

Ivan’s question: Author and sociologist Amos Wilson once said, “The violently oppressed react violently to their oppression. When their reactionary violence, their retaliatory violence or destructive violence, cannot be effectively directed at their oppressors or effectively applied to their self-liberation, it then will be directed at and applied destructively to themselves.” My question is, what promises will introducing socialism have on reducing black-on-black violence given the fact that it is often said much of the violence that we see in capitalist societies is based on the oppression that Wilson speaks of?

6. Nora Barrows Friedman (Associate Editor, Electronic Intifada).

Ivan’s question: The late Dr. Bobby Wright once said that for socialism to be a reality it requires the cooperation of the masses of the white race. With that being a condition, is this even a real alternative given exploitative nature of Western culture?