Professor emeritus and former chair of Native American Studies at University of California Davis Jack Forbes writes in his book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, of what he calls the "sickness of exploitation," or the wetiko (cannibal) disease.

Cannibalism, as Forbes defines it, "is the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit."

Forbes notes, "Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil."

"Few, if any, societies on the face of the Earth have ever been as avaricious, cruel, violent, and aggressive as have certain European populations," Forbes concludes.

Native Americans experienced wetiko in brutal fashion not long after "first contact" with Europeans.

"[Europeans] slaughtered, during one short period alone, 50 million buffalo, because thousands of us relied on them, and in less than a generation, they annihilated them," Harold Dick Jr., a 72-year-old Chiricahua Apache, told Truthout. "And they take pride in this, and take pictures of the dead buffalo, like it takes a 'real man' to shoot an animal with a high-powered rifle from far away."

He added that when Native Americans talk about "great" people, they usually speak of medicine people, "but all of the greats the whites ever write about were great at destruction and subjugating people."

Dick Jr's point has been true since the so-called founding of the United States - given that it was rich, land-owning white men who authored the US Constitution, setting the stage for the white supremacy that drives US policy, both domestic and foreign, to this day.

Stan Rushworth is an elder of Cherokee decent who has taught Native American literature and critical thinking classes focused on Indigenous perspectives for more than a quarter of a century, and now teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.

"As far as Indians are concerned, no administration that I know of has had Indians' best interest at heart," Rushworth told Truthout. "Eisenhower said, 'We're getting out of the Indian business and unilaterally abrogate all the treaties and do away with all the reservations.' So the will of the American people is that we disappear."

Thus, for Rushworth and a lot of his friends, "Trump didn't lift a veil at all - he simply imposed another layer of a veil."

Dick Jr. feels similarly. He told Truthout that, from his perspective as a Native American, if the US is going to talk about freedom and liberty, people need to recall that the country was founded upon genocide and slavery.

"If they want to start clean, the have to cop to the fact of what they did, and that it was wrong, and that [of] over 300 treaties written, not one was ever kept," Dick Jr. said. "It is a huge case of hypocrisy ...they talk of 'freedom' and 'liberty,' but we don't get any. And by extension, the citizens of the country don't really get any, either."

They are far from alone in their analysis about what ails this country, and how very far back that ailment goes.

A Rotten Foundation

"We [Native Americans] represent a shame, we represent a huge moral lapse in a country that likes to see itself as based on morality," Rushworth said. "Rule of law is what people say we are based on. But rule of law is based on a society's moral behavior. And with Indians, there is nothing but contradiction there. There is this huge cognitive dissonance."

That cognitive dissonance stems from the history of genocide, injustice, slavery and colonial history the US is based upon.

Martin Rizzo is a lecturer in University of California Santa Cruz's American Studies Department, who specializes in Native American history, as well as colonialism and nationalism.

Rizzo reminded Truthout of the ongoing legal injustices around the fact that there has never been a reckoning with the reality of the theft of land and resources from Native Americans, but also pointed towards the need to understand the historical traumas from what was done.

"The process of colonialism involves direct genocide," Rizzo said, noting that scalp bounties in the West are one example of state-sanctioned violence, in which the government reimbursed white people for hunting down Native Americans.

Rizzo notes the psychological warfare component of this - how Native Americans were literally taught that they were "subhuman."

"Like Trump today saying we shouldn't be embarrassed about 'civilizing' this continent, this is deeply embedded in the colonial mindset that sees one people superior and another people inferior," Rizzo said. "We have to reckon with this."

According to Rizzo, Native Americans are dealing with trans-generational traumas that need to be undone due to hundreds of years of being told that their lifestyles were inferior to the colonists' way.

"We are seeing this colonial world that has been increasingly devastating the environment," Rizzo said. "Natives were pointing out hundreds of years ago the need to take care of the Earth for seven generations to preserve life for the future, versus this colonial approach we see today that is destroying the planet."

Dick Jr. reminds us of Article Six, paragraph two of the US Constitution, which deals with the sovereignty of Native people.

"The treaties made between sovereign nations are supposed to be ironclad and not disused ...but they've never kept this," he said. "One of the old chiefs once said, 'They should put wheels on us so when they change the treaties, they could just roll us out of the way.' The first thing they do when they come in is they take all of it. And no matter how much there is, they take more of it."

Speaking to Forbe's wetiko disease, Dick Jr. reminds us of the colonialists coming from Europe who called themselves pilgrims. L"The bottom line is that the day these people got off the boat until today is they've never kept their word."

Dick Jr. shed light on how the basic Christian belief system brought by the colonialists drove their behavior, pointing out how many Native Americans believe they were born into paradise, whereas the Christian mindset is one of being kicked out of paradise.

"They think we were 'bad' and god threw us out," he said. "But we think we must be pretty good, because the creator gave us all of this."

Rizzo pointed out the systematic annihilation then assimilation of Native Americans, a large component of which included the breaking up of their community.

"Native American policies of the federal government shifted from outright warfare and genocide against them to: Who can we integrate into societies?" he said. "The [Dawes General] Allotment Act [of 1887] broke apart collective holdings of reservation land, and this caused a rapid loss of land for Native Americans."

According to Rizzo, during the early 20th century, in 20 years, 35 percent of all Native lands were sold, and within 40 years, roughly half were gone, and this went on until the 1930s. This furthered the disintegration and isolation within tribal societies, and contributed to psychological displacement, depression and myriad other issues.

One example of the scale and rapidity of the genocide of the Native Americans occurred between 1846 and 1880 in California, when 90 percent of them were killed by white colonists.

Rizzo consistently teaches about the slavery and genocide that the US is built upon, because, as he put it, "It's like the guy who thinks he is flawless and continues to abuse and carryout bad things. If you're not willing to look at the harsh realities of the past, then it is impossible to work towards justice."

Rizzo reminds his classes that Native American children were forcibly removed from their families, forbidden to speak their native languages and suffered corporal abuse in the name of assimilation. For at least a century this was ongoing, in addition to the fact that during the period of overt slavery, African children were separated from their parents, and oftentimes sold off to plantations.

He connects this history to the crisis at the US-Mexico border, where the federal government is separating immigrant children from their parents.

"Even today people look at the border and say, 'Oh my god, this is not the country that we are,' but this is the country we are," Rizzo said. "This has happened over and over in our history ...We have to have proper context of this all being part of a larger systematic problem that has to be corrected."

Part of coming to terms with this ongoing legacy involves Native Americans grappling with historical trauma and relating to a society that largely erases their existence.

Struggles for Indigenous Students

Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, a Mescalero Apache, is the director of the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at University of California, Santa Cruz. The AIRC serves all students, but advocates for Native students who comprise less than 1 percent of the total student body, as is usually the case on college campuses. Hernandez told Truthout that her biggest struggle is retaining students, because the contemporary issues facing Native Americans in universities stem largely from the unhealed issues from their ancestors' brutal history under colonialism.

Hernandez talks to her students about this history in the context of how it contributes to contemporary problems and how so many of them are first-generation college students who are also struggling with guilt due to the fact that their people back home on the reservations continue to struggle mightily.

"Our collective histories as Native peoples have contributed to us as having to make these difficult decisions now because of what happened in the past," she told Truthout. "Some of us have to be these forerunners and push harder to get to the other side to get through college, or to go back (or not) and help our families, and bring other people through after us."

Hernandez works to help her students appreciate their history, because as she sees it, "We've always had these challenges and had to adapt rapidly. We were taken away from our families and expected to be really solid human beings, but there is a lot of dysfunction and sadness in our communities that has happened from that, and we are only now seeing the results of the colonization."

She sees colonization as ongoing, and one ramification of this is how so many of her Indigenous students are unaware of their own tribal history.

Hernandez works towards having her students learn to discuss themselves as Native in a way "that is confident, authentic, and they own that identity and do so with confidence."

This is because part of the current colonization stems from what Native American students deal with in their interactions with non-Natives.

"People dismiss them, ask insensitive questions, and often, the students don't have the tools to talk about themselves in a way that shuts that nonsense down," Hernandez said. "We have to learn how to talk about ourselves as Natives. Most of us present white. Because when you don't, instantly you are fair game for weird questions, stereoypes and other weird things."

An example she gave is this: "If someone says they are Egyptian, people don't ask them, 'How Egyptian are you?' We are the only group in the US that has to deal with that question. I've had people here ask me to help them figure out what their spirit animal is. I can't imagine what a 19-year-old does to deal with that. I just wonder when is this going to end." Hernandez wonders when people are going to see Native Americans as part of the American fabric just like every other demographic in the US.

"I'm like any other ethnic group, that's a big part of the contemporary experience, and I try to help students practice responding to these stereotypes and weird questions," she explained. "These are real things students are experiencing. So how do we then collectively respond and learn how to put on the brakes and say something isn't ok to say to me, or to dismiss me based on how I look?"

Additionally, Hernandez pointed out how underscoring all of those issues are the ongoing systemic problems of Native Americans suffering the low end of the tremendous wealth disparities in the US, having incredibly high suicide rates and having major health problems.

But, despite these massive issues, Hernandez encourages her students.

"Every day, I see these young people and I say, 'You are our future, you have to do this, you can't quit'," she said. "It would be a privilege to quit, but that is not a privilege we have. You alone are going to affect so many lives by finishing. You are going to show that little girl or boy that this is possible."

Hernandez is acutely aware of the challenge she faces.

"It's not easy here for them; we are so invisible," she said. "You layer that invisibility on top of feelings of inadequacy, and it makes it even harder. So I try to be that person here, to remind these young people how phenomenal they are."

It Is and Always Was "About Resources"

Dick Jr. told Truthout that in the colonialists' quest for freedom, they denied everybody else freedom.

"They've done everything in their power to annihilate us," Dick Jr. said. "Ninety-eight percent of the Indigenous population of Turtle Island [North America] was wiped out ...you have to work at that, to wipe out that many of us."

He pointed out how, despite living on the homeland of his birth and that of his ancestors, he had to buy land to live there. "So what I'm doing is buying back my land. So that is ironic. I have to buy my land in order to live in it. There is something really wrong with that."

Rushworth reminds us that the invasion of the continent by the colonists was always about resources, driven initially by how those who came from Europe did so because they had used up their resources there.

"Their lack of philosophical underpinnings, the idea that it is all there to be used up - that's what happened in Europe," he explained. "By 1492, it was trashed, by all accounts."

He reminded us of the conditions in Europe of that time: rampant disease, no functional social networks, widespread homelessness, child labor, fiefdoms.

"These were not healthy societies," Rushworth said. "That can be measured in how they treated prisoners, how they treated women, how they treated the environment. It was not healthy people that came here. Most of them didn't come here with a healthy attitude."

Hence, carrying this attitude and the soul-sickness that accompanied it, "They took what they wanted when they came here."

"That's when the Westward expansion began, and a really deep dehumanization became the national rhetoric, and that wasn't that long ago," Rushworth concluded. "And that is all about exploitation of resources. That comes into Jack Forbe's wetiko disease of exploitation, greed and power. I think he's spot on ...It is a disease, and that is what we are still living in the middle of."
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

How to sum up in a few words 50 years of political partnership, which was also an intensive friendship, with the person who, I believe, had the most influence on me?

The starting point: summer of 1969. A 14-year-old from Tel Aviv, during the summer between elementary school and high school, I notice an ad in HaOlam HaZeh newspaper asking for volunteers at the election headquarters of the "HaOlam Hazeh - Koah Hadash" ("New Force") party. I went. In a small basement office on Glickson Street, I found three teenagers folding propaganda flyers into envelopes. To this day, the smell of fresh print takes me back to that very moment. Two hours later, we heard a commotion outside. Knesset Member Uri Avnery, the man whose articles brought us to this office in the first place, walked in. He was returning from an election rally in Rishon LeZion. He exchanged a few words with the volunteers, thanked us for our help, and went into a meeting room with his aides.

At that point, it was not Uri Avnery's opinions on the Palestinian issue that motivated me to volunteer for the campaign. My own opinions on the matter were not fully formed yet. Only two years prior, in June of 1967, I had shared with many others in celebrating the fact that Israel expanded into "new territories." I would not have imagined that I would eventually dedicate most of my life to trying to get Israel out of those territories. I was attracted to Uri Avnery's party primarily because it was a young, fresh political party that challenged the old, rotten establishment parties, and because it was opposed to religious coercion, and advocated for separation of religion and state, public transportation on Shabbat, and civil marriage.

A few weeks after I began volunteering, I left a note on Uri's desk with a few questions: Can we really make peace with the Arabs? Should we give back all the territories Israel occupied, or only some? And what will happen with the settlers? (The settler population at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is today.) A week later, I received a letter in the mail - three pages of detailed answers to each one of my 10 questions. I still have that letter. I have no doubt that Uri wrote it himself - his writing style seeps out of every word. He took the time and energy, in the middle of running a political campaign, to provide thorough answers to the questions of a 14-year-old. I think it turned out to be a profitable investment.

The end point: Friday, August 3, 2018. A years-long political partner of Uri Avnery, at 63 years old, I receive his weekly column, as I do every Friday. In this article, he wrote about the Jewish Nation-State Law and Israel's national identity, and whether it was Jewish or Israeli (he of course advocated strongly for an Israeli identity). As I had done many times before, I wrote him an email commenting on the substance of the article, raising some fundamental objections. He suggested we discuss them further next time we meet. I asked for his opinion on the protest against the Nation-State Law, scheduled for the following day by the Druze community. He said he was convinced that the demonstration would not focus on the Druze's exclusive standing in Israeli society, or the unique bundle of rights they get for serving in the military, but that it will tackle the fundamental principle of equality for all citizens.

The last which I will ever hear from him was a one-line message on my computer screen: "I am going to the Druze protest tomorrow." I assume that he did read what I had written him, that on that night he went to sleep in his bed and that he woke up the next day with the intention of participating in the protest. In the evening, when I was standing amidst the large crowd that amassed in the Rabin Square, I assumed he was standing somewhere around. I rang his phone twice, getting no reply and chalking it up to bad reception (which is common during mass rallies when very many people use their mobile phones all at once). In retrospect I know that by then he had already been admitted to the emergency room at Ichilov Hospital, never to regain consciousness. It was the activists who planned to give him a ride to the demonstration who had found him lying on the floor of his apartment.

What filled the 50 years between the start and end points? The HaOlam Hazeh - Koah Hadash party, which merged into Peace and Eqaulity for Israel, a political party known as Shelli in Hebrew; the Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which held meetings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and became a faction of Sheli; the Progressive List for Peace, which we joined after Shelli broke up; and then Gush Shalom. So many meetings, marches, protests and conversations. So many memories.

Standing side by side, holding posters at a protest to prevent the closure of Raymonda Tawil's news agency in East Jerusalem. The photo that Avnery's wife, Rachel, took of that demonstration is still up on the wall of the room I am writing these very words in. A conversation with Avnery the day that HaOlam Hazeh, which he edited for 40 years, officially shut down. I said: "I know this is a difficult day for you." He answered: "The paper was a tool, serving a purpose. We shall find other tools."

It is early 1983. Uri Avnery, Matti Peled and Yaakov Arnon, known us the "Three Muskateers", come back from a meeting with Yasser Arafat in Tunisia. As soon as he lands at the airport, he hands me photos of the meeting, and I bounce from one newsroom to another across Tel Aviv to distribute them in person. I then take a shared taxi to Jerusalem where Ziad Abu Aayyad, editor of the Palestinian Al-Fajr ("The Dawn") newspaper, waited for me.

A bit later in 1983, the radio announcing the assassination of Issam Sartawi, a PLO member who often met with Avnery and was a close personal friend to him, and my phone call to Uri informing him of the sad news. The frustrating endless phone calls, in the couple of days that followed, proved to us that it was impossible to rent a hall in Tel Aviv to commemorate a PLO man - even one who advocated for peace with Israel and was killed for it.

December 1992. Prime Minister Rabin, who had not yet signed the Oslo Accords and had not yet become a hero of peace, expels more than four hundred Palestinian activists to Lebanon, and we put up a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister's Office. A cold Jerusalem winter, and it is snowing, but inside the tent that was donated by Bedouins from the Negev, it feels warm and cozy. Uri, Rachel, myself and my wife Beate join other activists in a long conversation with Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, on Judaism and Islam, and how religion and politics converge and clash.

In 1997, in the middle of a protest in front of Har Homa - Netanyahu's flagship settlement - Uri's stomach wound, which he had been carrying since the war in 1948, breaks open. A Palestinian ambulance clears him to Al-Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem; we are all very anxious. Rachel tells me, "even though I do not believe in God, I am praying." But Uri recovers and lives on for 21 more years of intensive political activity.

May 2003, the Muqata'a (Presidential Compound) in Ramallah. That afternoon, there was a suicide bombing in Rishon LeZion, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drops a broad hint that he might send an elite IDF unit to "handle" Yasser Arafat that night. We are among 15 Israeli activists who go to Ramallah to serve as human shields. We call the media and tell them that "for the Prime Minister's information, there are Israeli citizens sitting outside of Arafat's door!"

Arafat shows Uri his gun and says, "if they come, I have a bullet in here for myself." We spend an entire night at Arafat's door, having conversations with young Palestinian guards in a mix of Arabic, Hebrew, and English, paying attention to every sound. Then it is dawn, and we understand that we made it through the night safely, and that the soldiers will not be coming.

Another long, relaxed conversation when we stopped to eat something on our way back from a Progressive List meeting in Nazareth: "The Crusaders were here before us, they came from Europe and established here a kingdom that lasted 200 years. Not all of them were religious fanatics. Among them were people who spoke Arabic and had Muslim friends. But they were never able to achieve peace with their neighbors or adapt to this region. They had temporary agreements and ceasefires, but were not able to gain real peace. Acre was their 'Tel Aviv,' and when it fell, the last Crusaders were thrown into the sea - literally. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it."

"If I ever get the chance to serve as a minister, I would want to have Education Ministry. That is the most important portfolio in the cabinet. The Defense Minister may be able to send soldiers to die in war, but the Education Minister can shape children's consciousness. The policies of today's Education Minister will still bear manifest results in 50 years, when today's children become grandparents and talk to their own granchildren. If I were the minister, the first thing I would do is remove the [Biblical] Book of Joshua from the curriculum. That book advocates genocide, plain and simple. It is also a historical fiction - the events it describes never happened. Rachel was a teacher for 40 years, and every year she succeeded in avoiding teaching this trash."

Rachel accompanied him everywhere, an active partner to everything he did, editing his articles and dealing with the all the logistics of organizing protests. We all knew she was a carrier of hepatitis B - a time bomb that might explode at any moment. And when it finally did, Uri spent six months with her in the hospital, day and night. He almost disappeared from political life. One day, I happened to bump into him in the hallway of Ichilov Hospital as he was pushing her in a wheelchair, from one checkup to another.

In her final weeks, someone told Uri of an experimental treatment that might save Rachel's life. Although he knew the chances were slim, Uri spent large sums of money to purchase the medication in America and have it flown to Ben Gurion Airport, and from there, transported directly to the hospital. When she passed away, Uri asked that nobody contact him for three days, and he completely disengaged from the world. Once those three days were over, he went back to his routine of protests and political commentary ­ or so it seemed.

How to finish this article? I will go back to 1969, to an article by Uri which I read under the table during a very boring class in eighth grade. I still remember it, almost word for word; it was a futuristic article that attempted to imagine what the country would look like in 1990. The page was split into two parallel columns, representing two parallel futures. In one of the futures, Independence Day in 1990 is marked by a tremendous manifestation of military power, with new tanks on display in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Moshe Dayan congratulates IDF soldiers who are on alert in the Lebanon Valley and the Land of Goshen near the Nile, and declares: "We shall never give up the city of Be'erot (formerly Beirut), this is our ancestral homeland!"

The biggest obstacle to Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination in 2020 is Kamala Harris, the corporate, anti-Black prosecutor. But Black voters are now in Bernie's camp.

If Bernie Sanders can remain vigorous until the opening of the Democratic primary season in September or so of 2019, when he turns 78, the self-styled "socialist" with the FDR domestic program and the Harry Truman foreign policy will fare much better with Black voters than he did last time around.

Two factors spelled doom for the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign: super-delegates, mainly Democratic Party elected officials, many of whom had announced their support for deep-pockets Hillary Clinton long before the primary process had begun; and Black voters, who were still trying to figure out who Bernie Sanders was when the February and March primaries rolled into their states. By the end of the March primaries, the conventional corporate media wisdom was that Black voters were a bulwark of the "moderate" or "centrist" forces within the Democratic Party, while young whites composed the vanguard of the left(ish) Sanders insurgency.

The corporate media pundits got it both right and wrong, regarding Black voting behavior. It is true that Blacks tend to back the Democratic presidential primary candidate that they believe has the best chance of beating the White Man's (Republican) Party standard bearer in the general election. However, that does not mean Black voters share these "moderate" or "centrist" candidates' positions on the issues. Blacks are substantially to the left of whites, including white Democrats, on most issues, but believe that keeping the White Man's Party out of the White House is more important than nominating the most progressive Democratic standard bearer. Thus, the duopoly system compels Black Democratic primary voters to suppress their own progressive instincts for the sake of defeating the GOP.

The overarching necessity to keep the White Man's Party at bay requires that Blacks resist even the fundamental urge to vote for one of their own. In 2008, Hillary Clinton retained majority Black voter support and the backing of most Black elected officials right up until Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses -- at which point Clinton's Black voter base evaporated. If a "brother" could win in an overwhelmingly white state, it was considered safe for Blacks to support him for president.

In terms of their respective politics, there has never been the slightest difference between Obama and the Clintons. Obama became the second corporatist Democratic Leadership Council drone to enter the White House. If Hillary had won in 2016, hers would have been the third DLC presidency.

But, Obama was Black, and that was an historic first. It was also a disaster for mass Black progressive politics, which was at times warped beyond recognition by the deformative influence of the Great Black Hole on Pennsylvania Avenue, which consistently pulled towards war and austerity. Cory Booker had hoped to be the "first" Obama -- that is, if Booker had not lost his first race for mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in 2002, he might have beaten Obama in the race to become corporate America's Great Black Hope -- a new, Black face for the U.S. empire, to replace the disgraced Bush-face of defeat in Iraq and, just before the 2008 election, global capitalist collapse. But, guided by the cover story of the first issue of The Black Commentator ("Fruit of the Poisoned Tree, " an expose.of Cory Booker's profoundly rightwing political roots), progressive Democrats and union activists beat back the rightwing tide that had poured into Newark from all points on the reactionary map in support of young "Cory," whose national political debut was launched at a power luncheon of the far-right Manhattan Institute. Obama became The One. Booker had to wait until 2006 to win Newark's City Hall, a step towards his current Senate seat and (already active) presidential campaign.

Booker cannot escape his deep-right roots, and neither can fellow Senator Kamala Harris escape her anti-criminal justice reform history as a California prosecutor. Having provided the first Black presidential success story, the Democratic Party now serves up an excess of anti-Black Black presidential aspirants. My guess is that Harris will have the Black lane to herself by the 2020 primaries, and will stake an even more urgent claim to become the first corporatist woman in the White House that was not married to the resident criminal.

Kamala Harris will be Bernie Sanders' biggest obstacle in 2020. But no one should assume that she will have a lock on the Black vote. In 2015 and early 2016, Black voters told pollsters they did not know who Bernie Sanders was. Many thought of Sanders as someone whose attacks on frontrunner Clinton could harm the prospects of beating back Trump. They later learned that polls showed Sanders would have defeated Trump by a far bigger margin than Hillary was projected to win the White House -- and, of course, she did not win. That means Sanders is seen as a winner, a man who can remove the Orange Terror from the Oval Office, which is all that matters to most Black Democrats.

The next presidential go-round holds real promise for Sanders, the more left(ish) candidate, despite the double-trap that the duopoly system usually presents for Black voters. Recent polls show Sanders gets his highest ratings from Blacks: 73 percent favorable, while only about half of whites and 68 percent of Hispanics are favorable to Sanders.

While most U.S. voters believe they are effectively restricted to choosing between two corporate parties, Black voters perceive only one choice within the duopoly: to oppose the White Man's Party by voting for the Democrat most likely to win. That double-bind almost always means Black support for the candidate with the deepest pockets -- the most corporate Democrat. This, despite the fact that, according to political scientist Michael Dawson, the largest group of Black voters most closely resembles "Swedish Social Democrats" -- the "socialist" bloc Bernie Sanders claims to most admire. (Dawson adds, "and many [Blacks] are more radical than that.") This time around, however, the "left" candidate is also the one with the winner's glow, who would have beaten Trump in 2016. By next September, Black folks may well see Kamala Harris as the spoiler who could screw up the chance to be rid of Trump.

Of course, the only way out of the duopoly is to leave it, by building a real "socialist" party -- or one close enough to encompass a minimal program against endless austerity and war, the only items on the capitalists' menu in the twilight of U.S. empire. Sanders remains "an imperialist pig," like Truman and all the Democratic presidents that came after him -- and also plays the "sheep dog" that gathers in the wayward lefties of the flock. But that struggle for a new party occurs in an environment in which most of its prospective members are ensnared in the Democratic Party, which holds captive the 40 percent or so of the U.S. population that are actually social democrats, or "more radical than that." This cohort includes the vast majority of Black people, and is larger than the second-biggest ideological bloc in the country: Trump's White Man's Party GOP. The corporate Democrats will never relinquish their control of half the duopoly, and would rather repeat their loss to Trump than open the door -- even if only rhetorically -- to "socialism." They will either crush Sanders in the cruel light of day or, should he get the nomination, abandon and sabotage his candidacy -- as they did George McGovern (non-socialist, but anti-Vietnam War) in 1972.

From such a heady, nasty mix, one can never know the outcome. But it could be the opening that breaks the duopoly -- a process that began with Donald Trump's primary victories, in 2016, prompting most of the ruling class and their national security spooks to crowd into Hillary Clinton's "big, nasty tent" -- from which they launched "Russiagate" on election night.

When members of the Democratic National Committee voted to take power away from themselves and other "superdelegates" -- removing their leverage over the presidential nominating process - they took a big step toward heeding a sign that activists held outside their decisive meeting: "Democratic Party: Live Up to Your Name."

Outside that meeting at a Chicago hotel, we were holding the sign to put a spotlight on existing hypocrisy and to call for seizing an opportunity.

Officials rarely decide to reduce their own power. And the Democratic Party has not made such a historic reform to its presidential nominating process in decades. So, how did it happen?

After participating in the 2016 national convention as a Bernie Sanders delegate and then working as part of coalitions to get superdelegates out of the nominating equation, I've been pondering what we can learn from the historic win that occurred on Saturday. Here are some takeaways:

1: Leadership to make historic change must come from the grassroots.

The mass media did not do anything to help jettison the power of superdelegates. Neither did even the most progressive Democrats in Congress. The impetus came from, and was sustained by, a progressive base that saw what was wrong with the nominating process in 2016 and was fed up.

2: Education and agitation must happen in communities nationwide.

Sometimes we hear how it's not enough to "preach to the choir." But, while ultimately insufficient, it's necessary: to build on and expand a solid base. Only with thorough and ongoing outreach - to inform and galvanize progressives - can momentum for long-term pressure be sustained.

3: In many respects, even the best Democrats in Congress are not providing much cutting-edge leadership. Grassroots activism should be providing leadership to them rather than the other way around.

If it had been left up to the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the superdelegate reform would not have happened. Overall, the reform proposal got scant support - and some notable vehement opposition - from Democrats in Congress, including some who are often praised as "progressive."

4: When grassroots activists lead - and are willing to fight like hell, astutely and reasonably and unrelentingly - the Democratic leaders can sometimes be compelled to follow.

It's virtually impossible to name a profoundly positive social change that was first initiated from Capitol Hill or from the DNC leadership.

5: We need to methodically organize - inside and outside of the Democratic Party - in order to effectively harness the progressive energies that require public education, activism, and expressions of outrage.

Grassroots organizing - local, regional and national - is crucial. That's what happened on the superdelegate issue. Overall progressive strength and organizational muscle led top national Democratic Party powerbrokers to conclude that the party must earn a lot more trust from progressives in order to win more elections. Those powerbrokers came to understand that failure to ditch the power of superdelegates would only worsen the falloff of grassroots support and enthusiasm for the party's candidates.

6: Election campaigns should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around.

Winning elections - to defeat Republicans while electing more and more progressive Democrats - is absolutely vital. GOP control over the federal executive and legislative branches, and therefore increasingly over the courts as well, must be rolled back: beginning with the midterm elections this fall. In the absence of hallucinatory political analysis, defeating Republicans will require supporting Democrats on the general-election ballot.

At the same time, progressives should not defer to leadership from Democratic Party officials or congressional Democrats, who are routinely constrained and compromised by their roles. And in a time of perpetual war and runaway militarism, in sync with rampant corporate power, the party is currently in need of a basic course correction that can only come from the grassroots. The ultimate key to vital social change is social movements.