Story by Hannah Grossman – February 9, 2023

Melina Abdullah is a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University. Her role in academia is “intrinsically linked to broader struggles for the liberation of oppressed people.” She co-founded and is active in the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter and is currently suing the national branch for allegedly siphoning off $10 million for a personal consulting agency. Abdullah believes that capitalism needs to be dismantled and said that it was designed to oppress Black people. “When we feed capitalism, we feed racism,” she said in a 2020 interview on the Uproxx podcast ‘People’s Party With Talib Kweli.’ Abdullah has also claimed that “white capitalism feeds itself through the exploitation of Africa and Black people.” “So this world is intentionally and deliberately created in this way, right? So every system that we live under, it’s not like we stumbled into these systems that put Black people at the bottom of every single social, political and economic measure… These are designed intentionally to produce these outcomes… And so it’s important that as we think about these systems and the ways in which these systems seize upon us, prey upon us, exploit us, that we not submit to those systems, the only way we preserve our sanity and humanity is by resisting those systems and becoming abolitionist in our approach,” she said.