By Benny Schaft
April 8, 2026
Iranian missile art says “In memory of Tupac Shakur.”
Since the start of U.S. aggression against Iran on February 28, the ruling class has made continuous attempts to sway the people into supporting this war. From false allegations of sleeper cells to outright lies about assassination plots against the MAGA president, the war machine has been working overtime. Among its primary targets in the propaganda campaign have been people of color, especially Black service members.
This was on full display two years ago when Iran defended itself against terrorist attacks carried out by both Israel and the United States. In one of Iran’s defensive strikes, three Black GIs were killed. When alive, Kennedy Sanders, William Jerome Rivers and Breonna Moffett were viewed by this government as being expendable. In death, they were transformed overnight into symbols of valor and heroism, not out of any genuine love or respect by the warmongers but to falsely portray solidarity with Black service members and Black people as a whole.
But members of the Black community saw right through it. Many recognized immediately that the ruling class was attempting to propagandize our people into believing that Iran is anti-Black and hostile to Black Liberation. Alongside that propaganda came the usual reactionary voices, out of touch and disconnected from our community, presuming to tell Black people how we should feel and what we must do to achieve our freedom, including who our real allies are.
Iran’s longtime solidarity
The historical record tells a very different story. The Iranian people and their government have been committed to recognizing and supporting the struggle for Black Liberation since the Iranian revolution of 1979 overthrew the hated U.S. puppet, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
One of the earliest acts of that revolution was the release of 10 hostages, six of whom were Black. Both the Iranian people and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made clear that Black people were not responsible for the actions of this U.S. imperialist government against Iran and the Global South, a recognition that this country itself has never offered to us as Black people.
Iran has continued that policy of solidarity in the decades since 1979. In October 2015, the Iranian government hosted and sponsored an anti-racist conference in Tehran, Iran’s capital, held specifically to address the centuries of oppression and racism Black people have faced in the United States. No Western nation has ever done anything remotely comparable, and there is no evidence to think they will in the near future.
In the aftermath of the 2020 police lynching of George Floyd, Iran joined with China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and other revolutionary governments across the Global South in condemning his murder and refusing to sugarcoat the role of the United States government in maintaining a system of white supremacy that continues to take Black lives to this day.
Iran was also the first country to issue an official Malcolm X postage stamp in 1984. The United States eventually followed in 1999, not as an act of solidarity but as a hollow, performative gesture designed to create the illusion that this country is willing to reckon with its own racist history and current reality.
That point is driven home further by what happened at the United Nations General Assembly just two weeks ago, when Iran voted alongside countries of the Global South to formally recognize the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. The United States — along with its Zionist, apartheid ally Israel — voted against it.
And even while enduring state-sponsored terror at the hands of both the United States and Israel, the Iranian people have never stopped expressing revolutionary solidarity with Black Liberation. From murals on buildings to tributes on drones, they have honored our freedom fighters. Most recently, a drone bore the image and name of the late revolutionary artist and rapper, Tupac Shakur.
All of this brings us to the question of what we must do. The struggle of Black people and the struggle of Iranian people are not separate. They are connected by the shared experience of imperialism, colonialism and the full brutality of the capitalist system.
We can see this clearly as we apply the tools of dialectical and historical materialism when we compare the overthrow of the Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and the assassination of the Congo’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. We recognize that the same imperialist forces that attack the sovereignty of Iran are the same forces that have always demonized Black people here and abroad.
This is why Black workers have no obligation and no duty to fight this war on behalf of a fascistic government that continues to oppress our people with the prison-industrial complex, the armed wing of the state and through the unrelenting terror it wages on our community.
