The existential threat to the United States is not Donald Trump, MAGA, or even ICE. That’s our immediate threat and it’s a symptom of the actual problem.
The real problem is and always has been the marriage of white supremacy and capitalism (don’t worry the patriarchy is in there too). But the existential problem is stamping out white supremacy. White Americans have either led the way in creating the systems and structures of white supremacy or depending on the time period and power levels we’ve allowed it to flourish.
For example, we consistently loop in time. I wrote about it last week, but right now we’re entering an era that looks like the end of Reconstruction and beginning of Jim Crow. And the technocrats have stated they’re looking for workers to feed their machines. Sam Altman said he wants intelligence on tap, on a subscription service. The Voting Rights Act was just gutted in three moves by the Supreme Court. A direct mirror to what happened after the Civil War when the Supreme Court gutted the 14th and 15th Amendments in three court cases over twenty years.
We have oligarchs again – the Robber Barons are alive and well, but they’re now richer and more quietly violent than the train and mining Robber Barons of the 1800s. We have a pay for play political system, just like the spoils system of the late 1800s. One Robber Barron of the 1800s literally said he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. And that’s exactly where we are.
We know that companies who donated to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund are getting big breaks from state run lawsuits. From Public Citizen, at least 11 of these cases have been dropped. But bigger than that we’re watching companies and technocrats marry into our government. This time last year four tech executives were sworn into the US Army as Lieutenant Colonels. Why? For innovation of course. Because we know the majority of these tech companies are innovating at a breakneck speed (sarcasm).
To move towards anything that resembles class consciousness, we first have to dismantle white supremacy and there has to be a will within the people to do it. But stepping out of the culture of whiteness for white folks isn’t just scary, it can be dangerous. It’s not danger from outside your race, it’s from inside. I say this as someone who spends their time speaking about race on the internet and has been fending off rape and death threats for over a year.
