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Bombing, Nuremberg', Saul Steinberg (1945). © The Saul Steinberg Foundation Via Bonart.cat
I do not grieve Kamala Harris’ presidential loss, but I hold sadness for another Trump presidency. The current political atmosphere is a troubling blend of uncertainties and certainties. The impact of the infamous Project 2025 and the callousness reminiscent of his first presidential term are a given; however, how the breadth of this white supremacist programming will be carried out over the next four years—and on—remains unclear.
Nevertheless, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a lazy replica of past white supremacist undertakings—has been here before: Project 1776, 1793, 1808, 1825, 1830, 1838, 1845, 1850, 1854, 1857, 1863, 1865, 1877, 1883, 1887, 1890, 1896, 1898, 1903, 1910, 1915, 1924… 2016, 2020*... and so on and so forth.
Activists and organizers in the southern US warned us about current iterations of Project 2025. They pointed to aggressive and violent Democratic politician-led responses to the campaigns to “Stop Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia (or in Baltimore, Maryland), post-Roe state infringement on reproductive rights that required federal intervention or an executive order, and the recent Biden/Harris administration’s nonchalant “FEMA ain’t got it” response to hurricanes in the US southern belt. Political analysts and historians have also highlighted the demobilization of progressive activist movements and the normalcy of Democratic Party-stylized “diet fascism.” This shift has pushed American politics further to the right at a time when the public is begging for a New Deal 2024 and deterrence from the Biden/Harris administration’s streamlined proxy wars and genocides.
Take the Gems And Leave the Mess
I was never excited or joyful about the possibility of a Harris administration. Kamala Harris is bossed and bought—the opposite of Shirley Chisholm. I spent my formative years watching the Kamala Harrises of the world silence and traumatize Black girls, femmes, and women like me—unambiguously Black, dark-skinned, working class/poor, always asking too many questions. The Kamala Harrises of the world use the politics of desirability, celebrity, and internalized anti-Blackness to silence us and then extract our trauma as kindling to support their rise.
At the end of the day, these Harrises and the political class they represent have always abandoned me and mines, leaving us for dead in sacrificial zones. We are hardwired to position desirability politics over reality—Harris is rich, powerful, racially ambiguous, and multiracial, a politician, a "top cop," Upper Middle Class, married to a white man (social capital), and openly Zionist. Kamala Harris’ investment in white supremacy and allegiance to the empire casts her as an active participant in the system. Let's not be delusional.
Harris reminded me of my youth working in Martha’s Vineyard in the trenches of “Black Excellence,” colorist and texturist anti-Blackness, and Black Middle Class-styled American exceptionalism. My time there was oxymoronic, uncomfortable, and revealing—with “good” memories layered with inconsistencies, power games, and pain. I remember mundane and extraordinary days during my teenage years on porches conversing with Angela Y. Davis and even an encounter with Kathleen Cleaver, both guests at the home I stayed at. I remember listening to conversations of Black radicals and former Black Panthers about the Inkwell and August Lantern festival and chiming in, if appropriate, between working double shifts and multiple jobs on the island in the summers.
Seeing the Black radicals of yesteryears layered within the ecosystems of Black liberals, Black celebrities, and Black capitalists was an interesting experience. These complexities were exposed with Davis’ recent endorsement of Harris at the sheer disappointment of her Black decolonial feminist and Black leftist supporters. I do not hold any animosity about the choices one personally made this election cycle, but I also was not surprised by this endorsement—which differs from a personal and private vote. Take the gems and leave the mess.
The experiences of Martha’s Vineyard were intermixed with brutal racism, classism, and Zionism living in a majority white-Jewish town in Massachusetts, where my mom was often asked, “What family do you work for?” and the police came to our residence too often, responding to calls from racist neighbors. The first time the police arrived was when I was five years old; my sisters and I were playing on our stoop within the first month we moved to the town.
The racism we faced was counteracted by anti-Zionist Jewish connections. At the age of 14, I did not fully understand what the Jewish people in my core-community meant when they said, “We don’t support the state of Israel.” However, I did understand that they supported me (my existence in a brutally racist town), and “I” was a part of the “we.” Just as I was exposed to the “Diaspora Wars” and the politics of the “Black Middle Class” within the context of Black America, I have always understood Zionist ideology holding a space of deep chasms and conflict amongst Jewish American communities. These chasms have been exposed to many for the first time through the genocide in Gaza, the history of Israel's occupation of Palestine, and the blatant anti-semitism experience by pro-Palestinian Jewish activists by pro-Israel contingents and the state.
Anti-Palestinian discrimination has been layered within Islamophobia and Anti-Arab rhetoric and propaganda to support Israel and Zionist political ideology. Harkening to the Bush/Cheney era “War on Terror,” Palestinian and SWANA community members have experienced increased violence and surveillance. The attempts to erase Palestinian history, people, and pain are very much an American project. US-Israeli war crimes are jarring and frightening.
Almost eighty years of Israeli occupation and apartheid of Palestine give us a view of the present existence and future technological developments of United States fascism. Just as the Biden administration's premature ending of the COVID-19 pandemic desensitized Americans to mass death, Israel’s genocide in Gaza—with the indiscriminate bombing; targeting of designated safe zones, hospitals and humanitarian aid routes; and targeting of families (children!), journalists, health workers, UN workers, and aid workers—demonstrate transition to an overtly heinous standard for war and flagrant live-streamed war crimes. This standard already existed with US genocides in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as documented torture at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Abu Ghraib prison. However, well-evidenced Israel and US war crimes are coupled with arrogant threats to the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
Islamophobia and anti-Black iterations of Orientalism are rooted in the colonial history of the United States and the Western hemisphere. Many indigenous Africans human trafficked across the Atlantic were Muslim or held Islamic cultural practices. Scholars note the importance of Islam in the resistance of the enslaved in Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil.
In the modern history of resistance, Palestine will always be THAT liberation movement—in line with Angola, South Africa, Algeria, and even Attica Prison—central to Black radical/anti-fascist politics of Franz Fanon, Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Walter Rodney, Kwame Ture, the Black Panther Party, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and Assata Shakur. The Palestinian movement has also always exposed global realities and internal conflicts, particularly around the existence of Black Arabs and anti-Blackness in Arab communities, with a readiness to engage and repair. This is how I have experienced my solidarity and connection to the movement.
“30 Minutes” Campaign
Speaking within the world of Black America, Black progressives and decolonial activists knew Harris would only win with an authentic appeal to progressive organizers, the working class, progressive voting members of diverse multi-status immigrant families, and the youth. Those who were pivotal in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins transitioned to supporting Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign efforts. All of whom were “silenced” (Oprah voice) by the Harris campaign, the DNC, and establishment Democrats, to double down on support for “the state” that shall not be named. The youth, in particular, were traumatized, beaten, arrested, threatened, suspended, and doxxed on college campuses—supposed bastions for intellectual rigor and uncomfortable conversations—for their leadership and participation in pro-Palestinian efforts.
In addition to the “30 minutes” the Harris camp and DNC had to campaign, outside of Black celebrity endorsements, Harris did not campaign like the first woman, Black woman, or South Asian president. Her campaign was not made for the people who were likely to vote for her, Harris' base—this is proven by the 15 million voter deficit and early concession of defeat. Although voter suppression and tampering should be taken seriously, voter education, mobilization, and registration organizing were greatly limited in this election cycle.
Harris would have won with a Biden/Harris arms embargo on Israel and some semblance of a New Deal 2024. Using a Clinton/Bush strategy, Harris and her campaign refused and banked on a Liz Cheney-esque “mythical moderate white woman” to vote her in. The same mythical white woman in her campaign commercials who votes for Harris opposing the wishes of her Trumper husband.
So, who do we blame for a Trump presidency?
The Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC):
How are you going to give a Black/South Asian woman 30 minutes to campaign for President of the United States? Was this a setup? In addition to 30 minutes, there was a Biden/Harris administration promise to withhold military weapons transfers in 30 days if Israel did not let 350 trucks of humanitarian aid per day into Gaza, with aid entering the north specifically. We passed the 30 days and Israel will face no accountability. Additionally, the limited aid trucks that made it into the north are the site of Israel’s most recent massacre, killing and injuring hundreds. Was the 30 days one of the many Biden/Harris “gotcha” campaign promises?
Kamala Harris’ campaign committee:
A narrative around identity and authenticity should have been carefully cultivated for Harris as those did for Barack Obama. This would have been more difficult than for Obama as he used his leftist and community organizing past to give a plausible err of “hope” in his political rhetoric during an obvious recession and dump-Bush era. A narrative similar to Obama’s would have been harder for a career district attorney and politician with a past for publicly ridiculing progressive agendas, a callous legal history with Black and Brown Bay area communities as a “top cop,” and an unwavering allegiance to AIPAC. A daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants with a notoriously viral “don't come” tagline in response to a US-made refugee crisis is a hard sell for those of us with discernment.
Additionally, Harris’ campaign isolated and maligned progressives, the left-leaning working class (including naturalized immigrants), racially diverse Palestinian-Arab American-Muslim American voters, the American children of immigrants, and the youth. Harris’ ignored base outrightly questioned the morality around the United States leading to a genocide that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them children. Additionally, her base pushed on why billions were going to a foreign country to commit genocide in a moment when Americans are utterly struggling and the US infrastructure is in disarray. These are the organizers and first-time voters who would have loved to see the first Black/South Asian woman president even if only about representation. Being Black American and Jamaican, although with the American empire being what it is, this would have been meaningful to me, even if for just a moment.
The mythical moderate white women and real-life Trump-voting white women/people:
The ghosts of mythical moderate white women never showed up to vote against their husbands like the DNC and establishment Democrats planned. Real-life white women and white people voted for Trump. White women who support Trump exist and vote in their own interest to uphold white supremacy and control other people's bodies. Let’s be real. This is a white majority, white supremacist patriarchal nation—still bent on a eugenics-era fear of “population replacement.” In terms of voting, white women and white people ushered us into this moment—into a second Trump presidency, period. But Harris’ campaign catering to this voting bloc, already committed to Trump, is interesting and weird.
The Biden/Harris administration:
The Biden/Harris administration is to blame for carrying out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, and supporting genocides throughout the Global South (Sudan and The Democratic Republic of Congo) and countless proxy wars and destabilization. The administration is not only gaslighting us about what we are seeing but requiring the people of the United States to make “a choice” between their own uncertainty and corporate-led death machines the administration refuses to stop. Y’all utterly disgust me and will never be forgiven.
Billionaires, Actual (not Imagined) Foreign Agents, Lobbyists, Capitalists, and Corporations
who have all bought out all these politicians for pennies: F*ck you!
So, What Now?
I suggest we all read, reread, and thoroughly digest all of the radical prose and purpose of antifascists and anti-imperialists whose quotes are callously and hastily made into viral social media posts without proper context. For example, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Huey P. Newton theorized revolutionary intercommunalism as anti-oppression and anti-capitalist solidarity building amongst subjugated global communities. Pragmatically built into the practices of the BPP through the 10-point program and written as a part of his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Newton asserted the United States was no longer a nation-state but a boundless empire controlling spaces and populations through moving technologies and mechanisms of the state. He advocates for oppressed people of the world to struggle in a collective global, revolutionary way—organizing from the base of their local communities to take back the control of economic, political, and cultural institutions. For Newton, “post-colonial” economies were integrated within the American Empire. This means that subjugated populations must band together as communities under revolutionary intercommunalism to resist capitalism’s reactionary intercommunalism.
Organizers and activists are doing the work of revolutionary intercommunalism right now in Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Oceania, Atlanta, the Bronx, and elsewhere… support them (financially!), join them, and learn from them!
A lot of internal processing will be needed to move us through this moment. Whether “us” is a collective global community surviving empire, the US populace, or “you and yours.” As we process this moment, I hope those who truly want to see a liberated and decolonized world will be a part of small/large and local/global movements to get us where we deserve to be.
Free Palestine. All Eyes on Sudan. Free Congo. Hands off Haiti.
*Project 1776
…1793 - “Fugitive Slave Act of 1793”
…1808 - Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade 1808 by the British and US (Transatlantic Human trafficking) [did not stop shit, only emboldened the British Navy to police the Atlantic and the United States to enforce domestic human trafficking of enslaved Black people as well as forced birth.]
…1825 - Jacksonian Era, opened up the electorate to landless white men and restricted the voting of Black property owners in Northern states that could take advantage of local/state voting laws.
…1830 - “Indian Removal Act of 1830” - coded into law the forced removal of Indigenous nations into lands under treaty.
…1838 - Trail of Tears, Forced Displacement of Indigenous Nations
…1845 - Texas made a US state, expanding the institution of slavery and human trafficking within the mid-Atlantic states, upper South, and circum-Caribbean.
…1850 - “Fugitive Slave Act of 1850” - incentives slave catching as a gig economy, leading to mass human trafficking of free and self-emancipated communities as well as the mass displacement of communities to free territories (Canada).
…1854 - Kansas-Nebraska Act, causes sectional crisis
…1857 - Dred Scott Decision
…1863 - New York Draft Riots
…1865 - Black Codes, 13th Amendment, Ku Klux Klan
…1877 - The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction
…1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act
…1883 - Colfax Massacre, Supreme Court decisions on Civil Rights Cases
…1887 - Dawes Act
…1890 - Massacre at Wounded Knee
…1896 - Plessy v. Ferguson
…1898 - Spanish-American War, colonization of Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam, Cuba
…1903 - brutal end to Philippine War
…1910 - The Immigration Act of 1910
…1915 - Birth of A Nation came out and a praise-filled screening took place at the white house hosted by President Woodrow Wilson.
…1924 - Johnson-Reed Act, “Indian Citizenship Act,” Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924
…2016 - Presidency of Donald Trump
…2020 - Biden Administration elected but quickly breaks promises made to repair impact of COVID-19 pandemic and impact of chaotic first Trump presidency.
