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racial justice
Travelling the Winding River of History to the Sea of Justice
Despite Donald Trump and all the other horrors of this century, I still believe that the essential human trajectory is upwards: We continue to widen the circle of beings that matter; we continue to become braver, and maybe even a bit wiser.
Jun 01, 2026
This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my—I’ll admit it, easily attracted—attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with.
A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between “their” and “they’re.” Unlike The New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, “Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?” (The face of the copyeditor who let that one pass should have looked as if some blusher had been applied.)
While over the last 12 years, I’ve written about a wide variety of subjects, a number of themes stand out to me for their recurrence: racial justice, war (and US military misadventures), and the insistence of women on claiming our humanity. Mostly, I’ve tried to reflect the many ways that we human beings continue to struggle for a good life in a just world, despite all the forces ranged against us. More than once I’ve had recourse to a sentiment frequently attributed to the Reverend Martin Luther King (though it didn’t originate with him): the idea that the arc of the moral universe is long, but invariably bends toward justice.
One Recurrent Theme
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a woman I’d met a few times before. She’s a Black veteran in her 90s, the newish lover of an old friend of mine. We were reflecting on the fact that so much of what we’ve fought for in our lifetimes—civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights—has been all but demolished in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. “People died for those victories,” she said to me, “and now they’ve been undone so fast.”
After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally.
It was the Sunday after the Supreme Court finished dismembering the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That prolonged judicial murder by the Roberts court began with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which snuffed out a key provision of the VRA. Prior to Shelby County, jurisdictions identified in the VRA as having a history of suppressing the vote in Black, Latino, or Native American communities had to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. In the Shelby decision, however, the court’s conservative majority held that the passage of time had made such preclearance unnecessary, because voter suppression was no longer a problem in such places. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously described that position as “throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not getting wet.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice put it 10 years later, it was clear that Ginsberg had been right—that it was still raining in the Southern states. “The effects of the ruling were immediate. The same day, Texas officials announced that they would implement the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law, which had previously been blocked in the preclearance process.” In fact, “without that ‘preclearance’ regime, the revival of discriminatory tactics was immediate: In the last 10 years, at least 29 states have passed 94 laws that make it more difficult to vote, particularly for communities of color.”
Then, in its next major attack on the VRA, the court gave two of Arizona’s laws its stamp of approval. As I wrote in 2022, a year earlier, a court that was by then already significantly shaped by Donald Trump “issued a ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding Arizona’s right to pass laws requiring people to vote only in precincts where they live, while prohibiting anyone who wasn’t a relative of the voter from hand delivering mail-in ballots to the polls. The court held that, even though in practice such measures would have a disproportionate effect on non-White voters, as long as a law was technically the same for all voters, it didn’t matter that, in practice, it would become harder for some groups to vote.”
Now, in 2026, the court has essentially finished the job with its decision in Callais, which allows states to redraw their voting maps to eliminate majority-minority districts. Not a month later, Southern states (including Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee) have rushed to redistrict. Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas are likely to follow suit between now and the 2028 general election. As The Guardian reports, Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, observed that “this is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south.”
I’m glad that congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis didn’t live to see this day.
It turns out that white racism has been a consistent theme of my writing for TomDispatch, which is hardly surprising, given what a constant reality it’s proven to be in 21st-century America (especially in the Trump years). In 2025, I described how the Department of Government Efficiency’s decimation of the federal workforce constituted a direct attack on the Black middle class, and especially Black women. In “No More Dog Whistles,” I wrote that, under Trump, “racism isn’t just the subtext, it’s the text.” A decade earlier, I was examining race and police violence in my home city of San Francisco, which had seen a spate of police murders of Black and Latino residents. And so it went, and so it still goes.
The Ethics of War, Torture, and Terrorism
That subhead is actually the title of a college course I used to teach. It’s also been the focus of my “scholarly” work since the 9/11 attacks shocked the world and pushed the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration over to “the dark side.” My first piece for TomDispatch described how, a decade and a half after the 9/11 attacks and the launching of the Global War on Terror, the United States was still torturing people. President Barack Obama might have closed the CIA’s infamous black sites—its global chain of secret torture bases—but the practice continued, including at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Subsequent articles of mine covered torture here at home, including at police stations and in our jails and prisons.
Now, we’re seeing a new kind of black site: hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, many already established, some still in the planning stage, strung out across the country as our own American gulag archipelago. And like the Soviet gulag, some of those sites are intended not just as holding pens, but as labor camps. As Public Citizen reported this month, “Working for $1 a day in the government’s so-called Voluntary Work Program (VWP) while detained is the only option available to earn any money for the more than 60,000 immigrants held in hundreds of active detention centers across the United States by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.” It seems that the program is “voluntary” in name only, as it’s the only way detainees can get money for basic hygiene items like toothpaste, and because refusal risks retaliation, such as being placed in solitary confinement.
I’ve labeled such centers “black sites” because, like the ones run by the CIA during the “war on terror,” they remain opaque to ordinary US citizens—or even many members of our federal and local governments. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which administers the ICE detention camps nationwide, has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter them. Like the CIA’s black sites, those camps represent an elaborate version of homeland security theater, designed to remind Americans of just how dangerous unauthorized immigrants supposedly are, as evidenced by how harshly DHS must treat them. They function both as a direct form of repression and as a warning to the rest of us about what could happen to anyone who resists the Trump regime. In that sense, such concentration camps (for that’s indeed what they are and what I’ve called them) are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which (some years ago) I wrote a book called Mainstreaming Torture.
Another continuity between the Bush torture program and today’s ICE concentration camps is the outsourcing of the work of imprisonment and interrogation to private contractors. In the “war on terror,” private contractors—operatives from private outfits like Erik Prince’s oft-renamed Blackwater—engaged in such “interrogations.” Today’s ICE centers are also run by private contractors: the country’s two main for-profit prison companies, the GEO Group and CORE-Civic. The latter is responsible for the infamous Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. ICE cemented its status as a public-private partnership in May 2026 when David Venturella was appointed its acting director. He left a job at GEO Group to take the post (after leaving ICE to join GEO in the first place). Some things are beyond irony.
War! What Is It Good For?
Other war-related themes have recurred in my writing for TomDispatch. I’ve written about US military interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. And now we’ve witnessed perhaps the ultimate pointless intervention—Trump’s war on Iran, which, if it doesn’t end up frying us all, seems likely to wreck the world economy and plunge millions into starvation.
When unpiloted aircraft were still new, I wrote about how the Obama administration had used drones for assassinations in places like Yemen. Today, we’ve become jaded by their use—and by extrajudicial killings in general. Now, there’s hardly a journalistic ripple when the Trump administration sinks yet another tiny boat allegedly carrying drugs—and occasionally just carrying fish—in the Caribbean Sea or Eastern Pacific Ocean. Almost 200 people had died that way by the first week of May 2026.
I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.
The exponential rise of artificial intelligence has refueled a discussion I entered back in 2022 with an article on LAWS (lethal autonomous weapons systems). The United States has been pursuing its dream of deploying an “automated battlefield” since the Vietnam War. One major AI company, Anthropic, seems to have taken itself out of the running to assist the Department of Defense (still its name, despite Trump’s proclamations to the contrary) in fully automated kill decisions. However, Peter Thiel’s Palantir will undoubtedly be happy to step in to fill the spot. It has, after all, already been helping Israel in its genocide in Gaza. Palantir will likely be ready as well to assist in another realm Anthropic refused to enter: using AI for mass domestic surveillance. After all, this is what its flagship program, Gotham, is for.
It’s All About Hatred of Women
I didn’t grow up in a religious household. My father, though raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, had abandoned most religious practice by the time he and my mother got together. She was a lapsed Episcopalian, so I suppose it’s not entirely weird that I call myself a nice Jewish girl who goes to an Episcopal church. The point is, there was no reason for me to be praying as a six-year-old, but I often did, asking God to let me wake up the next morning as a boy. As second-wave feminists used to say, I didn’t envy the penis. I envied what it could get you: opportunity, freedom, and most of all, respect.
I lived through the movement for women’s liberation, which saved my life. It brought me the right to control my own body; to decide if and when I would have sex; to decide if and when I would have children; to decide if and when—and whom—I would marry. In truth, I never wanted to do that last one, but the vagaries of US tax law made married life much easier than a California domestic partnership. Still, I used to wonder why my gay leaders thought the two things I wanted most in the world were to join the army and get married.
So, it’s not surprising that I’ve used my TomDispatch platform to write about feminist concerns like abortion rights, my own experience of abortion, and staring down misogyny in the aftermath of Trump’s second election victory. Now, of course, his administration is advised by men who want to repeal women’s suffrage and follow up on the Supreme Court’s rollback of Roe v. Wade with white natalist dreams like an end to no-fault divorce and restrictions on birth control.
A Simple Arc?
So much of what I’ve written about over the last 12 years is now at least as bad as it ever was and possibly significantly worse. We’ve lost so much with the rise of Trump. After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally. And yet…
All over the country, people are indeed fighting back. Minnesotans inspired a nation with their resistance to an occupying ICE army. Local communities are mobilizing to try to keep energy-eating AI data centers and detention camps out. (Just recently, ordinary people in Florida forced the closure of the notorious Alligator Alcatraz detention center.) Millions have turned out for No Kings demonstrations. And maybe it was fear of a growing backlash that kept the Supreme Court from allowing Louisiana to outlaw the abortion medication Mifepristone. I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.
So, about that arc of the moral universe: Maybe it’s not a single curve but something more like a river winding its way toward a great ocean. Or maybe it’s like a sine wave on a slant. It has both peaks and valleys, and we’re definitely sitting in one of those valleys right now. Nonetheless, despite Donald Trump and all the other horrors of this century, I still believe that the essential human trajectory is upwards. We continue to widen the circle of beings that matter. We continue to become braver, and maybe even a bit wiser.
That’s been my story all these years and, dire as things seem today, I’m sticking to it.
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The Trump Administration’s Anti-Blackness is Showing on the Global Stage
The United States’ actions are not just a betrayal of the rest of the world; they are the latest examples of the Trump administration's betrayal of its own people—and in particular, of the 45 million Americans who are of African descent.
Apr 22, 2026
On March 25, the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a historic resolution marking an extraordinary step forward for global racial justice. Spearheaded by Ghana and co-sponsored by more than 65 countries largely from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, a declaration designating slavery as the gravest crime against humanity passed the General Assembly. Through this, the majority of the world aligned on one key message: The enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants for over 400 years is the gravest crime against humanity, we are still dealing with the consequences, and there must be reparatory justice to address the lingering impacts.
In a shameful moment for Americans and the world, the Trump administration voted against this resolution on behalf of the United States—only 1 of 3 countries to do so. This decision comes just months after the US withdrew from the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, falsely claiming it was “racist.” These two actions show that the Trump administration’s anti-Blackness is not limited to its domestic policy—it’s on full display on the global stage, too.
The history bears repeating: The slave trade ignited 400 years of racialized chattel slavery, representing the longest running system of organized human exploitation in history. This period marked the first time in human history when race defined the global political, economic, and social hierarchy. The United States was a driver in creating and perpetuating this unprecedented form of slavery. Across the globe, countries mimicked the United States’ policies to deprive an entire race of its humanity. The centuries-long system impacted millions upon millions of people of African descent, and even after this inhumane system of trafficking, selling, and enslaving human beings was abolished, its legacy continues to be felt today.
The resolution spearheaded by Ghana represents the worldwide atonement for chattel slavery that continues to have immeasurable consequences on the world. Because it is not legally binding, the only rationale for a country like the US to vote against it is that its leaders believe in erasing our world's greatest atrocity. It signals to the international community that the United States refuses to recognize the ugly parts of our past and how it impacts current realities.
The Trump administration’s actions to undermine forums at the UN designed to promote the rights and equality of people of African descent will be a stain on our nation’s history.
In his opposition to the resolution, the US representative characterized it as a scheme for developing (read: African) countries to gain leverage for the future allocation of resources. Additionally, he accused the resolution of being an attempt to establish a hierarchy of crimes against humanity (note: This was the same justification that the UK, Canada, and EU countries cited as explanation for their abstentions). Yet, this narrow-minded mischaracterization fails to recognize that the transatlantic slave trade and racialized slavery comprised all crimes against humanity: trafficking, forced labor, sexual assault, disease, famine, and the dehumanization of an entire race.
And yet, this is not the only instance of the Trump administration displaying its anti-Blackness on the world stage. When the administration made the decision in January 2026 to withdraw from the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) because it was “contrary to the interests of the United States,” it was saying the quiet part out loud: This administration does not care about or represent the interests of Black Americans.
The UN PFPAD was created in 2021 as a space for people of African descent to discuss ways to improve the quality of life and livelihoods of people of African descent and share recommendations with member states. Its mandate includes promoting “the full political, economic, and social inclusion of people of African descent in societies in which they live as equal citizens without discrimination of any kind” and “ensuring equal enjoyment of all human rights.” The forum’s annual meeting represents the largest UN gathering of Black civil society from around the world. Its fifth session just concluded in Geneva, Switzerland, where the US government’s absence was noticed, but overshadowed by the energy and momentum behind Ghana’s historic resolution.
Civil society from around the world noted the fact that the world’s “superpower” was 1 of 3 countries to vote against the resolution, but the sheer number and diversity of Black American civil society leaders present at the forum made it clear that this shameful vote does not reflect our unwavering commitment to and solidarity in the global struggle for reparatory justice.
The United States’ actions are not just a betrayal of the rest of the world; they are the latest examples of the Trump administration's betrayal of its own people—and in particular, of the 45 million Americans who are of African descent. This is why the video message from Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) in the PFPAD closing ceremony was so important: When the federal government fails to represent our interests or even be present in rooms where our issues are being discussed, Black civil society and congressional leaders have always stepped up to fill the void.
The Trump administration’s actions to undermine forums at the UN designed to promote the rights and equality of people of African descent will be a stain on our nation’s history. The administration is telling us loud and clear that it does not view ensuring Black people’s equal human rights as a priority. So, while this administration falsely claims that “President Trump has done more for Black Americans than any other president,” we must remember the words of our great James Baldwin, “I cannot believe what you say because I see what you do.”
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Eulogy for My Friend and Freedom Fighter, Yanar Mohammed
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently. She was one of them.
Mar 29, 2026
The first time someone threatened to kill Yanar was in 2003.
That was the year she returned to Baghdad, after having fled with her infant son during the first US war seven years earlier.
With Iraq now under US occupation, Yanar noticed something that the media did not: The US had unleashed and empowered Iraq’s most reactionary political forces, and like fundamentalists everywhere, their first priority was to subjugate Iraqi women and girls.
Yanar wasn’t having it.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed.
She saw what was happening and launched the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) to fight against the dismantlement of women’s rights and the terrible rise in violence against women. The organization’s first office was a bombed-out bank in central Baghdad.
From that moment, Yanar became a lightning rod for anti-feminist attacks, and very soon after, the threats began.
In 2004, I published an open letter to the chief of the US administration in Baghdad, reminding him that the United States was legally obligated to protect Yanar’s life and the lives of all Iraqi civilians under occupation. I didn’t know Yanar yet, but she wrote to thank me, and we arranged to meet in New York.
We sat on a lumpy couch in MADRE’s old office and talked about building a network of safe houses, where women fleeing violence could find safety and solidarity. Then we went to Macy’s, and Yanar tried on every single lipstick at the makeup counter.
Over the next 22 years, Yanar became one of MADRE’s closest partners, and to me, she became family.
MADRE accompanied Yanar as she brought her visions for revolutionary feminism to life again and again, founding a network of shelters for women and keeping them operational through attacks by clans, militias, and the State.
She launched a feminist newspaper and radio station and staffed them with women who rebuilt their shattered lives through the care, feminist education, and job training that OWFI provided.
She created safe spaces for young people to come together across sectarian lines to defy the logic of the US-caused civil war and create art, music, and poetry.
She co-founded the first organization of Afro-Iraqis, understanding that there is no feminism without racial justice.
She built an underground railroad to free women who were enslaved by ISIS.
She fought like hell to defend women’s legal rights, understanding that the more we lost, the more critical every victory became.
She led protests, campaigns, and coalitions that brought down a corrupt government and forced its successor to answer to demands for accountability from Iraq’s most marginalized people.
Yet, as extraordinary as Yanar’s legacy is, she was so much more than the sum of her accomplishments.
Yanar loved jazz, sushi, and beer. She also worried about her son and spent years hoping to find love. She loved her husband, who made her so happy these last few years.
Yanar was also despondent at times. More focused on all that was left to do than on what she had achieved. Her moments of exhaustion and frustration always reminded me that we don’t have to be infallible heroes in this work; we just have to keep doing our part and take care of each other along the way.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed. The Iranian-backed militias that had threatened Yanar for years have been galvanized like never before by this war.
In January, when Yanar and I spoke about the killing of Renee Goode in Minneapolis, we were both struck by the parallels between those militias in Iraq and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States.
“Now you have what the US brought to Iraq,” Yanar said, “A paramilitary force working for the worst reactionaries in government, terrorizing communities and committing extrajudicial executions.”
We talked about the beauty and the power of the organizing to protect immigrants, and the militant joy of people coming together to remake the world: in Minneapolis, in Baghdad, in Gaza, in Darfur, and in Haiti.
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently:
Heating soup and handing out blankets,
Offering sanctuary to those who are under attack,
Spinning the ideas that will move everything forward,
And putting their bodies on the line again and again.
Yanar did all of these things. And she did them with joy in her heart and fire in her belly. I loved her for that.
Two years ago, when I was in Jerusalem, where I lived as a child, Yanar wrote to me about her hopes for the future:
My plan for the coming decade is to have a small house with a big garden in a Baghdad suburb, where I will get a dog, and plant all the flowering trees and vegetables. And I hope the day will come when we can both visit each other in our home cities without any fear.
This is the legacy Yanar leaves us to enact—to fight for each other and spend time together in the flowering gardens we’ve planted.
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Without Haitians There is No Collective Liberation
Two Haitian immigrant advocates chart out a path for what a truly liberatory policy toward Haitian and other Black immigrants could look like.
Feb 26, 2026
We started Black History Month with a critical—though potentially momentary—win for Haitian immigrants, specifically those with Temporary Protected Status. Although the Trump administration has appealed the decision, the current pause of the termination of TPS for Haitians has been a moment of reprieve for our community.
In this period of polycrisis, this victory also demonstrated the continued power of community organizing. But, in order to ensure this win is sustained and pushes us toward Black liberation and collective justice, we have to amplify the monumental role of Haiti and Haitians in our shared struggles for equity and justice in the US—past, present, and future. There’s a great deal for us to learn from Haiti and Haitians about collective liberation.
We felt momentary relief with the court ruling on TPS, but the unease we carry was not able to dissipate altogether because we know this government is undeterred from flouting the legal system. Living in limbo is already difficult for TPS holders, but like with all immigrant communities, there is the heightened fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its inhumane and life-threatening tactics, which we see vis-a-vis their modern-day recreations of slave catchers.
Furthermore, Haitians live with another kind of fear—the fear of being both invisible and hyper-visible, but never fully human. This characterization has been deliberate and by design; a punitive response to Haiti’s successful revolt against slavery—the first in the world—and what it set in motion for Black and other colonized people across the world.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms.
The paradox of hyper-visibility paired with erasure is part of a larger pattern of anti-Blackness in this country. White supremacists tend to treat Haiti as symbolic of everything they intentionally mischaracterize or misrepresent about Black people, as a pretense to spew racialized anti-Black hatred. The public imagination they craft around Haiti is carefully curated to dehumanize us and to stoke fears around Black people rising up once again. We are an enduring threat to white supremacy and racial capitalism, which is why we continue to be punished and targeted as a people and a country.
This public imagination is exactly what the Trump administration leveraged to spread sensational lies that many Americans went on to accept as factual. It is why our community faces higher detention and deportation rates, and sees disproportionately lower rates of being granted asylum. And, it contributes to why philanthropy has not prioritized sustained giving to Haitian organizations. Even though we face unceasing attacks from the administration that have stripped over half a million Haitians of their statuses, targeted them repeatedly for halts on adjudication for almost all forms of relief, and imposed the most severe forms of travel bans for both non-immigrants and immigrants, we are not seeing a commensurate response to support us from the philanthropic community, to give us a fighting chance against these attacks.
Every day, there is a reminder of our invisibility. Language justice for Haitians is often an afterthought. We regularly have to advocate to immigrant rights organizations and grassroots organizing groups to provide Kreyòl interpretation for webinars, trainings, and materials that are directly applicable to hundreds of thousands of Haitians. Even though Haitian immigrants are the second-largest population with TPS, language access is usually not extended to Haitian TPS holders.
We are routinely rendered invisible by all factions of US society—policymakers, philanthropy, media, and even progressives—and yet we become hyper-visible in moments of crisis, political convenience, or scapegoating. We saw this hyper-visibility in the response to Haitians arriving in Del Rio, Texas, when Border Patrol agents were caught chasing Haitian refugees on horseback in 2021 and in the last presidential election when Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were thrust to the center of Republican political theater vis-a-vis the circulation of blatant misinformation designed to incite anti-immigrant sentiment.
Being left out of—or misrepresented in—mainstream narratives of immigration and American identity has real-life consequences. We feel it in the lack of services tailored to our community, insufficient language access, and more. We see it when we’re treated as an afterthought in immigrant rights advocacy and grossly underfunded compared to other immigrant communities—multiplying the unseen labor of the few Haitian migrant groups that exist. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Black migrant justice groups received less than 2% of all funding for the movement, 0.04% of funding explicitly granted for Black communities in general, and overall less than 0.01% of all foundation grants given during 2016-2020,” which is why initiatives like the Black Migrant Power Fund—launched to address these gaps—are so crucial in this moment.
Our exclusion has also led to the distortion and flattening of our identity–we are often seen as victims with no agency, our significant present-day contributions have largely gone unnoticed, and centuries-old imperialist policies by the US and France continue to go unchecked despite playing a big role in the ongoing injustices in Haiti.
We reject this single story of victimhood and believe there is an urgent need to platform the pivotal leadership and perspectives of Haitian migrant rights’ leaders advocating for their communities across the region, which is why the Hemispheric Network for Haitian Migrants’ Rights was started. Haitian leaders’ initiatives and organizations are significantly under-resourced, yet they are undeterred in their battle against the anti-Blackness that knows no borders and confronts Haitians at every turn in their migration journeys.
In terms of contributions to the US, Haitian TPS holders alone contribute $5.8 billion to the US economy and pay $1.5 billion in taxes, but this is rarely considered in discussions about Haitian immigrants. Moreover, in our recent report from Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, we shared that through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) Parole Program, a two-year humanitarian parole program, CHNV immigrants contributed an additional estimated $5.5 billion to the US economy annually through spending alone.
The February 3 verdict offered momentary relief for the 350,000 of us who have TPS status, but we must continue to fight tooth and nail for humanitarian protection. It remains to be seen whether the appellate or Supreme Court will grant the administration’s emergency appeal, and strip so many people of merited and necessary protections. Legislative efforts to protect TPS continue, with a discharge petition proposed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with over 155 co-sponsors.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms as the next phase of our fight starts up to protect not only TPS, but to advocate for all forms of policy and practice that ensure Haitian migrants can be safe and thrive. Philanthropy must provide sustained support to our organizations because supporting Black migrant communities is a moral and social imperative, particularly for any institution that espouses a commitment to racial justice.
But above all, we must push back against white supremacy and fascism by finally recognizing that how we treat Haiti and Haitian immigrants, and really any group of people who occupy this paradoxical position of invisibility and hyper-visibility in our society, is a barometer of our commitment to collective liberation.
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The VA is Ripping Away Abortion Care for Veterans... Again
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
Jan 25, 2026
In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.
We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.
At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.
No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.
But that progress was short-lived.
The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.
In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.
Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.
Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.
Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.
I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.
June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.
We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.
I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.
This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.
The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
Because in the end, we are all only human.
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Our Voices and Our Votes Matter
On this National Voter Registration Month, let’s honor the generations who fought, marched, and even died for the right to vote by doing our part.
Sep 28, 2025
In 2002, the National Association of Secretaries of State designated every September National Voter Registration Month. This is more than a month on the calendar; it’s a call to action to remind us of one of the most powerful truths in a democracy: Change doesn’t happen unless we show up.
It’s a reminder that our voices matter, our votes matter, and that the freedoms we often take for granted can only be protected if we exercise them at the ballot box.
In recent years, one freedom has been under relentless attack: reproductive freedom. Across the country, state legislatures have rolled back rights that generations before us fought to secure. People are being forced to travel hundreds of miles for medical care, to carry pregnancies against their will, and to endure unnecessary suffering because of political decisions made by elected officials. These policies don’t reflect the will of the majority. Poll after poll shows that most Americans believe in protecting abortion access and reproductive healthcare. But here’s the catch: Beliefs don’t change laws. Votes do.
That’s why National Voter Registration Month matters so deeply. It’s about more than filling out a form. It’s about building power to defend all of our freedoms: reproductive rights, voting rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate justice, disability rights, racial equity, and economic fairness. Every freedom we value is on the line, and the ballot box is where we fight for them.
Young people, your future is being decided whether you participate or not. Claim your power.
This message is especially urgent for young people. Generation Z and Millennials already make up the largest voting bloc in the country. Young voters have the numbers to decide elections and to set the course for the future. Yet too often, young voices are missing at the polls because they aren’t registered and don’t realize how simple the process can be.
Here’s the good news: In many states, high school students as young as 16 or 17 can preregister to vote. That means when they turn 18, they’re automatically added to the rolls and ready to participate in their first election. By the time they reach voting age, they’re not scrambling to meet deadlines; they’re already prepared to cast their first ballot and shape their future.
If you’re a young person reading this, or if you know one, don’t wait until the night before a big election to figure out the process. Go online today, check your state’s rules, and register, or preregister now. Encourage your classmates to do the same. Host a registration drive at your school. Post on social media. Because here’s the truth: Decisions about your future are being made right now by people in power. If you’re not registered, you don’t get a say.
National Voter Registration Month is also a reminder to all of us, no matter our age, that democracy is not a spectator sport. Registration deadlines vary by state, and millions of people lose their chance to vote every cycle simply because they missed a deadline or their information wasn’t updated after moving. Taking five minutes to check your registration could be the most important action you take this year.
The stakes have never been higher. The Supreme Court has already overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping away a nearly 50-year precedent. State legislatures are racing to see how far they can go in restricting abortion access. Some are even targeting birth control and IVF. None of this happened by accident. It happened because elections have consequences.
But there’s another side to that story: Protecting and expanding freedoms also comes down to elections. In states where voters showed up to pass ballot measures protecting abortion access, reproductive freedom is still secure. In districts where young people voted in record numbers, leaders committed to justice and equity were elected. The message is clear: When we vote, we win.
So, on this National Voter Registration Month, let’s honor the generations who fought, marched, and even died for the right to vote by doing our part. Let’s commit to registering ourselves, helping our neighbors get registered, and making sure every eligible high school student knows they can take action now.
Our freedoms are not guaranteed. They are defended or lost at the ballot box. If you care about reproductive freedom, if you care about climate justice, if you care about racial equality, LGBTQIA+ rights, or economic security, then voting is not optional; it is essential.
Young people, your future is being decided whether you participate or not. Claim your power. Register. Preregister. Show up. And know this: your voice, your vote, your freedom, our collective future, depends on it.
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Young Pregnant People Need Choices, Not Shame
With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Aug 09, 2025
Access to affordable family planning and sexual health services is under attack, with the current administration threatening millions of dollars in Title X funding.
Millions of poor, uninsured, low-income individuals rely on this program not only for contraception but for cancer detection, HIV testing, and other essential services. The administration’s hostility toward proven programs like this puts young people at greater risk of pregnancy, in an environment where reproductive choices are limited. The consequences of abortion bans are clear: People are getting sick and losing their lives because access to basic reproductive healthcare is being stripped away. But what if you are young? What if you are Black? What if you live in a state restricting abortion? What if you do not get to decide?
For young pregnant people, these bans and funding cuts are even harder to navigate because of barriers to their independence. With the potential cuts to Title X programs, young people’s access to contraception will be even more limited. If they become pregnant when they don’t want to be, some states that still allow abortion have restrictions requiring consent from parents. With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Reproductive justice is a human rights framework coined in 1994 by 12 Black women in response to the reproductive rights and health groups that excluded the lived experiences of those who have been marginalized. This concept includes the right to parent, the right not to parent, the right to parent children in safe and healthy communities, and the right to bodily autonomy. Young people, too, deserve reproductive justice.
What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame?
A powerful misconception is that we are often just one decision away from shaping the course of our lives. But it isn’t the one individual decision. It’s the collective punitive reaction from society that stands in the way of young people getting the support they need. For the young pregnant person who is parenting, there is a systemic lack of support coupled with stereotypes that lead to negative outcomes.
As a child, my knowledge about the consequences resulting from decisions we make about our bodies was limited to the concrete and practical, such as skinning my knee in the neighborhood kickball tournaments when I ran around the bases too quickly. That knowledge quickly expanded when my older sister became pregnant as a teen, and I observed the organized shunning she experienced from family members to healthcare workers to teachers and friends. This was the first time I witnessed shame. I heard how family members talked about her pregnancy as a defining moment, as if any glimpse of a future was now extinguished. Those family members and friends who were “supportive” disappeared once my niece was born. It was at this moment that I decided that I wanted to offset that shame for her, for us, for every young Black girl who is navigating a pregnancy.
I did my best to be a supportive little sister as a child, standing up to all who spoke negatively about my sister and her choices. This experience stayed with me, and as a first year medical student, I founded Sisters Informing Healing Living Empowering (SIHLE) Augusta, renamed Choices Within Reach, an organization that works to support young Black mothers in Augusta, Georgia, through providing community, financial resources, and infant supplies. For the past seven years, in addition to my medical and residency training, we have worked to disempower the systems that shame and marginalize young people about their reproductive choices. Transforming that childhood rage to triumph, this ever-expanding sisterhood is my greatest accomplishment.
Now, as an OB-GYN and community organizer, I continue to hear the echoes of my sister’s story through my patients and the young people I serve in Georgia.
These stereotypes of young parenting people that go back to public condemnation of “teen moms” and “welfare queens” in the 1970s and 80s are still alive in the collective shunning of young Black pregnant people. In many schools, there is a “pregnant student” policy that states that the school won’t make accommodations for a pregnant student unless required by documented medical circumstances. High school students are not granted “maternity leave.” These policies are penal and don’t support the pregnant student’s success, especially when combined with isolation that the pregnant adolescent may be enduring within her community.
It is these punitive policies and attitudes that lead to statistics like only 50% of teen mothers receive their high school diploma by age 22, compared to 90% of teens who do not give birth in their adolescence. The lack of education and support makes it hard for them to find job opportunities, leading to a hard time making ends meet, and so on. This is a collective shunning of young motherhood.
These roots also shape our healthcare system. Just as young moms slip through the cracks of the community, they also often do in the healthcare system. Adolescent medicine providers try to close these gaps for young people. However, the gap widens when they become pregnant. Is it the OB-GYN who receives little to no training on how to specifically care for a pregnant teen or the pediatrician who has not specialized in pregnancy that is trying to care for the teen who is pregnant? When the gaps are felt by young moms, they might disengage from prenatal care, lose trust in their providers, and face poor health outcomes for the mother and baby.
This is especially true when the stereotypes of pregnant adolescents are woven into the implicit and explicit biases of the providers. These biases affect how their providers view them, the care they receive, and their outcomes. Kia, who experienced pregnancy at 16 years old, had her pregnancy confirmed by her pediatrician, who had been caring for her since she was an infant. However, once her urine pregnancy test was positive, there was an obvious disconnect. They told her she could no longer be seen in the office and was not offered any options counseling, OB-GYN references, or even an ultrasound. This experience led Kia to delay seeking prenatal care. What if the pregnancy was in the wrong location? What if there were complications? As we attempt to close the gap of maternal morbidity and mortality rates in the U.S., which are disproportionately higher in Black people, we must address the systems that increase risks faced by young Black parents.
The fight against the societal punishment of young Black parents is an issue of reproductive justice. In a nation where systemic barriers persist, the futures of young Black parents don’t come down to personal choices; they are intricately tied to the what kind of support, education, and resources they can access. It is far beyond time to restructure the narratives and fill the gaps society created for our young Black pregnant and parenting people.
What if we had culturally sound, group prenatal care that focused on and highlighted the needs of young, Black pregnant people? What if we built a community that came together to support young parents with childcare, financial resources, and school or job support? What if medically accurate, comprehensive sex education were available to all young people? What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame? We can create the kind of world where we all have equitable access to the full spectrum of reproductive freedoms, no matter our age or location.
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Voting Rights Act 'On Life Support' Amid Right-Wing Attacks
"It's time for Congress to restore its full protections by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act," said one Democratic lawmaker.
Aug 06, 2025
As the Voting Rights Act turned 60 on Wednesday, advocates highlighted right-wing attacks on the landmark legislation and called on Congress to pass a long-stagnant bill aimed at restoring and strengthening one of the most important civil rights laws in U.S. history.
The VRA, signed into law in 1965 by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson amid a groundswell of civil rights activism, was meant to ensure that state and local governments could not "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."
However, the law has been eroded in recent decades by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country, including through racially rigged and other gerrymandered congressional maps, restrictions on voter registration, reduction in early voting options, and voter identification laws. These measures disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, and some GOP officials have admitted that they are intended to give Republican candidates an electoral edge.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated a key section of the law that required jurisdictions with a history of racist disenfranchisement to obtain federal approval prior to altering voting rules. In 2021, the nation's high court voted 5-4 in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee to uphold Arizona's voting restrictions—even as Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that they disproportionately affect minorities.
"Instead of anniversary toasts, election law experts are preparing eulogies for the landmark legislation."
Now, the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority is poised to "end voting rights as we know them," as Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy put it Tuesday. That's because the justices said last week that they would rehear a case that could result in them striking down Section 2 of the VRA, what University of California, Los Angeles legal scholar Richard L. Hasen calls "the last remaining pillar" of the law.
"Instead of anniversary toasts, election law experts are preparing eulogies for the landmark legislation, which conservative lawyers have attacked on multiple fronts in recent years, after the U.S. Supreme Court took square aim at the statute's constitutionality last week," Jim Saksa wrote Tuesday for Democracy Docket.
As Hasen explained:
Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday's order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state's six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor's veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice.
Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.
However, a group of non-Black voters argued in a lawsuit that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the 15th Amendment's ban on federal and state governments denying citizens the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
"To me, this is it," Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington, told Democracy Docket. "I would bet my left arm that they will tell us that Section 2 is in violation of the 15th Amendment."
Civil rights defenders including numerous Democratic lawmakers urged Congress to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation first introduced in 2021 whose sponsors said will "update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act."
"Sixty years ago today, the Voting Rights Act became law thanks to the perseverance of civil rights activists. Today, our sacred right to vote remains under attack," Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), one of the bill's primary sponsors, said on social media Wednesday. "We must protect our democracy and honor those who risked everything by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."
Although the bill passed the then-Democrat controlled House of Representatives in 2021, it failed to pass the Senate and a subsequent bid to advance the legislation failed the following year.
Calling for passage of the bill, Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)—whose home state played a critical role in the civil rights struggle—said on the social media site Bluesky that the VRA "is on life support after being gutted by the Supreme Court and far-right judges."
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law exactly 60 years ago. But today, it is on life support after being gutted by the Supreme Court and far-right judges.It’s time for Congress to restore its full protections by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. 🗳️
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— Rep. Terri A. Sewell (@sewell.house.gov) August 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said on Bluesky that "60 years ago today, the Voting Rights Act became law. Now, we have an administration conducting voter suppression in real time. In Texas, Republicans are trying to gut our democracy by redrawing maps to erase five Democratic seats—before a single vote is cast."
"The fight continues," Crockett added. "We owe it to those who marched, bled, and believed to keep pushing until every voice is heard and every vote counts."
The ACLU said: "Democracy can't wait. Congress must protect our voting rights at the federal level by passing the reintroduced John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."
However, passing the bill will be next to impossible, given Republican control of both houses of Congress and President Donald Trump in the White House. That doesn't mean voting rights defenders should give up, Legal Defense Fund president and director-counsel Janai Nelson stressed Wednesday.
"If we are to continue the pursuit of the multiracial democracy that the VRA set in motion 60 years ago and if we are to honor our republican form of government founded on representation by the people, we must be unwavering in our commitment to fulfill the promise of Selma, refuse to cede any further ground, and mobilize in support of equal voting rights and fair elections," Nelson said.
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Juneteenth and the Fight for Justice in Selma and Beyond
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Jun 19, 2025
At Foot Soldiers Park, Juneteenth is more than a date on the calendar. It’s a declaration, a call to always remember, to resist, and to continue to reimagine what freedom looks like.
For the last four years Juneteenth has become a commemoration of historic significance that has become more powerful and more necessary. As a community, we gather not just to honor history, we gather to face the present and to envision a better future rooted in truth, justice, and collective power.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. That delay wasn’t a historical oversight, it was an intentional strategy of suppression that today, still shows up through the systems we confront daily.
We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
Today one thing is clear, slavery didn’t end, it evolved. It’s been institutionalized in the form of mass incarceration, labor exploitation, generational poverty, voter suppression, and policies that consistently and disproportionately harm Black and Brown communities. One-hundred and sixty years later, Black and Brown people are still profiled, surveilled, underpaid, and denied full access to justice.
And yet, we are still here. Still resisting. Still building our communities up. Still rising.
Our hometown Selma is ground zero for the struggle for voting rights and the fight for the socioeconomic prosperity of people of color in our country. We both span two generations of Black people in Selma. One of us was among the 600 foot soldiers who bravely marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and demanded voting rights for Black people—ultimately leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The other one of us was raised to carry that spirit of activism and determination to protect and preserve those rights for generations to come.
In 2021, at a historic moment for our country, we founded Foot Soldiers Park to preserve Selma’s legacy, memorialize the stories of the everyday people who fueled the civil rights movement, and to position the city’s historical significance into an engine for liberation, economic development, and racial justice.
With a mission rooted in the legacy of Selma’s foot soldiers, we don’t shy away from the truth, we walk directly into it. Because that’s where change is born and transformation begins. We don’t just preserve history, we activate it. We innovate. We organize. We lead.
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Despite Selma’s historical significance in shaping the very fabric of this country, the majority-Black city is still struggling to overcome generations of institutional racism and overall neglect. Forty-one percent of the population lives in poverty. Thirty-percent are suffering from food insecurity, and an abysmal $27,000 a year is the average income in the city.
When we founded Foot Soldiers Park, we had a clear goal—to transform Selma; ask hard questions; and set a bold agenda to build generational wealth, protect our civil rights, and empower our youth to lead. We are campaigning to fund Selma’s first-ever community and education center, and foot soldiers memorial. This urgently needed hub will be a beacon for leaders, students, and educators to weave the rich tapestry of Selma’s civil rights movement and serve as a conduit for ongoing scholarship in this critical field. As our civil rights are again under attack, we’ll serve as a catalyst for community-led action and civic participation, healing and restoration, youth engagement and activation—building the bench for the next generation of political, business, and social justice leaders.
This Juneteenth we need to face the truth—there will be no erasure. What our history shows is how resilience can lead to transformation. Generation after generation we have turned pain into purpose, and memory into motivation to design systems that move us closer to justice.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A right delayed is a right denied.” Juneteenth reminds us that justice delayed is not justice at all. Freedom withheld is not freedom for all. And the arc of the moral universe does not bend unless we bend it. Together.
For us Juneteenth is not just symbolic. It is sacred. It is strategic. It is where truth, joy, memory, and action converge.
Every year we celebrate because our people’s story does not end in chains. We celebrate because our ancestors did more than survive; they organized, educated, resisted, and loved. We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
In Selma, we never rest and we don’t sugarcoat the truth. We are the foot soldiers of 1965 and the foot soldiers of tomorrow—as agents of change, we will keep marching forward.
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How to Use 197 Forbidden 'Woke' Words and Still Get a Grant From the Trump-Musk Government
A grant proposal concerning reparations for the descendants of slave owners, submitted in good faith to Elon Musk during this cruel and unusual time of oppressive wokeness.
Mar 27, 2025
Dear Elon,
On behalf of the Diversified Organization of Grant Enablers, (the original DOGE), thank you for ordering the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to flag proposals that contain certain oppressive “woke” words you don’t like. We’re not wild about them either.
Forbes leaked the list of the 197 terms, rendered here in bold italics. (And kudos, dear sir, for not banning George Carlin’s seven dirty words!)
BTW, the biased media is inflating the number of forbidden words, trying to make you look bad. For example, it counts as individual terms diverse, diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse community, diverse group, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, and diversity. Fake news, is it not?
But we have a suggestion. Rather than ban them, giving the liberals something easy to roast you with, why not put them to work in an anti-woke context? That’s what our professional team of DOGE grant writers has done in a model culturally appropriate proposal. You will love it, even though it uses just about all the barred terms. (Sorry, we failed to squeeze in people + uterus.)
We don’t want to brag, but this can’t-miss proposal will shake up the lunatic left. You will want to immediately fund it, even while chain-sawing so many others into sawdust. And when you spread the word on X, your popularity with anti-woke key groups is going to skyrocket! Even Steve Bannon will snuggle up to you.
Thanks for purifying our thoughts and bringing your antiracist Afrikaner sensibility to our great nation.
Proposal For Reparations for the Descendants of Slave Owners (DSO)
Britain abolished slavery in 1833 and provided former slave owners 20 million British pounds (the equivalent today of $22.1 billion US dollars) as compensation. Racial justice demands a similar response from the U.S. federal government for the descendants of U.S. slave owners.
In South Africa today, oppressed white farmers face land confiscation without compensation from its BIPOC government. Slave owners in the U.S. were victims of a similar injustice after the Civil War, punished for their identity. Without reparations, which have been too long denied, their descendants are victimized again generation after generation.
To promote a truly inclusive society based on equity, equality, and diversity for all, we must recognize and celebrate our cultural differences. While we are a nation of immigrants, we also are a nation of slaveowners!
For too long implicit bias and hate speech have been used against those, due to no fault of their own, who were born into slave-owning families. These key populations, labeled DSO here, should be considered at risk minorities. They helped create our national identity and contributed significantly to our cultural heritage. Racism in America would have little meaning without them.
Our proposal is a multicultural exploration of race and ethnicity among the slave-owning class, and their extended contact with indigenous communities and the Hispanic minority along the Gulf of Mexico. These marginalized non-white groups, including males and females, also owned slaves and suffered losses due to emancipation.
We must put aside our stereotypes about the plantation class. This underappreciated and undervalued population is difficult to analyze due to our own unconscious bias against all aspects of slavery. The DSO have lost their voice and its once fearsome power, since some ancestors of slaveowners are burdened by a crippling sense of guilt and so are underrepresented in modern political discourse.
To advocate for reparations for DSO members is not to whitewash their faults. Slave-owners promoted systemic racism, segregation, and white privilege— even for white non-slave-owners— but we should acknowledge their genuine sense of belonging formed though the intersectionality of sociocultural and socioeconomic factors in plantation society.
Even though white women were systematically placed on a pedestal, they were never excluded from institutional slave-owning power. They adored their narrow gender identity. These women of high status were never marginalized by aggressive feminists. They were totally at ease with being biologically female and with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Also, we can find no transgender and transexual members of slave-owning society and the DSO. Women did not run domestic plantation life in order to overcome disparities or spew meaningless pronouns in polite society. This wholesome tradition has been carried on by the DSO and provides another reason for just compensation.
A key, but seldom discussed factor, is the gender-based violence suffered at the hands of marauding Yankee soldiers. The DSO may deserve additional compensation for the trauma suffered as well as any resulting mental disabilities of their forebearers.
Meanwhile, slave-owning men were real men, biologically males with no wanton legacy of men having sex with men (MSM). And please forgive us for a personal judgement: These god-fearing slaveowners left their descendants with not the faintest expressions of non-binary awareness, thank goodness.
Because of the uncompensated destruction of the slave-holding structures, we regret to report that more than a few white plantation women became commercial sex workers in order to survive the marauding armies. The anguish and mental health problems facing white plantation prostitutes should be considered when awarding reparations. While it is too late to do something for them, our unconscious bias about sex should not distract us from a path of justice for their descendants.
Another important thread connects the slave owners to the climate crisis they and their descendants experienced. Monocrops repeatedly planted to raise cash in trade depleted the soil on Southern farms, creating pollution in their drinking water and a more generally degraded environmental quality. Westward expansion of slavery took more and more land from Native American tribes. Without climate science to inform them, effective solutions were missed and succeeding generations paid the price. We compensate farmers today for crop failures and tariff losses, why not do the same for the DSO including tribal DSO?
We hope that grant reviewers will look beyond their built-in anti-slaveowner confirmation bias, as well as their preconceived notions about race and ethnicity. It’s time to hone our cultural sensitivity and embrace a true cultural diversity, one that includes both descendants of slaves and slave owners. Our all-inclusive survey will make plain the biases we hold against this DSO class.
Since the Civil War, polarization has led to oppression and vilification of our great but marginalized plantation heritage. This injustice can only be rectified by fair and equitable compensation for the undervalued and underserved, whose relatives had their Black human capital stripped from them.
Our project asks only that we adjust our orientation and increase the diversity of those considered the victims of slavery. We must foster inclusiveness, devising just and equitable compensation programs for all descendants of slavery, including the DSO.
Social justice requires that we overcome our own prejudices and promote diversity of thought. By doing so, we all should recognize that slave-owning descendants too should be considered among our most vulnerable populations, entitled to equal opportunities when reparations are considered.
Now is the time to rectify the historical inequity faced by the DSO.
Now is the time to enhance the diversity of reparations recipients and the way they are viewed.
Now is the time to fund our bold proposal which strives, like no other, to bring community equity to all our people.
Cc: Rober Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, and the descendants of Robert E. Lee
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