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white supremacy
Hate Group Turns DC Into 'Fascist Hellscape' With July 4 March
"Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC," one human rights lawyer said.
Jul 04, 2026
Hundreds of members of the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front descended on Washington DC Saturday morning as the nation's capital prepared to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Members of the group, wearing masks and carrying Confederate and US flags, rode the DC metro and marched around parts of Capitol Hill before departing the city by train, as WUSA reported. Beyond the march itself, no other incidents were reported connected to the group.
"What kind of fascist hellscape is [happening] on Pennsylvania Ave at the Eastern Market Metro stop?" Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz wrote on Bluesky upon spotting the group.
Chafetz said the group appeared to be all white and all male.
What kind of fascist hellscape is happing on Pennsylvania Ave at the Eastern Market Metro stop? These guys—seemingly all white, all men—have their faces covered, are carrying shields, wearing brown …
[image or embed]
— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz.bsky.social) July 4, 2026 at 6:43 AM
"Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC," human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany wrote on social media. "Their manifesto calls for a white ethnostate, excludes people of color from their definition of citizenship, and is deeply antisemitic and xenophobic."
In one video shared by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller, members of the group stood in a line outside DC's Union Station chanting, "Life, liberty, victory" and "Reclaim America."
A group of masked men gathered at Union Station today and called for reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants. Some held Confederate flags. They have been marching across Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/xTfaoJDHOO
— Mitchell Miller (@mmillerwtop) July 4, 2026
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Patriot Front split from Vanguard America after the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, at which white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into counterprotesters, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others
"Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country," SPLC explains.
The group believes that democracy no longer functions and wants to transform the US into a "pan-European" ethnostate that excludes both citizens of color and new immigrants and refugees.
One image from a Reuters photographer shows the masked Patriot Front marchers standing around a Black woman sitting on the DC Metro.
"This image is from today. A Black woman sits on the DC metro as masked white nationalists prepare to march on our nation's capital. This is America's 250th anniversary," attorney Aaron Parnas posted on social media.
This image is from today. A Black woman sits on the DC metro as masked white nationalists prepare to march on our nation's capital.
This is America's 250th anniversary. REUTERS/Cheney Orr pic.twitter.com/eIO8XJwIuA
— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) July 4, 2026
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blasted the group for carrying Confederate flags and embracing fascism while claiming the mantle of US patriotism.
"You have no right to call yourself a '[patriot]' while carrying the flag of one of America's enemies, and claiming victory on behalf of the ideology that fueled another—both of which the US defeated," D'Arrigo wrote on social media.
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The Supreme Court’s Whites-First Reasoning on Gerrymandering
Conservative justices’ excuses for eviscerating the Voting Rights Act embody an indefensible indifference to the rights of Black voters.
May 27, 2026
Will the Supreme Court’s evident desire to assist the GOP before the midterms override a decision by three Republican-appointed judges to spare Black-majority districts in Alabama from being gerrymandered out of existence?
This is the question posed by possible Supreme Court review of the finding by an Alabama judicial panel that Alabama could not use a congressional district map that deliberately discriminated against Black voters.
Two of the three judges on the panel, which found race-based discrimination, had been appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump; one, by President Ronald Reagan. The issue now is whether the conservative justices of the Supreme Court will upend the panel’s racial discrimination finding, notwithstanding that the Alabama judges had followed legal standards set in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
If they allow the Alabama decision stand, it will be a rare exception to the flood of Supreme Court-encouraged gerrymandering prompted by the Callais decision. Those Republican gerrymanders are likely to purge one-third of African-American representatives from Congress by destroying the Black-majority districts that elected them.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice.
Nonetheless, the six justices of the Supreme Court who caused this political bloodbath along racial lines claim that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the voting rights of African Americans. The purge is lawful under the Voting Rights Act, say the justices, because the GOP has partisan reasons to eliminate the Black districts that cannot be “disentangled” from racial motives.
Through a convoluted logic we explore below, and in the supposed interests of a “color-blind” Constitution, the right-winger justices have emasculated the Voting Rights Act. The majority insists we ignore the reality of race relations in America and ignore the link between Republican partisanship and Republican racial politics. But judicial ignorance cannot yield justice.
Partisanship and race have always been inextricably linked in Southern politics. Since party identification for white people in the South has, first and foremost, been driven by race, any “disentanglement” requirement makes it impossible for the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of Black and other minority citizens.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1870, recognized that the right to vote serves as the great protector of civil and human rights. The amendment prohibits states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race. But for nearly a century, the former Confederate states in effect suspended the 15th Amendment. Decade after decade, they prevented Black people from voting through legal chicanery, violence, and economic intimidation.
The long civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s against Jim Crow and for racial equality reached its culmination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act recalled the 15th Amendment to life by giving federal courts broad and flexible authority to protect African-American voting rights. Overwhelming majorities of both parties supported the act, with 80% of senators and 80% of congresspeople voting for it.
Among other protections, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from imposing any electoral “practice or procedure... in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” Notably, it does not require proving the racial intentions behind supposedly neutral voting requirements or election practices. The Voting Rights Act was passed precisely to protect the Black franchise even when those who oppose Black voting rights don’t say so out loud. Consequently Section 2 bars a practice if it “results in... abridgement” of voting rights.
In an effort to avoid any ambiguity, the act was amended in 1982 to specifically confirm that Section 2 is violated if a political processes gives racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate... to elect representatives of their choice.”
For decades federal courts applied this provision to protect African-American voters from racial gerrymandering. But in last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, the Supreme Court deleted those protections and turned the Voting Rights Act upside down. What was the supposed logic behind the decision?
Callais expanded on the court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which unleashed states to engage in unlimited gerrymandering. “Partisan” gerrymandering represents a majority party power grab. With gerrymandered districts, a slight majority of voters could elect a supermajority in a state legislature. Or, as President Trump hopes this year, multistate gerrymandering might give the GOP enough purloined congressional seats to retain their hold on Congress even if most voters, nationwide, vote against Republicans.
Gerrymandering defies the fundamental principles of America constitutional democracy; nonetheless the Rucho majority held that courts could not restrain the practice.
Bad enough. But in this anti-democracy decision, the conservative justices also found an excuse for gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Disempowering Democratic voters and disempowering African-American voters commonly go together, and the court’s right-wingers saw a danger: Disadvantaged voters might try to “evade” Rucho’s green-lighting of gerrymandering by “repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”
This stands reality on its head. The real danger is packaging (and therefore excusing) a racial gerrymander as a partisan one. Of the two “risks,” why did the right-wingers choose to privilege the one that de facto enhances white voting power, not the voting rights of citizens of color?
The “danger” in thwarting partisan gerrymandering is that a white majority won’t be allowed to unfairly magnify its power beyond its actual level of voter support. The danger in racial gerrymandering is that voters of color will, once again, be denied a meaningful voice in the political process because of race. In a multiracial democracy with a history of white racial oppression, it is obvious which concern should matter more. Except to white nationalists and their allies.
In order to put a state’s supposed “right” to gerrymander first, the conservative justices held that African-American voters who attack gerrymandering as racially discriminatory have a “‘special’ burden to overcome.”
“Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” so an African-American plaintiff must “disentangle race from politics” and prove racial considerations drove a decision to eliminate Black majority districts.
“If either politics or race could explain a district’s contours, the plaintiff has not cleared its bar,” the Callais majority held, and the state is free to gerrymander away African-American congressional districts.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it.
The unexamined premise of disentanglement is that partisan advantage is a “race-neutral aim.” But how can partisan advantage be deemed “race neutral” when the very identity of the political party seeking advantage rests on racial ideology?
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.” So it is here.
Following the Civil War, white Southerners became the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party. The politics of the Democratic Party were grounded, before all else, on white supremacy. But in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, Southern support of Democrats eroded, then washed away.
White segregationist voters fled to the GOP, pushed by President John F. Kennedy’s and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights and pulled by Republican support for resistance to integration. The GOP’s Southern Strategy was employed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan’s presidential campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, notorious as the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, made unmistakable that Reagan was making a racial appeal to anti-integration white Southerners.
The racially motivated movement of white voters transformed the South from Democratic stronghold to Republican bastion. The GOP’s stance on race also found a sympathetic audience among whites outside the South, who often fought to preserve de facto segregation and white advantages.
In short, the Republican Party of the last 56 years was constructed on white resistance to integration and opposition to African-American rights. When, consequently, Republican politicians attack African-American political participation, the attacks advance GOP partisan interests by invoking voter-perceived racial concerns.
There can be no disentangling of race and politics when the means of attaining partisan advantage is racial politics—any more than you can “disentangle” cream from coffee after you’d poured it in. The mixture of race and politics is the Republican flavor.
By imposing a “disentanglement burden” on those seeking the protection of the Voting Rights Act, conservative justices made it impossible for the act to ever provide a remedy for the denial or abridgement of minority voting rights. What is true of redistricting applies to any other electoral practice that impairs minority voting effectiveness: Its discriminatory impact must always confer partisan advantage on a political party whose underlying ideological appeal is white resentment and white supremacy.
Consider what this means for people of color in our multinational, multiracial society.
Discrimination, past and present, in housing, zoning, employment, education, policing, and community resources, along with inequalities in wealth and income, have contributed to concentrating African Americans and of other people of color in America’s inner cities.
Although racial minorities are inevitably vulnerable in a larger society that disdains them, the existence of population centers in which minorities are the majority should at least mean that those non-white majorities can elect representatives to the tables of power. In the language of the Voting Rights Act itself, they are entitled to equal “opportunity... to elect representatives of their choice.” Redistricting that is simultaneously racial and partisan denies that right.
Tennessee’s post-Callais redistricting divided Memphis, a city with a 63% African-American majority, into three pieces, which were then distributed to three majority white districts. What could be more obvious than that this is precisely the kind of political practice Congress intended to outlaw in passing the Voting Rights Act? But the court’s “disentanglement burden” likely makes this legal atrocity untouchable.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice. The Republican Party’s entanglement of politics with race is no reason for the Supreme Court to deprive minorities of the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it. Since their timely promotion of Republican political advantage cannot be disentangled from the GOP’s racial politics, we can fairly conclude that Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are intentionally advancing white supremacy.
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White Supremacy Is the Point of the Trump Presidency
With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.
May 16, 2026
Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control.
With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.
The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated by dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”
The effect of the ruling was immediate. A Hechinger Report analysis in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200. That jibes with a January study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which found that high-achieving students from underrepresented groups of color “cascaded” downward “into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.”
At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
Any patronizing notions that African Americans squeezed out of elite private colleges can still get a fine education at top state schools are not borne out by data. In analyses for Brookings and the Hechinger Report, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 Black students after the Supreme Court decision.To add salt to this wound, Park said many so-called “gains” of Black and Latino enrollment in public flagships were “illusory.” That is because many of the flagships claiming the most gains are the same ones that suffered massive drops in such enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, Park noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students hanging high and dry in debt, were up by 15,000 Black students in 2024. That is nothing less than educational sharecropping.
Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in healthcare, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government.
He unleashed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be on the witch hunt for companies and contractors that practice DEI and allegedly discriminate against white people. That, on top of the ban on collegiate affirmative action, triggered a national cowering on diversity that rendered to rubble any remaining reckoning about racial disparities in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.
According to the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosures plummeted from 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%. Institutional investing giants such as BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Vanguard, and Morgan Stanley all removed language directing boards to consider race, ethnicity, or gender in board makeups, surrendering to Trump.
Whether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021, Black women accounted for 12% of the federal workforce (compared with 6.6% of the civilian labor force). But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black women accounting for 95,000—35%—of the 271,000 job losses, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Put another way, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimated that Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.
Inside and outside government, Black women suffered one of the highest shocks of unemployment in a quarter-century, with Black women with bachelor’s degrees suffering the greatest job losses. Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in a February policy brief that the losses among educated Black women “were a direct consequence” of Trump’s federal layoffs and buyouts.
While not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white workers. Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.
At one point in the Biden administration, which launched efforts at DEI as well as major jobs programs, the Black and white unemployment rates were, respectively, 4.8% and 3.1%. That was the only time the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented the closest parity to white workers in that time.
Under Trump 2.0, Black unemployment has rocketed back to double that of white people.
The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais finishes the trifecta. The high court has declared that it needs proof of “intentional” racism in allowing race to be considered in maps of legislative districts. That is ridiculously cynical since everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face that carve up Black urban districts to add Republican congressional seats, accelerating a process that has already happened in states like Texas. On Monday, the high court issued a subsequent decision that allows Alabama to use a new congressional map that will likely eliminate a majority-Black district.
The romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress. Moreover, the Supreme Court has opened the door for white racial gerrymandering at all levels of local, county, and state governments, down to school boards.
The voting rights groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action say the Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention.”
This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency. It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In the 2024 election, 93% of Trump voters told a Pew survey that the economy was their top issue. Similarly, in a YouGov poll, 91% and 85% of Trump supporters said the economy and inflation were their respective first and second concerns.
That is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural commodities.
In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating of 37% on his handling of the economy, 39% for his attack on Iran, and an atrocious 29% on inflation. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, Trump was down to 22% approval for his handling of the cost of living.
Yet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere. He still holds an 80% job approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in a Morning Consult survey and an 85% stamp of approval in a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
One reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term. In a May 5 Economist-YouGov poll conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.
Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, but immigration and crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though more than 6,200 children have been detained, according to the Marshall Project, and even though ICE bullets have killed white people (Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis).
Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in the Washington Post-ABC News poll. The highest Republican ratings for Trump on the issues in a Reuters-Ipsos poll were for immigration (80%) and crime (77%). Ditto for a Forbes-Harris poll (78% for both immigration and crime).
While only 38% of all Americans approved of Trump’s National Guard occupations of cities such as majority-Black Memphis and 43% Black Washington, D.C., 78% of Republicans cheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll. That was despite the fact that crime was falling in most American cities, including Memphis and the nation’s capital.
Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tanks continue to fly and the Trump administration is still in overdrive in its witch hunt on “DEI discrimination.”
The witch hunt is so insane, the Trump administration has even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama. The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces.
Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president told aide Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
The only result can be social disaster.
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Donald J. Trump Is Not a Member of the KKK—But He Sure Sounds Like One
For Trump there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism.
May 12, 2026
“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic." —President Donald Trump, greeting British King Charles on April 28, 2026.
“The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address are descendants of the Magna Charta— supreme symbols of Anglo-Saxon souls striving for freedom, justice, and humanity. Anglo-Saxons established this Nation, wrote its code, and sent their sons into the wilderness to gather fresh stars for the flag. . . . The making of America is fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon achievement. Anglo-Saxons brains have guided the course of the Republic. Our ideals are Anglo-Saxon, our social traditions, our standards of honor, our quality of imagination, and our indomitability.” —from “Americans Take Heed! Scum O’ The Melting Pot,” a 1921 KKK pamphlet.
Donald Trump’s most recent contribution to his year-long “America 250” celebration was truly bizarre, with British King Charles somehow serving as a symbol of the heritage for which the American Revolution was fought. That Trump simultaneously posted a photo of the two leaders, under the heading “Two Kings,” only added to the weirdness. But, as Jonathan Chait has noted, along with many others, accompanying the weirdness was something dark and dangerous—the idea that the US is an “Anglo Saxon” nation, and that the idea of “freedom” announced in the Declaration of Independence is a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant idea that is “alien” to “alien” peoples and cultures.
It was thus interesting that on the same day that he feted King Charles with encomiums to their common Anglo-Saxon heritage, Trump also announced his new “America 250” commemorative passport, featuring on one side an enormous drawing of his head against the background of the Declaration, and on the other the famous John Turnbull painting of the Continental Congress. Trump’s Kim Jong Un impression notwithstanding, it is entirely fitting that he would commemorate his “America 250” vision with a passport, for the policing of borders, long with the massive campaign of immigrant kidnapping, AKA/detention, and deportation, are the hallmarks of his administration.
Trump made this commitment clear while speaking at the Republican National Convention and accepting the party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2024, reiterating what he has been saying for well over a decade:
The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I, you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.
The Trump administration’s violent and sometimes murderous assaults on Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and especially Minneapolis, began only months ago and continue still, even if in less obtrusive ways. Mass deportation is simply one element of a much broader attack on refugees and immigrants. Last November, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced a total ban on reviewing asylum applications. Common Dreams reports that “Not a single refugee who isn’t a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report.” Meanwhile, Trump continues to disparage Somalia, its people, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in viciously racist ways, recently doubling down on his vile 2018 comment:
Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.
For Trump, there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism. It sometimes seems as if he is single-handedly trying to validate the most radical versions of the “critical race theories” that he hates, personifying a past, and present, of exultant White supremacy.
Trump is hardly the first White supremacist to occupy the White House. And yet, in a sense, his every move confirms what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed back in 2017, in labeling him “The First White President.” “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power," Coates argued. "In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
While Trump has many ideological predecessors—George Wallace springs immediately to mind—one has to go back an entire century, and to a perhaps unexpected place, to locate a public figure who so powerfully conjoins racism and xenophobia.
Back in May of 1926, the North American Review--founded by Boston Brahmin intellectuals in 1815, and widely considered the first significant literary magazine published in the US—featured just such a figure: Hiram Wesley Evans, the Vanderbilt University-educated author of a substantial, 30-page essay entitled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” Evans was an up and coming public figure seeking to promote the restoration of American Greatness. He was also the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). And his essay, described by the editors as an “authoritative paper on the Ku Klux Klan by the foremost representative of that Order,” inaugurated a symposium featuring essays by four “writers of national authority”: Martin J. Scott, S.J.; Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple Emmanu-el, New York; W. E. Burghart Du Bois, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and William Starr Myers, Professor of Politics, Princeton University.
It may seem surprising that such an eminent journal would feature a serious symposium on the KKK centered on a substantial essay by its “Imperial Wizard and Emperor.” But indeed, the KKK—boosted by the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation," whose legendary ending featured the glorious rescue of vulnerable Whites by heroic Klansmen on horseback—had just experienced a rebirth under the leadership of William J. Simmons. Simmons was a vicious racist. He was also a patriot, and he dedicated his organization to the “sublime principles of a pure Americanism,” and declaring that “[T]he Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy.”
As Linda Gordon notes in her 2017 classic, The Second Coming of the KKK, by the 1920’s the Klan was a nationally important organization whose reach extended far beyond the South and claimed between 4 to 6 million members. More important: “the 1920’s Klan’s program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920’s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries.” Over the course of the decade, it elected governors in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas., and exerted influence in a range of other states from Ohio and Michigan to New York.
The organization was particularly strong in Indiana, where in the mid-1920’s it claimed both the state’s governor and a majority of both houses of the General Assembly. Gordon indeed opens her book by describing a 1923 Fourth of July Klan celebration that attracted thousands of supporters in Kokomo, Indiana, and which featured a speech by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. The speech—entitled not “Why We Hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews” but rather “Back to the Constitution"—declared: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. . . The American Revolution was fought for principles of self-government…then embodied in a federal constitution the like of which man never seen, are sacred now as they were then.”)
By 1923, Hiram Wesley Evans had been named Imperial Wizard of the Klan, supplanting Simmons and initiating a campaign to raise the profile and advance the political influence of the Klan. “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” was, in effect, his vision statement. And its parallels with the rhetoric of Trump’s MAGA movement are chilling.
Evans begins by noting that while in 1915 the nation was “in the confusion of sudden awakening from the lovely dream of the melting pot, disorganized and helpless before the invasion of aliens and alien ideas. After ten years of the Klan, it is in arms for defense . . . “ The Klan, he insists, is dedicated above all to “the idea of preserving and developing America first and chiefly for the benefit of the children of the pioneers who made America, and only and definitely along the lines of the purpose and spirit of those pioneers.”
According to Evans, the Klan hates no one, and simply seeks to protect the American homeland from invaders who threaten true Americans: “We are a protest movement—protesting against being robbed . . . our great cities . . . taken over by strangers . . . the Nordic American is today a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.”
And while Evans denounces the alien hordes, he also blames “liberals” (also referred to as “Mongrelized liberals”) for the civilizational crisis at hand, insisting that liberalism “provided no defense against the alien invasion, but instead has excused it—even defended it against Americanism. Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial, and spiritual treason.”
As America is being besieged by enemies without and within, he insists that “the Klan alone faces the invader . . . the Klan is the champion, but it is not merely an organization. It is an idea, a faith, a purpose, an organized crusade,” one that indeed has “won the leadership in the movement for Americanism.” Standing firmly “against radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds,” Evans insists that the Klan alone stands for American Greatness without apologies: “We believe, in short, that we have the right to make America American and for Americans.”
The anticipations of Trump here are striking.
Trump does not explicitly denounce Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Blacks in the manner of Evans and his turn of the 20th century Klansmen, nor does he invoke the language of “Nordic” racial superiority in the manner of Evans, who praises “the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestantism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are condensed into the Klan slogan: ‘Native, white, Protestant supremacy.’”
And yet, minus the reference to “instincts of loyalty to the white race,” it is easy to imagine Trump speaking in much the same way. The distinction between real, Anglo-Saxon Americans and aliens; the contempt for people of color; the obsession with stemming a literal alien invasion; the representation of liberals and radicals as traitors to the nation—these are the core themes of Trumpism.
Trump does not wear a white robe and pointy white hat, or claim to be a Grand Wizard, or burn crosses, or talk of Nordic racial superiority. He does display a remarkable solicitude for tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis, Confederate battle flag carriers, violent Three Percenters, and Proud Boy insurrectionists.
But Trump is no Klansman. He is the twice-elected President of the United States. And yet his defensive, xenophobic, and frankly reactionary vision of “Americanism” bears a striking resemblance to the vision put forward a century ago by the Klan—a group whose ideology was, and is, closer to the center of American politics than we might like to believe.
Contributor's note: I would like to thank Robert Orsi and Bob Ivie for their comments on this piece.
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US Racism Waged a Multigenerational Assault on the Mental Well-Being of Black People
I lived in American segregation for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls.
Apr 16, 2026
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.
Let me explain.
Life Under Racism
Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.
As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.
I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.
I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.
Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.
The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.
The Psychological Effects of Racism
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)
Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.
In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.
Isolation in the White World
Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.
The Doll Test
Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.
I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).
I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.
But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.
Black Community Support
My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.
But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.
Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.
I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.
There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.
I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.
And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.
The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.
We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”
I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.
After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”
How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.
Interventions
Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.
Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.
Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.
During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.
However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.
For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.
Aftermath
I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.
Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.
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We Must Fight Fossil Fuel Oligarchs to Save Democracy
It’s no coincidence the fossil fuel industry has lined up behind racist, belligerent, and authoritarian leaders like Trump.
Apr 10, 2026
The second Trump administration has been an unrelenting assault on democracy.
Basic democratic rights are disappearing. Unarmed people have been executed in the streets and smeared as “terrorists” by the government. Entire families are being kidnapped and denied basic rights in inhumane detention centers. And journalists are being arrested for doing their jobs.
Against this backdrop, working for climate justice might seem like a distraction.
But a clear-headed look at how we ended up in this grim situation in the first place shows that the movement for climate justice, far from being a distraction, is an essential part of the fight to defend and deepen democracy.
We cannot defeat authoritarianism without breaking the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on our economy and our political system.
The Trump administration has received major political backing from fossil fuel oligarchs—in response, in fact, to Trump’s open solicitation to trade favors for their support. The government has subsequently followed an energy and environmental policy agenda that benefits the industry.
The administration has expanded the industry’s access to resources at home through leases and permits for drilling in public lands and waters. It has attacked Venezuela, kidnapped its president, and is attempting to open up the country’s oil reserves to US corporations.
And of course it launched an unprovoked war on Iran, sending the price of oil skyrocketing—and leading to genocidal threats from the president against Iran unless the country reopens the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf oil passes.
Meanwhile at home, the Trump administration has weakened environmental standards, including mercury pollution standards for power plants. By attacking motor vehicle fuel economy standards, it has effectively grown the captive market for the industry’s products. And it has abused the federal permitting process to try to kill the fossil fuel industry’s main competitors, wind and solar energy.
This is not merely a case of an administration that supports the fossil fuel industry and also happens to be authoritarian. The industry directly supports and benefits from an authoritarian government that curtails democratic rights and silences dissent. It also benefits from a government that upholds white supremacy and enforces racial hierarchy.
Several years ago, a report I worked on for the Institute for Policy Studies documented how the fossil fuel industry has used its money and influence to push for state-level legislation to criminalize protest against fossil fuel infrastructure projects. These so-called “critical infrastructure laws” are now on the books in 19 states. The industry has also used strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) to intimidate and silence critics.
This is a predictable response of a powerful, politically connected industry that is under assault on two fronts.
First, competition from cheap, widely available wind and solar energy poses a serious economic threat to the industry. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world, and new generation capacity is dominated by renewables.
Simultaneously, the industry faces serious political and reputational threats. Growing numbers of people worldwide are experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, storms, floods, and toxic air and water pollution attributable to the industry’s activities. Many of them are connecting the dots, and refusing to be passive victims of a powerful industry and its political backers.
Social movements against particular fossil fuel projects, or against the industry more broadly, have multiplied on every continent. What’s more, they are already winning. The industry faces restrictions in several political jurisdictions, and likely recognizes that it could even be expropriated in the not so distant future.
Faced with these twin crises, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly resorting to relying on the repressive apparatus of state violence to crush dissenting voices and maintain its dominance.
The industry has also historically benefited from a racially and economically unequal society. The lack of political power of Indigenous, Black, and other racially marginalized communities, and of poor communities of every race, has enabled the industry to locate polluting infrastructure in these communities, treating them as sacrifice zones. This has let the industry avoid the protracted zoning and legal battles they would have to contend with if they tried to locate their infrastructure in more privileged communities, greatly reducing the cost and lead time for their projects.
In recent years, the growing strength of the environmental justice movement has threatened the ability of the industry to continue to reap the benefits of racial and economic stratification. It is therefore no surprise that the industry is supporting an openly white supremacist political agenda that seeks to bring old racial hierarchies back and eliminate the very concept of environmental justice.
In sum, the far-right agenda in the US is deeply intertwined with the political and economic objectives of the fossil fuel industry that is at the root of climate change. We cannot defeat authoritarianism without breaking the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on our economy and our political system.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that these observations are mainly based on US politics, but are applicable to many parts of the world. Fossil fueled fascism has become a global phenomenon, and our resistance to the fossil fuel industry must be similarly global in scale.
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Zero Waste Doesn’t Work Without Environmental Justice
As the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution.
Mar 30, 2026
Zero waste is often framed as an idealistic goal: a world without trash, pollution, or environmental harm. But like aiming for zero traffic fatalities or zero preventable diseases, zero waste isn’t about perfection; it’s about striving for measurable improvement. At its core, zero waste asks us to rethink how we produce, consume, and conserve our resources as well as how we dispose of our waste. Because right now, that waste does end up somewhere, and too often that somewhere is in Black, Indigenous, and brown communities.
Zero waste is about generating little to no waste through strategies such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others. Not only do these strategies support the reduction of waste, but they also lead to more resilient cities and communities, social equity, and healthier environments.
Although the zero waste movement has grown substantially in recent decades, it continues to be challenged (rightfully so) by those who see it developing into the next “organics” movement—a movement that once prioritized providing healthier food options only to those who can afford them at a premium. Thus, leaving many communities (mostly Indigenous, Black, and brown) without options for fresh food produced with increased standards and no added synthetic substances.
But similar to the organics movement, zero waste concepts have been around for generations and are deeply rooted in various cultures around the world. The irony is that these same communities being left out are the ones that have the greatest ancestral knowledge associated with producing organic food through their generational fights against colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions.
Historically, Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples have acted as stewards of our natural environment, but have been the most impacted by pollution. Policies like redlining have further concentrated polluting facilities, including waste facilities, in Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. In the United States specifically, the environmental justice (EJ) movement was birthed through various industrial fights against the siting of landfills and incinerators in mostly Black and brown communities.
Since 1982, the small community of Afton, located in Warren County, North Carolina, has often been referred to as one of the birthplaces of the environmental justice movement, as the local community fought against a new hazardous waste landfill. This low-income, rural, and majority Black community became responsible for the first arrests in US history over the siting of a landfill. Unfortunately, the people of Warren County lost the battle, but many considered this to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.
It wasn’t just the community of Afton fighting against the siting of waste infrastructure. Indigenous, Black, and brown communities across the country were being inundated with industrial and toxic waste zoning, and the federal government knew this. In fact, this pattern was confirmed by a 1983 analysis by the US General Accounting Office, which concluded that most commercial waste treatment plants or waste dumps were more likely to be found near Black communities than near white communities.
These industries know these communities lack the resources and capacity to fight back to protect themselves. They even developed whole reports on this topic. The 1984 “Cerrell Report” was a document commissioned by the California Waste Management Board, which advised that waste incinerators be sited in low-income, rural, and Black and brown communities solely because these areas were deemed to have the least political resistance and capacity to oppose industrial projects. These communities are most impacted by waste policies and are often targeted by the waste industry for further development. The end result of this is decades of underinvestment, coupled with extreme health disparities and negative social impacts.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions. Across the country, communities are composting, reusing, and practicing zero waste as acts of resistance against systems that profit from landfills, incinerators, and other polluting facilities.
After more than a 30-year fight, community activists in Detroit finally shut down the city's incinerator in 2019. The facility was referred to as a “bad neighbor” due to it being a major source of air pollution, emitting pollutants like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, mercury, and cadmium throughout the surrounding communities. Recognizing local legislators believed the incinerator was the best way to handle the city’s waste, local activists took it upon themselves to develop a backyard community composting program to show not only that zero waste was possible in Detroit, but that community members wanted it and had bought into this idea.
Seven years later, the City of Detroit’s Office of Sustainability launched its first-ever Community Compost Pilot Program with a goal of diverting over 80,000 pounds annually of food waste from landfills and incinerators. If it weren’t for the initial efforts from community members, the City of Detroit would likely still be burning its trash to this day.
And, it's not just Detroit. Activists in California closed down the last two incinerators in the state in favor of developing new zero waste policies. Specifically, they targeted the vast amount of public tax subsidies that were being used to prop up the incinerator industry, as incinerators are incredibly inefficient and expensive to operate. Instead, that money is now being directed toward real zero waste solutions such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others.
In addition to closing the facilities of the past, EJ communities have now begun influencing the facilities of the future through the development of new statewide landfill methane regulations. The states of California and Colorado have both recently updated their landfill methane regulations to include stronger protections for vulnerable communities and higher accountability for the waste sector. Many of these recommendations came directly from EJ communities suffering the most from the impacts of landfills.
This is only a small snapshot of the hundreds of communities across the country working to demonstrate that community-led zero waste strategies can reduce emissions, reduce waste, and reduce harm. From Louisiana to Oregon, from Maine all the way to California… Practical solutions to our waste and climate crisis already exist, and as the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution, too often for generations.
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Another Thing Trump and Epstein Share: White Supremacy
Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump.
Mar 18, 2026
Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also—wait for it—a white supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Donald Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.
Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.
Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and Indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.
The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners, being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”
There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the global South.
Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.
Epstein on Race
Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences. Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).
According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.
Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”
Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help. In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African-American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”
Epstein also spent time on hardcore white supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright white supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science. According to The Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.
The “Great Gene” President
Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:
- “Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”
- “You have to have the rights—the right genes.”
- “Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”
- “I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”
And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.
It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and congressional Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Al Green (D-Texas), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), radio host Charlamagne tha God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.
Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling white-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).
His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025 speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for white—and implicitly white only—immigration to this country:
Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, "This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest," because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden—just a few—let us have a few. From Denmark—do you mind sending us a few people?
In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.
At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 white South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely claiming that whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27 and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS) and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.
Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid-19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology. It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.
In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft—legal at the time—would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations. After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well-known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.
Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in US history. He will never acknowledge—or even understand—that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.
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It's Well Beyond Time to Cut Ties With the Anti-Defamation League
While the ADL attacks and smears Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian justice, it gives cover to and helps legitimize (often antisemitic) right-wing politicians and others who back Israel.
Mar 16, 2026
The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, is holding its annual summit in New York City this week. The ironically-named summit on “hate” features far-right MAGA pastors and politicians, billionaire CEOs, and conservative journalists among its speakers.
No longer putting on the pretense of opposing all forms of bigotry, the ADL has shown it's perfectly comfortable with Trump-era racism. In the year since the last summit, the ADL has withdrawn its criticism of white supremacist groups, denounced antiracist education as "radical," continued to loudly back Israel's genocide in Gaza, and cheered on Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations of students and other noncitizens who have criticized Israel’s violence and stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people. In fact, the ADL endorsed the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2025 targeting critics of Israel and threatening those who aren't US citizens with deportation for protesting in support of Palestinian human rights.
The organization’s Islamophobia has also been front and center. Soon after the election, the ADL singled out New York City’s first Muslim mayor—and a supporter of Palestinian justice—and announced the “Mamdani Monitor: Holding the New Administration Accountable” to track his policies as well as his personnel appointments.
Far from opposing the ascendancy of the white nationalist right, the ADL has doubled down. While it may appear that the ADL’s recent visible displays of its reactionary agenda are the work of its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt alone, in fact, this agenda is not new. But the harm it’s causing is certainly getting worse. The organization’s reactionary political positions—evidenced by its ease in aligning with the likes of Trump and its behavior as an attack dog for Israel’s far-right government—were already clear in its long history of, among other things, Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.
The ADL’s disturbing positions and actions have become even more aggressive since the genocide in Gaza.
For decades, out of the public eye, the ADL has illegally surveilled Arab Americans, Muslims, social justice activists, members of Congress, and others, including Jews, who speak and act in support of Palestinian justice. It has smeared the groups it targets as “suspect,” using the language of hate, terror, and antisemitism—as when it circulated blacklists of “Arab propagandists” in the 1980s and endorsed the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for leading protests against Israel’s atrocities. When the NYPD launched aggressive, unconstitutional surveillance of the Muslim community post-9/11, justifying it as part of the domestic and global “war on terror,” the ADL gave an award to the program’s commanding officer.
The ADL’s disturbing positions and actions have become even more aggressive since the genocide in Gaza. As law professor and legal scholar Sahar Aziz points out, the organization has attempted to “criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students, as well as Jewish, queer, and BIPOC students” for opposing Israel’s actions. It has continued to attack Muslim and Arab American groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which have challenged the ADL’s anti-Muslim racism.
The organization has continually platformed Islamophobes and anti-Palestinian bigots. In 2024, more than 60 Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and other organizations condemned the ADL for its consistent pattern of fostering anti-Palestinian hate and for giving a platform to anti-Muslim Pastor John Hagee. In 2025, ADL leaders elected to its board Johnnie Moore who was the executive chairman of the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which was responsible for numerous massacres of starving Palestinians. And its summit this week features archconservative pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has made hateful remarks against Muslims as well as LGBTQ people.
While the ADL attacks and smears Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian justice, it gives cover to and helps legitimize (often antisemitic) right-wing politicians and others who back Israel. Excusing Elon Musk’s notorious Nazi salute and ignoring Trump’s invoking of conspiracy theories are just two examples of its hypocrisy.
As aptly stated by Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), one of the hundreds of signatories on an open letter to progressives to #DroptheADL, “The focus of civil rights organizations should be on critiquing state power and not about targeting those who critique state power.”
As the ADL’s reactionary agenda becomes clearer for all to see, there is a growing groundswell of social justice activists, progressive Jewish groups, educational institutions, and members of every profession who are pressuring policymakers to stop cooperating with the organization. The urgency of educators, political leaders, organizations, and others breaking ties with the ADL in this deeply racist, repressive national climate can’t be overstated.
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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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