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More By Djehuti
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The Week's Battlegrounds
Eight fronts in the ongoing war against Black existence:
1. Economic Neo-Plantationism
Trump's 34% tariffs weren't about "protecting workers"—they were about recreating captive labor pools. By reshoring manufacturing, the policy demands a return to cheap, disposable Black labor, mirroring convict leasing systems after Reconstruction.
2. Memory Lynching
The Pentagon erased Jackie Robinson's military service, proving even "acceptable" Black icons get disappeared when inconvenient. His 1944 court-martial for resisting bus segregation was memory-holed—just as Salt Lake City bulldozed BLM murals under "asbestos concerns."
3. The Liberal Minstrel Show
Cory Booker's 25-hour filibuster achieved less than a single day of the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade. Like Reconstruction-era Black legislators silenced by Klan violence, today's Black politicians perform outrage while voting for increased police funding.
4. Chemical Warfare
10/10 synthetic hair products tested contained carcinogens; 9/10 had lead. This isn't negligence—it's corporate lynching by aerosol, with the FDA playing the role of passive spectator, just as Southern doctors ignored syphilis in Tuskegee.
5. Tokenism's Dead End
The death of Mia Love, first Black GOP congresswoman, exposed the right's tokenism trap. Her career ended as it began: with Trump sneering "she gave me no love"—the same contempt shown to Hiram Revels when white allies abandoned him in 1871.
6. Museum Counter-Insurgency
Trump's Smithsonian purge targeted African American history exhibits, continuing the tradition of burning Black achievement. This isn't fascism—it's as American as the 1893 World's Fair, where Black contributions were displayed in "primitive" dioramas.
7. The Police Betrayal
When neo-Confederates marched in Lincoln Heights, police took no names—just as sheriffs turned away from lynch mobs. The community's response? Armed patrols echoing the Deacons for Defense's 1965 stand in Bogalusa.
8. The Beauty Industrial Complex
The $2.8B Black hair industry knowingly poisoned its customers, proving capitalism always commodifies Blackness before destroying it. But stylists are fighting back with chemical-free co-ops, just as Fannie Lou Hamer organized health clinics.
The Throughlines
Nothing is given (murals, museum plaques, congressional seats)
Everything is taken (safety, memory, bodily autonomy)
Resistance is ancestral (from sharecropper unions to Lincoln Heights patrols)
"America is about as much our country as the lion's cage is the lion's."
References
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