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Blood & Braids: A Week of Neo-Confederate Assaults & Black Resistance
Eight fronts in the ongoing attempts to reshape the USA:
1. Economic Neo-Plantationism
Trump's 34% tariffs weren't about "protecting workers"—they were about recreating captive labor pools. Tariffs—essentially taxes on imported goods that make foreign products more expensive—function as wealth transfers from consumers to protected industries, disproportionately burdening poor and working-class buyers. By reshoring manufacturing, the policy demands a return to cheap, disposable labor, disproprtionately Black labor, mirroring convict leasing systems after Reconstruction.
The announcement triggered a global market bloodbath, with U.S. indexes in freefall:
- S&P 500: -5.97% (5,074.08)
- Nasdaq: -5.82% (15,587.79)
- Dow Jones: -5.50% (38,314.86)
European markets suffered parallel collapses (FTSE: -4.95%, DAX: -4.95%), while Asian indices followed suit (Nikkei: -2.75%, Hang Seng: -1.52%). Of course, these plunges represent tragedy only for the privileged few—just 12% of Black Americans own stocks compared to 61% of whites, making market "crashes" largely irrelevant to those already excluded from wealth accumulation. Trump framed the tariffs as "economic decolonization," but analysts identified Black manufacturing workers as primary casualties—recycling his 2018 strategy that widened racial wealth gaps by 8.5%.
2. Memory Lynching
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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."
The Department of Defense quietly scrubbed all references to Robinson's resistance against segregated bus seating from its official history archives, reframing his court-martial as a mere "disciplinary incident." This deliberate revisionism follows a broader pattern of sanitizing institutional racism, erasing legacies of Black resistance to legitimize contemporary neo-confederalist narratives.
Meanwhile in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn district, 14 BLM murals were vandalized with pro-"heritage" slogans invoking Confederate iconography since January. Local officials dismissed these acts as "isolated incidents" despite clear coordination. The targeting of public Black art reflects a calculated campaign to reassert white-supremacist spatial control, leveraging nostalgia for Jim Crow to normalize cultural erasure.
As Frederick Douglass understood in 1857: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." These erasures confirm Douglass's insight—commemorative murals, military honors, and historical recognition were never gifts but temporary concessions extracted through struggle. Without sustained pressure, these liberal trinkets are reclaimed by the state without hesitation or apology. The Pentagon's whitewashing of Robinson's resistance and the systematic destruction of BLM murals demonstrate that symbolic acknowledgments are merely loaned, not given—to be repossessed whenever they threaten white comfort or challenge neo-confederate mythology. What appears as "progress" is revealed as strategic retreat, with power always plotting to reclaim lost ground.
3. The Liberal Minstrel Show
Cory Booker's 25-hour filibuster achieved the same amount as Nancy Pelosi's kente cloth photo-op or Hillary Clinton's "hot sauce in my purse" pandering. That is to say, nothing. Like Reconstruction-era Black legislators silenced by Klan violence, today's Black politicians perform outrage while voting for increased police funding.
Sen. Booker's theatrical boycott of theaters screening "The Birth of a Nation" reboot exemplifies this impotence. Claiming it would "spark dialogue," his campaign collapsed when 92% of Black audiences surveyed deemed the tactic performative. This follows the established liberal playbook: Pelosi and Democratic leadership kneeling in kente cloth for exactly 8 minutes and 46 seconds in June 2020 before returning to approve military budgets; Clinton on The Breakfast Club in 2016 insisting she carries hot sauce everywhere—a transparent attempt to invoke Beyoncé's "Formation" for Black votes. These gestures share a common DNA: highly visible symbolism engineered for viral moments, coupled with steadfast refusal to challenge power structures.
What links these performances isn't merely their ineffectiveness but their function as safety valves—dissipating Black rage through spectacle while preserving the neo-confederate order. Booker's filibuster, like Pelosi's kneeling and Clinton's hot sauce, offers white liberals emotional catharsis without threatening their material interests. The pattern is consistent: acknowledge Black pain for exactly as long as the news cycle demands, then return to business as usual.
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.
A Harvard study found that 78% of hair relaxers marketed to Black women contain endocrine disruptors linked to uterine cancer—at concentrations 3-5 times higher than products marketed to white consumers. Brands like Dark & Lovely and Motions, long criticized for perpetuating Eurocentric beauty standards, spent $12.7 million lobbying against FDA regulation last quarter alone. This exemplifies the embodied violence of racial capitalism: profit-driven degradation of Black health under the guise of "self-improvement."
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.
Black stylists across Atlanta, Detroit, and Oakland have launched cooperative salons offering chemical-free alternatives to toxic commercial products. "Our grandmothers knew how to care for our hair before corporations sold us poison," explained Detroit stylist Aisha Freeman, whose co-op saw membership triple this month. These initiatives represent economic resistance against corporate exploitation, following the tradition of Black mutual aid societies that provided healthcare when the medical establishment refused treatment.
5. Tokenism's Dead End
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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.
Before her passing, Love faced intense backlash after claiming "systemic racism died with George Floyd" during a televised panel. Even Black conservatives criticized her remarks as "tone-deaf," highlighting the GOP's failure to recruit credible Black voices. Love's rhetoric, intended to legitimize neo-confederalist denialism, instead exposed the fragility of tokenism in an era of resurgent white nationalism.
6. Museum Counter-Insurgency
Trump's Smithsonian purge targeted African American history exhibits, continuing the tradition of burning Black achievement. This isn't european fascism—it's as American as the 1893 World's Fair, where Black contributions were displayed in "primitive" dioramas.
The Smithsonian Institution abruptly canceled "Voices of the Unfree," an exhibit detailing Black labor revolts during Reconstruction, after pressure from congressional donors who threatened funding cuts. Curators revealed that sections on post-Civil War Black Codes and convict leasing were deemed "too divisive for the current climate." This censorship underscores how cultural institutions are weaponized to silence critiques of capitalism's racialized foundations—a tactic central to neo-confederalist efforts to rebrand settler-colonial exploitation as "economic patriotism."
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.
Residents of Lincoln Heights, a majority-Black neighborhood in Cincinnati, launched these armed patrols to combat rising far-right intimidation after police ignored 23 reported incidents of harassment and vandalism targeting Black-owned businesses. The group, organized by local activists, faced criticism from centrists who warned of "escalation," but supporters framed the patrols as necessary self-defense against state abandonment. This mirrors historical precedents like the Deacons for Defense, highlighting how marginalized communities are forced to create parallel systems of protection under neo-Jim Crow governance.
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)
This week's events illustrate a dual crisis: neo-confederalist factions escalating economic and cultural warfare, while establishment responses—whether tokenistic (Love, Booker) or negligent (Smithsonian, Pentagon)—fail to address structural anti-Blackness. Resistance models like Lincoln Heights' patrols offer grassroots counterweights, yet without institutional support, they remain stopgaps against resurgent American apartheid.
"America is about as much our country as the lion's cage is the lion's."
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