American Civil War – 💡Cosmic Frame>>>∞ and beyond💡

“It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed”.

Racism is not just prejudice, bigotry, or de facto; it is simply prejudiced plus “power”. This exclusive “power” was stolen by people of European descent to collectively form a club called “white” across the globe. Power comes in different forms, from militaristic, legal, economic, political, civil, and cultural to educational.
The vile video of George Floyd’s fatality reflected the state-sanctioned patronage for 400 years of racialized and class systemic injustice. It harkens back to slavery, lynching and police brutality. The “protect and serve” emblem worn by the police is only executed in white America. In Black America, the police are seen with skepticism, distrust, fear and a constant reminder of repressive history. There is a profoundly antagonistic relationship of black America with the police throughout history. Starting with its roots from the Slave Catchers, fascistic viciousness from Bull Connor, Jim Clark, Daryl Gates, Frank Rizzo and Walter E. Headley of the police command, stop and frisk policing of Commissioner William Bratton, crime and mass incarceration bills co-written by Joe Biden to the ongoing non-prosecutable police brutality cases. The narrowed focus on solving criminality, not its cause, has decimated black and poor people writ large. The causes of crime including poverty, lack of education, limited employment opportunities, the decline in state funding for social programs, lack of medical facilities, food deserts, gutted worker pensions, weak labor unions, environmental racism, gentrification, discriminatory housing policies, and American gun culture of which effective policies could ameliorate remains unresolved and neglected. Policing Black America is perceived as “preemptive strikes of fear and disenfranchisement to maintain a power structure” against Black America. This fear within the black community has ingrained a “psychological state of insecurity” towards police and whites writ large. This fear is not driven by hate but by caution, self-defense and self-preservation. This fear is often matched by psychological resilience within Black American culture expressed by activism to avoid falling into the box of despair to perpetual victimhood. The historical continuation of black life denigration made George Floyd a martyr despite his prior criminal acts. The systemic carriage of institutionalized injustice and economic deprivation “cleansed him of any prior acts”, unfortunately as Officer Chauvin knelt on his neck. Was a $20 counterfeit bill worth his death? Poverty, over-policing, and race caused his demise. George Floyd became an unintentional symbol of systemic racism and class warfare.
The hollowing effect of guilt and empathy washed some whites while anguish, exasperation and despondency flowed in blacks as such inhumanity splashed on every television, phone and computer screen. The societal bubble of “whiteness” basked in indifference, utmost value, proactive bias and wishful thinking were cracked. This bubble has afforded white America righteous indignation of being self-ascribed “Americans”. Black people projected themselves onto dying George Floyd. This metaphysical projection reminded them of the continual devaluation of black America or “the Unamerican”. Solemn and righteous rage filled the streets as protesters marched across the United States and even extending to other countries. The air was thick with an unquenchable thirst for change in the face of militarized aggressive police, unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and its associated acute economic depression, media mischaracterization (conservative media’s focus on looting and vandalism) and the apathetic and melodramatic styled authoritarianism of Donald Trump. The resulting riots from George Floyd’s death are another thread in the American flag, including Perry Race Riot, Rosewood massacre, Atlanta riot, Tulsa race massacre, Emmet Till lynching and many more. These were reactions to unresolved underbellies of systemic discrimination, the evisceration of dignity, poverty and other draconian measures. These causes are not new; there are historical reverberations through American history. It is safe to say; managing black existence is American history and its politics.
But there is something strikingly unprecedented about George Floyd’s protests, the array of races, particularly whites and dominantly below the ages of 40 in a coalition, protesting across the United States and the globe. This struck a chord within me and had me postulating, “Is there a chance of hope? Has a memorable historical juncture been reached? Time will tell.

The modern-day whites who are genuinely sympathetic to the plight of African Americans recognize the anti-blackness created by their forefathers. This anti-blackness has explicitly and inexplicitly benefited whites and filled the halls of white privilege. Historically, poor and middle-class whites were offered limited economic well-being while symbolically given the cultural whiteness of faux aristocracy in a society. This privilege has afforded some whites disingenuous victimhood expressed as “White genocide is racial equality” or “All lives matter” in response to the challenge to white supremacy or “Blacks lives matter”. This victimhood is wrapped in an “entitlement of predestined superiority”. The pursuit to share social class, rights, spheres of influence and political capital in an “agency” becomes warped as massive mistreatment, inconvenience and invasion to whiteness. My mum once said that “you can’t cry more than an already grieving soul”, white symbolizes “you” and African Americans personifies “grieved soul” in the idiom. The unrealistic cry of dispossession within whites far outweighs any gains for the already downtrodden blacks. These visceral and hyperbolized feelings of “dispossession” within some whites spark a nostalgic pursuit of a “newly reimagined past” which often fuels right-wing populism to rescind gains made by blacks. The quixotic white Americanism is expressed in cultural heritage, Christian fundamentalist identity (white Christian evangelism and Protestantism) and economic security are full tenets of white identity politics. In America, dispossessed whites are triggered by an economic loss but instead triangulate Christian identity and cultural heritage as the true dispossession. The economic loss should be their primary cause, but cultural virtues have become blinders against a more egalitarian tomorrow. Since 1980, meaningful material and economic gains, especially among the white working-class, have been marginal. Instead, the “cultural feeling of being white” becomes their primary refuge to restore their economic dignity. Culture wars are their moshpit for cultural restoration, not economics (of which blacks could be their rightful ally for a majoritarian movement). Automation, neoliberalism, globalization, oligarchy, opioid crisis, de-industrialization, environmental deregulation, inadequate coverage of healthcare and corporate monopolies all personify the true “grim reaper scythe” that decimated the white working class, not the loss of white cultural identity. Simply, American elites have weaponized race to gain political power and amass wealth aided by politicians, especially Republicans, by separating black and white working-class.

In recent memory, the Obama presidency, coinciding with the onset of the 2008 recession, evoked a cry from the bellies of white conservatives because he represented “a diverse, secular, cosmopolitan and younger America” rather than the “white, Christian and rural America”. “I want my country back” was and is still their rallying cry. It spurned a racially tinged and anti-establishment counterrevolution that was sponsored by conservative elites and propagated by social media and conservative media outlets (Fox News and Breitbart) using racism, conspiracy theories, culture wars, and legislative obstructionism. Sarah Palin, Tea party movement, Birther movement, 2nd Amendment protectionists, All lives matter, Alt-right, Make America Great Again, Donald Trump presidency and rise of 5 horsemen of Trumpocalypse (Jeanine Pirro a.k.a Clara Petacci, Laura Ingraham a.k.a Ava Braun, Tucker Carlson a.k.a Joseph Goebbels, Sean Hannity a.k.a Heinrich Himmler and Lou Dobbs a.k.a Hermann Göring) are not mere signs of polarization but are reactionary measures against racial demographic changes, Black lives matter, America’s reckoning with Confederate monuments, government bureaucracy a.k.a Deep State, science expertise, Obama’s presidency, globalization, Iraq war and 2008 recession. The latter is considered the “The Heartland” or “Real America”. The other is an obscene invasion of their social order, privilege and heritage.

White privilege has benefited from the “intentional misrepresentation of oppressive racial history” into generational amnesia implicitly or explicitly by whites for an ascent, belonging and protection of “cultural whiteness” while falsely claiming pure meritocracy, individualism, enlightenment and historical objectivity. Presumed innocence before guilt, redlining, voter rights protection, employment opportunities, white flight, industrialization into white areas from black areas, gentrification, better-funded education, less polluted neighborhoods, well-funded hospitals, favorable mortgage rates, police’s communal protection and so on are historical consequences of unconstitutional de jure segregation interpreted from laws for white privilege. It stretches from the New Deal, Federal Housing policy of the War on poverty till today. Modern-day white privilege and supremacy have taken a masqueraded “method of guile” in every facet of American life. This guile expressed in cultural heritage, insulated awareness and law and order manifests modern conservatism and is colloquially called “white resentment”. The American story is often misrepresented as only meritocratic. The true story is, it is first racialized, strongly favorable to ownership to capital, thirdly inherited wealth, then meritocratic. Therefore the American story is “rigged”.

“Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so.”

Systemic racism isn’t merely day to day prejudice or bigotry. It is prejudice exercised with legal, socioeconomic and authoritative power. It is institutionalized in the constitution, laws, education, property rights, culture, media, civil rights, voting rights, basic healthcare, capital and employment. These are written, exercised and enacted based on skin/cultural/ethnic discrimination.

These are the central tenets to white supremacy:

Fear, disgust and apathy are their spirit animal
Strong disdain for modernity
A revisionist and nostalgic call for a reimagined past; a static era of white utopian antiquity e.g. “Make America great again” and “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy” are both negationist calls for the “glorious past” of the white hierarchy of racial fascism.
“Born to rule” philosophy as a form of entitlement for dominium over “others”.
An “us versus them” cultural identity based on racial purity and wrapped in ethno-nationalistic iconography e.g. Confederate flag, Swastika, Qanon and KKK hood.
A call for “traditional Christian morality” against racial equality, secularism, gender equality and miscegenation
Rigid societal hierarchy
Weaponized “coded words” or dog whistles evoked to stoke white resentment with a transparent veneer of plausible deniability of “typical political discourse” e.g. “welfare queens”, “takers”, “state rights”, “young bucks”, ” aggressive black women” and “predators”.
Fervent authoritarianism/fascism is modus operandi
Anti-science and anti-truths
Pseudoscientific and paranoid societal propaganda
Apathy-filled insulated bubble: A belief that sole individualism and free will is societal consequences for inequalities not de jure actions by the white nation-state and/or institutions against black’s existence. White existence however is quietly excluded from this rugged individualism rationale. “Black America problems are Black Americans problems but white America’s problem is America’s problems.
Melodramatic sense of victimhood from an exaggerated sense of cultural dispossession expressed as a recall of a “forgotten era of white utopia”
Violent to non-violent measures for economic exclusivity
False apocalyptic perception in the form of “state-sanctioned” social engineering against whiteness e.g. white genocide or the Great Replacement propaganda.
Amoral Christian fundamentalist-nationalism for their ideal white-theocratic nation-state.
Societal nihilism and Social Darwinism
Protection and/or restoration of white order by any means using the power of the government and vigilante militias (Law and order messaging).
Societal progress and equality is painted as “unfair, intrusive and special rights for blacks”.
Animated by culture wars.

There is a chicken and egg argument regarding systemic racism and societal prejudice. Did the system create prejudice or did prejudice create systemic racism? I am of the former question.

Let’s start a thought experiment:

The system is a societal structure with “a democratic structure” on the ideas of an elitist “selected” within a majoritarian constituency, then subjugates the rest of the populace. The majoritarian, the second level of the social hierarchy, share cultural, ancestral and ethnic lineages with the “selected” but are lower in class, economics, education and capital. The majoritarian is given a narrow corridor for social mobility into the “selected” class. The system was built by the “selected” as a managerial entity of the social hierarchy. They use divisive politics, law and property to propagandize the superiority of the “selected” to insulate themselves from any dissent. The majoritarian populace gains a sense of societal power by practicing democratic feudalism. They are dominated by the selected but dominate the rest but have limited access to “true power”. The oppressed are at the bottom of the social strata and deprived of civility, liberty, freedom, humanity and economic status. This breeds a dogmatic societal construct of superiority, prejudice, entitlement and apathy unified by ethnonationalism against the oppressed. This elevated sense of being is filtered through in every aspect of society, from social, economic, political to cultural structures. There is only an economic gap separating “the selected” from the “majoritarian class” but there is a depraved human value gap separating “the selected” and “majoritarian class” from the “downtrodden”; this is the societal system in place. This institutionalized structure outflows the stereotypes, prejudices, bigotry to explain and defend the pervasive social hierarchy. It paves the way of the “ethnic warrior mindset of the majoritarian” against the “invading degenerate subclass”. This dogma often has a pervasive effect on the psyche of the oppressed as their liberty, self-sufficiency and dignity are stripped. They become ripe for continual exploitation, dehumanization and even mortality. The oppressed become wrapped in a regressive rationale that to “look” or “behave” like the majoritarian is their only righteous path to humanity. Self-hate, defeatism and despair begin to fester. This is a lie because laws of genetics cannot be defiled for a phenotypic change, nor are the downtrodden inherently culturally defective. This isn’t an underlying genetic nor cultural defect to the state of the downtrodden; it is systemic dispossession, a will of men with power. Hierarchy justified by violence is instituted. This is the ethnic Utopian construct of the selected-master class, majoritarian-ethnically related class and downtrodden-slave class. It is a script for a “civilization of amorality in the pursuit of transcendence”. But alas, the downtrodden always regains a sense of collective conscience of being and revolt through moral violence or moral non-violence for a democratic society. It is a matter of time for breaking the chains of subjugation; a redistribution of power, pursuit of dignity and upending the socio-economical hierarchy. It cannot be permanent poverty for the oppressed. Democracy is always a threat to social hierarchy, particularly a repressive version; Democracy is then treated as an anarchic revolt against the social order in place. Democracy always gives room for “agency”. This threat of an ascending democracy always falls to the ebbs. It flows against reactionary countermeasures from the selected and the majoritarian. Any pursuit of justice by the oppressed and its allies within the majoritarian call is maligned as “snowflake”, “political correctness”, “reverse racism”, “infringement of status quo and privacy”, “ungodly”, “tyrannical” and even akin to “totalitarianism.”

It isn’t a coincidence that the capitalist, colonial and imperial systems were integrated with slavery and justified pseudoscientific racism and dehumanization. The ideology of white supremacy was born out of a construct of systematic capitalistic exploitation (imperialism, genocide, slavery and colonialism); it was empirically supported by pseudoscience and eugenics, which drips in the societal consciousness as socially engineered hate, xenophobia and civilizational superiority. White supremacy is a hierarchical structure of socioeconomic, pseudoscientific, reactionary and philosophical construct that advocates white civilization as superior, managerial, imperialistic and advanced, so any violent to non-violent action for preservation is justified. This creates an overzealous impetus for white entitlement boundless from time and space but “genetically inherited”. It is a societal template that reshapes, adjusts, and retools itself against blacks’ growing cries for dignity. It never leaves; it can take a more subtle form but has episodic vapid spasms. White supremacy isn’t empirically scientific nor innately born with; it is power stolen, power protected, and power justified for a societal superiority of the ideology of “whiteness”. Homo-sapiens is our race, not black, red, yellow, nor white. It is an engineered political hubris of social hierarchy. The concept of race is used as a weaponized tool to advocate for the pseudoscientific belief of genetic superiority or deficiency manifested in “rightful” economic status regardless of inhumane man-made historical causes (slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and imperialism). Therefore racism is not simply prejudiced, hate nor ignorance. It is a pseudoscientific idea of ethnic, intellectual and physical traits that define a social hierarchy. So the “uncivilized” has to be “civilized” as a favor by the “whites”. Dehumanization of the so-called savages is justified, and Western Civilization is the rightful vehicle for their emancipation. Black bodies were seen as commodities for sale, experiments and extortion because they were supposedly naturally inferior. Forced black subjugation is not the problem but their “inferiority”; therefore, the social caste system is justified. The system birthed the culture of not “Europeanism” but “whiteness”. To them, history, culture and progress only started in Europe, nothing before. This pseudoscience, philosophy and practice emanated since Christopher Columbus entered the Bahamas in 1492 through the Age of Enlightenment, Jim Crow and persist today, although to a more minor degree. The exploitative political and economic structure armed with the pseudoscientific belief of “race” culminated in causing racial-socioeconomic injustice since 1492.

In a nutshell, race shouldn’t be real. Still, the ideology, politics, economics and social hierarchy of racial categorization are “actualized” as “racism/racial caste”.

The global society that benefits from modern capitalism owe its worth to enslaved Africans’ torture, abuse, dehumanization into commodities and financial instruments (they often became collateral for financial bonds) and financialization of unpaid labor. How? You might ask. The genocidal savagery on Native Americans produced expropriated lands that enslaved Africans toiled on, particularly in the American South, to produce cotton with the aid of the cotton gin. Cotton was the primary raw material harvested through enslaved Africans’ inhumanity for the gargantuan textile industry, which institutionalized the Slave Power or Slaveocracy of the American South, built the emerging American economic Empire, a major propellant for the First Industrial Revolution (the late 1700s to 1850) and implemented the writings of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” making a pathway for the modern global capitalist system.

There are three schools of thought addressing race, criminal law and predatory capitalism within the “left political aisle”. First, solving racism is primarily economical, so removing predatory capitalism for a social democracy will fundamentally remove systemic racism. Therefore it is mainly the incentive of “government” to remove all the structures of institutional racism and predatory capitalism. Secondarily, they call for a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system to remove racialized injustice, discretionary measures for white-collar and elites crimes and overprotected law enforcement. Democratic socialism with equal opportunity for all is the central theme. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led progressive activists, social justice advocates, and Marxists collectively called the “Democratic Socialist-progressive liberals”. Secondly, removing systemic racism should be the incentive of a “good government” working with “well-regulated markets”. Well regulated capitalism with equal opportunity for all is the central theme. They call for well regulated and structural policies towards law enforcement This is the position of Elizabeth Warren’s led “Brahmin (educated) left”, Progressive Capitalists, liberal technocrats, social democrats, liberal social activists collectively called the “Polanyi-Keynesian liberals”. The third is to infuse racial statistical proportionality in wealth or social distribution in the neoliberal order, e.g. Black Americans are 13% of the US population; therefore, they should be 13% of the 1%. The third faction uses an illusionary statistical tool or a form of racial financialization claiming to fix sociological problems. The so-called “lift all boats through incrementalism” platitudes fills the air. They call for weak reforms of the criminal justice system. It increases racial representation with vacuous broadband economic reformation. It is essentially throwing money at police but invariably leads to more militarization and continued qualified police immunity. They posit that access to neoliberalism to essentially fit into the meritocratic order is what African Americans are denied. Therefore meritocratic racial representation, not economic restructuring and criminal justice overhaul, is their prescription. Neoliberalism infused with race deconstructionism is the central theme. This is the position of Obama and Clinton led center-leftists, coastal elites, mainstream liberal media, liberal billionaire class, educated class, liberal monopolists and a professional-managerial class called “Mises-Hayek-Freidman liberal-neoliberals”.

The first two have very valid persuasive agendas. The third self-deluded themselves by suggesting full restorative justice could lead to leftist’s authoritarianism or the “scary socialism”. Therefore incrementalism is the ideal. They forget that most plutocrats will pursue maximalist power by “owning” through financing even if it is far-right authoritarianism by aligning with anti-secularists, anti-egalitarians, white militia, Christian fundamentalists to redefine what “American” is. Democracy and morality is not their goal, but “capital” is. Americanism will always be susceptible to cultural, Christian and white nationalism as it plunges into the depths of societal nihilism even if the plutocrats aren’t necessarily racially regressive. The owners of “unfettered capital” will inevitably sabotage the social progressiveness of Obama and Clinton led center-leftists-Mises-Hayek-Freidman neoliberals. Socioeconomic freedom for “labor” is focused on racial, civil, political and economic. Obama-Clinton neoliberals focuses on ‘”political”, marginally focuses on “racial” and “civil” but forgets “economic”. Therefore the third faction doesn’t eliminate the ills of predatory capitalism, and it indirectly reinvigorates racism through “white resentment”. It is a racial representation within the existing social hierarchy of “whiteness” without any vast economic restructuring.” A seen not heard approach”. They focus on “studying the problem” over and over without “actualizing the inevitable conclusions” or “whitewashing the answers”. Capital and its friendly liberal-neoliberals favor financing the perpetual investigation of a socioeconomic problem but refuse to implement its solutions. They create “workforce or “committees” to investigate as a diversion tactic and ends up in rhetoric affirmation and marginal reforms; this is the faux socioeconomic change that dominates the Obama-Clinton liberal-neoliberals. It cements repressive and unstable classism and breeds stronger discontent within economically dispossessed whites. This discontent will be channelled by an opportunistic conservative ecosystem into resentment, anti-intellectualism, anti-secularism culminating into a flair for anti-democracy . This gives room for the rise of a demagogue to capitalize from.

How can it be so?

This approach creates the seeds for regressive democratic standards of an “unresponsive government except to the plutocrats, racialized police state and military-industrial complex” and a “majority of the working class in despair”. This third faction’s choice of unresponsiveness due to its allegiance to “capital” creates a societal paralysis mimicking the “Weimar Republic” for which civil rights gains in America become a target. The rise of a demagogue of neo-fascist, racist, patriarchal, authoritarian, conspiratorial, the theocrat and ultra-capitalist ideology will eventually take power. Just as Julius Caesar of the Roman Republic opened the door for Dictator Augustus Caesar of the Roman Empire, the Neoliberal Democrats will eventually play a part in opening the door for a more competent and machiavellian “Donald Trump”.

Racial representation within the neoliberal order serves as a pacifier for plutocrats against the loud calls for economic, political and civil restructuring that the first two factions aims for in dealing with Black Americans and Americans writ large. Instead, it creates an “opaque bubble” of ineffectiveness.

I think the first is focused on the “manifestation of the corrupt social hierarchy”. In contrast, the second is the “tool, mechanism and delivery of an unregulated social hierarchy” and the third is focused on “racial technocracy within the insulated social hierarchy” I am torn between the first two approaches. Still, I believe an amalgamation of the two can be met. These two approaches provide egalitarian opportunities for most relative to the third approach.

Bernie approach is “restructuring” the system to allow for egalitarian opportunities independent of race, Warren’s approach is “reforming” the system for black inclusion, and Obama’s approach is “inclusion” of black America into the system’s status quo.

Racism and classism are socially engineered systems within an exploitative socioeconomic hierarchy, so the amelioration to both problems should be socially engineered. The overarching and intersectional fix to American ills is a “bill of economic rights” as stated by Franklin Roosevelt, to break away from the flawed neoliberal consensus. The neoliberal/Washington consensus ascribes the unitary value of humanity as a technocratic-atomized “market utility” which is supposedly independent of national sovereignty, race and gender due to its mythologized propaganda of a meritocratic and self-regulatory ecosystem. Therefore individualism armed with some unalienable rights “should” have the world as their oyster. The neoliberalist project from 1980 to the present has a dismal record by further exacerbating economic disparities from class to race, and worse; it culminates in an anti-democratic system. Education has not been the primary tool to reduce racial-economic disparities; these disparities increase with income level. The inherent logic of this ideology is that failure to achieve the capitalistic dream of “choice, freedom and wealth” through social mobility are consequences of cultural-racial indiscipline, individual laziness and regressive social welfare programs. So the false paradigm that Blacks are disproportionately poor is because they are uncivilized, do not prioritize education and are lazy becomes self-evident. Poverty and lower-class status are natural consequences primarily from individual choices used as a sociological defense of neoliberalism. Black poverty is worse; it is both a sociological and cultural consequence for their intrinsic status in a social hierarchy through modern-day neoliberalism. This revolves around the idea of an “apathetic meritocracy enveloped in historic plutocracy” that stretches from corporate/Limousine Democrats to Log Cabin Republicans. This logic fails to acknowledge “history and its intended consequences”. In essence, individual prerogatives are a factor, which is independent of race, which fails in comparison to the dominant factor of a choice of “American antidemocracy” expressed in social hierarchy throughout its history towards African Americans. To be pointedly clear, the viability of a foundational democratic nation-state should be extrapolated into self-reliance, which inherently generates innovation but not at the expense of the “common good” of which a deracialized social hierarchy and plutocracy ceases. The common good should be vested in equal opportunities to pursue self-reliance by not emphasizing equal results nor rugged individualism. Still, the common good is then needed to restrain unfair power dynamics. The cyclicity of the system achieves balance to restrain cultural and marketplace nihilism, which results from unregulated individualism. This social ladder in this society focuses on eliminating poverty, repairing racial inequalities, reimagining a better racial mosaic, and restoring the dignity of any work independent of class. Perfection is not the panacea, but fairness and justice are.

Dignity for lower-wage jobs is ridiculed, shunned and caricatured in neoliberal space. Hubris becomes the virtue of elites. In modern times, this has been the mandate programmed to neoliberalism from modern conservatism since 1964 Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Republican platform. History and oppressive institutionalized hierarchies are supposedly independent of the precarious state of Black America on the neoliberal platform. Proletarian issues are moral, revolutionary and “intersectional-economical”. This is not to dismiss the amoral and economic plight of racial injustice. Still, the majority of whites, especially ones with power, will show some symbolic solidarity but remain steadfastly against the genuine, nuanced amelioration, which is reparations. Blacks have to strategically fuse race as an essential subtext under the political umbrella of “economic revolution”. Why is that, you might ask? Black are disproportionately affected in every measure of economics, so mathematically, they will be advantaged in a universal socioeconomic restructuring. The deployment of vital resources will be based on the deficiencies of an established standard. The disadvantaged blacks will overwhelmingly benefit. In such a restorative world, time corrects pre-existing conditions of injustice. It is fair to say race issues are essential, but class issues are “important and intersectional”.

Within this socioeconomic bill of rights, a subtext must also be written; in the form of a structural plan or race-conscious policy customized for African Americans. The term “reparations” comes to bear. Reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, educational non-investment, environmental racism and the New Deal program exclusions. This should be wrapped in a documented and historical apology for the atrocities unduly inflicted on African Americans. The truth is “choice and freedom” is only provided for those who hold capital and those born of certain skin color. Capital can be constructed, extracted, leveraged, inherited and relocated but can equally be insidiously exclusionary. Today’s history is testaments to this “omnipotent” rationale in insulated market dynamics independent from labor demands and democracy, ultimately manifested as oligarchy or plutocracy.

Socioeconomic reoperations cannot wholly solve the toxicity of cultural racism, but it is a good conversation starter for a cultural shift of relations between African Americans and European Americans.

July 4^th, 1776 marked American Independence from the British which constitutionally recognizes white America. The pursuit of independence was a violent and virtuous insurrection filled with looting and vandalism against the British colonization of America. This day has no relation to Africans who were still enslaved in America. So why are Americans shocked by the few cases of looting and vandalism during the George Floyd protest? Leftist revolutions either American, French, or Russian has not been peaceful. The black civil rights movement has been relatively peaceful since the Reconstruction years.

“The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its tactical value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened”.

The advent of the now known “Juneteenth” or Friday 19th June 1865 is the true independence for Black America from the chains of slavery despite the prior “limited implemented” Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. The American civil war from 1863 to 1865 had to be fought to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. An incisive look into American history showed Abraham Lincoln’s ambivalence to ending slavery, white supremacist ideology in his younger years and his white ethnostate rhetoric (deporting all freed blacks) but made the singular goal of keeping the Union, his prerogative, so the abolition of slavery and keeping the Union were not necessarily co-dependent. From the words of Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army on 19th June 1865 marching into Galveston, Texas:

“The people of Texas are informed that, by a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor”.

The key phrase in this order is “absolute equality”, but George Floyd’s death is a testament to America’s failure. The reconstruction Amendments, civil rights bill and voting rights bill, anti-discriminatory laws have not entirely wiped the despair of black America; therefore, vestiges of absolute inequality remain. The derailment of the Reconstruction program owed to the freed African slaves was expedient for the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to be accepted by the Southern Democrats and Southern populace as the President of the USA due to the controversial election results. This opened the doors to the regressive Jim Crow era. The Jim Crow era notably was the least politically polarizing because of the political and economic abandonment of Black America. The polarization began to build again Post 1968 till today. In a way, the North won the civil war, but the South won the societal ideology and its dynamics.

Post-1968, every non-white immigrant owes their existence and rights in white America to the civil rights movement of black America. These non-white immigrants are subtly judged based on a racial polarity scale as in “How anti-black are you”. This subtle question of manifest destiny defines societal acceptance to privileges of whiteness or invariably to selected Americanism. This scale preempts or opens economic opportunities, education and housing. For example, the Italians, Eastern Europeans and Irish immigration into America primarily in the early 1800s to 1920s were perceived as lesser but not black; this gave them some not all to the socioeconomics of white privilege. Soon after, they assimilated into the white identity and accessed its associated socioeconomic benefits especially post World War II. This historical passage into whiteness affirms that race is societally dynamic. Therefore white identity and its institutions can recategorize any other ethnicities and nationalities for assimilation. Consequently, it is more than skin color. It is a history and societal structure based on dehumanization, exploitation, disenfranchisement, economic exclusivity bounded by de jure biases and laws; it is a caste system. This societal vice creates ascribed “qualities” to specific subsets of people to establish a social hierarchy where order not justice nor equality, reigns. At its roots, the race is inherently vacuous, visceral and unrealistic propaganda because it is detached from biology, but the institutions built on racialized caste system or racism are true. The delusionary theory of favorable cultural values are descendants from biologically natural selection of superiors race’s characteristics is utterly immoral, inhumane and pseudoscientific. There are only one human species!

From slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow to modern-day Jim Crow, a theme seems to arise. The black civil rights movement isn’t victimhood nor placates at the expense of white fragility. It is rather survival, awakening conscientious objection to white supremacy, humanitarian, anti-fascist, democratic, populist, revolutionary, moral, persistence for absolute equality, cultural dignifying and undeterred individual to collective black economic progress. The burden of fixing white supremacy and systemic racism is on white America, but Black America should rightfully raise the awareness of its ills and immorality; together could restructure society. Performative acts of solidarity, hashtag activism and anecdotal media messaging are annoyingly superficial, unbankable, tone-deaf, elitist, corporate-diluted, and patronizing but not emancipatory for blacks. It only weakens or, worse, obfuscate from the cause of the black civil rights movement. This is not a cause for black supremacy over whites but a fight for racial equality and an end to the divisive-social construct of “race”. This is not cause financed by liberal elites or a project of the anti-Semitic conspiracy by “George Soros”; it is a grassroots cause fueled by anathema towards an American facade of equality. This is not a cause for racialized nationalism but a case for patriotism and constitutionality. This isn’t a cause for an egalitarian economic class but reformative reparation for equalized opportunities, protections and dignity under the law. Therefore, the economic disparity should be resolved only by redistribution of resources in racially equitable quotas but instead, an economic restructuring across social class.

Holocaust survivors, Japanese internment campers and even former white slave owners received financial reparations for the economic distress and inhumanity endured. Are there monuments of Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Sukarno, Milošević, Pol Pot or Abdul Hamid II? Not all history is celebrated, particularly the callous, oppressive, insidious and unrepentant parts, but it should be remembered and learned. So heed, and historical-cultural-cognitive re-framing should be taken to the 1,500 US Confederate monuments and other oppressive public memorabilia. These statues are symbols of historical oppression. I agree with the takedown of those statues and their symbolism, but they are still shallow acts of morality, not an economic revolution, reckoning and repentance. It is symbolically appreciative but doesn’t repair the rotten roots of the institutions and “causes” that erected those statues in place. There is a clear distinction between historical figures with acute immorality, e.g. Thomas Jefferson, John D. Rockefeller, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and George Washington from morally bankrupt figures of arbitrary terror, e.g. Nazis, Winston Churchill, John Calhoun, US Confederate army, Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Leopold II of Belgium. Human consciousness and history shouldn’t view these people under the apocryphal auspice of clinical veneration. The former should be seen as complex figures of juxtaposed unscrupulousness with minimalist virtues, while the latter should be seen in the dark shadows of disdain and savagery. Conservatives, especially white conservatives who melodramatically decry the removal of statutes as “erasure of all history ” and equate it with fascism, ironically validates that “history is plagued with racism”. It forces critics into an illusionary lie that “such evil parts in history embodied in these statues” will be justified. So are these statues the part of history that the national identity is wrapped around? Such controversial statutes are intentionally myopically upheld by conservatives as either “a call or jubilance for white supremacy or white ethnostate”. Museums are very suitable for such controversial figures as a “lesson of oppression” instead of a statue. Therefore, history is still maintained but contextualized with such appropriate measures. The question I posit to white conservatives is “Should I put up a figure of someone who raped your mother? It is history! A blanked face of anguish washes their faces.

This is not a cause to siege white cultural heritage but for a sober, accurate, moral and constructive look into American heritage. This is virtuous radicalism to upend the white hierarchical and unfair class structure by upholding the “We the people are created equal…” in the United States Constitution.

Equality, dignity, liberty, morality, perseverance and solidarity are pillars of the black civil rights movement. Adherence to these righteous revolt’s posts has been peaceful. Still, it is naivete to be presumptuous on future guaranteed tranquillity, especially with the increasingly alarming possibility of an American dictatorship, the co-opting of white nationalist propaganda openly, the continual ascendancy of far-right Christian fundamentalism into government and growing economic inequalities.

Has America changed since 1865? Yes, but not enough; there is a consensus for major reform for black America. The American Civil War didn’t just end in the battleground but rather transmuted into the premeditated marginalization of black America till today. It has become self-evident that economic prowess is the only virtue America truly respects. It was becoming a “need” for America signals societal and political leverage. Black America needs to strategize and organize for a new paradigm shift in creating a grander “Greenwood District or Little Africa”; a self-resourcing movement for a better tomorrow through focusing on STEM education, ownership of housing, black entrepreneurship, black manufacturing base, proactive and frugal individual spending, mentorship programs, black banking and up and down-ballot voting for the right politician with meaningful policies not just on skin color. The church, politics, organized black labor, black businessmen, black intellectuals and black civil rights groups can be used to stress the consequences of racial-economic inequality in every media platform and the grounds of government. Also African Americans needs to reimagine themselves outside of “America-state construct” and reconnect with Africa. For Africa is for you and you are Africans.

Therefore build independent black institutions of power from economic to intellectual spheres, build foreign bridges with Africans on the continent to Latin America and Caribbeans and build constructive-defensive engagement with non-Africans. Which is the essence of Pan-Africanism.

This will not entirely solve all the ills of systemic racism, but it creates an awareness of economic focus while pushing for economic reparations, which is the other half of the resolution. But I expect a fiery backlash to such precipitating understanding of anti-blackness in America. The test of this reformist revolutionary movement will be judged by the ascendency or denunciation of the upcoming revanchist reactionary countermeasures. For freedom from slavery through abolition and civil war came Jim Crow. The end of Jim Crow through the civil rights movement came mass incarceration, weakening of voting rights, weakening of organized labor, militarized police departments and cutting into the welfare state. So what awaits Black lives matter is a question of time, not a condition.

The gains from civil and political enfranchisement only attain political power; free will within the bounds of the democratically instituted constitution, but economic power attains true personal freedom and/or sovereignty, large financial infrastructures, improved standard of living, sharing of the public sphere, increased educational output, increased productivity and collective bargaining-purchasing power. Economic power is actual progress. Freed blacks gained political power post- post Civil War (13th, 14th and 15th Constitutional Amendments) but failed to regain economic power by building capital from the clutches of white society, so their freedom was incomplete. This laid the ground for those political power gains to be slowly relinquished. Hence, owning capital always protects political power and civil rights, especially in this neoliberal capitalistic structure.

The tide of tolerance and advocation for black Americans has swayed Republicans to Democrats, so allegiance should be conditional, not absolute. Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the rise of politically active Ku Klux Klan, Daughters of the Confederacy, Birth of the Nation-Ku Klux Klan resurgence, Lily-white movement, New Deal programs, Board vs. Board of Education, Dixiecrats, Confederate flag resurrection-Southern Manifesto, Civil rights movement, Southern Strategy, War on poverty, Silent majority, Law and Order, War on drugs, Modern-day discrimination, New Jim Crow, Will Horton and Neoliberalism were some the critical political pendulums that rocked the ongoing plight of Black America. Reconstruction, New Deal, civil rights movement, and Neoliberalism failed to convey financial restitution for slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Due to de jure implementations of laws and social programs, it was clear that whites afforded “good credit” for white neighborhoods and “bad credit” to black neighborhoods. Property rights, a constitutional entity and capitalistic entity for equity and access to credit for economic development were only legally protected for whites so economic violence against blacks’ property was seen as “kosher”. This financial differentiation leads to racialized economics manifested as “racial wealth inequality” still. The legitimacy of the black civil rights movement cannot be judged by changing all the hearts of white America into acknowledging black America but by advocating more economic investment and policies to reimburse Black America’s just due to progressively form a more absolute equal union for the United States of America.

The crux of the Black Lives Matter movement is while white lives always matter in America, black lives are not guaranteed in America. This signifies an illiberal democratic or a nascent Orwellian nation. Equality, not supremacy, should be the societal contract of a citizenry. My fear is the agency of Black Lives Matter does not become whitewashed, adulterated, corporatized and performative as the eyes and ears of the world have perked up. In some ways, it already is.

This is not a pièce de résistance to dump all black people’s problems as consequences from whites, but a philosophical and sociological foray to the inevitability of generational systemic racism and associated continually failed economics either de jure or de facto. It is an aggregated outcome, not an anecdote. Some whites haven’t fared well in the system and are caught in-between the economic cracks, to which I lend sympathy. The key is, it has been historically and continually disproportionately detrimental to blacks. To sound reductionist, “Some not all black problems, but enough to be rectified” is the contextual doctrine. It is an unjust system to Blacks and it is psychologically taxing to the already proverbially persevering Black America.

There has been a tactical effort to switch from mouth-foaming racist rhetoric of old into a modern-age “subtle Machiavellian malevolence” to discriminate against most blacks economically. The former tactic has become socially unacceptable and put on the fringes of the body politic. The critical thing is the tactics changed, but the viciousness was restructured but not removed. This new age “subtle Machiavellian malevolence” is cloaked in softer-toned dehumanizing rhetoric and actions. This is the predominant mindset called white grievance or resentment. Any issue affecting Black America is seen as a collective cultural defect, and its consequences are well deserved. It purports the construct of dominium of whites over blacks in a racial hierarchy as a natural outcome of the blacks’ ineptitude. Worse, elites can use this switch for nefarious policies by dividing class solidarity for economic exploitation through weaponizing race.

Lee Atwater who was George Bush Sr’s campaign manager before becoming Republican party chairman, infamously discussed the “reinvented Southern strategy” and he stated:

Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

This shift has become the political platform of the Republican Party since Nixon’s 1968 campaign in dealing with socioeconomics. However, it still carries the hallmark of its historical ill intent even if some whites are caught in its web of economic deprivation. Statistically and historically, blacks are more underprivileged than whites, so defunding the welfare state attacks more blacks than whites. The corporatist Democrats focus on using racial quota for marginal economic gains to suitably fit into the ultra-capitalistic machine and often perform sentimental-performative solidarity to weakly appear “in unison with the black working class the working class as a whole”. This approach has found strange bedfellows with corporate Democrats and most Republican politicians lining together to form the Neoliberal Structure, financed and controlled by the wealthy. This unification is the biggest stumbling block to economic progress for Blacks and poor-middle class whites. It began with Reagan, continued to Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama and now Trump. Republicans incite cultural and white identity politics while Democrats focus on maintaining the status quo and become relatively socially inclusive of obscuring from both allegiances to the wealthy. Marginal incrementalism and austerity measures for the working class and expansive Laffer-curve supply-side economics for elites, not revolutionary economic reforms, become their ideology. They both protect the societal institutions created by the ultra-capitalistic machine, which has eviscerated the poor and middle class since the 1980s. Reactionary whites fall into a nativist, conspiratorial, xenophobic and cultural moshpit to cause their economic problems. Generally, liberal whites become more socially conscious, not proactive while being class inactive. Generally, Blacks fall into a state of choosing “lesser of two evils” or “which candidate and/or policy would white prefer in avoiding a backlash or applying white filter” and singularly focusing on reforms in rhetorical, cultural and symbolic racism, not focusing on the grander economic imprint in systemic racism.

This is an economically asymmetrical system against poor-middle class whites but a racialized economically asymmetrical system against blacks. Therefore, it is fair to say that white identity politics “in part” and black identity, and “in part” politics are proletariat labor politics at its root, so intersectionality should be made. The harbinger to such solidarity is that white identity politics is blinded by its hubris, visceral sense of apathy, racial paranoia, exaggerated cultural dispossession and faux cultural aristocracy, which has degraded possibilities for true class solidarity across racial lines. Black progress outside of economics is hampered by voter suppression, mass incarceration, food insecurity, healthcare inequalities, educational divestment, environmental injustice and gentrification, which are consequences of de jure historical institutionalism. I am not a class reductionist, but I am a “realist” on the dynamics of race and labor. The power dynamic of white identity over black identity through history is why “political realism” should exist. Still, whites choose to be willfully revisionist, immoral, intransigent, reactionary and superfluous by being “solely cultural identitarians”. They are assiduously steadfast in upholding white supremacy either implicitly or explicitly regardless of ethics, logic, morality, religion, nor constitutionality. This has the being a significant pitfall of racial-class solidarity. This is why radical restructuring and reckoning must be made to facilitate the past ills for a better future in every facet of society. It is a generational defect of the ideology of “whiteness” within white America.

Since 1980, the economy has shifted from industrialization to a financialization economy, and in such space, social polarization ensued. This bore fruits of societal dissonance as Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “cultural hegemony” began to break, culminating in the “age of Trumpism”. The age of Trumpism is the output of failed neoliberalism promise of shared prosperity but instead created an “apathetic aristocracy resembling King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s court”. Trumpism attacks the liberal side of neoliberalism (dominantly Democrats) by being socio-culturally regressive, protectionist, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-military foreign adventurism (most rhetorical), anti-immigrant, pro-industrialization (mostly rhetorical) and anti-elitist. It also attacks the conservative side of neoliberalism (Republicans) by being protectionist, pro-national sovereignty, and loose on monetary policy. Despite these differences, Trumpism still affirms the Neoliberal consensus of deregulation, anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, predatory capitalism, supply-side economics, expansion of the military-industrial complex and financialization. Therefore Trumpism still protects “capital” over “workers” just as neoliberalism posits. The difference is Trumpism uses a far-right cultural-nationalistic platform as a veneer for its autocratic, white supremacist, theocratic and plutocratic agenda by introducing the tool of “neofascism/illiberalism” as seen in Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Norms, institutions, proletarian power, racial progress and democracy are at stake in the age of Trumpism and the foreseeable future because of America’s “choice” of neoliberalism and refusal to reckon with its racist history. Trumpism, liberal neoliberalism and conservative neoliberalism are social hierarchies inherently antithetical to the concept of class solidarity and true racial reckoning. The path into unresolved issues with race and class resides in the rightful co-existence of democracy, the welfare state, national sovereignty, politics through egalitarian measures.

“Progressive neoliberalism (Democrats) is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood). While, reactionary neoliberalism (Republicans) was the formula that allowed Christians evangelicals southern whites, rural and small-town Americans and disaffected white working-class strata to coexist, however uneasily with Libertarians, Tea Partiers, the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers plus a smattering of bankers, real-estate tycoons, energy moguls, venture capitalists and hedge fund speculators”.

Trumpism is the bombastic, chaotic and abominable lovechild of these two dysfunctional factions. It is defined as “Archie-Bunker reactionary neoliberalism or autocratic neoliberalism”. In simple terms, he is a idiotic bludgeon at the spear-tip of an insurgent neofascism . In my view, Trump is the perfect “Frankenstein” autocratic Republican, Clinton is a “smoother” Reaganite and Obama is a “soft” Rockefeller Republican. The question is effectiveness and Trump was completely incompetent among his fellow modern predecessors. Trump is a vehicle for Republican elitist cause for plutocracy, unitary executive powers, corporatized and vehemently socially conservative judiciary, military-industrial complex and authoritarian megalomania. His voracious corruption knows no bounds as he absconds every norm, ethics and law bounded by the Constitution. He is above reproach, he is above “law and order” and he is “law and order”. He has a parasitic and predatory relationship with the populace while an absolute loyalty clause from the populace is instituted. Trump is the Cultural President of a “nostalgic American Southern Confederacy” through white militia movement and white identity grievance. Trump, the amoral political actor has become an “anointed” vanguard of Christian values and “western civilization” for white evangelism and to a smaller degree white Catholicism collectively under the umbrella of “Christian nationalism/Dominionism/Radical Calvinism”, a sort of biblical prophet like King David leading them to the promised land of theocracy, patriarchy, anti-secularism, xenophobia and illiberalism. The keyword is “King”, which denotes an appeal for white absolute autocratic power above any human law. Such a religious sect is fundamentally driven by “political whiteness” but wants to exercise and/or retain their power for “White Christian freedom” using a pervasively grotesque interpretation of the Bible. The spirit of “Christian freedom” is a tool for antiblackness in the de jure to de facto social, political and economic order which inspired the “Religious right in the 1970s against the civil rights, voting rights and anti-segregation movements of the late 1950s to late 1960s which cemented to the today’s white Christian fundamentalism today. Trump also embodies the visceral, cultist, anti-critical thinking and conspiratorial vigor substituting for “real” economic despair primarily resonating from highly brainwashed poor to working-class whites. These constitute the “authoritarian, theocratic and nihilistic plutocracy” aided by the megalomaniacal Republicans and “smokes and mirrors” Democrats. Trump is not the age-old class populist, he actually is a “working-class charlatan” and “white cultural populist”. Trumpism’s birth also serves as an answer to the illogicalities of Milton Freidman’s postulate that “market society assures freedom regardless of race, which is achieved through government deconstruction” and Francis Fukuyama’s End of History assertion that “co-existence of market capitalism, globalization and democracy are human civilization’s endpoints “. Milton and Francis failed to see a paradox; an unfettered, unregulated and insulated market predicated on singular protection and growth of capital will bubble into a plutocracy and continue pre-existing plutocracy (secures “white-owned capital) which is unsurprisingly anti-democratic. Capital throughout history is also predicated on racialized subsidy from economic and political exploitation of blacks and even extending to poor and middle-class whites. Democracy, therefore, is secluded. This will inherently create a paralysis of incoherence from Milton’s idea of freedom. Also, the accrued capital from a history of disenfranchisement and exploitation insulates the ultra-capitalists from democracy which invariably ends its promise of social mobility for blacks. Simply, capital creates compounded capital over time for those already with capital by buying politics to rewrite laws, which translates to exclusionary power not justice for the majority. The common good embodied in a fair government should be the arbiter of justice in a society through a representative democracy, policies and law not the marketplace. Humanity cannot be quantized to unitary monetary value. Humans are social beings of a complex consciousness, which is far cry from financialization products as deduced by neoliberals. The markets always need to be “regulated” and “responsive” to the needs of both labor and consumers. Laissez-faire capitalism and/or Neoliberalism will eventually put the last nail in the coffin for democracy, for which any form of racial justice also gets buried. There is no separation of “political”, “economical” and “cultural” essences in society, there are all in a loop of reinforced influence on each other.

This friction of plutocracy and/or market capitalism against democracy causes societal disharmony and polarization either racially, economically, demographically, or politically for the masses. This friction allows for class populist charlatans e.g. Trump to use mass despair as a tool for illiberalism and racism and xenophobia but tinkering the edges of economic reform and continuing wealth redistribution towards corporations and the wealthy. At such point, the stream of fascism gushes into the political, economic and governing sphere. A systemic chain reaction of failure starts from Neoliberalism to Trumpism to Chinese authoritarian capitalism to Mussolini’s Italy and finally Nazi Germany.

In a nutshell, America is currently more representative democracy for whites, more fascism for blacks, more plutocracy for the corporations, more propaganda by the media, the more military-industrial complex, more oligarchic power for the wealthy and more rugged capitalism for the poor. Democracy should be at the consent of all people; the great political tool for equality. Racialized fascistic republic began in 1789 but a racial representative democracy started in 1968 but in the past two decades there has been a backsliding to an “illiberal plutocratic constitutional federal republic”. This timeline emphasizes the fact that America isn’t, wasn’t and not yet “democratic”. The constitution was intentionally written to protect a minority; a minority of the opulent property-owning white men or the “Enlightened”. The battle of race, labor and capital was settled in favor of this minority as written by this minority. This constitutional system was set up to shield from the “unenlightened dēmos” including enslaved Africans and Native Americans as of 1789.

Racism is interwoven with classism, classism is interwoven with capitalism, capitalism is interwoven with neoliberal globalization and neoliberal globalization is interwoven with military adventurism or liberal hegemony. These threads are the “modern-day World Order” that has supports racial and social inequalities in the world. Politics, economics, government and law are gears in a system of which capital and property rights are maximally protected over workers and race within neoliberalism and its twin “plutocracy”. The infusion of race into this plutocratic order creates a plutocratic caste system. The plutocratic caste system exacerbates the prior and creates new inequalities of race and class.

History has shown that neoliberalism, totalitarian communism, feudalism, mercantilism, colonialism and slavery are failed projects to manage race, class and government. It is therefore a prerogative of a new political economy that amalgamates both class and race to prevent a further descent into full-blown fascism. The model of Democratic Socialism/Progressive capitalism in Scandinavian countries and Uruguay, is a system that allows for strong national sovereignty, a strong welfare state, vibrant well-regulated capitalist state, strong democracy can birth a strong society where racial reckoning can truly be addressed and ameliorated. It should be noted that racism and neoliberalism are systems created by man, it is not a natural order ordained by God nor intrinsically biological, so it can also be dismantled by man.

The deep gouge of the American social fabric from the “socio” which encompasses race, religion, sexuality and gender, and the “economic” which encompasses wealth, income, capital and labor and to the “political “which encompasses governance and law remains ever unresolved.

To define my political identity simply, I am an Afro-feminist-secularist-humanist democratic socialist/progressive capitalist. The bonds of this society should be built by egalitarian opportunities, cultural diversity and responsive institutions. My view is that until the day a person like Ilhan Omar (above) becomes free, then America is free. She embodies the bottom of the caste system that still captures America. America “chooses” to be in this regressive caste and neoliberal economy but it can also “choose” to reimagine a progressive future of egalitarian opportunities and racial equality. The “savages” became “criminals”, “plantations” became “prisons” and the “slave patrol” became the “police”. America has criminalized black disfranchisement and poverty, demonized Black, Muslim and Hispanic immigrants while it has ridiculed and uneducated white poverty. This is America.

To end, I am cynical as with all Black America, so time will tell if absolute equality of opportunities is a pipe dream.

“The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind”.