There comes a time when a nation must confront the chasm between its ideals and its reality. The recent actions of Donald Trump...escalating conflict with Iran without justification, eroding democratic norms, and consolidating power with alarming disregard for constitutional limits...are not anomalies. They are symptoms of a deeper sickness, a rot that has festered since this country’s founding.
As James Baldwin once warned,
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
And what we must face now is the uncomfortable truth: America was never the democracy it claimed to be, at least not for all its people.
For generations, Black and Brown communities have lived this truth. We have known the hollowness of America’s promises, the cruelty of its systems, the hypocrisy of its leaders. While some now express shock at the erosion of democratic norms under Trump, we remember that democracy was never fully ours to lose. The same unchecked power that now alarms his critics has long been wielded against marginalized communities...through slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and economic exploitation.
As Dr. King observed,
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
The mechanisms of oppression, once reserved for the marginalized, have now expanded their reach, and suddenly, the nation is forced to reckon with what we have always known.
This is not to absolve those who have benefited from the system’s inequities. There comes a point when ignorance is no longer an excuse...when privilege must be met with accountability. White women who claim fear or manipulation by white men, working-class whites who cling to racial resentment rather than solidarity...these are not just victims of circumstance.
As Malcolm X sharply reminded us,
"If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
A thinking person, one who benefits from the structures of power, has a moral obligation to question, to resist, to act.
And yet, resistance cannot be rooted in division. The same forces that profit from racial animosity also thrive on our fragmentation. While we argue over borders, over identities, over scraps, the true architects of our suffering (the economic elite) consolidate their wealth and power. The wealth gap widens, corporate profits soar, and the cost of living becomes unbearable, all while we are distracted by manufactured conflicts.
As Baldwin once wrote,
"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history."
And that system depends on keeping us at each other’s throats rather than turning our gaze upward, toward those who pull the strings.
Make no mistake: the true struggle in America has evolved. It is no longer solely about race, though race remains a weapon in the hands of the powerful. It is about class. The ultra-wealthy, a fraction of the global population, have engineered a world where the rest of us (regardless of color or creed) labor under the weight of their greed. Through rigged tax systems, stagnant wages, and policies that prioritize profit over people, we are made to finance our own oppression. This is not an accident; it is by design.
As Dr. King declared in his later years,
"Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor."
But here lies the paradox of our moment: as white America begins to experience the instability, the fear, the economic precarity that Black America has endured for centuries, there is an opportunity (painful though it may be) for solidarity. The same forces that destabilize working-class white communities are the ones that have long ravaged Black and Brown neighborhoods. The same politicians who stoke racial resentment are the ones who slash social programs, deregulate corporations, and sell off our futures to the highest bidder. The enemy is not each other; it is the system that profits from our division.
And yet, we must be clear-eyed about history. The legacy of European power (of conquest, colonization, slavery, and genocide) is not some distant relic. It lives in the foundations of this nation, in its foreign policy, in its economic order. From the theft of Indigenous land to the atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the pursuit of domination has left a trail of suffering unmatched in human history.
But as Malcolm X taught us,
"History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from."
And what we must learn is that the path to liberation does not lie in repeating the sins of the past, but in dismantling the structures that perpetuate them.
The road ahead demands more than outrage; it demands unity. Not the shallow unity of slogans, but the hard, deliberate solidarity of shared struggle. Economic justice will not come through racial division but through multiracial coalition...through recognizing that the fight for a living wage, for healthcare, for housing, is the same fight whether you are Black in Baltimore or white in West Virginia. The system survives by convincing us that our fates are separate. Our power lies in proving it wrong.
In the end, America stands at a crossroads. It can continue down the path of division, of scapegoating, of unchecked authoritarianism...a path that will only lead to its own unraveling. Or it can confront, at last, the truth it has long avoided: that justice delayed is justice denied, that freedom cannot exist while any are oppressed, and that the cost of inequality is paid by us all.
As President Obama often reminded us,
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But that arc does not bend on its own. It bends because we bend it...together.
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