Empire's Overseers: The Two-Party Trap of Blackface Imperialism

Carlos Sirah

30 Oct 2024

The U.S. political system is perpetuated through the facade of choice. The false belief that we have the power to decide who our political leaders will be and what policy the government will implement, is one cultivated to manufacture compliance and quell the revolutionary spirit of the masses.

The U.S. two-party electoral system functions as an ideological trap of white supremacy by presenting a false binary choice that constrains political imagination while masking the material reality: both parties advance imperial interests through military spending, global interventions, and economic policies that prioritize corporate power over human needs. And the elevation of Black figures like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris to command the imperial machine demonstrates the continued success of this ideological and political trap, where the incorporation of non-white actors into the U.S. imperial machinery serves to legitimize rather than challenge fundamental power structures. This strategy extends from the neocolonial projects in Africa and the Caribbean back to the Americas, operating with greater sophistication, efficacy, and reach.

As a Black and South Asian woman in power, Harris co-pilots the administration’s agenda, actively undermining Black sovereignty in Haiti, supporting the zionist entity’s genocide of Palestinian people, and guaranteeing the war machine’s bases, contracts, and weapons programs dominate public spending. Her role demonstrates, once again, the reality that white supremacy works not exclusively through explicit racism but through the assimilation of non-white faces into imperial power structures. This makes the people’s oppression more perfect: by diffusing responsibility across seemingly “progressive” representatives while leaving the material conditions of exploitation intact.

Imperial power deliberately splits "domestic" and "foreign" policy to hide how U.S. imperialism dictates conditions at home. When Congress funnels $175 billion to Ukraine and $20 billion to Israel, it makes explicit economic choices that enrich weapons manufacturers while starving healthcare, housing, and education. Military bases and defense contracts deliberately trap communities in economic dependence, building a loyal base that champions endless war. The military-industrial complex colonizes public universities, turning them into research centers for war and destruction while bridges collapse and flooding decimates cities. Democrats deploy civil rights rhetoric, Republicans preach spreading democracy, while both fund apartheid regimes and death squads. What we get, then, are not not policies but an imperial system executing its core mission: sacrificing the people at home to maintain dominance abroad.

Imperial power exposes its true nature when it selectively grants and denies fundamental rights. While Harris claims to defend reproductive rights domestically, she actively supports policies that bomb Palestinian hospitals to smithereens and make childbirth impossible for Palestinian women. This is not just hypocrisy. It is the coherent application of western white-supremacist imperialist logic operating precisely as intended, measuring human worth by their usefulness to U.S. and western interests. The U.S. military, of which domestic police is but a branch, first perfects its surveillance technologies by testing them on occupied populations abroad. These weapons are then deployed against U.S. residents.. Military commanders develop and refine counter-insurgency strategies in foreign wars, then teach police forces to use these same tactics against the domestic population. The war always comes home.

It’s more grisly, even. The military-industrial machine weaponizes poverty itself, by running it through the gristmill converting economic deprivation into a mechanism of imperial control. Military service becomes one of few viable economic options in poor and minority communities, creating a pipeline where economic desperation drives imperial recruitment. Defense industry jobs create constituencies for continued military spending, while technical education, increasingly orients toward military applications. This is not mere economic policy – it is the systematic creation of material dependencies that make challenging imperial power feel impossible.

Breaking free from white supremacy’s ideological traps requires more than electoral theater. It demands organized, militant resistance by the masses of oppressed peoples who understand their struggles cannot be separated: the fight against Cop City is directly tied to the military occupations of Haiti and the genocide in Palestine.

Blackface imperialism is now the order of the day. Fully colonized Negroes functioning as empire’s overseers, shipping weapons for Palestinian genocide, forcing Haiti’s occupation, and militarizing police terror at home. Our liberation demands masses of exploited and colonized peoples advancing militant political education, forging grounded alliances between struggles, and uncompromising, strategic action that gives the empire no peace. The choice lies not between imperial U.S. political parties, but between submission to empire and militant mass struggle for liberation.

Carlos Sirah is a writer and cultural worker based in Los Angeles, CA. Sirah is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace.

electoral politics

liberalism

black liberals

Black Misleadership Class

imperialism

U.S. Militarism

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