Carlos Sirah of Black Alliance for Peace SoCal speaks as community groups in Los Angeles unite against ICE. Photo by Abraham Marquez for L.A. TACO
Popular resistance against the Trump administration in Los Angeles and other cities is a very positive development and one that Black people must embrace.
The devolution of Black politics has never been so evident and could not happen at a worse moment. While the crisis of legitimacy accelerates, and provides opportunities for movement politics, many Black people have declared themselves to be uninterested in political engagement or even worse, to be in solidarity with state oppression. Social media is replete with examples of Black people declaring that they don’t care about genocide in Gaza, or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has nothing to do with them or even that they are glad other people are targeted for deportation.
The city of Los Angeles, California is now the focal point of resistance, and while there is Black solidarity within the coalition protesting ICE raids and Donald Trump bringing in the National Guard, there is also a strange resistance to acting in solidarity with those who are specifically targeted in this phase of state repression.
There is a great deal of confusion about what Black politics should be. The confusion continues because Black politics, the assertion of Black/African people’s human rights here and abroad, was killed off by repression, the influence of money in politics, years of right wing indoctrination, and the presence of a neo-liberal, imperialist Black man in the office of the presidency. The result is that the people who once were most likely to be at the very least skeptical of the state’s motives are now in support of some of its worst acts.
Entertainer Azealia Banks not only declared, “I’m a Zionist,” but felt compelled to add, “No black person should be supporting Palestine.” Ms. Banks attempted to explain away her inexplicable comments by asserting that all Arabs are racist and therefore undeserving of any solidarity. Even if that broad generalization were true, why would it mean that a genocidal state would be acceptable to her or to anyone?
Banks is one of the worst examples of this dubious narrative, which says that Black people should only be interested in themselves because all Arabs are supposedly racist or all Latinos are racists or because other groups have not been in solidarity with us, or because ICE isn’t raiding them. It is difficult but necessary to clear through many levels of misguided thinking if we are to find our way out of a dangerous morass.
The same forces that destroyed the liberation movement have convinced many Black people that effective political engagement is limited to voting, when in fact voting is the least effective means of bringing about change. Numerous studies have shown that voters don’t get what they want even when their chosen party is in office. Of course, bourgeois democracy delivers a revolving door of democrats and republicans who alternately fall out of favor with the public only to market themselves anew and periodically switch places so that the duopoly can take turns raising hopes and then failing the public over and over again.
We see Black people claiming that their vote for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Barack Obama is akin to movement organizing when nothing could be further from the truth. The claims that Black people shouldn’t be involved in the fight against genocide or ICE because we have all fought so hard often amounts to nothing more than people having voted for a democrat in a presidential election year. The duopoly confidence game causes people to be angry because they think their quadrennial trip to a polling place amounts to more than it actually does.
The lack of historical knowledge is another factor in the encouragement of apathy. “No one helped Black people.” “Why should we care if someone else is deported?” “They’re stealing our jobs.” The prevalence of discredited American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) and Foundational Black American (FBA) ideology leads to hostility even towards Black immigrants. The site of masked ICE officers making violent arrests elicits nothing more than a shoulder shrug from the masses who think their situations are not linked with those being victimized.
At the very least, one would think the admonition warning against cutting off one’s nose in order to spite the face, would be kept in mind. Black people should know better than anyone that police, whether local or from ICE, are the enemy and that we should never applaud their actions, even if we appear not to be the target.
As for anti-Blackness among other groups, discernment is important. There is anti-Black racism among groups who are not white and it isn’t difficult to find examples. But that should not mean support for arresting people when they appear for immigration check-ins as they have done for years or that we shouldn’t feel repelled by ICE agents seeking entry to school buildings, dragging people from work places, and arresting U.S. citizens in the process. Black immigrants are always targets and are easily swept up in a racist system.
But there is also a lack of understanding about immigration itself. Immigration secures a class of disposable labor for capitalists, which is why people from all over the world are admitted to the U.S. If immigrants take what Donald Trump referred to as “Black jobs” it is because that is what the ruling class wants. It is not an accident that entire industries rely on immigrant labor. These same capitalists want a race to the bottom. If they don’t have migrants coming to the U.S. to work, they will leave the U.S. in search of even cheaper labor, and find ways to emiserate citizen workers even more than they do now. That dynamic is a constant, and no one should be fooled into thinking that Black workers would benefit even if every immigrant returned to their home country.
There is a mistaken belief that the fortunes of Black people from the U.S. would improve if others disappeared. Such conjecture is completely ahistorical. Yes, we must wage our own battle but what and who are we fighting? Our enemies are racism and capitalism. There is no reason to believe that mass incarceration, gentrification, or low wage work would disappear if global south immigrants were to leave the U.S. Our situation was not better before they arrived, and thinking that corporate, capitalist parties would somehow offer up something different is not borne out by any experiences Black people have had.
Donald Trump’s actions and his persona are different from other presidents, and that is a problem, but not just for the obvious reasons. It is important to remember that the Democratic Party’s allegiance to its oligarchic class, and its determination to vilify Trump instead of doing what their voters want, led to his return to the white house. It would be unfortunate if the only conclusion reached about this crisis is that we need another Democratic Party president when that party’s fecklessness led to Trump’s second term in office.
The lesson to be learned is that US Black people must understand that every phase of repression is a danger to us. We have no choice but to be in solidarity with all oppressed groups as we struggle for a new system altogether. This is better than finger-pointing about why the democrats failed to win the presidency. Democrats have cut the safety net, increased military spending, created a prison industrial complex, deported millions, and promised their capitalist sugar daddies that they will do everything in their power to keep people in a constant state of precarity. There must be no confusion about who our enemies are.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley@blackagendareport.com.
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