I woke up to news that another Black man was found hanging from a tree in Raleigh, North Carolina with local police calling it a suicide the same day. It feels like we are waking up to another lynching in another city across the American South over and over again: Javion Magee, Dennoriss Richardson, Earl Smith, Demartravion Reed, Kyle Bassinga, Juliana Nzita, To’Nea Nicole Miller, Jerard Jackson. It is something I did not think I would witness in my lifetime; I didn’t think twenty years ago that our country still had the capacity for this. After all we learned from the civil rights movement, the progress proved false, merely a superficial calm, an illusion of growth, and the suppression of dissenting voices. So here we are. Ida B. Wells’ spirit is weeping. Sad, disappointed, but not surprised. She stands alongside our ancestors and elders who knew that the capacity for violence never truly left our land.
The same reason racist white people have become emboldened is the same reason why the very power we need to investigate these hate crimes, our federal government, will do nothing about them. The Trump administration is rooted in white supremacy, and any civil rights protections Black people once had have now been redirected to support the whims of a white racist populace. That sort of rewrite of history is evident in the clemency granted for 1,500 January 6th defendants or lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing employment reverse discrimination against white men. The current administration certainly learned from the civil rights movement, understanding how the federal government intervened in states’ reign of terror during the 1960s. Think of the picture of Ruby Bridges being marched into class flanked by U.S. Marshals.
This is not lost on the people committing these crimes. They know that no one, neither their local racist governance nor the federal government, is coming to look for them. They also know their time is limited: do it now before the administration changes. They hope that any trace of their involvement will vanish by the time someone in official power gets around to investigating. We all know from the famous television show that the first 48 hours are essential to solving a murder. Those hours have come and long gone for each of these precious lives. The best evidence we have at the moment is the assertion by Black voices throughout this country from actors like Viola Davis, influencers like Deanté Kyle to academics like Dr. Stacey Patton and Dr. Michael H. Forde: Black people do not hang themselves from trees. The Equal Justice Initiative says over 4,400 race-based lynchings occurred in the United States between 1877 and 1950; 4,075 happened in Southern states. This is not lost on Black people. The reality is clear, but speaking out feels like screaming into a social media void that only echoes our own voices back to us.
This sense of dread brings me emotionally back to the days before Trump was elected. It became clear to me then that my more leftist friends had decided, out of moral conviction, that they could not vote for Kamala Harris. The lack of action to protect the people of Palestine meant she was not worthy of their vote; it was simply more of the same. What’s the difference? We need revolution. Let the empire fall.
I agree with these assertions in theory. I am angry and heartbroken at the genocide occurring to this day, especially the way the United States looked away during October of 2023. The United States vetoed multiple UN resolutions for cease-fire. In December of the same year, the Biden administration pumped more money into Israel, even bypassing Congress for emergency arms sales. We need accountability. There must be action. The plantation-capitalist system will never serve everyone fairly and must be dismantled for true equity to exist. Big money in elections has corrupted our politics, and so many candidates are bought and sold by the wealthy few under the lie that they act on behalf of “corporations made up of the people.” I know all these things to be true.
Yet right before the 2024 election, a heavy grief settled over me, a grief that felt ancient and modern at the same time, that bridged the years between 1619 and that day. I realized that the impossible was possible again: Trump could win. My anger at my leftist friends softened into pure hurt and grief, finally reaching the primary emotion beneath the anger. I no longer needed to be angry with them for following their conscience. How do you vote for a politician with blood on their hands, even against a more bloodthirsty opponent? We are all exhausted from choosing the lesser of evils.
But here is what I knew, what that feeling of grief felt in my bones told me: a Trump victory is not just “more of the same.” The evil of white supremacy has already been unmasked. Now it will empower more bad actors to act out their whims wherever conservative governments hold power. And I knew that the sacrifice placed on the altar of a clean conscience would be Black bodies. That has been the bargain in the United States over and over again. At the very founding of this country, men who knew slavery was wrong decided that unifying the new nation was the higher goal. A nation built out of anger of having to pay taxes on stolen land and calling it tyranny. You can go back to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, when Thomas Jefferson was ordered to take out the clause on the evils of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise gave enslavers more political power robbed from the enslaved. The fugitive slave laws made it illegal to help an enslaved person on free land — your conscience did not outweigh the property rights of white men. The Scottsboro Boys, accused of a crime they didn’t commit, were thrown to the angry mobs to assuage their hunger for vindication and white domination of the races. The lynchings, too numerous to list out individually on this page. Black bodies were the original sacrifice in America, and they remain so today.
I do not want to overlook how Brown bodies are placed on that same altar, as ICE raids continue to wreak havoc and people suffer and die in detention centers. The ACLU reports that deaths occur at a rate of roughly one every six days in ICE detention centers. But this reality exists because our foundational system was built upon the subjugation of enslaved Africans, creating a permanent ruling class designed to expand political power and feed the moneymaking machine.
The sadness and dread I feel centers on the realization that whether we are on the road to a people’s revolution or the collapse of an empire, the outcome remains rigged. Because our entire political systems were built directly over the fault lines of the original slave states versus free states, those red areas on the map do not merely represent the modern-day GOP. The well-documented Southern Strategy was written about as early as 1969 by Kevin Phillips, explaining how the Republican party would emerge over the following decades. From George Wallace saying in 1958 after a defeat for Alabama governor, “I was out-niggered by John Patterson, and I will never be out-niggered again”, to the congressional defection of Strom Thurmond from Democrat to Republican directly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. That red on our political maps represents the Black blood that continues to be spilled — and will continue to be spilled — as the bloodthirsty false god of white supremacy, like the biblical Baal, accepts its offerings unfettered and unbothered. The link between politicians using white animosity toward Black bodies for political gain is crystal clear.
For myself, as a Black person who grew up on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, who knows the four little girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing as friends of my older siblings and neighbors of my parents, who has been in the homes that were bombed, I know first-hand the sacrifices of apathy. If we are to change things, we have to vote and use the political system we have until we can get power to change it fundamentally. The goal must be as strategic as the ones used to disenfranchise us. Staying home on election day is not an option for me. The choice between Harris and Trump would not have brought revolution, but it would have saved actual lives as we fight to create more substantive change. The life taken could be your friend or neighbor instead of a distant video on your social feed. I hope we all remember that this fall and in 2028.
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What about this?
This piece is not written to indict the political left. I count myself among that number. What often looks like disaffection is not apathy; I know too many people who care deeply and carry profound distress. Rather, it is an appeal to readers of every persuasion to recognize that political and social reality is rarely binary. The road toward justice and healing is neither straight nor gentle, but an imperfect vehicle is no reason to abandon the journey entirely. If we are to preserve any actionable hope within an embattled system, we must commit to relentless, strategic participation—thinking two steps ahead rather than reacting purely from the moment. We cannot allow legitimate grief and righteous anger to turn inward and fracture our collective power. This piece lays bare what is truly at stake, in the hope that it offers clarity for the choices ahead.
— J. C.