It’s Morning Again in America, but Will We Remain Asleep?
Whenever race is mentioned in a conversation and someone asks, “Why is everything about race?” or “Why must you always bring up race?” it’s an indicator that they’re ignorant of the role race has had in America’s founding and its continuance, as well as racism’s impact on people. It largely has to do with the refusal of many to acknowledge—much less teach in schools and society—the ugliness that is the history of the United States.
Much of the blame is on white people, conservatives and liberals alike. It’s on conservatives for refusing to acknowledge the sustaining injustices produced by whiteness to shield white people from guilt as they consolidate power as the nation becomes more diverse and the number of white people decreases. It’s on liberals because, while acknowledging what conservatives won’t, they’ve acquiesced to demands for reform and inclusion at home in exchange for allowing the country’s imperialist agenda to be carried out worldwide.
However, people of color deserve some blame as well.
Some in the African-American community have chosen reform over revolution; inclusion within rather than indictment of a political and economic framework built on and maintained by the exploitation of Black bodies; our labor for white profit and pleasure. Why? Because the goal for some was (and still is) citizenship and equality—not justice. Therefore, radical (Black) critique of the state is abandoned and shunned, even at the cost of BIPOC lives domestically and abroad.
An example is support for genocide in Gaza by the Congressional Black Caucus.
Additionally, some within other communities of color are guilty of choosing to assimilate into whiteness, both politically and psychologically, to achieve the “American Dream” for themselves; the economic and political “freedom” entitling them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—because all men are created equal.
Few are likely aware the phrase “all men are created equal” was not in all drafts of the Declaration of Independence. An earlier draft stated: “All men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life, liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Why the change to the text we have? Enslavers believed the original wording of the text encouraged both rebellion by Africans and abolition of slavery in general. Thomas Jefferson reworked the wording to no longer reflect freedom as an entitlement for African people. The Framers applied the same logic to the Constitution with the insurrection, three-fifths, and fugitive slave clauses.
For the next seventy-five years, a series of debates and compromises would take place to maintain race-based chattel enslavement, which made the United States a dominant economic power. It was during this time that the United States continued its policy of white settler colonialism, with its genocide of Indigenous peoples in order to take their land and assimilate their people and launched a war on the country of Mexico, taking land that makes up a part or the whole of nine states.
The same settler colonialism, whiteness, capitalist racism, and anti-Black racism that established antebellum America followed the country’s agenda into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with apartheid, state-sponsored terrorism, and miscegenation laws domestically, and the extraction of resources from nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia by imperialist measures. This became the superexploitation (similar to enslavement) of racialized workers around the globe, satisfying both the white man’s burden and the white man’s lust for what he’s always competed for and sought to control, according to John Henrik Clark: land, people, and resources.
For the everyday American, specifically white people, American imperialism—“democratizing” wayward lands, establishing military strength, and building the economy and anti-Blackness domestically—fomented a false sense of security and superiority and an even greater desire to consume. According to Charisse Burden-Stelly, citing W.E.B. Du Bois: “This superexploitation allowed white workers to get a share, however pitiful, of ‘wealth, power, and luxury . . . on a scale the world never saw before’ and to benefit from the ‘new wealth’ accumulated from the ‘darker nations of the world’ through cross-class consent ‘for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them’—a consensus solidified through the doctrine of ‘the natural inferiority of most men to the few.’ ”
In other words, as the capitalist class got richer, the white consumers got fat and happy, all at the expense of Black people at home and people of color around the globe. But the white worker, whom politicos and “experts” have insisted is the key to recent elections, is disgruntled economically. This is due to crumbling infrastructure, rising health care costs, and the outsourcing of jobs.
Their anger is justified. That same anger can be found in Black and brown communities also.
Wages continue to remain stagnant as the price of consumer goods rises and the benefits of public goods are reduced in profit-making or austerity measures. Simultaneously, American tax dollars leave this country to fund wars around the globe. Yet many blame “wokeness.” They blame migrants, they blame affirmative action, they blame diversity, equity, and inclusion. But a root cause of society’s precarity and persistent economic insecurity is neoliberalism, and a root of neoliberalism is racism.
Yet many of these white workers found their solution to these matters in a second Trump presidency. According to 2024 exit polling data, Donald Trump was trusted more than Kamala Harris to handle the economy, and among Trump voters, the only issue more important than the economy was immigration. These folks want a return to the “good ole days” when they got a share of wealth, power, and luxury, however pitiful.
A vote for Trump was a vote for the good ole days at the expense of Black and brown people in the hopes of making America great again. Trump’s election means mass deportations, as well as political, economic, and possibly physical violence against Black people and other persons of color, regardless of gender identity, class status, or religious beliefs.
Gil Scott-Heron once said that America wants nostalgia; “they want to go back as far as they can—even if it’s only as far as last week—not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” Sadly, folks don’t want to face backward enough to learn from history. They’d rather lie—and force teachers to lie—because nostalgia feels good; learning hard lessons does not.
Learning hard lessons requires a change in one’s behavior. There is no call for the redistribution of wealth, no call for reparations for Black people, no call for universal income, no call for universal health care, and no call for a truly multiracial democracy because not enough people want it. Apparently, the evidence from 248 years of whiteness, settler colonialism, genocide, anti-Black and capitalist racism, isn’t enough of a deterrent.
Many believed that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency meant America had turned a corner. That, in 2008, the Obama victory meant the dawn of a new morning in America; a post-racial morning where once and for all racialized people would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
A morning where the use of the word colorblindness wasn’t justification for ignoring the stigma and injustices attached to one with more melanin in their skin.
A morning where, for once, African Americans, particularly those Langston Hughes called the “low-down folks,” believed they would be heard, not simply tolerated.
Sadly, that morning never came.
Rather, it was simply morning again in America. The same was true after the election of 2024. It was a morning all too familiar to the souls of Black folk and the souls of other folk subject to the wages of whiteness. Too many people remain fast asleep because they’ve been told to reject wokeness. I suspect the next four years will show us if America will wake up or if it will die in its sleep. But the writers within this issue of The Progressive, including myself, are hopeful it will assist with a new great awakening.