Since his second inauguration, the billionaire, known for his highly discriminatory anti-immigrant mentality and behavior, has taken the toughest measures in favor of a “cleansing” that will have terrible consequences, even for unborn children.
And here we go with a continual slide into fascism, and, yes, a fascist nation turns on its own people. Fascism can also come into the light of the 21st century as techno-feudalism, another form of elite billionaires and their ground troops strangling the working class, even professional managerial class, through digital tracking, surveillance and behavioral modificaton.
Trump’s hatred of diverse workforces, hatred of equitable hiring practices and his love of class inequities will bring the chickens home to roost.
Even this nation’s economic/literal hit men (and hit women), the CIA, is worried about recruitment now that Trump is bulldozing fairness and affirmative action which is in place to level some playing fields: “We’re going to strangle off talent pipelines that were already narrow to begin with. And that’s going to deprive our intelligence community and our national security establishment of critical knowledge, talent, skills, language … that might be valuable in trying to get somebody into a foreign country,”
Black History month should be transformed into a total curriculum revamp so youth can understand slavery then, followed by the Jim Crowe era, and now with the Racist in Chief and his goons calling for internment camps and tossing people who disagree with capitalism and him – this penury, predatory, parasitic, casino capitalism – out of the country.
We are – I have many targets on my back – the Nobodies. It is instructive to read the following poem as a dirge for this country’s slide into despotism: By Eduardo Galeano
The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
For Black History Month, we can see how disconnected our so-called elected officials are with the majority of working class people of all ethnicities: In a study done by Nicholas Carnes in his book “The Cash Ceiling,” he broke down how in 2018, millionaires make up only three percent of the public, yet they control all three branches of the federal government. While more than fifty percent of U.S. citizens hold working-class jobs, less than two percent of Congress has held a blue-collar job before their Congressional career.
So how can these people understand environmental racism when they are part of the problem?
Trump’s Team and many in MAGA can’t wrap their arms around the fact Black people face some of the highest cancer and asthma rates in the U.S. These rates are without a doubt linked to the environment in which someone lives, works and plays. When African-American Robert D. Bullard began collecting data in the 1970s, few understood how a person’s surroundings can affect their health. Bullard was even surprised how segregated the most polluted places really were.
Bullard was the first scientist to publish systematic research on the links between race and exposure to pollution, which he documented for a 1979 lawsuit.
“This is before everyone had [geographic information system] mapping, before iPads, iPhones, laptops, Google,” he said. “This is doing research way back with a hammer and a chisel.”
This is what Black History month means for many of my former Latino, Native American and Black college students: Highlighting and studying men like Bullard. With 18 books under his belt on this topic, Bullard’s work launched a movement, the environmental justice movement.
Imagine a presidential candidate or even president’s cabinet embracing this baseline — that everyone has the right to a clean and healthy environment, no matter their race or class.
Former vice presidential running mate with Jill Stein, Amaju Baraka states this new time strongly:
“It is Western imperialism, led by the U.S. that is responsible for the billions of human beings living in poverty, it is imperialism that degrades and destroys the earth, that makes water a commodity, food a luxury, education an impossibility and health care a distant dream. It is the rapacious greed and absolute disregard for human life by imperialism that drives the arms trade, turns human incarceration into a profitable enterprise and transforms millions into migrants and refugees because of war and economic plunder.”
Carter G. Woodson was the impetus behind today’s Black History month. In 1924, he was instrumental in the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, renamed Negro Achievement Week. The month of February has stuck, since the organizers of the first celebration picked this month because two valorized men’s birthdays fall in February: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the 12th and the 14th respectively.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.
Paul Haeder | Radio Free (2025-02-07T16:55:31+00:00) Black History Month and the Nobodies. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/07/black-history-month-and-the-nobodies/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.