Africans and the African-descended in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America currently find ourselves passing through yet another existential moment. A focus of western commodification since the fifteenth century, our lives are once again devalued, and openly so. Our stories have never been accurately told, our experiences long hidden and ignored, and now their traces, once again, undergo caricature and erasure (even Jackie Robinson, the most iconic of American luminaries, was temporarily removed from a Defense Department website). We have entered a realm in which reality is undergoing yet another round of revisionism, a world of inversion, where a lie is truth, and truth is prevarication. Where we pretend, for the purpose of further concentrating power in hands already filled with more than enough, that racism no longer exists, that there is no sexism, where xenophobia and homophobia are cheered. Relegated to the category of unmentionable, these matters are no longer to be raised in the public square.

We have entered some province where the slightest reservation about state policies is equated with antisemitism, with “hate speech,” where voicing any level of concern for the plight of Palestinians is to support “terrorism.” Antisemitism is as reprehensible as Islamophobia, yet the latter runs unchecked, such that an American president, of no known faith tradition himself, has the temerity to say that a Jewish senator, because of a relatively moderate stance, “has become a Palestinian,” meant as an insult, a slur. We are in some land where “Christians” cheer an individual, already found guilty of sexual assault, who was likely headed for multiple felony convictions before the intervention of a discredited Supreme Court.

In this land of the free and home of the brave, we can no longer speak of deep-seated, systemic factors necessarily contributing to, if not largely responsible for social inequity and economic disparity. Any such analysis is now dismissed as “wokeism,” an ill-defined mechanism of dismissal by which structural approaches are summarily rejected as “ideology,” while affirming entrenched prejudice and ignorance.

In this new (yet familiar) realm, naked aggression is openly expressed, even celebrated, with an American president threatening the seizure of foreign lands. He muses that, if necessary, he will simply take what he wants (an attitude akin to sexual assault). He instructs his agents to round up and deport “illegals,” relocating them to infamous prisons in Central America, accusing them of crimes and gang affiliation – all without proof or due process, without the slightest transparency. We are in some dimension whereby masked government officials kidnap university students in broad daylight, whisking them away to jail cells far from family and residence, if not to some other country entirely, while others have their student visas rescinded. All for expressing political views – they were apparently mistaken that free speech is a right in the U.S. The Secretary of State has taken a step further, scouring the social media of prospective foreign students to prevent “undesirables” from entering the U.S. in the first place.

We now inhabit some bizarre domain wherein an anti-DEI movement (with “DEI” serving as the functional equivalent of the N-word), super-charged with the full backing of the White House, runs rampant, threatening to kneecap an entire system of education by withholding federal funds. The Smithsonian Institute and its crown jewel, the African-American History Museum, is likewise under assault. All unfolds absent any real discussion of the merits of the ideas informing the anti-DEI movement – there is no debate. Instead, anti-DEI mania is presented as normative, as obvious, as common sense. Indeed, when a military helicopter tragically crashed into a regional jet in D.C. in late January of 2025, it was the American president who immediately attributed the accident to DEI. When asked for proof of his assessment, he could offer none, replying instead that he made the statement because “I have common sense.” The racism and arrogance are as astounding as the irony is deep that an executive branch, replete with inept sycophants, presumes to assess the qualifications of anyone. Even so, the anti-DEI crusade moves swiftly, taking advantage of an ultimate subterfuge – that it is not itself an ideology.

Apparently motivated by some combination of revenge, exclusionary rejection, narcissism, threatened masculinity, entitlement, wealth, and provincialism, the White House threatens to withhold federal contracts in an effort to bring prestigious law firms to heel. Wielding the same scythe, the president threatens to withhold federal funding from leading universities, to subdue them, unconcerned with disrupting critical research projects. These universities are targeted, we are told, because they have tolerated antisemitism; though on its face commendable, this explanation is actually a cynical ruse, it is but pretext. For when viewed together with the treatment of so-called liberal law firms, the real objective becomes clear: the dismantling of dissent.

This White House has empowered the wealthiest man in the world to gut federal agencies, his DOGE brigade throwing thousands out of work. With apartheid-era nostalgia, he does so with glee, without concern that these are human beings with families. The assumption may have been that African American workers would be disproportionately affected, but the suffering is in fact widespread.

And now an unstable president, operating in the vacuum left by a feckless Congress derelict in its fiduciary responsibilities, imposes worldwide tariffs, initially all-encompassing in the chaos he characteristically produces, with an aim to humble an entire planet. Roiling equity and even bond markets, the policy’s folly quickly became apparent, the administration slowly scaling back in slapdash fashion. But what this so-called economic nationalism clearly reflects is an urge to dominate, more in line with a nineteenth-century view of the world. We are back to the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, only this time all must bow the knee – not just Africa – and not just to the U.S., but to this one individual (who last week crowed before a Republican fundraiser, “these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass”). Hubris at its height, a most exquisite demonstration. Meanwhile, the observation has often been made that MAGA is in essence a cult, the irrational veneration of its central figure at its core (rather than adherence to any set of principles). Nations can avoid a trade war if they come before him and genuflect, one by one. MAGA applauds, participating in a kind of hero worship recalling the Ancients. A form of idolatry, as if under some spell, captive to a spirit of strong delusion.

People of good will, African and non-African, did not ask for this fight. We did not seek it. But it is here, delivered to our front door. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” Martha and the Vandellas sing in the background. The song was about something else in 1965, but the lyrics are most à propos when repurposed for the current challenge.

We can only press forward now, drawing upon our faith and integrity, upon the rectitude of our cause, upon the lessons of the past. We will boycott and protest, and otherwise remonstrate. We will participate in the electoral process, working for better results. And we will build more effective coalitions. All of these efforts are critical, but none more than vision for a new day, by which we might exit the night. We have to decide, once and for all, whether we will forever remain oppressed, in a posture of perpetual protest, moored in constraint; a supplicant estate, ennobled in our suffering, “speaking truth to power.”  We must decide, once and for all, whether to mobilize around certain truths: that we all have the right to live on this planet; that we all have the right to share in its bounty; and that we have an inescapable responsibility to work toward the realization of these rights. Surviving the present crisis will be a tall order, make no mistake. But if that is all we do – if we only “survive,” and we do not take advantage of this moment to reimagine and work toward what can be, and in concrete ways – then we will have missed a critical opportunity.

So let us go to work, to ensure that what we are passing through now will never again come this way.

Mike Gomez