Brown Shirts, White Nationalists, and Black Lives: Forging an Anthropolitics
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The first Trump administration unleashed or at the very least uncovered longstanding latent white supremacy woven into the fabric of a settler colony built on plantation slavery. The interregnum was Biden our time; pressing pause, performative virtue signaling while failing to address root causes. The 2024 election saw the possibility of the first woman, first Black woman, and first Asian woman, being elected president. With a hastily assembled platform, Harris surged at the polls until JD Vance spread deliberate falsehoods about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which Trump boosted on the debate stage that evening. Following the 900-page blueprint, the sequel was far worse than the first: ICE and the National Guard’s attacks on communities, from Los Angeles to Chicago and the Twin Cities, attacking public education, ending DEI on the national stage and genocidal wars in Iran and murders in the Caribbean leading up to a kidnapping in Venezuela. The multifaceted crisis calls for solidarity between groups working on different issues, seeing the intimate connection between immigration and anti-Blackness, and anti-Haitianism in particular (Darbouze 2021; Dougé-Prosper 2021; Dubuisson and Schuller 2024). Haiti is in many real ways the ongoing foil to U.S. white supremacy, as well as warning for the real human costs of global racial capitalism. Lessons from Haitian understandings of the interconnection of seemingly distant crises are urgently needed right now.
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