The Daily Reid: fascism, deportation, and the politics of Black rest

How to tell if your country is going all "black boot on face" on you...

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How would you know if America became a fascist state? What signs would tell you that it happened? One way you might be able to tell, is that first the history of minorities and disfavored groups’ contributions to the nation … then the very existence of their identities and stories … and finally actual people begin disappearing. And when they disappear, they sometimes wind up in foreign gulags, where sometimes, the regime has paid to send them. Here’s how Amnesty International describes the purpose of disappearing people:

Enforced disappearance is frequently used as a strategy to spread terror within society. The feeling of insecurity and fear it generates is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared, but also affects communities and society as a whole.

A global issue

Once largely used by military dictatorships, disappearances now happen in every region in the world and in a wide range of contexts. They are commonly carried out in internal conflicts, particularly by governments trying to repress political opponents or by armed opposition groups.

Who is at risk?

Human rights defenders, relatives of those already disappeared, key witnesses and lawyers seem to be particular targets.

And it’s helpful if the foreign autocrats taking money to house deported people in their prisons boast that they will not send them back to their families.

Which brings me to a briefing today inside the Oval Office, where Donald Trump assembled the key cast members of his regime — whose near-monoracial esthetics seem intended to buttress the idea that there is a superior and preferred identity in this nation that even those who share a “foreign” ethnicity can and should aspire to. The purpose of the briefing was to tout the the regime-to-regime cooperation with Nayib Bukele, the young autocratic leader of El Salvador whose government the Trump regime is paying roughly $25,000 a head to take disappeared immigrants accused of being gang members and terrorists (without adjudication of course.

At the photo op, a CNN reporter interrupted the autocrat mutual admiration society to ask about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a construction worker married to an American citizen, and the father of three American children, who has lived in the U.S., in the state of Maryland, for fourteen years, until the day he was snatched, and rendered to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered the regime to facilitate Mr. Garcia’s return to his family. The regime refuses, as does their new partner in the Americas.

Did you get all of that?

Despite what the courts have said and ordered, Homeland Security Secretary (and costume fetishist) Kristi Nome and Attorney General / Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi continue to insist that Mr. Garcia is a gang member and terrorist. Marco Rubio, who has clearly shorn himself of any moral compass or even compassion for a fellow Latino father and husband, eagerly joins the regime’s in-house Nosferatu, Stephen Miller in reducing Mr. Garcia to a non-human. To the regime, he is nothing more than an “illegal.” A gang member. A terrorist. This despite no court having ever found any of that to be true, and his having received no due process. In America. This while the Salvadoran president grins and smirks that he can no more return Mr. Garcia to America than he can sneak a terrorist across the U.S. border. And the regime conducted this lavish display of cruelty and lawlessness while continuing to defy a federal court order by maintaining their ban on the Associated Press from the Oval to cover this latest outrage.

Disappearing people … street kidnappings and threatened ideological deportations … plus the open threat of including U.S. citizens in the next auction to El Salvador’s notorious prison…

That’s how you know.

Read this piece by Sherrilyn Ifill:

Americans Must Prepare to Fight for the Citizenship Rights of U.S. Prisoners

Where have all the Black protesters gone?

It seems to be the question of the moment: why have Black Americans largely stayed away from the mass protests sweeping the nation over the doge layoffs, the Elon takeover of the federal government (and our private data), and the many other outrages from this regime? After all, many of the attacks are on Black people, Black history, Black museums and even the Black Lives Matter mural in D.C.

So were Black women really at brunch while mainly older white Americans marched in the April 5th “Hands Off” protests? Are we seriously sitting on a wall sipping wine while America burns?

Actually, no.

Black women — AKA the 92 percent — likely will not be marching en masse anytime soon with the government workers, angry farmers and others populating protests nationwide nearly every day. We’re not out there picketing at Tesla dealerships or burning Tesla cybertucks, though most of us wouldn’t buy one of those hideous things if a dealer paid us. Most of us would say, literally damn Elon Musk straight to hell if we weren’t so churchy and it wasn’t so close to Easter. We see him for the apartheid-era white South African he is. We’re aware of the settled lawsuits alleging racism at Tesla, even before the very weird, oddly saluting, Ketamine-fueled billionaire took over Twitter and turned it into a neo-nazi trap house before purchasing Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

We truly get how dangerous and destabilizing his and Republicans’ determination to gut Medicaid and Social Security so they can replace income taxes on the rich with 19th century tariffs that are already cooking the economy are. Trumponomics is making it just as hard to pay our kids’ college tuition or afford pre-school without Head Start as it is for every American. In some cases, it’s even worse. And that’s not even to get into the spreading measles and the women dying because they can’t get an abortion or getting prosecuted for miscarriages — also disproportionately us.

Our 80 percenters — namely Black men — likely won’t be marching with y’all, either. They’re too busy helping us figure out how to keep the choices six in ten white voters made from eliminating HBCUs, wiping out Black antiquities and museums, and burning the history of our presence in this country to cinders, along with any book written by someone who looks like us. Plus they have to worry about what’s sure to be skyrocketing mass incarceration enriching private prisons (foreign and domestic) and executions under Trump using laws disproportionately targeting them, while ending consent decrees against violent police departments.

To reiterate: the vast majority of Black folks did not make these choices and we keep trying to tell y’all to stop supporting Republicans, but you keep refusing to listen to us. In fact, if every White voter was beamed into space during elections, Republicans would never win. And that’s even with the presence of people like Byron Donalds and Clarence Thomas in the electorate, plus Latinos for Trump.

The media was hot to trot on the Huge Gains Trump Made With Black and Latino Voters but it amounted in the end to 12 percent of Black voters and a 55 percent Latino vote for Trump that was basically negated by the 60-40 Latina preference for Kamala Harris. Trump definitely did better than in 2020 with voters of color, particularly among Gen X and Gen Z men and my doggone Gen Xers. But that didn’t amount to the Black-Brown coup the media so eagerly tried to sell.

What was consistent in 2024 was that six in ten white voters — who comprise nearly 70 percent of the electorate — really, really wanted Trump to be president again.

And a third of voters decided, for a lot of reasons, including disappointment with Democrats and the economy, and a huge messaging failure by a party that couldn’t stop defending The System long enough to listen to people’s actual struggles or reckon with the genocide in Gaza and eke out a win against a toxic celebrity.

We can re-explain the election a million times, and it won’t matter. And we appreciate the 52 percent of college educated white women and 60 percent of Latinas and AAPI voters who rocked with us, but it’s hard to find the time to do much commiserating right now. We’re terribly focused on figuring out how to Trump tariff-proof our financial and economic lives, save our museums, books and historical heirlooms, plus our HBCUs and MBDA-funded businesses, update our passports so the Project 2025 Christian nationalist Commanders can’t trap us here and try to turn us into Marthas, and protect what’s left of our right to vote. In short, we’ve got our hands full mitigating the dire consequences of the electoral choices of 80 million mainly white voters, plus a handful of our own duped people, and a lot of pull the ladder up behind me Latino immigrant voters on our own families and communities.

In some ways, our deep disappointment at being abandoned once again by what should be our working class allies has sharpened the smooth edges of our public empathy. The number of Black Tiktokers doing a version of “sorry for your deportation but I shall be napping or brunching as you see yourselves out,” is kind of breathtaking — though make no mistake, most of us fully understand that if and when Trump shifts to deporting U.S. citizens, with John Roberts’ likely sign-off, we’re very much on the menu. We’re just choosing to resist the regime in our own strategic ways.

The mainstream media is taking notice of Black folks’ absence in the streets, claiming without evidence, that part of the reason we aren’t marching is a sense of futility in fighting Trump this time.

Not so.

We don’t think marching is futile — we perfected marching as protest. We’re just taking a break from putting our bodies on the line for TV Pete’s “war fighters” with Mein Kampf in the military library but not “How To Be An Antiracist” to do what he and Trump would likely love to have them do if we were out front, and allowing white Americans to fight for their democracy on the front lines for awhile. We know that the ugliness being visited on Latino and other immigrants, and pro-Palestine supporters (many of whom are us) will be at our doorstep soon. That’s why we’re doing the work that’s needed to shore up our families, communities, educational institutions and legal organizations, to protect them from the horrors your Trumpy uncles voted for.

And not for nothing, but this notion that Blacks are not working has a history that isn’t pretty.

The idea that unless we’re working in front of you, we’re not working, or that if we’re not protesting beside you, we have no desire to protest, is so deeply offensive, it’s exhausting to have to explain it to liberals. At this point, we expect magas to be racist, and white moderates to to be complicit. But white liberals? You’re supposed to know better.

The implication that we’re lazily watching America burn contains the implication that we’re lazy at all. And that’s just not a possible scenario in a country we literally physically built for free. White Americans need to have some hard conversations with their Republican relatives and friends, many of whom will be hurting because of Trump’s economic policies in particular, and go right back to voting Republican in the next midterm elections (assuming we still have free and fair elections by then.) Same goes for many Latino families, particularly Cuban-American and Venezuelan immigrant families in South Florida who are getting some illmatic surprises from the man they trusted to “just deport the bad ones.” Trust me, we’re confronting the realities of those in our community — particularly young and Gen X Black folks who made the same choice and even now are watching some Black celebrities suck up to the man his own former VP called “maybe America’s Hitler” and whose allies are plotting to make him president for life.

By the way, Bukele is both a fan of and a model for Trump … down to his right wing populist politics, anti-globalist language, emergency rule, his determination to blow through term limits, and belated rhetoric about God…

There’s clearly work to do in all of our communities. So let’s all do our homework. One part of ours is the upcoming State of the People Tour, in which the dozens of Black organizations that have never stopped working to shore up our communities will be continuing that work in ten majority Black cities over the course of nearly two months, culminating in a community conference on Juneteenth.

In other words: don’t assume that because we’re not doing what you’re doing, that we’re not doing anything.

When a relay team runs a race, it involves an intricate blend of rest — run — sprint — — and release. Each member of the team waits for the baton to come to them, standing at rest but on light, shifting feet, ready to take the baton, take off sprinting, and pass it on. After each exchange, the runner gets to rest again.

That’s what we’re doing. We’re in the relay yet again in America. It’s exhausting. But we know what has to be done.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.