Roundup 

Since last week ICE has stepped up its deportation efforts, including arresting and detaining a third grader in New York. And in defiance or a court order, the Trump administration has made no move toward returning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a legal immigrate from Maryland who ICE deported to a prison in El Salvador. Update: as of Tuesday April 8, SCOTUS has temporarily blocked the order to return Abrego Garcia. 

Trump also continued his indiscriminate firing of government employees, decimating our health agencies in the middle of multiple health crises, the most recent being a strain of drug-resistant Gonorrhea that health experts were monitoring until their firing. 

In legal news, while Trump has been dealt more losses, AG Pam Bondi placed Erez Reuveni, an immigration lawyer at the DOJ, on administrative leave after he criticized Trump’s mishandling of Abrego Garcia’s case. Bodi claimed the reason was for not “zealously advocat[ing] on behalf of the United States. . .” A more convenient excuse there has never been.  

Also, reports say Amazon is in talks to buy Tik Tok. 

Good News 

Due to world markets tanking following Trump’s tariffs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have lost billions, though this is little solace to working class folks who’ve seen their 401k’s value shrink. 

Also, there is an update on Signal Gate: The Pentagon has assigned an inspector general to investigate whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared classified information in Signal group chats. 

But the major story since last week was the series of “Hands Off” protests held this past weekend across the country to protest Trump and Musk. An estimated 100,000 people attended the protest in Washington, D.C. alone. Barring a few incidents, the protests were peaceful, and more are schedule for April 19.   

This leads me to the topic of this week’s blog.

 

A Tale of Two Protests 

Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020, protests sprung up around the country under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, which sought justice for Floyd and police reform.  

Likewise, following the election of Trump for a second term, and Elon Musk’s role at DOGE and the subsequent chaos that has ensued due to their ham-fisted and often illegal actions, the Hands Off protest movement started.  

But where BLM was a movement by and for Black and Brown people, Hands Off has ostensible been a moment for and by white people. I say this because 92% of Black women and 80% of Black men voters went for Harris in 2024, while the majority of white men and woman went for Trump. 

But the contrast doesn’t end there. 

BLM protesters were met with hostility from police, including being sprayed with tear gas, shot with rubber bullets, and being arrested for stepping a toe outside the designated protest cage. Whereas, Hands Off protesters were allowed free movement, and in some instances the police blocked off the street for them. 

This disparity in treatment has gone unnoticed online, and it raises a good question: why so blatant mistreatment of one group and kid gloves with the other?   

To answer this question, we must first answer another one. 

Is This Who We Really Are?

When Trump was first elected (with the help of Russian interference and James Comey leaking details about Hillary Clinton’s emails days before the election), people asked if this was who we really were. And they asked it again when he was re-elected.  

But it’s not as if Trump came out of nowhere.  

This is who we’ve always been. The core of the US has always been rotten, for the same hand that wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” enslaved hundreds of Africans and also wrote they were only three-fifths a person. 

The land of the free has been anything but for Black Americans. 

We and our ancestors have fought and severed the US since before it was a country, and how were we repaid?  Centuries of enslavement, followed by Jim Crow, red lining, experimenting on us like we were animals.

And when we managed to form thriving communities they were torn apart, flooded, and bombed in some cases by racist whites. Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rosewood, Florida; Wilmington, North Carolina; the list spans centuries and the country, a history writ large in blood and Black bodies.  

The truth is this is always who the US was and continues to be.  

Because instead of addressing the racism at its core and have conversations around race, people like Trump want to pretend none of the above ever happened, such as his latest stunt removing all references to Harriet Tubman from the National Park’s webpage on the Under Ground Railroad.  

Be for fucking real. 

This hatred of Black people and Blackness is baked into America through the concept of American Exceptionalism, and the concept of whiteness is central to American Exceptionalism. From the Founding fathers to Jesus, the dominant image of America from its beginning was as a promised land for whites, and it was Manifest Destiny to exterminate any nonwhite person that stood in their way. 

 Thus, the myth of white supremacy was born to justify these atrocities. 

  White supremacy and whiteness as concepts are predicated on the hatred of Black Americans and Blackness. Italians, Germans, the Irish, they were all not recognized as white at one point and it was only by their assimilating and embracing the hatred of Black folks and Blackness that they got their white pass. 

But white supremacy is so virulent, it has Black folks across the African diaspora looking down their nose at their Black American cousins. 

 So, with this context, it’s no surprise when white bodies are the ones protesting, police leave them be. As the late great Paul Mooney said, “They have the complexion for the protection.” 

In summation, yes this is who America always was and is. 

I leave you with this quotation from Maya Angelou: 

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”