At this point, it is clear that ICE will not stop killing people. There is no boundary for their violence either, even if there are targets. Citizenship will not protect anyone from the violence of this masked mob. It should also be clear that whiteness will not protect you. White people are not the targets of this campaign of terror, yet their racial status does not protect them from its violence. ICE is a nativist white supremacist project that will gladly sacrifice the white folk they deem as unworthy or enemies.
Many will ask: how did we get here? For those who believed the lies of the US cold war propaganda campaigns, this violence will appear new. Especially for those who believed Black people deserved the violence of incarceration and police terror, they will wonder why the police are only now attacking “innocents.”
None of this is new. Of course, the violence against black people, indigenous people, and other people of color is nothing new. Yet, even violence against white people is not new, even if it appears to be. The police kill hundreds of white people every year and no “All Lives Matter” protest organization has emerged to defend their lives.
White supremacists have always killed white people, in spite of their rhetoric. The KKK murdered poor white folk and raped white women they deemed too poor and dirty to be “proper” women. The category of whiteness always excluded many people who try to claim it. Capitalists have even less loyalty to whiteness. For a capitalist, whiteness is merely a tool to use or discard when necessary. Profit is not loyal. So, the ruthless competition to accumulate profit cannot be loyal either. Whiteness is a fantasy that consumes itself, always able to deem a new group of people as unworthy of its protected status. In the end, nobody is truly exempt. White folk would be smart to learn this lesson and not fall for the illusions of its security.
The conflation of whiteness with American nationalism produces this cognitive dissonance. A belief that to be American means to be exempt from the violence of this country. One purchases innocence through being ignorant and accepting the lies fed to you. For black folk and other people of color, we have never been able to purchase innocence nor be protected by it. You can purchase innocence with ignorance, but the US is telling its citizens, that innocence will no longer save you. Your allegiance to the flag will not save you. Your taste for patriotic violence will not save you. Your belief in the lies and propaganda campaigns will not save you.
The United States appears to be a country to many people – a nation to belong to and identify with. The US has a flag and an anthem, yet its history betrays the innocence of its image. The 13 colonies were the product of empire that became their own imperial force. Eventually the US would become a global empire that serves the transnational capitalist class that uses the government as a tool to help their accumulation of profits and resources. In the middle of the twentieth century, the US was both the center of the global economy and the most powerful military. Now, the US remains a powerful empire but is no longer the unipolar center of the global economy. The waning quality of US imperial power has changed the relationship of the capitalist class to US government. This has also changed the structure of US statecraft, away from neoliberal multiculturalism towards an open embrace of white nativist illiberalism and fascism. These changes to the global empire’s standing changes the government’s relationship to its citizen.
The capitalists are no longer interested in offering a middle-class life to anybody in the country, including white Americans. The median age of first-time home buyers is 40 and overall median age of homeownership is 59 years old. Six figures no longer guarantees one access to even basic affordability in most major metropolitan areas. The middle class no longer exists as a viable dream for the majority Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha (and is no longer a reality for most folks of any generation). The amount of wealth owned by the top 1% is greater than the robber baron era. This will only get worse. Without being able to offer positive middle-class benefits, the state has responded by giving its citizens nativist spectacles of racial violence aided by algorithmic platforms and generative AI. ICE is a big part of this racial nativist spectacle – a redistribution of pain to offset the lack of a redistribution of wealth.
Our turn towards domestic militarism is not new of course. This was all a part of the rise of neoliberalism as the major political doctrine uniting both centrist-oriented parties. Neoliberalism espoused the market as the solution for social problems and advocating for the destruction of the welfare state and labor protections and tax breaks for the wealth. This was a large transfer of wealth to the capitalist class, which is how we have moved towards our current affordability crisis. Yet, the lie of neoliberalism was that they advocated for small government. The dark side of neoliberalism was the rise of mass incarceration wherein certain populations of the working class and poor were scooped up into the criminal justice system. War on Drugs and eventually the War on Terror built a sprawling network of government surveillance, police entities, and carceral systems.
Neoliberalism offset its blatant racist policing and carceral system with diversity management, operating primarily in its educational and corporate sectors. Through the desegregation of higher education and corporate diversity efforts, certain people of color and white women found new avenues towards managerial and service jobs that needed labor. The height of this was the election of Barack Obama and the corporate diversity initiatives made in reaction to the George Floyd protests. Multiculturalism was the mask slapped onto neoliberalism’s blatant stealing of resources and fascistic carceral-surveillance system.
Well, this nice mask of multiculturalism has been ripped off. Universities are now being pummeled by the Trump administration for their diversity efforts. Corporations have received the message and have shuttered their DEI offices. The time of neoliberal incorporation via diversity is over. We must ask the question: why has capital decided to abandon this project?
There are many answers to this. The easy answer is Trump and that is what the democrats and their associates would love to oversimplify this down to. As with most things with Trump, we must look past his persona and bluster to recognize the alliance of capital and political interests that made this possible. It's not simply cowardice, though it is that. This is about a transformation in the structure of global capital and the politics of this empire's particular capitalist class.
Another way to look at it would be that capitalists no longer feel they need the multicultural base of labor they once pushed for. They will use automation to eliminate many entry-level jobs and other information management jobs they once needed people with college degrees for. They will not eliminate all jobs. Yet, automation will allow them to depress wages and further dominate the labor that remains in the service industries. Greater exploitation means they no longer need to aggressively recruit. Add that to the pressure from the current administration and we see that for many corporations multiculturalism is no longer an easy branding victory. The juice is no longer worth the squeeze, so to speak.
Some corporations will remain with the DEI efforts if they see a business strategy in it, but it will no longer be the major face of bipartisan corporate strategy. Some of the biggest losers of this will actually be black and POC republicans, but I won’t hold my breath for them to realize the irony.
This current administration represents an accelerated endpoint of neoliberalism instead of a complete break. The mistake we have made is describing neoliberalism as anything other than what it has always been: the Counter-Revolution of the Capitalist Class. The distinction is that former neoliberals were politicians, who are managers by class largely. Musk and Trump are owners and are thus completing the fascistic dream within neoliberalism: to turn the state over to the ultimate market logic, private ownership. Private ownership is a fascistic form. The corporation is the ultimate fascist environment.
Contemporary fascism is simply neoliberalism with its multicultural mask off. We have been heading in this direction since the latter half of the 20th century, at least.
ICE represents an acceleration of the domestic militarism of the past that relied on local and state level policing. This former infrastructure of mass incarceration has not ceased, yet a federal policing infrastructure has added a new layer of state violence. In this regard, we are in unprecedented territory because there has never been a federal police force of this size and budget. McCarthy era policing did not have a federal police entity with this kind of budget. The FBI has never approach anything close to their capabilities. The closest comparisons would be the times the national guard have been federalized or the civil war. Both are bad metaphors. Federalizing is a temporary action, even if the time limitations are indefinite. The civil war was a breaking of the constitution, of which the legality is still on tenuous grounds.
ICE is a legal and perpetual federal policing authority that operates in the legal grey zone of the border. There is no invocation of exceptional executive power necessary in order to deploy them. They do not have immediate checks other than the executive branch. The legal options of fighting them are pretty limited and seem to be untested. This political struggle will demand us to hold onto struggle because I do not see any immediate or short-term legal remedies that are possible. Understanding the historical roots of this moment is the only way to find our way out of this. We must pick up the freedom struggles that neoliberalism was built to crush.
Racial liberalism and multiculturalism are dead. Abolition, community self-defense, and open defiance are literally the only way forward.
People thought abolition was a pie-in-the-sky thing. In actuality abolition is about our survival. It is either abolition or tyranny. There is no middle. The police do not serve you. They never have. They never will. There is only one path to change this. You either understand class warfare or allow tyranny to grow.
Nicholas Brady is a Black writer from Baltimore and an Assistant Professor of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. His scholarly work investigates the ways that Black flesh conceptually disturbs normative understandings of technology, machine intelligence, the political, the urban, ecology, sexuality, communication, and social change. He is currently at work on a monograph exploring the relationship between blackness, sound, and artificial intelligence.
You can find more of his work here: https://lnk.bio/nicholasbrady