For the past week or so, I’ve been drowning in a horde of post-election coverage – whose fault is it that Trump won, who came out to vote, lawsuits about voter suppression, various rehashes of the same tired consensus that the Electoral College sucks and so on. Most of the discourse I’ve read is as much of a garbage fire as the rest of the media’s punditry has been this whole election year. But the adage holds true – you’ll find some diamonds in the dirt if you look hard enough. It’s admirable that many liberals are finally joining Antifa organizations in taking action against an incoming Trump administration, but as one comrade of mine said, “where you been?”

A glaring issue that many leftists have noticed is a failure to indict capitalism as the fuel behind the machine we call White Supremacy that has found so overt a figurehead in the Orange Monster that calls itself Donald Trump. As my elder comrade, Yasmin Nair, says,

“…large segments of liberals and the left who are now fetishizing the Working Class in a desperate attempt to come to terms with what happened.”

She goes on to discuss the myriad reasons that this sudden attention to lower-class whites comes at a convenient time when Democrats are scrambling to find reasons for an incompetent and stagnant Clinton’s loss to an openly bigoted misogynist con man. And we ourselves on the Left, she says, are centering Whiteness, forgetting that increasing swathes of the “masses” that we study so prominently in Marxist critiques of history, are in fact people of color. Yet this is only part of the "American Nightmare" that Brother Malcolm spoke of – that structure of discrimination that Trump’s planning against Muslims? It already exists. Breaking Treaties? Obama has done little or nothing to prevent corporate interests from forcibly pushing Natives out of North Dakota. Deportations? Obama made Bush and Reagan look like hippies with how many Latinxs he ejected or has stored away in detention camps. President Obama’s surveillance state, built to aid “national security” is the same Big Brother that Trump will wield with impunity against the marginalized.

Liberals are in disbelief, thinking America is “better than this." I told my mother this and I’ll tell you too: We were never great. We have always been this racist. The reason my grandfather chose Trump over the safety of my father and sister, over your dignity, is the same reason any other white American did: Trump is the American Dream. And he wants to believe it.

The machine of Whiteness, by its very nature, instinctually clings to state violence to protect itself. That is our history in this country, and across the globe. And this being the reality, millions of Americans are Amerikkkans by default, if not by proxy.

I hope you know by now what a monstrous lie that the United States is built on, that we made ourselves powerful by our own merit and not by massacring indigenous tribes and enslaving an entire continent of people to construct our economy. We must come to a reckoning with the Nightmare, and defy it. For now, we must contemplate and reflect on what this means, listen to the decades of scholarship by the likes of Professors West and Alexander and truly look into this abyss that we, as whites and other unconscious accomplices of empire, have ignored for so long.