I realize, of late, I’ve been writing about anti-imperialism 101 without giving contextualization for how the oppression of folks in the global South relates to marginalized struggles in the United States. I would like to note that expressing solidarity (whether verbally, on the ground in the streets, in word and deed, etc.) with people who are resisting colonization, enslavement and many other *bad* structures, to understate the problem, should not be conditional. It is the responsibility of people living in the United States, especially those who the government extends the privileges of citizenship, to unlearn the propaganda fed to us, to support struggle without idealistic conditioning.

For example, the Venezuelan government is currently grappling with a fascist-led opposition that is intent on toppling the Maduro adminstration in favor of a more corporate, right-wing regime in the manner of other Latin American revolutions who fell to proxy agitators. The Libyan people are now dealing with actual slave markets in their streets because of regime change. The invasion of Iraq has resulted in a region beset by sectarian violence and Wahhabist warmongering. Western agitation against the DPRK threatens to destabilize the Korean peninsula and endanger countless citizens on either line of the DMZ. Ukraine remains in the grip of oil barons and neo-Nazis. Maybe this doesn’t bother the average American person because we’ve bought into the idea that our view of the world, our capitalist paradigm, that we are entitled to define everyone else in the world as “Other” in relation to us. I’m not here for that - it’s nonsense.

What I have meant to provoke you into thinking is this: How do these various foreign political situations relate to US workers? Of late, POTUS Trump is intent on building a bigger version of the border fence to our south, justifying obscene budget cuts to education policy and further militarizing the border police - in so doing, Trump is looking at two demographics of workers for his labor: inmates, and legal workers. Of the former, there is aplenty, and I must remind you that US prisoners are effectively going without proper compensation (and if you have some kind of case against that, you might be a capitalist). Of the latter, there is a shortage, since Trump campaigned on a platform that demonized undocumented laborers, many of whom are folks of Mesoamerican origin (Mexicanos, Guatemaltecos, de El Salvador, and so on). So what then? Do the elites of White America realize that their precious Empire is built on the backs of slaves, of exploiting foreign labor when convenient?

I highly doubt Trump or his constituents see the irony in this. White supremacy as ideology and mythology, from the rich to the poor, sells whites a vision of America that recognizes their achievements alone, solely within their own context without any regard for the folks of color, the immigrants, and African Americans who made this empire possible (and frequently, these three categories of labor intersect and interact, and it would be remiss of me to overlook that). Domestic oppression in the United States, in all the myriad forms that it manifests, is connected to the building of White wealth. That wealth is predicated on a sincere White belief that the labor, lives, and humanity of non-whites is fundamentally disposable. From the biological essentialism of eugenics, to the racialized conception of African and indigenous people, there have always been constructs arising to explain the rightfulness of the accumulation of this profane wealth.

The reason I name this as White supremacy, why I connect domestic oppression to foreign oppression, is because it is necessary to name and politicize evil. Such is the first step towards solidarity.