Response to Trump's authoritarian regime that is fueling an already hostile MEGA base and "end of days" Christian Evangelicals.

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But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.

James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village.

There are painted gangs of raiders, arsonists, thugs. Masked. Those trying to survive the catastrophe look out for the painted ones. All are desperate, and given the world they live in, the raiders and the survivors carry guns. Both use these weapons but not to solve the trouble both groups are in. They use weapons to secure water, food, shelter. Twenty-four hours and seven days a week all are on alert. If Parable of the Sower reads as if there is no Right or Left, the two are indistinguishable, that's because they are but only recognize the Other as Other. Strangers.

Are they really?

I would prefer to write on what is happening in Gaza. Despite the effort of the US and UK governments' attempts to ban support for Gaza, I'm angry about my taxes contributing to the drone attacks that is intended to reduce Gaza to rubble. The reality of a fascist takeover in the US is real, as real as the US's dream of building a paradise for the wealthy where Palestinians lived.

In the US, the Trump administration, in violation of Posse Comitatus, has sent the military to assist ICE in rounding up immigrants, who might be standing in a group of three or four, speaking Spanish, or speaking with an accent or just appearing darker than white Americans. As a black American, I'm not asked here in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to show my papers, passport or driver's license, but I know the history of places such as South Africa where that was once a norm, in a majority black country.

Contrary to South Africa, where I live is an enclave of whiteness. At times, I feel as if I were the contamination, the threat, the criminal among others who look like me and who live where I was born, Chicago. For many in Wisconsin, Chicago is a crime-ridden city, filled with black and latino/a people aiming to rob if not kill white Americans. I imagine folks in Kenosha listen to Trump when he describes Chicago as a killing field.

I remember years ago, a now-deceased friend reminding me that I won't want to fit in a world that denies facts, the reality of a world without the mythical narrative of white innocence. White innocence blankets everything and makes it seem to those who believe that black Americans can never fit in - no more than immigrants here or Gazans living within a mythical narrative that describes them as outsiders. Hamas terrorists, every last one.

Something would be wrong if you managed to fit in!

And I know this. I know this all too well.

I live in this senior complex where I'm, nonetheless, a stranger. Out of place.

It did not occur to me - possibly because I am an American - that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro, writes Baldwin in his essay, Stranger in the Village. Twenty-five years ago, I did consider the move to Wisconsin to teach at a campus in its university system would land me in an enclave where residents of the town, neighbors, even students would be baffled by the black woman, the only black professor in the English department. I was quickly dispelled of any notion that I might be considered by those fellow white colleagues, residents, neighbors, students worth the respect of a human being.

Here, in Kenosha, the residents had seen a black before, but somehow I had landed in their place as if a contaminant, with agency: I was there to invade a racially homogeneous people.

Our healthcare system in the US is a joke. Born with a heart condition meant that I could receive social security when I was 22, as my mother wanted me to do. Instead, I opted to apply to college, and once I was accepted, I had plans of being as independent as possible. My parents had younger children at home. But not only did I owe money once I left college, I also learned that I couldn't let employers know I had a pre-existing condition.

And then there's the other betrayal. It's the 1970s and Black Power and feminism. Phyllis Schlafly is calling on women, white women, to return home and become wives and mothers. Black Power is made to sound like the misunderstood meaning of the word jihad. Today, black lives matter too is a four-letter word.

I am accused today of being racist as I was accused of being militant, which meant, I was too black. Being racist and black means being too black. Concerned at all about the plight of black people means we, who are, reject white America. We mean to overturn it!

I mean to overturn the notion of whiteness! In my own life, I try. I won't be complicit with the normalization of lies about blacks and crime and the solution to make it safe for white America. Reuters reports that 80% of extremism-related US murders in 2022 was committed by white supremacists. And such crime is on the rise. There are still too many Americans who don't want to see a steady progression toward a democratic society here in the US.

Like Baldwin, decades ago, it's still notable when I, and other blacks, are looked on as if freaks of nature. I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know.

I was in the laundry room the other day with the woman who, for over two years, harassed me and forced me to move to the next building in the complex this past June. I didn't expect to encounter her in the main building's laundry room, and once I did, I wasn't going to back up and wait until she left. I went in. I had my back to her as I pulled my clothes out of the dryer. The silence was loud and spoke of the divide between this white woman and myself.

I thought of all the anguish and rage I knew couldn't be expressed among a white management at the time. Racism was something only I gave any thought to because, after all, I was racist! I felt her eyes tearing at my back. No whip. For now.

A day later, I ran into another white resident in the same laundry room. He moved into my old apartment. He wasn't experiencing any trouble with the woman below. No trouble at all! His sister occupies the apartment across from this woman. So brother and sister. And that matters!

As Baldwin notes all those decades before the rise of an authoritarian regime, from whites emanates a certain authority that he could never possess. Neither could I.

As much as I try to walk with the authority granted to me by my existence as a human being and ancestor of those who built this country, I, nonetheless, find that I am always to be made aware that I'm not the one who knows.

Trump does! He knows not only that blacks are criminal but also that blacks have been contaminating US history with false narratives surrounding the extent to which slavery was traumatizing for us as it was for the country.

Obviously, slavery traumatized the US, so much so, a war had to be fought when white Southerners began imagining a country that had to be shared with former enslaved people. A nightmare, as many envisioned, would become a reality. White Americans would become strangers.

How long ago? Fifty or forty years ago, a once-and-for-all to end any further all-once-and-for-all pogrom!

Remove any historical reference to slavery or Jim Crow. Remove the icon images, such as The Scourged Back and those famous lynching picnics. Books and artifacts. Call into question the Civil Rights Act

Replacing historical references to the enslavement of blacks, our resistance, and contributions will be patriotic references to Confederate soldiers

It doesn't make my life here at this complex any easier when, as Baldwin writes, white residents do stop and wonder when they see me about the stranger who reflects back to them. White America has prioritized the idea whiteness so that even latino/as, Asians, and some blacks are seen among a sea of white faces at Trump rallies.

The rejection of US's history of violence against indigenous, black, and latino/a people fits in with the intent to become so normalized that everyone will once again believe white is the way to be human.

This isn't Switzerland. It's the US where brutality, inflicted on blacks, was normalized. A rite of passage for white young men, like those portrayed in Toni Morrison's Beloved, received lessons from their uncle and slavemaster, to rape and milk Sethe. Later will come scenes of black men and women swinging from trees. Later still, Emmett Till's deformed body lies in his coffin. Crossing the Pettus Bridge, there are black bodies trampled upon by law enforcement.

The presence of black people in the US means there is always a war waging in America. This portion of the country wants so much to hold on to that era before the Civil War when blacks knew one thing: their place! In the meantime, whites roamed the country and the world as free citizens not strangers.

There is Gaza, its people dying from drone strikes and hunger daily. In the meantime, Israel's narrative offers the Gazans as deserving of the violence. They are, after all, not human. They are barbaric. Violent!

According to PBS, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health, some 60,000 Gazans have been killed since Oct 7. Some 90% have been displaced. In the month of July, 2025, 60 people, according to the World Health Organization cited by PBS, died of starvation. Over 140,000 Gazans have been wounded. This violence can happen and be justified by the Israel government if the world recognizes Palestinians as strangers.

However, the protesters around the world suggests the campaign to make Palestinians strangers among the human species isn't working.

In the US, a regime of anti-black haters are trying to return the US to the days of plantations where existed, so the narrative of a great America goes, happy enslaved blacks. Blacks were perversely needed to work the fields of tobacco and cotton to establish profits for slaveholders but also to establish American commerce and its industries. Since Reconstruction our value has been perceived by the white supremacist to be of no use in a white America. What was the practice of lynching and burning down black towns if not the effort by Southern participants and silent Northerners to get rid of the black presence in America?

There's Trump and Netanyahu's dream for the Palestine.

What is at bottom with the efforts of this authoritarian regime when it comes to black Americans? As with any authoritarian regime, it's about turning the everything upside down. Or right side up for those who for some 50 years have felt put upon by black Americans' demands for justice. In America, Trump's rise to the presidency again may not benefit the MAGA crowd in the long run but his rise is opening the door for equity-challenged Americans to see strangers in black Americans.

It's a black woman above them. That is, a stranger! One with books and a terminal degree. What happened to our supremacy?

I don't sleep in my bedroom. I sleep on the floor of my living room. Seventy-two. But I dont have time to meet with neighbors and tell them what a horrible womenshe is as my neighbor does! I'm alone. No witnesses to the pattern of harassment that is relentless, daily, nightly. Supporters of Trump and the Right feel it. They know it's coming. It's their turn. White America's turn - never to relinquished to the stranger!

But I'm not a stranger, am I? No more than the Haitian or Mexican citizen or undocumented immigrants. No more than the indigenous. Black people aren't strangers in America, writes Baldwin. The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact hat white men are the creators of civilization and therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. In turn, Baldwin continues, makes the Negro-in-America a form of insanity that overtakes white men.

When I do walk about conscious of their authority, and I'm also aware that this whole business, as Baldwin understood, is insane. And yet, I do know something, and that is, that white America refuses to open its eyes to this insane relationship that is destroying this country.

We are not strangers! So where does this leave us?

It is true, writes Baldwin, that black America has endured despite the terrorization. But its also true that if white America continues to shut its eyes to the insanity it will only invite their own destruction.

What will it be?

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.