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The Life You Didn’t Save Is Your Own [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-23

I am writing this post as a warning to all of us and a call for us to “read the writing on the wall.” While those of us who are not white supremacists, transphobes, homophobes, and sexists are dismayed by the rhetoric that is already so boldly on display, and by the Executive orders signed yesterday, recognize that many among us are in grave danger and that democracy itself is teetering on the edge of collapse, I am not sure we quite realize what the “end game” of Trump and his allies is.

America has long been engaged in dissimulating its agenda to maintain itself as a white, Christian, patriarchal state. We are seeing ICE raids targeting so-called “undocumented” migrants and immigrants in plain sight, but we are not seeing the long term implications of this “crack down” on immigrants and the current attempt to overturn the 14th amendment, which originally gave African Americans citizenship and has since been used to naturalize children born to immigrants within the borders of the United States.

The tactic of this administration, which extends a broader tactic of American society long before Trump’s ascendency, is to push through practices and laws against a group that the other segments of the society do not identify with in order to establish a rule of law that will eventually affect groups that were not ostensibly the original target. So while for this phase of Trump’s plan the targets of denying birthright citizenship are primarily those people who enter the United States at the southern border, the overturning of the 14th amendment will eventually be used to redefine the legal status of black people in this country. Without the 14th amendment, most black people in this country—except perhaps those with a white, US born parent—will legally no longer be citizens.

If you take a look at the Executive order published as of 1/20/25 on the White House website, it says that the 14th amendment was “rightly” meant to counteract the Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to African Americans. However, Dred Scott has never been overturned and so, without the 14th amendment, the citizenship status of black people in America is in question. When Trump said that immigrants from the Southern border were taking black jobs, he was speaking of agrarian and service jobs—not jobs in tech, healthcare, education, politics, or entertainment. With lack of legal citizenship being used to define a person as criminal, and with the language of the 13th amendment offering freedom only to those who have not committed a crime, the revocation of the 14th amendment would return most black Americans to the status of a slave. And, with a vacuum of agrarian labor due to mass deportations, this enables those imprisoned for the crime of being “illegally” in the United States (and with nowhere to be deported to) to fill the gap left in the agrarian labor market with free, black American labor.

Does this sound familiar?

If you think this is hyperbolic, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Many communities in America believe that all of this will miss them. Many black people may think the birthright laws don’t affect them. White-adjacent people may think they are immune to any of these policies. But an honest look at history and the ideology of white supremacy will reveal that almost no one is safe. Social mobility, already hardly achievable in this society, will also be a thing of the past.

All of this is enabled by the injustices people ignored because they didn’t think the issue applied to them. If Trump is successful and stays in power, we will see a drastic rearrangement of American society as return to that of 1787. And, make no mistake, the majority of whites will lose in this scenario also. (Just read “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner for a glance at how the techno-billionaires will manage the 95% of white Americans who make less than 360k a year. Or, just take a look at Trump’s tax plan.)

And by the time people realize that the “life you didn’t save is your own,” it will be too late.

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