Eight months ago, if you said that the second coming of MAGA would, in broad daylight, wheel the Confederacy back in, you would have been called an alarmist. It would have seemed like overblown anxieties typical of the antiracist wingnuts or the “woke” to say that those who sought to make America great again would, like the first MAGA movement, the Redeemers, attempt to re-stage slavery.
Eight months ago, it would have been unreasonable to assume that just because MAGA featured men and women waving the Confederate battle flag in a mob swarming the Capitol, who were interested in trad wives and the disenfranchisement of women, and sought to ensure textbooks repeat the slaveholder’s narrative that the people they enslaved enjoyed their enslavement, there were significant elements in the movement interested in a return to plantation life.
But today, even for those who accused us of woke hysterics, certain things must seem odd. It must seem curious that the Confederate monument of an enslaved Black “mammy” loyal to her manly enslaver, rapist as he goes off to war in the battle to keep her back whip-opened, ordered removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2019, has been ordered restored by the defense secretary. It must seem a bit strange, Trump’s proposed PBS replacement, PragerU’s cartoon of a bright-eyed Christopher Columbus — famous for cutting Indigenous children’s hands off for not collecting enough gold — teaching kids not to rush to a negative judgement on slavery.
It was not mere alarmism to think the people waving the Confederate battle flag might be interested in restoring the Confederate States, or be interested in avenging their intellectual forebears, the slaveholders who faced occupation by Union troops after the US Civil War, by sending federal troops to occupy Washington, DC. It was not absurd to assume they would cheer on the federal police patrols now fanning out through Black communities across the nation in revenge for the Black uprising after George Floyd’s murder — an echo of the slave patrols that fanned out over the slave quarters across the nation after slave revolts.
Ever since the victory of the Black uprising against US-codified apartheid in the 1960s, there has been a public soreness about politicians shouting “down with the [n-word]!” in public life. So, if it were to be effective, the Confederacy would have to be re-assembled piece by piece. Members of that ex-Confederate soldier institution par excellence, the Ku Klux Klan, were no longer tolerated, if in full garb, in the US Congress. MAGA politicians cannot hope to be effective if they quote directly from earlier Klansmen senators like Theodore Bilbo in his crusade against woke anti-lynching campaigns: “When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like a camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization.” Instead, they must edit themselves down to “If we import the Third World, we become the Third World,” and “We won’t have a country anymore.”
The Confederacy must be wheeled into the public square in the glass Trojan horse of the anti-woke state. A restoration of the Confederate-loving mammy statue “toppled by woke lemmings” over here. A gutting of the Voting Rights Act over there. A suggestion to release Derek Chauvin here. A segregationist, ahem, “anti-DEI” programme there. So that now, eight months in, we can eventually reach the point where it is again reasonable to turn Black communities into open-air prisons. A few years ago, white supremacist Nick Fuentes declared that he wanted the military sent into Black communities, and it was laughed off. Today, federal agents are asking Black people sitting on their porch to show them their ID and arresting and publicly humiliating them for smoking. The white supremacists’ wishlist has been achieved in broad daylight at the bargain price of placing their white hoods in temporary storage.
This is what the anti-woke state is — the plantation: white supremacist America under the occupation of more open white supremacists. There is no daylight between the campaign to end wokeness and the desire to see Black populations suffer, however much anti-wokeness is presented as the reasonable middle ground between the extremism of both sides — the Ku Klux Klan on one side and the bodies they hung from trees on the other.
The anti-woke in power immediately set about resurrecting their shrines to the sex traffickers of Black children and merchants of Black flesh. They immediately set out to curtail Black liberties and reverse performative efforts to reduce police shootings — however insincere. Being woke has always meant being attuned to anti-Blackness and resisting the society of white rule — which is why it is hated the world over. The colonist leaders who have shaken hands in agreement that anti-wokeness is the new paradigm, from the conservative former grand wizard to the progressive governor, have all meant the same thing: to see resistance ridiculed and dismantled.
The people who decry wokeness are no different from the people who decried Emancipation. What, indeed, was the abolition of slavery to a Confederate, other than woke government overreach? What was the integration of restaurants and schools to the segregationist other than woke corporations and DEI gone mad? What the 19th-century Redeemers sought, what the millions-strong 20th-century Ku Klux Klan sought, and what the 21st-century MAGA movement seeks is the restoration of the whipping post.
What else is the desire to see migrants handcuffed and forced to kneel and eat food like dogs, other than the fulfilment of the missed desire to witness slaves being punished? Are not the deliberately cramped holding cells reminiscent of the slave ships’ hold? Isn’t the scene of ICE rummaging through the city in search of “illegal” brown people also the scene of slave catchers sent out to catch runaways hiding away from the plantation? Isn’t sending refugees of US neocolonialism, “illegal immigrants”, to be tortured in a prison in El Salvador as a deterrent exactly the slaveholder’s selling of disobedient slaves to plantations “down South” from which they can never return? Is not the family separation the very heart of the slave auctioneer’s block? The ripping of mothers from children, husbands from wives, with no way to reconnect, is this not exactly the scene of horse-drawn buggies carrying Black loved ones away to be tortured elsewhere and never to be heard from again?
It is because it is. The people who smiled at the lynching photos last century would take selfies at “Alligator Alcatraz” today. The people who gathered to point and laugh at an accused Black family hanging from a tree would today flood social media in the comment sections on every police shooting, saying the Black man deserved it. Racists aren’t brainwashed into intolerance by a charismatic cult leader today any more than they were in centuries prior. Racists like racism. They bathe in our pain. They kick over memorials to Gazan children. They buy Twitter and open the floodgates to Blackface minstrelsy memes. There is no surge in DC’s crime any more than there was an invading migrant caravan. The deployment of federal troops in “Chocolate City” is only done to satiate the appetite for witnessing the colonised’s suffering. There is no need to terrorise, harass, and detain us. They do it because they can. The slaveholders’ society never changes, no matter how many new liberal politicians jump out in front of press mics, complaining, “This is not who we are.” It is.
But it should be noticed that this generation is not waiting for salvation from Union troops. Already, the ol’ slick-haired politicians promising freedom once we hitch our liberation to their 2028 campaign wagon are worrying about the lack of youth buy-in. This generation of the colonised is not content to sleep on the mat outside, hoping the next master might be the one to set us free. They are stepping off the two-party merry-go-round and are emotionally divesting from America, be it Confederate or United.
Each link of the ideological enchainment that is patriotism is snapping with every demand that they deny the holocaust in Palestine. With every cultural institution’s capitulation, every educational institution’s ransom payment to the fascist government, the taught feeling of obligation to racist society disintegrates. With every abuse of a migrant that reminds them more of their family than their lynch mob-supporting fellow citizen, a screw is loosened in the leg shackle tying them to the wall of hope in the eventual redemption of settler-colonialism. They are turning, in droves, away from the genocidal settler-colonies and the West’s latest lurch towards Nazism, and seeing themselves as part of the global colonised already rising up. The people you once called dogs are refusing to lap up the promise of an end to racist oppression from your hand. They imagine, expect, and are building a future post white rule. The sleeping lion is woke.
