Although ICE’s own statistics on the percentage of so-called “undocumented” immigrants from Haiti is only about two percent, that agency has already announced its intention to focus on Haitians starting this weekend. Their decision to have this focus is rooted in the racist foundations of their overall work. Regardless of the desires of petti bourgeoisie Africans born and living within the U.S. to see themselves as “protected citizens” of this country, it’s always important for the U.S. to remind Africans where we stand. And, there is no easier scapegoat available to point the finger at for the economic problems most working class European (White) people have than Haitians because they have no one to defend them here, including – unfortunately – many Africans born here. There have been plenty of signs to illustrate the intention of the U.S. government to focus anger towards Haitians. Going back a couple of years, the coward in the White House perpetuated that baseless rumor started by some lowlife European in Ohio or Indiana that Haitians there were eating people’s household pets. These lies against our Haitian family members have continued and expanded with added and age-old boogie man stories about Haitians taking imaginary jobs against from “the hard-working white people” in various parts of the country.
This reality that people from Haiti and everywhere are facing deserves honest analysis beyond hyperbole, racist lies, and xenophobia. Especially since there is plenty of blame to go around for this criminality.
Foremost blame goes of course to the U.S. government on all levels. This is a capitalist system which means wherever the interests of capital go, U.S. government policy (which is bought and paid for by multi-national corporations) goes. Capitalism’s chief weapons have always been, and will always be, white supremacy, patriarchy, and homophobia because these systems of oppression work flawlessly to consistently entice the white masses, as well as many people of color, to react to the state’s claim of scarcity. This claim has people convinced that in a world full of abundance, there is never enough and that the scarcity exists because of people of color (women, etc.), especially people of color who are perceived as “not having the right to be here, stealing resources from white people, etc.” Social media is packed with videos from places in Eastern Europe like Poland where there are supposedly very few African people, and how pristine and safe those environments are. Of course, no mention is ever made about how the wealth of world capitalism has been built on the backs of colonized countries and this is the reason the colonized countries are poor and unstable while the European countries, plus the U.S., Australia, zionist Israel, etc., are prosperous. The capitalist system has been able to convince millions of people that there is an inherent superiority of culture within European people while there is simultaneously, a natural dysfunction within African culture.
Of course, none of this is true. Instead, there is the European thief who built his empire on the backs of humanity and that humanity is wrestling with trying to rectify these injustices. No one in their right mind would voluntarily leave the beauty and beaches of Africa (any part of Africa) to go somewhere like Poland or really anywhere in Europe or the U.S. unless political and economic conditions gave them no other option. This scam is just the latest manifestation of institutional white supremacy being used to justify continued exploitation and why the wealth is where it is and why it isn’t where it should be.
The African masses within the U.S. also share a portion of the blame. These internet spread “movements” like this so-called Foundational Black Americans (FBA) scam and any of these fantasy based identify frauds are a huge part of this problem. The message these people are spreading is soaked in the scarcity model. They spread the concept that Africans in the U.S. don’t need Africa and mostly want nothing to do with it while perpetuating the narrative that Africans, including those from Haiti, who come here are stealing opportunities from Africans within the U.S. Besides the fact these people aren’t even aware of the many ways they depend upon Africa (cell phone batteries, the internet, chocolate, electricity, gold, diamonds, so on and so on…), these people’s entire arguments are based upon a foundation where they provide zero evidence while claiming they are the true indigenous people of the Americas. Of course, this isn’t all of them, but the point is that by spreading these false narratives, intentionally or not, they are helping craft the environment where it becomes so much easier for ICE and the U.S. government to demonize our families from Haiti. One of the saddest pieces about this are that truthfully, many Africans born in the U.S. have direct biological ties to Africans in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean. In 1800, terrified of escalating slave revolts, the U.S. government passed legislation making it illegal for slave ships from Africa to dock in the U.S. This measure was done as one of many attempts to control the number of Africans existing within the U.S. because contrary to how they want us to understand history, we consistently and relentlessly fought against being enslaved.
The consequence of that action in 1800 was that enslavers, as well as the institutions that depended upon slavery for their enrichment i.e. the banking and insurance industries, refused to give up on the overwhelmingly profitable slave industry. Instead, these criminals simply refocused the slave trade so that Africans were routinely shipped into the U.S. from Caribbean nations like Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and of course Haiti. If these FBA folks were serious about understanding our true history, they would be digging into these facts, but for most of them, truth and history are the farthest things from their minds and objectives. Buying into the scarcity lies and stoking fears among dispossessed Africans born in the U.S. to galvanize those efforts into a disgraceful push to negotiate a payday from the capitalist system for slavery is what many of these people are actually trying to do. Along with it being disgusting that any of us would even consider placing a price tag on our people’s suffering (beyond the correct position that any serious reparations must center Africa, not paychecks for people in the U.S.) the behaviors of so many of these people have created a very unsafe reality for African people, and not just the ones from Haiti.
ICE is ramping up. The question these FBA people need to ask (and unfortunately, and more than likely, the fascists will answer this question for them in the coming months), is how will these people enforce their attacks against the people of Haiti within the U.S.? Are some of us naïve enough to believe that having a driver’s license and other elements of your lives within the U.S. is going to be enough to prevent these people from taking some of you who were born here? Houseless Africans who have no identification? They are easy victims to help these gestapos meet their weekly quotas. And, if you don’t care about houseless Africans, just remember that if you ever leave the house without your identification, you automatically are in the same class to these gestapos, really whether you have I.D. or not.
For anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of the history of this country, we know that these terrorists are going to go into African communities and harass all of us, regardless of where you were born. They have plenty of precedents doing this. Whenever a white women accused any of us of anything fictional, all of us in the vicinity suffered. When the Zebra Killers (multiple African men in the Bay Area who were accused of killing six Europeans in the early 70s) were active, thousands of African men were detained. In fact, every time a European blames us for something i.e. Susan Smith (the woman who drowned her two sons and blamed an African man) or the man in Boston who killed his wife and blamed an African man in 1990, many African men were detained. They didn’t care if you had identification clarifying who you were. They didn’t care if you had a position of prestige within the capitalist system. All they cared about is that you fit the description. It’s absolutely incredible that in 2026, so many of us actually believe anything would or could be different today because?
We are revolutionary Pan-Africanists not because we have some idealistic notion that everyone Black is on the same team. We are revolutionary Pan-Africanists not because we think that what we say today is the same as what we are doing. We are revolutionary Pan-Africanists not because we believe in any fantasies about African unity. We are revolutionary Pan-Africanists for two reasons. One, that we recognize the ill refutable fact that an injury to one of us means all of us are never safe. And, two because we know that the only salvation to all of that is a free, united, and socialist Africa. We also know that all of these efforts to divide us and justify why we need not connect with our family members outside of the world that extends past our noses is nothing more than confusion that only benefits the agendas created and carried out by our enemies.
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