By Aswad Walker
There’s a dangerous lie circulating among us: That what Black people are experiencing right now is just another rough political season, another pendulum swing we can ride out by keeping our heads down and minding our own individual business.
That lie is deadly.
What’s unfolding isn’t random, happenstance, or temporary. It’s a coordinated, escalating assault—across law, politics, culture, education, business, media, and religion—aimed at reducing Black life in America to something disturbingly close to a modern-day chattel reality.
Citizenship Under Attack
Our citizenship is being hollowed out in real time. Black people legally registered to vote have been purged from state and county voter rolls by the hundreds of thousands since 2013’s Shelby v. Holder case. The legal and political apparatus designed to protect us from discrimination in housing, banking, employment, and education has been systematically dismantled.
The very tools Black people relied upon to challenge racist and illegal practices have been blunted or removed. This isn’t oversight. It’s strategy.
Blocking Black advancement
At the same time, Black advancement is being deliberately obstructed.
Moves to earn advanced degrees, fund businesses, and scale professional careers are being met with new barriers at every turn. Anti-DEI directives have opened the floodgates for mass firings of Black professionals, with more than 300,000 Black women alone losing their jobs. This is not about merit. It’s about removing Black excellence so white mediocrity can continue to rule the day.
Erasing our History and Future
Education, long recognized as both a battleground and a lifeline, has been placed under siege.
Black contributions to U.S. and world history are being erased from classrooms. College professors and K–12 teachers are losing jobs or being threatened with termination for even discussing our story. Like SHAPE Community Center’s executive director and co-founder, Deloyd Parker, is fond of saying, “A people who don’t know their history is like a tree without roots. And you know what happens to a tree without roots.”
That “whitewashing” tactic is old, and those deploying it know exactly what they’re doing, and why.
Policing, Deportation, and Occupation
The assault does not stop at policy; it has teeth. ICE agents have arrested and deported countless law-abiding U.S. citizens and immigrants who followed legal procedures, many of them Black—African Americans and Black immigrants from African and Caribbean nations. Militarized police forces are being deployed, giving off more than a vibe of “occupation.”
People warn about a future Insurrection Act, but with ICE and militarized police already marching on Blue states and cities, it looks like the Act is already “acting.”
Silencing the Truth-Tellers
And on cue, Black journalists, tasked with telling uncomfortable truths, are under attack. The arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are meant to warn, threaten, and scare. Silence is being enforced, not requested. The message they want us to take from this: resistance is futile.
And while it has taken nearly 400 years for some white Americans to finally acknowledge the reality of indiscriminate violence by law enforcement—after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—Black people have known this truth for generations. We don’t have another four centuries to wait for consensus.
The Cost of Complacency
Yet, for many of us, life continues as business as usual: go to work, go home, scroll, shop, and hope things blow over. But what is happening around us and to us is neither normal nor temporary. In less than a year, Blackfolk have experienced the erosion of more than 60 years of Civil Rights-era victories—conservatively estimated, not even counting the decades and centuries of struggle that made those victories possible. History is clear: change has never come simply with the passage of time, and ignoring danger has never produced safety.
What Fighting Back Actually Means
If anything is going to change for the better, it will not be because help finally arrives on someone else’s timetable. It will be because we act. By “we,” I mean Black individuals doing their part within organizations, institutions, and communities to create the structures, protections, goods, and services we need. No movement moves unless people first recognize that a war is already being waged against them.
If the assault on Black humanity is ever to stop—if Black advancement and thriving are to become concrete again—it will be because we rebuild our walls: unity and community, cooperation, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, creativity, purpose, and faith. These are not abstract ideals. They are survival strategies. They are the principles that have carried us through every previous storm.
Ignoring a war has never brought anyone victory. Only recognizing it, organizing for it, and fighting back gives us a chance at the tomorrow our ancestors envisioned, and the future our children deserve.