Fear of a Black Planet Starts with Fear of Black America

The United States, in its glory, has made some stupid mistakes. 

Looking back into history, there’s McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which amounted to a political witch hunt. Then there’s creating World War II internment camps to hold Japanese-Americans (even though many served America in the military), despite none of them harboring any threat to the country. Then we can also go into things like the Trail of Tears, the Vietnam War, the multiple blunders surrounding Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War. And of course, enslaving millions of Black people and upholding systemic racism for centuries.

But I have a new entry: electing Donald Trump. In fact, historians of the future may list this in the top five stupid things America has ever done. Once sworn in, almost immediately, he began to show what a dumb move it was. There’s a long list that could fill an encyclopedia of damaging acts committed by Trump. But the bottom line is, so far, the Trump presidency has been about as valuable as used toilet paper.

What Trump has primarily done is harass, chase, malign, and persecute people that either he or the people around him don’t like. This has ranged from Democratic politicians to Mexican children. But he seems to have a particular disdain for Black people who live in big cities.

Remember, Trump’s record in dealing with Black folks has been abysmal for decades. As far back as 1973, Trump and his father, Fred, fought a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department after they were accused of refusing to rent to Black tenants in predominantly white buildings in New York. That lawsuit was settled with a 1975 consent decree admitting no wrongdoing.

Fast forward to 1989, when five teenagers, all Black and Puerto Rican were accused of brutally assaulting a woman, becoming what the media called the “Central Park Five.” Trump took out a full-page ad in several papers, including The New York Times, calling for the death penalty so that they could be executed for the alleged crimes. Years later, when they were proven not to have committed those heinous acts, Trump refused to reverse his stance.

We don’t have to even talk about his insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, which was proven over and over again. He did later grudgingly admit his error in this case.

So that brings us to his unleashing National Guard troops on American cities. First, he did it in Los Angeles, perpetuating a flat-out lie that demonstrators against his policies were burning down the city. They weren’t. The area they were protesting was only a few city blocks near downtown.  There was also little, if any, threat to federal property.

More recently, he sent them to Washington, D.C., because an ex-DOGE stooge supposedly got carjacked (more likely got his ass beat for saying the wrong thing at 3 a.m., to the right person). Two teens were later arrested, but that didn’t stop Trump from declaring that the National Guard must be brought into the city to end violent crime. Since that time, the violent crime rate has come down, but has followed an overall decreasing trend. Meanwhile, Washingtonians aren’t seeing much difference.

Meanwhile, the National Guard has been undertaking the dangerous crime-fighting duty of picking up garbage.

But since his disastrous first term, Trump has been threatening a military invasion of Chicago, and now he seems close to making good on that threat. On CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took a break between Botox treatments to say Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations would be ramped up there. But she stopped short of saying that the National Guard would be deployed. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order on Sunday, essentially barring his police department from helping ICE kidnap immigrants and from giving assistance to any federal or military units. This is unlike D.C., which, as a federal enclave, is under presidential control.

What’s remarkable is that the mayoral leadership of Los Angeles (Karen Bass), Washington (Muriel Bowser), and Chicago (Johnson) are all American Black. What’s more remarkable is that urban violent crime, while still a problem, has declined notably. That decline started in 2021 when Joe Biden took office.What’s more remarkable is that Chicago’s example of effectively using violence interrupters as an alternative to overpolicing in high-crime neighborhoods has lost federal funding. This means drastic cuts to programs that work and using law enforcement – and possibly the military – to fight crime, something that has proven historically to make things worse.

Mr. ‘What the Hell Do You Have To Lose’?

Trump has long insisted that cities controlled by Democratic mayors are the most violent and crime-ridden, but he seems to forget that the states with the most violent crime rates are all under Republican control. He also forgets that siccing the National Guard for reasons other than loss of control because of insurrection is illegal. But then again, when has Donald Trump ever had regard for the law when it comes to getting his way? Law and order is what he says it is, and it certainly does not apply to him.

The president has insinuated that he would be doing the same in other cities, and right now, despite how much he consistently lies, there is no reason not to take what he says at face value. His behavior reflects a racist fear America has always harbored in its social DNA of Black people taking over. I mean, while it seemed like we all celebrated when Barack Obama was elected, there was a sentiment harbored by this country’s most nefarious, dysfunctional thinking people that this must be prevented. Essentially, there are far more demented people like Laura Loomer out there than you think, and they lust for more and more power to subjugate the rest of us.

What are these people afraid of? Black people becoming educated, owning businesses, controlling their economics, making their own lives better, and worst of all, having no reason to heap praise on far-right conservatives? That's probably it. Violent criminals are not a problem. A Black person that doesn't bow his head and mutter "yassah bawss" is.

It was always pretty obvious that the Trump administration’s attack on Latinos would be followed by an attack on Black people, and we seem to be at the beginning of it. That Black unemployment has spiked to 7.2 percent doesn’t seem that accidental to me, given that among Black women the rate is 6.3 percent, with an overrepresentation in the federal workforce, where Trump made his most draconian cuts.

The next logical step is to attack the places where we live, particularly where we’re most powerful. The Washington area (particularly Maryland and Virginia) is populated with Black people who largely have federal jobs. It remains to be seen how the reductions will affect them. New York, a place that Trump has already meddled with by springing Mayor Eric Adams from trouble in a corruption scandal, would be a prime target for him since some of America’s most affluent Black people live in the city and its suburbs.

We also should not forget that with Adams polling so poorly, and Andrew Cuomo all but blowing his chances of winning the seat, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the conservatives’ worst nightmare, is leading in the current mayoral race. Trump is only thinly veiling his intention to attack New York with his dictatorial agenda.

Could he fail? Absolutely. If history is any indication, you can only push people who live in cities so far before they explode. If they do, ICE will not have anywhere to hide, and governors like Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker and New York’s Kathy Hochul would have no legal obligation to protect them when they are acting above the law in the first place, and a National Guard mobilized by them would have to follow their orders instead of Trump’s.

But for right now, it’s better that we stay keenly aware of his moves and be prepared for the presence of federalized law enforcement, not as something that will solve crime problems, but for the purposes of intimidating us.

Fear of a Black Planet is real.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.