There is a nagging, persistent suspicion in modern political life that what we are witnessing today is not new.
We watch as political figures construct underground military bunkers, as immigrants are hunted and tagged like cattle, as detention centers operate for private profit, and as Black Americans continue to turn up dead under suspicious circumstances. Yet, with every iteration of this behavior—delivered neatly wrapped in the veneer of legality—the collective response remains performatively shocked: How could this happen? This is not the country I know.
We clutch our pearls, express outrage, and then rinse and repeat, as if actively trying not to remember, trying not to know. We operate under the delusion that if we numb ourselves enough, or look away long enough, the reality bearing down on us will somehow alter itself.
It won’t. No amount of distraction can alter the reality facing this generation: we are living through the same historic playbook, updated with higher-technology delivery systems.
In 1939, Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” a haunting protest ballad detailing the horrors of lynchings in the American South:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees...
Decades later, the song remains a seminal artistic capture of American racial violence. Yet the bitter crop it describes has not stopped growing; it has simply been reclassified.
Across the United States—and specifically within states like Mississippi—recent sudden deaths of Black individuals have provoked deep terror and familiar skepticism. When Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old mother of four, was found hanging outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement was quick to handle the scenario with familiar institutional distance. Her death followed those of Demartavian Trey Reed and Nolan Wells, both of whom died under deeply suspicious circumstances in the same state within a brief span of time.
Despite her family’s firm insistence that Fortune was in a stable state of mind and did not take her own life, institutional mechanisms routinely default to a single diagnosis: suicide.
Labeling these deaths as self-inflicted functions as an immediate procedural shut-off valve. A ruling of suicide ensures that no further investigations are conducted, no local surveillance is reviewed, and no systemic patterns of rising white supremacist violence are probed.
This institutional posture is not accidental. The historical Ku Klux Klan wore hoods not merely out of cowardice, but because the individuals under those hoods were the local law enforcement officers, the medical examiners, the judges, the store clerks, and the prosecutors. The structures designed to investigate systemic violence are, and historically have been, manned by the very elements that benefit from its continuation.
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| THE CYCLE OF INSTITUTIONAL DENIAL |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 1. SUSPICIOUS DEATH / STATE CRUELTY |
| Black individual found dead under horrific circumstances / Immigrant tagged |
| │ |
| ▼ |
| 2. INSTANT CLASSIFICATION |
| State defaults to "Suicide," "Self-Inflicted," or "Standard Procedure" |
| │ |
| ▼ |
| 3. PROCEDURAL SHUT-OFF |
| No deeper investigation; evidence unexamined; media frames neutrally |
| │ |
| ▼ |
| 4. PUBLIC NUMBING & REPEAT |
| Society treats the event as an isolated anomaly rather than a systemic trend|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Physical violence is only one execution method in the broader playbook. Modern white supremacy utilizes technological, institutional, and media apparatuses to conduct character lynchings against Black individuals who cross into spaces reserved for elite dominance.
Consider the case of Dr. Jason Arday, who made history as the youngest Black professor ever appointed at Cambridge University. Following his appointment, he was subjected to a relentless, sustained media campaign in the UK probing every element of his personal and academic history—generating nearly 200 targeted articles in less than two weeks over allegations that were ultimately proven false.
When Dr. Arday tragically died at age 41, the public assault on his legacy did not pause. The relentless scrutiny he faced illustrates a broader structural mandate: Black excellence is routinely treated as a mathematical error or the result of “overpromotion.”
When Black individuals excel, the apparatus works to cut them down, forcing them to navigate an environment of constant defense, heightened vigilance, and institutional hostility. Whether through the historic terror of physical violence or the modern machinery of character assassination, the underlying message remains unchanged: stay in your place.
This institutional indifference extends seamlessly to the border and the federal immigration system.
When Monsanto Mailer, a Haitian asylum seeker who fled gang violence after suffering severe physical trauma, walked out of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Ohio, he collapsed onto the pavement in tears. His legal documents scattered across the concrete as he processed the psychological shock of having a heavy GPS tracking monitor strapped to his ankle.
This humiliation is framed by state agencies as routine administrative oversight, yet it functions as explicit psychological degradation. At the same time, investigative reports detailing state-custody abuses—including high rates of sexual assault and pregnancy among minor girls held in federal detention centers—are routinely sanitized by corporate media outlets through passive, obfuscatory language like “testing positive for pregnancy.”
Language is deliberately sanitized to obscure the reality of state-sanctioned violence against vulnerable populations.
To exist as a person of color under these conditions in the United States is to carry a heavy, constant, yet invisible weight—a chronic activation of the nervous system.
It is a weight composed of daily microaggressions, structural barriers, the fear of routine traffic encounters turning fatal, and the unspoken realization that full citizenship remains conditional. Many only recognize the immense physical and mental toll of this burden when they physically step outside the country’s borders and experience environments where state violence is not an omnipresent threat.
Historically, figures like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis spent extended periods abroad not out of detachment, but out of necessity. Leaving the country provided the physical and mental space required to calm the nervous system and clear the mind from the relentless trauma inflicted by American structural racism.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE BURDEN │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • CONSTANT VIGILANCE: Evaluating physical safety across geographic locations │
│ • CREDENTIAL DEFENSE: Justifying qualifications in professional spaces │
│ • STATE TERROR: Navigating interactions with law enforcement and systems │
│ • HISTORICAL ERASURE: Watching systemic violence reclassified as "suicide" │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The persistent refusal of American society to look backward—to dismiss demands for accountability, reparations, or historical truth as “backward-looking”—ensures that the nation remains trapped in a perpetual loop. Performative gestures, such as politicians wearing Kente cloth or painting slogans on public streets, serve as substitutes for structural legislation and meaningful accountability.
History may not repeat itself with exact precision, but its underlying patterns remain clear. As technological capability advances, the mechanisms used to enforce hierarchy, silence dissent, and process human beings for profit grow more sophisticated.
The fundamental question facing this generation is whether it will continue to accept performance art and collective numbing, or finally disrupt the playbook before the cycle repeats itself once more.
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