Since the moment non-indigenous people set foot on the soil of what became the United States of America, the dominant class employed violence to maintain power and hoard resources for their own economic benefit. Genocide of Indigenous peoples who thrived on the land for thousands of years was the policy, framed through a lens of religious justification by Manifest Destiny. White Americans used germ warfare, starvation, massacre, displacement and internment into concentration camps called reservations, and destruction of family and culture by kidnapping Indigenous children and employing forced reprogramming through legalized brutality at “Indian Schools,” all to steal land and resources.
To maximize profits in this land that white colonizers were ill-equipped to cultivate, they imported African humans through force with the intention of creating a permanent bottom caste whose only purpose was to be beasts of burden for the ruling class. The ocean of the Middle Passage was so fraught with bloodshed and death that sharks changed their migration patterns to follow slave ships as a guaranteed source of food from Black bodies. Many current banks and insurance companies such as Bank of America, Aetna and JPMorgan Chase became wealthy insuring human cargos against the inevitable loss of profit from disease, murder, and suicide suffered by kidnapped Africans on this voyage of terror, or from financing enslavers and the products produced by the enslaved.
An entire war was fought about slavery, and after the Confederacy was defeated in its quest to permanently enslave Black people, white people immediately began a rigorous campaign to regain their power and “Manifest Destiny” to have permanent control over the Black people they had become accustomed to owning. The insult caused by their incomprehensible new position as potential equals to those whom they convinced themselves were inferior fueled a rage that boils to this very day.
Yet white Americans in the past several months have been stunned by the current political violent and tyrannical regime currently in power. “This is not who we are!” they lament in
bewilderment as civil rights they believed sacrosanct crumble without meaningful pushback from others who are in position to stop it. They point to Nazi Germany as a horrifying outlier and are aghast at the steps we have reached and passed on the “Fascism Checklist,” confused about how the U.S. could so quickly fall away from democracy to something more akin to a regime with which Nazis would be, and are, comfortable.
Most Black Americans, however, are side-eyeing our white neighbors with exasperation. We have been living in this country for 400 years, and the consternation white Americans are experiencing as a novel and unexpected paradigm shift feels like an insult to us, because none of this is new to Black Americans. Since the first stolen African arrived in this land, through the centuries of enslavement, the years of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, legalized over-policing, destruction of Black communities, discrimination in housing and education, and other deliberate control tactics, we have never been confused about what the United States is at its core.
When white Americans see fascist parallels between Nazi Germany and the USA in 2026, they believe that the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism, attacks on marginalized communities, violence and brutality, rigging of elections, and the dismantling of the concept of basic universal human rights, is something foreign to the values of Americans. Yet that version of American exceptionalism is a lie that can only be believed by ignoring the reality of centuries of evidence to the contrary. Black Americans have lived the reality of what this country is, and that reality has been allowed to continue to the present day precisely because of the blinders white Americans keep over their eyes to keep from having to see and address the fact that this country has always been fascist at its core.
Nazi Germany did not wake up one day and invent the Holocaust. They admired the American Jim Crow system of legalized discrimination of Black lives to justify brutality so much so that they used it to create their own caste system: the Nuremberg Laws. Nazis copied the U.S.’s treatment of Indigenous people living within U.S. territories, and reclassified citizenship to consolidate power. They revoked the citizenship of Jews born in Germany, and then used that reclassification to justify deportation. They created concentration camps to imprison those who no longer qualified for the rights of citizens to own property or to live freely. Nazi media propaganda convinced non-Jewish Germans that Jews were not humans and therefore those lives did not matter in the quest to make Germany great again.
In the book “Caste: The Origins of our discontent” by Isabel Wilkerson, she writes “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources — which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”
What is happening now in the U.S. is only shocking to white Americans because they have refused to acknowledge the fact that Black and brown Americans have always been treated with disdain for our lives, our human rights, and our equality as citizens, because this country has never stopped being an intentional caste system. Black lives have never mattered to the majority of white Americans, because stepping outside that caste system is unthinkable when they have learned to believe that it is the natural order of things. White Americans consistently vote in lockstep with the systems and people who look like them, whom they know will prioritize white comfort above all else, even if it means the destruction of our democracy.
“This was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or
recognized it or not.” — Isabel Wilkeson, Caste.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton.