“This is America” Project: A Reflection

Introduction: Background to the “This is America” Project

July 4, 2026, marks the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In 2016, the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission was organized to work alongside America250.org , Inc., chartered in the same year, to “facilitate robust public-private partnerships that bring the vision for America250 to life.” In 2025, Congress apportioned $150,000,000 to commemorate the occasion. However, for the Trump regime, this approach to U.S. propaganda was not enough. Donald J. Trump authorized the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday to organize a “grand celebration.” Underscoring his priority and focus, Trump housed “Task Force 250” in the Department of Defense, and a key priority was protecting U.S. monuments from vandalism, with “pro-Hamas vandalism” being named specifically. Additionally, the Trump-aligned Freedom 250 organization supplanted America250 as the primary organizing body. Freedom 250’s “patriotic partners” included Boeing, Chevron, Deloitte, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Northop Grumman, ExxonMobil, and United Health Group. Attesting to the “one party, two factions ” reality of the U.S. government, all of these corporations, except for Chevron, Exxon Mobile, and United Health Group were also “sponsors” of the “nonpartisan” America250.

Freedom 250’s events and initiatives included “Freedom Trucks,” which were traveling museums promoting patriotism; “America Prays,” which aimed to get one million people per week to pray for the country leading up to July 4th; a student art competition in which students would create an artistic rendering of someone from the “250 American Heroes” list; a “Rededication Ceremony” on the National Mall that aimed to “thank God for 250 years of His Providence of the United States” and to pray for God's blessing for the next 250 years; and several sporting events such as the “Flag Day UFC fight”, the “Freedom 250 Grand Prix,” and the “Patriot Games.” Thus, the government chose to celebrate the United States through Christianity, militarism, a celebration of monopoly capitalism, patriotic propaganda, and entertainment.

To provide a counter-narrative to the official state propaganda, I launched “This is America,” a multimedia project on Instagram and Substack , where I posted every day, from June 4 to July 4, 2026. I organized each Instagram video around a quote and three takeaways, and on my Substack, I provided the quote, a longer excerpt, three takeaways, and the full primary document. The project was meant to be a form of popular education that could also be used in classrooms and as a starting point for further research. In terms of messaging, I aimed to show that the true foundations of the United States are capitalism, racism, and imperialism – not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I wanted to convey that “freedom” and “democracy” in this country are inextricable from warmaking and political repression. I also sought to convey that the driving force of the “American spirit” is profit and accumulation by any means. I lifted up the voices of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Black radicals, including communists/socialists, pan-Africanists, and revolutionary nationalists, both to offer an alternative account of 250 years of U.S. settler colonialism, and to expose the public to lesser-known thinkers. I didn’t follow any particular temporal or thematic organization scheme. Instead, I followed the energy of who I wanted to talk about each day. I was fortunate to have a comrade, Chris Alfonso , help me with editing and producing the videos.

In reviewing the project, I was able to organize the thirty-one posts into nine general themes: internationalism and U.S. imperialism; ruling class management through the “carrot and the stick;” pathology of whiteness; Blackness as the limit to rights and democracy; anticommunism; the pitfalls of liberalism; the cost of resistance; Black women’s experience of capitalism; and the U.S. political duopoly. These themes accurately reflect the contradictions and antagonisms conveniently left out of the reigning mythology peddled by the ruling class about “250 years of this racist settler colonial empire .”

Internationalism and U.S. Imperialism

Seven posts examined the topic of U.S. imperialism and the importance of internationalism. On Day five (June 9, 2026), I quoted Harry Haywood’s Against Bourgeois-Liberal Distortions of Leninism on the Negro Question in the United States (1930), which emphasized the relationship between U.S. imperialism and the superexploitation of Black people, and racism as the ideological rationale for this “antagonism.” In my explanation I stressed that Black people in the United States are nationally oppressed, and therefore, imperialism, not racism, is the primary source of our oppression. Racism is not irrelevant, however, as it has a central ideological function as a tool of national oppression.

George Jackson was the subject of Day 9. Jackson made a similar argument to Haywood in his “Letter to Fay ” (1970). He argued that Black folks are not Americans, but rather an “oppressed, economically depressed people.” As such, it is incumbent on us to make international alliances to fight our primary enemy: U.S. imperialism. Here, I used Jackson’ s words to emphasize that, for the “Black Amerikan colony,” international solidarity with the enemies of U.S. imperialism is both strategic and necessary – especially as the United States leans more into its fascistic character.

Directly following Jackson, I covered Maurice Bishop’s speech, “Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua- Together We Shall Win” (1980) in which he emphasized the Caribbean’s demand for a Zone of Peace and an end to the United States’ backyardism, military intervention, and endless “doctrines” that undermined self-determination. Building on Bishop, I argued that the Caribbean has always been the laboratory of U.S imperialism, and this was currently manifested in the terroristic bombing of random fishing boats; the kidnapping of sovereign presidents; crippling sanctions, blockades, and unilateral coercive measures; and ongoing occupation and destabilization.

On Day 18, I featured one of my favorite Black Marxist thinkers, Doxey Wilkerson, and the background context he provided in “The Historic Fight to Abolish School Segregation in the United States” (1954). In it, he argued that, given the combination of progressive currents emanating from fighting fascism in World War II, as well as anticolonial movements, U.S. imperialism was being faced with staunch resistance from peace and democratic forces throughout the world and was on the decline. I articulated Wilkerson’s position to U.S imperialism today by arguing that the United States is the most discredited and despised it has ever been and, as such, it is no longer trying to mask its plunderous, piratical nature. Instead, it is trying to stave off collapse by more intensely attempting to loot the natural resources of places like Iran and Venezuela, monopolizing every industry to extract every bit of profit, and investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI)to accelerate surveillance, repression, and terrorism against an increasingly disposable population.

Like Jackson, Huey Newton emphasized the importance of solidarity beyond U.S. borders in “Uniting Against the Common Enemy ” (1971), which was the subject of Day 21. Newton contended that the fight against oppression was happening both in and beyond U.S. borders, and the more territory we liberated from U.S. imperialism through common struggle, the more effective Revolutionary Intercommunalism would be against Reactionary Intercommunalism. Here, I offered that the “large collection of communities” Newton referred to had fought against Euro-American imperialism under a number of banners, including Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, Afro-Asian solidarity and the “Bandung Spirit,” Tricontinentalism , Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned movement, and proletarian internationalism. They were most effective because they did not operate not as “separate nations of men,” but as a united front of sufferers.

On Day 27, I focused on We Charge Genocide , one of the most important documents of the 20th century, which was presented to the world in 1951, simultaneously by Paul Robeson in New York and William L. Patterson to the UN in Paris. This document explained how the United States defied international law by refusing to use its powers to protect Black people against genocide—an international crime—and, in fact, encouraged murder and brutality through this systematic refusal. I used this document to underscore that the United States is a repeat offender when it comes to genocide, commuting the crime within its own borders, denying it when those it supports, such as Israel, commit genocide, and falsely accusing its foes (such as Iran) of genocide.

Finally, on Day 30, I uplifted “Intifada, USA” (1990) by June Jordan, who noted that Israel not only expected billions in “handouts of money and missiles” from Uncle Sam as an outpost of U.S. imperialism, but also “the unqualified enslavement of U.S. citizens” to a pro-Israel position. I took this opportunity to dispel the “tail wagging the dog” analysis regarding the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran because, as Jordan demonstrated, Israel is integral to U.S. imperialism, and the U.S. takes no issue with funding, arming and propagandizing for the zionist entity to protect its own interest throughout West Asia.

Ruling Class Management through the “Carrot and the Stick”

Interestingly, the posts for this theme came within ten days of each other. On Day 13, I highlighted “African History in the Service of Black Liberation, ” (1968) a speech by one of my most important guerilla intellectual ancestors, Walter Rodney. Using the example of the study of African history, Rodney explained how the ruling class co-opts Black scholars and scholarship through its funding mechanisms. As long as this study was funded by monopolists like the Rockefellers, the ruling class was willing to let Black people study African history and culture divorced from material struggle, while concealing the contradictions of U.S. capitalism. I elaborated on Rodney’s point by noting that U.S. governance works through the carrot and the stick—through co-optation and coercion. Because capital funds its own opposition so that it can both control and profit from it, the ruling class is willing to make some concessions as long as such concessions don’t fundamentally threaten the system.

The next day, I focused on Ida B. Wells’ The Red Record (1895), which juxtaposed the carrot and the stick. Wells explained how white folks legitimated the slaughter of Black people by claiming they were engaging in “race riots” and planning insurrection. I explained that throughout U.S. history, it has been perfectly acceptable for white people to assault, maim, and murder Black folks for imagined, ostensible, potential, or actual acts of violence. This has often transformed Black self-defense into insurrection, as Black people were expected to acquiesce to any and all treatment by whites.

Shifting back to the “carrot” approach, on Day 16 I posted CLR James’s American Civilization (1993/1950), which turned out to be the most popular video of the series. James argued that the government and the private sector were using organizations like the Urban League, which have interests like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers on their board, to pick a handful of educated Negroes to “add weight” to conservative policies and propaganda in exchange for good white-collar jobs. I explained here that what Wallace Thurman called the “Niggerati,” has historically served a contradictory function. On the one hand, some of the most courageous freedom fighters have come from this class and ultimately committed “class suicide;” on the other hand, the majority of the Black intelligentsia dutifully serves its class reproductive function through hostility to working class and poor folks, peddling liberal progress narratives, and discrediting radical and revolutionary struggle. Related to this, two days later I featured Maude White Katz’s Freedomways article, “End Racism in Education: A Concerned Parent Speaks ” (Fall 1968). In this article, Katz wrote about the ways the US education system serves the interests of the establishment, as the establishment owns and controls the economic resources. Yet, this is not divorced from the fact that it was the struggle of Black folks in the South and labor unions in the North that brought about public education. This contradiction, I explained, is why U.S. public education remains a central terrain of struggle that must be wrested from the monstrous claws of corporate greed and private interests to ensure free, fair, and affirming education.

Finally, Day 22 was dedicated to my favorite sociologist, Oliver Crowell Cox, and his wonderful essay, “An American Dilemma : A Mystical Approach to the Study of Race Relations ” (1945). In this review of the text, An American Dilemma by Swedish economist on “race relations” in the U.S., Cox also analyzed how the Black reformer compromises with the system by seeking to eliminate race, but not class antagonisms. However, this is a fool’s errand, Cox argues, insofar as the white ruling class will never let Black folks participate fully and equally as exploiters because then there would be no racial scapegoat precluding the white and Black masses from coming together. In the final analysis, then, white supremacy is the stick when it comes to Black folks and the carrot for the white masses. I used this Cox’s analysis to explain that throughout history, when the Black elite has pushed a race-first program without interrogating their own class position, it’s been to the detriment of poor and working-class Black folks, and the latter have the responsibility to reject this form of Black class management.

Pathology of Whiteness

Writings by William Patterson, Eslanda Robeson, James Baldwin, and Gerald Horne helped to illuminate the ubiquity if white pathology in the United States. On the second day of the project, I used a quote from Patterson’s “Negro History Week” (1954), which argued that only savages in a modern exploitative society would deny the contributions of Black people to history and society solely on the basis of race. I extended this analysis to highlight that today, rightwing troglodytes are continuing this erasure by attacking Black history, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (DEI), and what is deemed "Critical Race Theory” (CRT). This includes some self-styled white leftists who insist that any focus on race and racial inequality is “id-pol” (i.e. “identity politics”).

On Day 15, I drew on the words of Eslanda Robeson from the interesting “talk book,” American Argument (1949) – a conversation with white U.S. author, Pearl Buck. Robeson noted two important social outcomes of white folks’ exclusion of Black folks: first, a self-imposed social confinement, insofar as they refuse to fraternize with those they considered beneath them and; second, access to very little knowledge about Black people except “what they can find out the hard way” or are told directly (even as Black people know a great deal about whites). Here I offered that while antiblack racial oppression causes Black folks to live “butchered half-lives,” maintaining a sense of false superiority transforms white folks into calloused, antisocial human husks. Which conveys that whiteness is neither powerful nor supreme, but rather precarious and sterile.

James Baldwin made a similar observation in “White Man’s Guilt,” which was the subject of Day 26. He maintained that white people fell into the fatal trap of believing they inherently deserved their good fortune and safety, and that Black people simply needed to emulate white folks to earn that same station. At the same time, white people aren’t truly happy because they believe that they aren't truly safe given their fear that Black people desire racial revenge. As such, they have lost touch with reality and themselves. I added that history is rife with white projection, fear, and mythology, resulting in unspeakable acts against Black people, from segregation and lynching to mass incarceration and routinized police murder.

Finally, on Day 30, I centered Gerald Horne’s The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014), which was a big inspiration for the “This is America Project.” Horne argued that 1776 was a “lineal ancestor of 1861” insofar is it preserved slavery, fueled capitalist accumulation, and propelled a uniquely “republican” and “toxic” form of white chauvinism that was “one of the more profound human rights violations of the previous millennium.” I then argued that an heir of 1776 and 1861 is the continued criminalization and condemnation of radicals and revolutionaries, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to NSPM-7.

Blackness as the Limit to Rights and Democracy

The United States likes to tout itself as the world leader in liberal rights and democracy. The condition of Black and poor people, however, has always exposed this lie. I launched the “This is America” project with W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Conditions in the United States” (1949) in which he argued that the U.S. is not a true democracy because industry is fundamentally undemocratic and political life is ruled by the wealthy. I added to this that today, an even smaller number of billionaire kleptocrats dictate the terms of the U.S. economy, immiserate the majority of the Global South through imperialism and war, and will continue to do so until we have real democracy, e.g., people’s control over the means of production and the political system.

The undemocratic nature of the United States was further examined on Day 7, when I focused on the “Proclamation of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. ” (1951) This Black radical women’s organization argued that the government has denied Black folks democracy, citizenship rights, and dignity, and victimized them with Jim Crow and state violence, all while sending Black men to “fight in the name of democracy in foreign lands where they must face frame-up court martials, while at home neither they nor their people are, free.” I enjoined that like STJ, we must accept that the U.S. military is not fighting in the interest of the oppressed anywhere, and that’s evidenced by the disrespect for democracy within its own borders. ICE raids, the erosion of women’s bodily autonomy, state-sanctioned murder of Black people, ongoing indigenous dispossession, hatred of working class and poor people, and the rapid expansion of monopoly in all aspects of our lives fundamentally negates the lie that the United States is fighting for freedom, democracy, women’ rights or self-defense abroad.

The third post under this theme was from Langston Hughes on Day 23. He argued in “Democracy, Negroes, and Writers” (1941) that Black folks were being asked to defend democracy in World War II when they were receiving very little at home, and it was the responsibility of writers to expose the harsh realities of life so they could be remedied by the democratic process; the masses to struggle for full democracy for racialized people; and the government to not only defend, but extend, it. Here I concurred with Hughes that the objective of the culture worker is not only to represent and understand the world, but also to change it, and this is perhaps why U.S. society has worked so hard to destroy, distort, pillage, and profit from Black creative production.

Anti-Communism

Of course, I peppered in a critique of U.S. anticommunism throughout the project. Six days into the project, I featured Abdulrahman Babu’s “Speech at the International Conference on Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle” (1990), where he exposed the U.S. imperialism’s dual aversion to communism and national liberation in the Global South. He argued that every U.S. president in the twentieth century used anticommunism as pretext to target Third World leaders, not least because “the United States contains a large population from Third World countries in its own borders.” Bringing this assessment to the present, I shed light on the arch-gusano Marco Rubio’s June 4, 2026 statement that, “For decades, Cuba has been the world capital for radical left-wing terrorism. The regime in Havana has recruited, trained and backed violent Marxist and Third-Worldist movements across our hemisphere and beyond.” That lie, and the subsequent document published on July 20, 2026, conveyed precisely what Babu described.

On Day 11, I centered Claudia Jones’s Ben Davis: Fighter for Freedom in which she attributed “McCarthy fascism” to the “powerful financiers” who were likewise invested in the superexploitation, domination, and indignity of Black folks. I contended that “powerful financiers” continue to be at the forefront of our frog march to fascism, led by villainous billionaires like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel; white nationalists like Stephen Miller; and rabid anticommunists like the ultra-Gusano Marco Rubio. I would have been remiss not to include my work on this subject, so I ended the project with it. Drawing on my article, “Modern US Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights,” I lifted up the co-constitutionality of antiblackness and anti-radicalism as the legitimating architecture of U.S. racial capitalist society. To this I added that The New Negro Movement, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and the Black Lives Matter Movements were all accused of being results of outside agitation, foreign-inspired, subversive, and/or communistic, while anarchist, socialist, communist, abolitionist, and other anti-capitalist movements have been considered even more dangerous when they promote racial equality and could be tools for Black liberation.

The Cost of Resistance

Another theme that emerged from Days 4, 24, and 25 was the cost of resistance. On the fourth day of the project, I thought with Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “Christmas in a Cage II” (1987) in which he explicated the ways that Black resistance—including by Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, and MLK when he became vocal on the Vietnam War—has always been the ultimate offense to “a young nation born in bloody resistance to England’s crown.” I opined that organized and militant Black folks will always be seen as a threat to U.S. capitalist racist society. Therefore, those of us committed to liberation need to understand the difference between those who are encouraging discernment and strategy, and the “respectable” Negroes—the handkerchief heads, as Malcolm X called them—whose function it is to mollify the masses to bow to the system.

Safiya Bukhari’s “We Too Are Veterans: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders and the Black Panther Party” (1991) was the topic of Day 24, specifically her revelation that fighting for Black liberation had the same psychological conditions as fighting in the Vietnam War. After the destruction of the Black Panther Party, Bukhari was left disoriented and adrift because “freedom was still not assured.” I contributed that the combination of surveillance, incarceration, police violence, state torture, medical neglect, and social isolation has left some of our most valiant warriors with a host of mental and physical issues from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, and depression to heart failure, blindness, and cancer. Given the toll it takes on the mind and body, dismantling capitalist imperialism is a disability issue.

The next day, I turned to the 19th century to draw from Henry Highland Garnet’s “An Address to Your Slaves in the United States” (1843). For Garnet, the cost of not resisting slavery was infinitely higher than fighting it; in fact, to remain passively in bondage, he argued, was an affront to God, the ancestors, and the self. Thinking about the current moment, I asserted that the moral, intellectual, and physical obligation to resist is alive and well. It is activated in struggles for national liberation, the defense of socialist revolution, organizing against militarized state force, mutual aid networks, rent strikes, and quotidian efforts to keep folks housed, clothed, and fed. Organized action in all its forms is still an imperative for all freedom-loving people.

The Pitfalls of Liberalism

The theme of the pitfalls of liberalism emerged from only two posts which had quotes from Paul Robeson (Day 19) and Shirley Graham Du Bois (Day 28). In Here I Stand (1958), Robeson lambasted liberals’ insistence upon “gradualism” as another form of racism that was rooted in the idea that inalienable rights were the purview of whites only. On this logic, improving the rights of Black folks was to be understood as an act of “charity and tolerance.” I expounded on Robeson’s critique by identifying another aspect of “gradualism” in the belief that if we just install the “right” people into power, at some future point we’ll eventually undo the ills of this country. This mistaken idea purports that if we “vote like our lives depend on it,” stay peaceful, follow the law, and engage in civil discourse, at some point, human flourishing will replace mass suffering.

Shirley Graham Du Bois offered a related critique in her Freedomways article, “Negroes in the American Revolution” (1961). “Honest” liberal allies, she argued, thought that Black people had made “marvelous progress,” that much had been done to improve the lowly conditions of slavery’s descendants, that any extant discrimination was the domain of “backward Southerners.” Moreover, many of these honest liberal allies believed that Blacks may not be ready for full citizenship. She attributed this perfidy to white ignorance of Black folks’ consistent contribution to U.S. history. I ascribed this cowardice to liberals’ bourgeois outlook rooted in the idealist belief that good will win out over evil through an appeal to positive human ‘instincts.’ They believe that racial oppression can and must be overcome through moral suasion, and those who want to accelerate the pace are considered reckless, naïve, and even subversive. This reactionary and unprincipled position conveys why, historically, the white liberal has been an impediment to Black progress.

Black Women’s Experience of Capitalism

Posts on Day 3 about Louise Thompson Patterson, and Day 17 about the Black Women’s United Front (BWUF), engaged Black women’s experience of capitalism. Patterson’s “Toward a Brighter Dawn” (1936) was one of the earliest articulates of “triple exploitation,” or the idea that Black women are superexploited as workers, women, and as Black people. Here, I took the opportunity to clarify the difference between terms “triple exploitation” and “intersectionality.” Patterson was analyzing Black women’s particular relationship to the capitalist mode of production and the labor market, and the social relations emanating therefrom, not overlapping identities. BWUF took a similar position, pointing to the class character of women’s inequality and exploitation that required the collaboration of men and women to overthrow capitalism. As such, bourgeois feminism, which ignored class, was little more than a tool to reproduce the extant system. I expanded on this position by pointing out that bourgeois feminism has no shortage of tactics to reproduce capitalist imperialism, including encouraging invasions in the Global South to “protect women,” (while using the police as a concierge service to harass racialized women in the U.S.); promoting women’s rights, except when it comes to women in Southwest Asia; and attempting to discredit Black labor activists while staying conspicuously silent about white labor leaders supporting the current fascistic regime.

The Duopoly

Duopoly was the final theme of the project, emanating from Glen Ford’s “Both Major U.S. Parties are Plagues on Humanity” (2015) on Day 8 and Grace Campbell’s “How Shall the Negro Woman Vote?” (1928) on Day 12. Ford argued that U.S. elections are undemocratic “reality-creation festivals” in which the two factions of the one-party state pretend to offer different approaches to domestic and foreign policy, while in reality they have the same masters and strategy. I agreed that the two main parties systematically block any viable alternative to their rule; that even though the two may differ on various aspects of social policy, they generally aligned on expanding U.S. imperialism; and that because of this alignment, the only available “choice” is capitalist imperialism and the imposition of white ruling class interests. Campbell had made an argument similar to Ford’s almost nine decades earlier, namely that both Democratic and Republican administrations were responsible for “Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disfranchisement, and general terrorism; [and] lack of opportunity of making a living and poor educational facilities.” The two capitalist parties had not, and would not, offer anything viable for Black people. I held that the entire political class, irrespective of their particular clique, has a vested interest in racial hierarchy, capitalist exploitation, and imperial domination; and difference is in degree as opposed to kind.

Conclusion: Impact of the “This is America Project”

Overall, I learned a lot from this project. It allowed me to revisit readings I enjoyed and to read texts I may have otherwise overlooked. It taught me how to make information accessible and interesting for an audience with a short attention span and dwindling literacy skills. It pushed me to produce knowledge outside of the book and essay form, and to approach a single document with different media in mind. Additionally, I got to work closely with a kind and generous comrade who helped to elevate the aesthetics and enhance the appeal of the project. However, I remain ambivalent about using social media and short-form content for political education and study. In a culture that pushes distraction and entertainment over intellectual curiosity and critical thinking, it’s possible that the format of the project perpetuates these maladies. Additionally, it is very easy to let analytics and the algorithm cloud one’s judgement about which figures to include. Nonetheless, I am happy that hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to thinkers, ideas, and political positions they may not have encountered otherwise, and I hope I made a small contribution to unmasking the United States as a racist settler colonial empire masquerading as liberal democracy.

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a member of AISC.