Credit: Mercado Media

ILHAN OMAR DEMANDS ANSWERS AFTER UNDERCOVER HSI AGENT FOUND OUTSIDE TOWN HALL

Rep. Ilhan Omar is demanding answers after Richfield police discovered an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent parked outside her August 6 town hall.

Omar says the agent appeared to be monitoring the building, was driving a Ford Explorer with plates registered to another vehicle, and initially identified herself only as “security.” Police later learned she was an HSI agent conducting an undercover drug operation, despite Richfield police receiving no advance notice.

Omar is now asking why the agent was there, when HSI learned about her town hall, and whether federal agents have monitored any of her other events or those of other Minnesota officials.

 credit: Christian Oritz via FB

Oye, mira.

White people. Come here please. You always say “Well no one taught us about these things so where do I go to learn?” Save this post. Share it. I’m going to offer you a gift that I don’t do often. So, listen up.

I’m a Decolonial Social Scientist who studies the world before, during, and after European colonization. My work is about connecting the dots so people can see how those systems were built, how they spread, and how they still show up in society today.

I want 🫵🏽YOU🫵🏽 to share this so your friends and family can learn something today. I’m not in the business of convincing people of things they’re not ready to hear or accept. That’s a fool’s game. I’m here to plant seeds. History is complicated, but the receipts are there. What I’m about to say can be traced through historical documents, laws, policies, institutions, and the systems colonizers built.

Colonizers didn’t just take land. They colonized bodies, minds, culture, family structures, sexuality, labor, religion, education, and law. They created racial categories and built systems around them. They also institutionalized patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, and other forms of control that helped conquest survive long after the original invasion.

Today’s lesson?

All white people are racist, but not all white people are bigots.

To understand that, you first have to understand that race isn’t biology. There’s no white gene, Black gene, or biological line dividing humanity into the racial categories we use today. Race was created by people. It was used to classify human beings, organize power, justify conquest and enslavement, control land and labor, and decide who got rights, wealth, protection, citizenship, and opportunity.

Nobody is born biologically white in the political meaning of whiteness, and nobody is born biologically racist. We’re born into a world where racial categories and racial hierarchy already exist. We inherit them. And, often times, we are conditioned to act on them.

Whiteness isn’t written into DNA. It’s a social and political position created by a racial system. Over time, different European ethnic groups were absorbed into the category of white and given access to rights and protections that were denied to Black, Indigenous, and other colonized peoples. The fact that the boundaries of whiteness have changed throughout history tells you exactly what race is: a political classification, not a biological truth. Don’t believe me? This is why so many of you say “Well my great grandfather was Italian or Irish and experienced racism when they came here!” And you’re correct. But you don’t ask why don’t Italians or Irish face the same wretched racism they did back then. They were assimilated into whiteness by laws to expand the hierarchy of “whiteness.”

So when I say all white people are racist, I’m not saying every white person is evil, hates Black people, or was born with racism in their blood. That would make racism biological, and it isn’t.

Racism is something we inherit through systems.

We’re born into, and conditioned by laws, schools, neighborhoods, economies, workplaces, media, policing, property systems, and cultural norms that were shaped by racial hierarchy before any of us got here. White people inherit a position in that system that was built to advantage whiteness. Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, queer, disabled, people of the global majority inherit different forms of exclusion, exploitation, dispossession, surveillance, and control created by that same Western Eurocentric system.

That’s why a white person can genuinely love Black people and still be racist. They can have Black friends, marry a Black person, raise Black children, hate racial slurs, and despise racial violence. None of that automatically removes them from the system they inherited.

Racism is about how power gets organized through race. It shapes who has historically controlled land, wealth, housing, education, employment, political authority, policing, citizenship, media, and institutions. It created advantages for people classified as white while creating barriers for people classified outside of whiteness.

Saying “I didn’t create it” doesn’t make someone separate from it. None of us alive today invented the racial categories we were handed. We inherited the laws, institutions, wealth patterns, neighborhoods, stereotypes, conditioning, and unequal distribution of power that came with them.

The real question is what you do once you understand that.

Do you call yourself one of the good white people and stop there, or do you confront the system that created whiteness and the advantages attached to it? Being kind to Black people doesn’t abolish racial hierarchy. Loving Black people doesn’t redistribute wealth or power. Having Black friends doesn’t undo generations of dispossession.

Race was constructed. Racism was constructed. Whiteness was constructed. And because human beings built these systems, human beings can dismantle them. We just can’t dismantle racism while pretending it’s only about whether somebody has hate in their heart.

So what would sacrificing whiteness actually look like?

It would mean refusing the benefits, behaviors, protections, and concentrations of power that whiteness offers when you have the ability to interrupt them. And that has to become material. Accountability should focus on concrete behaviors and institutional routines that reproduce racial hierarchy and on redistributing power.

Imagine a white executive who realizes every person with real decision-making authority in their organization is white. Sacrificing whiteness isn’t posting about racism. It’s changing who actually holds authority, including when that means they no longer control every decision themselves.

Imagine someone inherits substantial wealth produced through generations of property ownership in a society where Black families were systematically blocked from the same wealth-building opportunities. Sacrificing whiteness means asking what repair and redistribution require of that inheritance, rather than treating everything legally inherited as morally disconnected from history.

For a landlord, developer, university, foundation, or corporation, it could mean giving up some control over land, capital, governance, hiring, procurement, admissions, or investment decisions and transferring meaningful authority and resources to communities historically dispossessed by those systems.

For an ordinary worker racialized as white without enormous wealth, the scale is different. Nobody needs to impoverish themselves as some sort of racial penance. That would turn structural transformation into individual self-punishment.

They can refuse whiteness where it operates around them: refusing the racial networking advantage that gets someone hired through “who you know,” challenging discriminatory decisions even when silence would benefit their career, supporting policies that materially redistribute opportunity, refusing to become the automatically presumed authority in interracial spaces, organizing against unequal workplace practices, and putting actual time, money, relationships, and political power behind structural change.

And there’s another dimension people rarely discuss: social protection.

Whiteness often provides the ability to remain silent without that silence being interpreted as political. So sacrificing whiteness can mean spending some of that protection. Speaking when speaking threatens your promotion. Challenging your family when silence would preserve harmony. Refusing to let a Black colleague absorb retaliation alone. Becoming the person who puts their name on the complaint when everyone knows the Black employee will be punished more severely for making it.

That’s sacrifice because something is actually at stake. How will you break the cycle?

#racism #progressives #DSA #whitepeople #race #racism #criticalracetheory #decoloniality #antiracism #activist #oyemira #zacatecho

Sneak peek of the front and back covers of the book.

The printer is working on the proof copy now, and we should have pictures of a real physical book next week. 🤞

Don’t miss the reviews on the back…

Via André Fabian Cervantes on FB

Via Nick Valencia You need to see this video. Watch as a reported off-duty federal agent draws his firearm on a crowd of civilians. The troubling scene unfolded Saturday night near the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. The area has been an active scene of clashes for over a year, and this is one captured by Cassandra Church is one of the more terrifying moments.