Nia Ola on the Racial Conflict of America and Post-Reconstruction Laws
"I'm losing my shit a little bit, I will not hold you. [The] broader sense of "how we got here" has many factors. Chief among them white folks never learning their lesson. And culturally, we spend far too much time insulating white folks, and honestly all non-Black people, from their racial guilt at its highest form. In order to keep a chain of communication open with them and that has always been a mistake. 'Cause if we were allowed to have honest, historically supported conversations about what conflict is being reconciled with in the American context, we would have to be talking about trans-Atlantic slavery.
We would have to be talking about reconstruction, we would have to be talking about the plantation. Which no one wants to talk about because it was decided along the way that if we center the reality of the conflict we are all living in, then that must mean you are excusing the harm other groups are experiencing within this conflict. I'm gonna have a couple videos in the caption (@shakingsheets on tiktok, video posted 10-05-2025); one from last winter when I said we were ultimately reconciling with a post-Reconstruction black/white racial conflict, and everyone in the middle was collateral, in the sense that you need the Brown out of here (deportations) in order to re-litigate the a racial caste system reminiscent of that of the plantation. Which is the ultimate aim of white Christian Nationalism because it was birthed around conflicts related to enslavement. And they (folks in the comments) chewed me up for that a little bit.
They was calling me "anti-brown" and "anti-indigenous", all for being a student of history. And it's that same logic and historical background that made me hop on here and say, "Hey, this is not the 30s. Germany is not an apt comparison. We're actually running the 1890s and the American Gilded Age."
They said I was bugging, they said two things could be true at once. They told me it didn't matter what period people connected the current moment to. As they long as they were paying attention, as long as they were aware, as long as they were speaking up. Which is funny to me, because if you don't actually know the nature of the conflict, you talking doesn't mean shit.
You don't know what's actually being litigated. This is the double-consciousness that DuBois wrote about. This is the tale of two cities Black folks have been living in because we are an internal colony! We are an occupied people. I said that in a video two-and-a-half-ish years ago. And it flew over heads. People ICE and other heavily armed and masked law enforcement snatching people on the streets, brutalizing protesters, you know, orchestrating raids in the middle of the night and dragging Black folks outta their cribs. Their children naked, zip-tied, while laughing. Deploying tear gas because they're mad they gotta sit in traffic, and everybody's like, "Oh my God, it's the Gestapo!"
And I'm like, "These are slave patrols." Police were literally birthed out of slave patrols. Running up into people's shit in the middle of the night, brutalizing Black folks and dipping? That's "Night Rider" activity. People talk about White Christian Nationalism, Project 2025, and I'm like, "Fun fact: The first American WCN organization in the country was the Klan!" Which was immediately founded after emancipation and the start of Reconstruction.
The Southern Baptist Convention where a lot of the stars of WCN come out of - think like the Jerry Falwells - where a lot of these conservative think tanks, and leaders in the religious Right come of, was birthed in the 1840s response to enslavement. The baptist church had a national convention that splintered because of stances enslavement, where a lot of Northern churches pushed for abolition and Southern churches preached that [slavery] was their mandate by God.
It's the children of the Southern baptist convention and movement who go on to become the Evangelicals who push for anti-abortion rhetoric and laws. Because they had to shift issues after Brown v Board of Ed, and they were not legally allowed to segregate religious institutions and colleges anymore. Having this extreme anti-abortion stance is a novel concept within the Christian church. For a long time, they and other Abrahamic religions didn't recognize the presence of a soul until the second trimester around 22 to 24 weeks depending on the denomination your in.
They found abortion permissible up until that point. In earlier readings in history you'll see it referred to as "the quickening". The religious Right grasped onto this issue because they could no longer maintain their tax exempt status if they continued to segregate, and white women were not having enough all-white babies. It's why Black folk who are anti-abortion frequently bring up Margret Sanger who founded Planned Parenthood. And her intent in doing was population control. She was a eugenicist, she hated the disabled, and Black people. She wanted us to stop having babies.
Which is why from [the] jump a lot of their advocacy and services centered Black populations. It's the same reason David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Klan then became a state rep for Louisiana, pushed for funding for family planning in Black neighborhoods. He wanted us "to have choices" and for those choices to conveniently lead to lessened Black population. Controlling Black movement, capital, labor and reproduction has always been the aim of WCN. It's its North Star. And it's why I stress heavily that every issue is a Black issue. Because it is all permeating out of Plantation Politics.
For years they have been using post-Reconstruction penal codes and legislation meant to target Black folk for other purposes. "Anti-Abortion Trafficking Bills" are using them. When she was a senator, Kamala Harris used the Travel Act to get Back Page seized by the FBI. [She] lied to the public and said they had proof of them sex trafficking and the only charges that stuck on the founders (of Back Page) were money laundering. Because they have been cooperative with the feds for years and independently investigated for claims of abuse on their website. But because they refused to snitch on independent consensual adult workers, trying to make a way in the trade, they were punished, and the site was seized and shuttered.
Very racist fears, post-Reconstruction, led to deep criminalization of Black folks, our bodies and how that body can be used with other people. The Mann Act (White Slave Traffic Act of 1910) was famously used to jail Chuck Berry, as well as Jack Johnson the first Black Heavy Weight US Boxing Champion, who was locked up using the Mann Act because they said he was trafficking his white wife.
That's the legacy of the US-of-fucking-A. And I don't understand why it's like pulling teeth to get people to realize this. Like, the proof is in the pudding. We are in a Black/White racial conflict, and they yearn deeply for the plantation. And they are trying to get a lot of the groups in-between us the fuck out of here to litigate that racial caste system. They wanna return to the roots of this settler colonial state. One where you only needed to discern one quality about an individual to decide whether they were a person of property. Whether you are massa or slave.
And the inability to reconcile with this history. To have transparent conversations about what it is that people are truly aspiring toward, we, all of us, are gonna end up on the technological Plantation. (Actually, we're already there, but that's another conversation). With a shortened pathway to get out, because people are offended when you remind them that the harm that comes to them sometimes, isn't the final step. And that the goal is something else, that they have a very complicated relationship with.
Because the existence of hierarchies imply that there is a top and a bottom. And a lot of people in those groups that sit above that bottom spot feel comfortable there. And knows that truly interrogating that, challenging that - challenges them as well. And power they profess never to have against the people at the bottom. And don't nobody wanna do that work."
