This year, the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American settler colonial project. Against the backdrop of deepening economic crisis, climate catastrophe, multiple genocidal wars, voter disenfranchisement, fascist migrant crackdowns, censorship, growing technofascist surveillance, and discrimination against the QTBIPOC community, the government and its false "mass culture" expect us all to participate in this so-called "celebration."
But the "recent" fascist turn associated with the Trump era ain't the only cause for suspended celebration. The administration's overtly fascist year-long line-up of celebratory events, including the proposed "Patriot Games," and recent UFC Freedom 250 fights at the White House, give many who oppose the regime cause to boycott this year's "Independence" Day festivities, but the bloody history of the United States argues otherwise. In other words, given the history of slavery, settler colonial violence, and genocidal conquest that sustains the US Empire, nobody should ever celebrate the Fourth of July.
As the formerly enslaved writer, orator, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass proclaimed in his 1852 The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro speech:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."
173 years later, Douglass' indictment still, unfortunately, holds. As an abolitionist publication in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, queer, and all oppressed people of the world who have for generations suffered under the boot of US Empire we say, Fuck the Fourth of July. We have compiled a list of Scalawag's most relevant publishing on the hypocrisy of an "American patriotism." In them, readers will find anti-colonial and anti-fascist analysis that indict the prison industrial complex, indigenous genocide, imperial extraction, gendered oppression, environmental degradation, and racial terrorism that continue to make the United States possible. Until the Revolution comes, we bid you happy reading and happy resistance!
OPEN BORDERS
The Colonial History of Texas Rangers
The Texas Rangers police force was founded in 1823 to enforce colonial rule in a "for whites only" government.
The True Revolutionary Meaning of Cinco de Mayo
Our colonizers and oppressors know what they do and have designed their corporations and market consumerism to reap super profits from Cinco de Mayo festivities in furtherance of the erasure of our true historical memory—through lies, myths, stereotypes, and revisionist history.
As the South goes, so goes the nation
This story was originally published at The Objective, a nonprofit newsroom examining systems of power and inequity in journalism. I am from a city that claims to influence everything. For better or worse, it's true — Atlanta really does influence everything. We are home to the hip-hop epicenter of the world. We are the cradle of the…
ICE and the IDF: The Transnational Nexus of State Control
These links illustrate both the ideological and practical ties between the two bodies, as both serve as means to increase the militarization of policing via the weaponization of surveillance technology.
Policing Student Protests and the Imperial Feedback Loop
Informed by colonialism, police repression as seen in the student protests, while seemingly unique, is part of a continuum of "management" tactics against threats to the state.
In the quest for abolition, America must learn from Haiti
The Hatian Revolution and the movement for Black Lives share much in common. What protest across the Black diaspora means for the ongoing fight for abolition.
CARCERAL COMPLEXIONS
The Thread That Binds: Settler Colonialism in Gaza and US Prisons
The US and Israel both have histories in a constantly shapeshifting process known as settler-colonialism, which in both cases began as an explicitly racist and ethno-nationalist endeavor but now must be rationalized in terms that are ostensibly race-neutral and colorblind.
Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist colonialism through an abolitionist lens
Exposing the brutal mechanisms of dehumanization and incarceration that Israel employs to oppress and erase the Palestinian people, two authors unravel the history of colonial violence and ethnic cleansing that turned Gaza into a vast open-air prison.
ICE and the military use the same playbook—exploiting impoverished communities
The coercive nature of jobs within the immigrant detention industrial complex—whether at privately-run ICE facilities in economically disinvested areas or with ICE itself—is not so different from the coercion that drives people to join the military.
A Look into Houston's "Safeguard the Flame" for Political Prisoners
"We are in the belly of the beast, the head of the empire—and the world is waiting on us. Our silence is complicity, our failure to act is complicity."
Free Xinachtli: Political Prisoners and Preserving Radical Histories
But here's the thing about political prisoners: they are not only prisoners, organizers, or revolutionaries. They are people, artists, lovers, writers, and poets.
Freak Generations: The Moral Panic Playbook from Crack Babies to Trans Kids
"We cannot defend trans youth without confronting the carceral, racialized, and reproductive logics that underpin this moment, nor can we treat gender-affirming care as separate from the broader struggle for bodily autonomy, housing, healthcare, and family dignity."
NATIVE AMERICA
Beneath the Everglades Marshlands, Resistance Lives On
The Everglades is considered one of the most biodiverse places in the entire world. It is so unique that it is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles naturally coexist. It is a land of defiance and possibility against the odds.
Without profit from stolen Indigenous lands, UNC would have gone broke 100 years ago
Before universities profited from stolen Indigenous territory through "land-grants," schools like The University of North Carolina sold Indigenous lands hundreds of miles away from their campuses.
A Native Crew asks: 'Whose land are you skating on?'
Florida Folx: A Gay, Commie Skate Crew on Modern Indigenous resilience and joy.
Salt, Soil, & Supper: Let's talk Indigenous gumbo
Gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, shrimp Creole, you know the Cajun roll call. That also means much of this newsletter revolves around Indigenous Gulf Coast cuisine, as this week's guest, Dr. Jeffery Darensbourg, a councilmember for the Alligator Band of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, tells me. Darensbourg is also…
North Carolina officials are ignoring a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women
Native communities are calling for a state task force to stop this epidemic.
Exploring the solar system through Indigenous winter solstice traditions
For many Native American peoples, the winter solstice is a time to honor the sun. Their rituals reveal a deep understanding of the natural world.
The longest-running Indigenous radio show in Texas
Inside the studio at KNON, broadcasting the "only radio program in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where you can hear stomp music."
ANTIBLACKNESS
Acknowledgment as Denialism: The Myth of Reparations in the US
These ongoing practices of control, erasure, and harm make clear that the U.S. has never fully confronted the deep structural violence embedded within its legal, healthcare, and political systems.
On Organized Labor's AntiBlack Mythology
The truth is that modern economic challenges are going to require contending with denialism about the inherent antiBlackness of this economic system. It requires diversifying the industries we think about unionizing, especially given that union density is at just 10 percent in 2025.
Your disdain for the South is just anti-Blackness
I understand western imperialism and colonialism as the everlasting greatest threat to the climate through the continued exploitation of the worker, the ongoing enslavement and subjugation of the Black, and the destruction of Indigenous lands.
Refining Fascism: Fetal Personhood, Transphobia, & AntiBlackness
While some have dismissed the EO's definitions as biologically incoherent—given that early fetal development renders all genitalia phenotypically similar (and female)—this EO, and the strategic assault it is a core component of, are not clumsily or carelessly written.
The 'Slave Trail of Tears': recreation or reckoning?
Nearly 200 years after the 'Slave Trail of Tears,' the Natchez Trace is haunted by the Confederacy and by spirits yet more ancient, even as it transforms into a site for recreation.
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow
But then Donald Trump showed up. And his third presidential campaign was full of people questioning who really has the right to vote and who really deserves full citizenship. A lot of us suddenly realized that we probably shouldn't let that guy back into the White House if we didn't want to go back to…
WORKERS & RESISTANCE
Into the Thicket
Freedom Colonies are towns and communities that were founded by freed slaves after Emancipation was announced in Galveston in 1865. Before that, we know these places to be marooned communities. There are over 500 estimated Freedom Colonies in the state of Texas.
Militant Strategy: The Black South's Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Tradition
I have been asked for a plan for dealing with current and coming political threats many times, and I've always felt that these requests had anti-democratic undertones. I could respond with some ideas, of course, but one individual's grand plan for shifting The Left's relationship to American elections means nothing to me. I believe that…
A Tribute to the Workers of the World
There can be no true freedom for the workers of the world under economic systems that exploit their labor and condition their mental processes by a series of spider webs that enslave labor for capitalist accumulation.
Texas Runs on Prison Slave Labor
As I write this, I sit in a Texas prison cell at Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Ferguson Unit. I am currently under disciplinary sanction because I have peacefully withheld my labor power.
From Black Atlanta to Palestine: A statement of connection, solidarity, and survival
Black and Palestinian organizers in Atlanta reveal the city police department's participation in an international exchange program with Israel, calling for abolition of the police and the end of imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, and antiblackness.
How to Build the End of the World
In the Black Radical Tradition, chaos and experimentation are required to challenge the state and build a reality worth defending. In the Cop City movement and beyond, Chaotic Protesters create meaningful resistance by disrupting the state's order.
Reproductive Resistance in the Antebellum South
Black women were distinctly aware of their location in the plantation economy. And with this awareness, they often deployed surreptitious methods to affirm their reproductive autonomy and resist the dominance of their enslavers and the doctors who stood to profit through the harm infected on Black women's bodies.
POP CULTURE
'The Last of Us' and the Gulf South's Dystopian Collapse
The shortages, the surveillance, the abandonment of entire communities – these aren't cautionary tales; they're documentation. That's why The Last of Us, in some ways, feels less like a fantasy and more like a mirror.
'Sinners' and the Legacy of Southern Vampirism
I see no distinction between a vampire clan and klansmen, between vampires and white supremacists, aside from the fact that the latter invade and destroy our spaces without invitation.
Sci-fi, fantasy, and fascism
Again and again, stories indistinguishable from sci-fi and fantasy narratives are used to justify fascist endeavors and uphold white supremacist understandings of race, history, indigeneity, colonization, and the world at large.
"FOREIGN" POLICY
Bombing Iran: Crude Oil Gulf Extraction and Gulf South Petro-Devastation
The same logic that organizes the extraction of the Global South organizes the domestic South. The plantation did not disappear, and the Middle Passage lives on.
How Durham, North Carolina, became the first US city to ban police exchanges with Israel
A successful North Carolina campaign in solidarity with Palestine adds to a Southern legacy dating back to the Civil Rights Movement.
Abolition Week: Empire Must Die
This year, our focus is Empire, its endless expansion, and the carceral technologies that make it possible.
Introducing Abolition Week 2023: The Bars We Can't See
In putting stories from Gaza in conversation with stories from U.S. prisons, we hope to expand conversations around abolition in the U.S. beyond the prison to include the ways that poverty, race, and gender also cage bodies and communities.
SURVEILLANCE & SOFT POWER
Carceral Labs: Surveillance, Repression, and Media in Palestine and New Orleans
The Zionist occupation operates like any carceral apparatus or manufactured humanitarian crisis—it is a profitable capitalist industry entrenched in a transnational, repressive, and technological dialogue between the Zionist leadership and the heads of Western hegemonic states they secure.
AI Surveillance as a tool of state repression
Just as the weapons technology developed by EOTECH is used to do imperialist violence across the globe, surveillance technologies are used to suppress protest here in the so-called United States.
Zohran Mamdani and the Sorcery of Soft Rebellion
Mamdani may appear to occupy the office, but the office actually occupies him.
Antidote to Soft Power: Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'État
As a chronicle of how power often colludes with culture in the construction of a mythological past, the film ought to provoke us to consider how the reconstruction of our histories is of utmost importance in our present era
ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS
Hell and High Water: From Gaza to Mississippi
Like the flood in Jabalia, the story of the Great Mississippi Flood starts with settlers.
What Petrocaribe can teach the Green New Deal
Environmental justice has always been a struggle against colonization and capital. The Green New Deal can be a part of this struggle, but only if it offers an eco-socialist vision as big as the Global South.
After Helene and Milton, Farmworkers Play an Outsized Role in the Cleanup
North Carolina farmworkers on an H-2A visa had their visas extended to work on the dangerous cleanup of damaged fields after Hurricanes Helene and Milton.