How did we get here, and how do we get out?
by Leah Harmony
According to a civilian-made interactive map there have been 48 Black people found hanging from 2018 to 2026 in the United States. Families and communities of the deceased view these deaths as highly suspicious. They have also expressed feelings that the investigations were insufficient or classifications were premature.
Zero cases have been publicly ruled homicides as of September 2026.
This year has seen the public profiling of other race-related incidents. The internet responses to these incidents show a white vitriol that is unprecedented in modern times. They seem emboldened by the current president’s commitment to ignore the history and reality of Black people in America.
Mississippi. July 2026. Nolan Xavier Wells, 18, traveled by boat with white friends to Mississippi’s Horn Island. His companions returned without him. His body was found two days later. Ignoring Mississippi’s violent and racist history, vocal defenders of white America say Black people’s low IQs are making us thing racism is involved. They wonder what we expected, since “Blacks can’t swim.”
Frisco, Texas. June 2026. Karmelo Anthony, 18, an excellent student with no criminal record, received a 35-year prison sentence for using a knife in self-defense. He acted after a fellow athlete and others cornered him, attempting to push him from the tent where he sought refuge from the rain. Karmelo was called a “murderous thug” who needs to be “hung in the streets.” They made memes. So many memes.
Columbia, North Carolina. June 2026. Karmelo’s jury selection began the same day Rick Chow was acquitted of all charges after fatally shooting 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, who was falsely suspected of stealing a water bottle. Because the child was also armed for protection, he was called a thug, a violent predator and a thief. They have said these things to his grieving mother.
Senatobia, Mississippi. That same month, Walmart police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. The police claim the driver drove right at them. The independent coroner says the baby was shot in the side. They say the baby’s death is her fault because she should not have been with someone who may have been stealing.
In 2026, this is where we are.
The beast feeds itself
If America and her racism were a metaphor, she’d be a beautiful tree with rotten roots. After she flowered, she’d grow poisonous fruit, unrecognizable as something from nature. The fruit that fell would soak into the earth, and the dark juice would feed her sickly roots, so she could do it over and over and over again.
For just a moment
In the time of Black Lives Matter, there was a moment, before the corporation of the same name took the money and ran, when it felt like there could be a reckoning. When Joe Biden was coming into power he directed his loudest voice toward activated Black youth and enraged white liberals, promising long-overdue equality and equity. His defining campaign pledge was big: He vowed to end white supremacy.
The political right viewed his impossible promise as a threat to the nation’s core values. It was then they began planning how to end his efforts and stop such a thing from ever being possible again.
Biden ran his election campaign almost completely on the infamous “many sides” propaganda and the people’s outrage over the George Floyd travesty. With that as a starting point, the radicals on the political left spent four years gaslighting the masses and overplaying cards that weren’t theirs to play, ironically providing all the kindling MAGA needed for the racist firestorm we feel today.
Reverse racism
In Trump’s second term, the first thing to go was the word “racist,” which activists and their opposition had already effectively gentrified, followed by the term “stay woke.”
Through the most ridiculous demands of over-correction imaginable and the shoving of a broken history down the throats of an under-educated population, Black people became public enemy No. 1 to MAGA — in real life, online and from within our current administration.
Starting in the White House, all anti-discrimination efforts have transitioned into anti-DEI efforts. Lawsuits have been filed and won for white men “negatively affected” by the elimination of the usual preferential hiring practices. It doesn’t matter that DEI and affirmative action disproportionately benefit white women. Or that Black people are the smallest recipients of DEI policies. Black people were made the face of DEI and therefore became the largest recipients of the MAGA backlash.
In response to the “very bad white man” label attached to each anti-racist campaign during Biden’s time in office, “the very bad white man” has come undone. He and his president have decided to exonerate all white men, past and present, from wrongdoing. Luckily for Trump, this includes himself and his friends on the one crime list they can’t say Black people appear on.
The killing of Black people in America, though generally accepted, is not only fine but celebrated in most cases and therefore meme’d ad nauseam. Because of the exorbitant way George Floyd was commemorated, MAGA took it to mean that Black people consider Floyd a hero, up there with Martin and Malcolm.
Their delusions activated fellow conservative whites to raise mediocre men, and even their wives, to royalty status. In retaliation for statues desecrated or relocated by the left, they consider it justifiable to erect statues honoring these basic men and mandate their existence on college campuses.
Using our tax dollars, more than 13,000 white South Africans have been relocated to America through our refugee program and given land to “save” them from discrimination by Black people in Africa. This is real. This is happening..
In the middle of an AI revolution, Elon Musk trained his large language model with the same out-of-context, nonsensical arguments that users of his social media platform regurgitate with authority. Many of those users have loud platforms and millions of followers.
They don’t “believe” in racism. Or they say only white people experience it. This is why, they say, they have “Black fatigue.”
They believe Black people are coddled and that they are forced to walk on eggshells around us. This makes them angry because they also believe Black people are the most violent, most criminal group on the planet.
Black past
They don’t see a lack of resources as a government obligation. It is, of course, the fault of Black people. They raise their children with this as truth.
Ancestral trauma does not exist if the traumatized have dark skin. Nor do remnants of the psychological and physical abuse form the familial foundations of slavery’s descendants.
To them it doesn’t matter that families torn apart in decades past contributed to fatherless children, poverty, rising crime statistics and incarceration. All of that, they say, is just Black people blaming the white man and playing the victim. Always playing the victim.
They believe and teach that the burning of Black towns is a myth and that Black people tear apart beautiful white cities, not in protest, but because we don’t get our way. To racist white people in 2026, there is no exhaustion worthy of protest. The brutality and unequal treatment in question are just more whining.
They joke about not making the Black kids mad because they’ll stab you, then burn the city down if they get in trouble for it.
In 2026, American Black people don’t have a right to resist. These people sincerely think racism is a plot by Democratic presidents of the past to eliminate the almighty white man who created every aspect of our modern existence.
Back to reality
Not in 2020, nor in any year before it, was white supremacy or racism solved. In the end, Black people are the ones left holding the bag. Many, in search of a brighter day, put aside the former president’s indiscretions to save themselves from the current president.
Some never knew Biden proudly declared himself the Last American Dixiecrat while campaigning for segregation. In truth, he was a man who used the word “nigger” on the Senate floor with the kind of comfort and arrogance that, ironically, only an American white supremacist could have.
This is America, where there’s nothing more American than racism. An aging white man set the stage for another aging white man to hand it back to the first aging white man. We have all lost 12 years in the meantime, still trying to explain to the programmed masses why kids like Karmelo Anthony need Black people on their jury and why it’s not OK to make a lynching joke or an “I can’t breathe” joke on Netflix.
This is the poison seeping into the earth, feeding the roots. This doesn’t get better. This kills us all, with Black people on the front line.
Constant arguments about things that should be common knowledge continue to go nowhere. So what’s lacking? How do we end this cycle?
Start somewhere
People on both the left and right need to understand the role of slavery, Jim Crow and the long list of discriminatory, murderous, debilitating and covert actions that followed. They need that history to understand why the monsters America created are “chimpin’ out.” No one can teach empathy, but we can offer tools.
Tools to see racism for what it is.
It is a thing so deeply rooted that there isn’t even another reason to offer for the chaos and karma of America. Racism isn’t a single action or an on-switch to someone’s rage or counter-rage. Racism is a living, breathing, breeding thing.
It is the design of “great men,” philosophers, psychologists, alchemists and doctors. It was written with quill pens by writers who stole libraries and men who knocked noses off statues, burned sacred books and felt righteous doing so.
Their children became the aristocrats and then the high society that ordered racism fashioned. They sewed it onto flags of victory, passed on to explorers who murdered countries, then gave away stolen land for free to create civilizations of desirable people, using altered Indigenous doctrines and structures left standing.
These celebrated men of honor and royalty, these men with family crests, had children with their sisters and their sisters’ children so their bloodline remained pure enough to sit on thrones, then benches, then boards. They are also presidents, world bankers and prime ministers, part of a machine made of hate at least as strong as what we call love.
These people have woven racism through so many timelines that it must be in the DNA of their children’s children. Racism is written into religious doctrines and stays quiet in thoughts that will never see the light of truth.
They must know it is so perfectly crafted that its effects are what these teen takeovers and sideshows are made of, and that those per capita crime statistics would make their buried kings smile, if such a thing were possible.
In the end
Racism is not of our making. It is a thing of white men and so white men must fix it.
Leah Harmony is Manager of Production for the Bay View, She can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com.