I love the US. But it's just not that into me.
weaken the Voting Rights Act again has cleared the runway for politicians who want to disenfranchise Black voters — and anyone who cares about effective democracy.
The act, a key piece of legislation from the Civil Rights era, ensured that where African Americans lived in the majority, constituency boundaries would reflect the concentrated power of their vote.now busy redrawing congressional maps, by 2028 or 2030, we could see a country where the party that controls the US House having been significantly outvoted in the popular vote. That is not democracy. And Black people will not be the only ones who lose.
I had moved among for two decades.
“American capitalism is a particular mix of capitalism, kleptocracy and oligarchy,” I told them, “and becoming more of the latter two over time. ”is distracting white people from examining their own mortality, and the mortality of American civic life.
“Black people live with mortality every damned day,” I said. “None of us will live for ever, and our nation might not either. ”Here’s the piece of the puzzle a lot of folks are missing: the war on democracy is also a war on excellence. You cannot understand America until you understand this.
Chideya, pictured as a child. She says Black people will not be the only ones who lose out in the weakening of the Voting Rights Act, the Defence Secretary — sorry, “Secretary of War” — now denying promotions to highly qualified Black and female officers. The panic in the US over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – schemes to provide fair representation – was never about quality.
My late uncle, Lt-Col Oliver Stokes, had a bronze star for military achievement, was a brilliant engineer and spent two years learning Arabic to serve as a liaison to Saudi Arabia. He had to manage white subordinates who refused to take his orders. That is reflected in what we are seeing now – ethnonationalism: the project of reserving the gifts of America for SWP: Some White People. I say SWP to disaggregate.
There are white Americans who actively work to dismantle the caste system. Then there are the putative beneficiaries sold racial resentment but still locked out of opportunity themselves. This administration could not have won without that second group. And what is happening now?
Their insurance premiums have gone up. because of a needless war. Services to working families have been cut to suit the kleptocracy. Their itch of racial resentment got scratched. The American dream did not get any closer.
, I spent three days with Trump voters in eastern Ohio and met a string of young, smart, ambitious women who wanted to work in politics and believed they were being denied a fair shot. They were probably right. The American caste system also runs on income and pedigree bias against white Americans. For all the lawsuits aimed at the Ivy League, those degrees still matter.
I empathised. But their vote was unlikely to get them any closer to the futures they wanted. Washington Post internship, a master’s from Syracuse’s Newhouse School, reporting from Zambia. She lost her career to racial bias and bias against hiring women with children.
She became a med tech, then a teacher. Chideya’s mother, pictured, was a promising young journalist but lost her career to racist and sexist bias, Disney put out an open call drawing test for animators. My grandfather Oliver passed the mail-in test and was invited to California. It was the early 1940s.
He considered driving his young family across the country to a studio where no one knew he was Black — then instead of going for his dreams, he stayed home. He was probably right. Disney was producing the anti-Blackanimator Tyrus Wong passed most of his career in obscurity, showing how punishing those studios were for non-white workers.
Still, I think about what Grandpa could have done if he had drawn for Disney instead of clocking in at the post office, let alone the family wealth he could have built. That was 80 years ago. The pattern of walled-off excellence has not disappeared. It has just changed shape.
And it is the key to understanding why America has gone so badly sideways. I call the unpaid civic labour and labour discrimination cost that many groups of Americans face “The Subsidy”. It is a not-so-hidden tax. My career has been different.
I’ve flown on Air Force One and listened to Nelson Mandela talk about why he chose not to criticise George W Bush after 9/11. I went to Standing Rock to meet the indigenous people protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the most powerful experience I’ve ever had as a reporter.
On the other hand, I have endured more harassment in newsrooms than I have ever faced in the field — even though one of my specialities is reporting on. Now I am staring at the prospect of being knocked down a peg. In the past, three decades of award-winning work on electoral politics and white supremacy could seem enticing to an employer.
But people with my background have become too hot to hire in an era when “anti-woke” Bari Weiss is editor-in-chief of CBS News.of US job losses in 2025. But this whole country is rife with the diseases of false scarcity, kleptocracy and antimeritocratic systems. After years of fighting, I have realised that the best way for me to protect my home nation – to be a loving patriot – is to move abroad.
So I am applying for Afrodescendant citizenship in Benin, a programme being evangelised byChideya is applying for Afrodescendant citizenship in Benin, West Africa I have a far better shot at publishing freely if I can publish from outside the United States. I first visited my father’s family inwhen I was four years old. I have always known the world was big, and I was encouraged to move through it freely. I stayed in America anyway.
There have been wonderful moments. There have also been breathtaking levels of employment abuse and, now, two years of formal unemployment. Many people are singing the same tune – Black women, immigrants, people with disabilities among them. This country’s actions endanger our very lives.
And just as Black people fled racial terrorism and moved north in the Great Migration, I believe there is another Great Migration starting to swell. This one is not just Black Americans. It’s the Indian H-1B worker who gets tired of chasing the visas. It’s the young people choosing to leave the country to stop paying punitive student loan agreements.
A loss for America, chance for the world This disastrous moment is also an opportunity — for global businesses, governments and cultural institutions to connect with the excellence and perspective of people the US has tried to discard. We know where the bodies are buried. We have lived experience, education and employment history. There is room for new transatlantic and global alliances, and an emerging wisdom that benefits the world.
Just because American democracy as we’ve known it is effectively dead does not mean it cannot be resurrected. But it cannot be restored without the wisdom of the people who have fought for it and suffered here. Farai Chideya is an author, journalist and futurist. Her ‘Shared Visioning’ series facilitates collaborative, community-based futurism.
She is working on a book mapping the possibilities for the next 250 years of American life.
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