WASHINGTON, D.C–The greens and yellows of the shrubbery surrounding the Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C.’s southwesterly corner are now accompanied by structures and trailers of construction paraphernalia and crews of men in neon-yellow jackets running up and down Independence Avenue as they rush to meet U.S. president Donald John Trump’s July 4 project deadline for the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s bloody, genocidal founding.
Located between the Lincoln Memorial at its western end and the Second Imperialist War (WWII) Memorial at its eastern end, the floor of the 2,028 foot long Reflecting Pool is being repainted “American Flag Blue” under Trump’s $500 million “beautifying” D.C. project.
Though the hustle and bustle of this construction is mostly limited to the National Mall area of D.C. (one small tourist-trap corner of a city once known as “Chocolate City”), the propaganda of “America 250” is everywhere. Whether it’s at random metro stations with banners that read “Welcome to America’s Metro System” with red, white and blue motifs or giant banners reading “Imagine what we can accomplish in the next 250 years” hung on the side of the Federal Aviation Administration’s building, the reminders of the founding of this settler-colonial project are unescapable.
These nationalistic projections of grandeur and American exceptionalism are of course not new to Trump’s administration—but neither are they to any other administration that has occupied the White House. As African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) Chairman Omali Yeshitela has taught us, the Republican and Democratic parties are only competitors insofar as they are vying for the best way to perpetuate colonialism and imperialist wars on colonized people around the world—of which Palestine, Venezuela and Iran are among the most recent and explicit examples.
Trump 2.0’s unabashed imperialist rhetoric and major nationalist projects like repainting the pool and the 250-foot arch planned near the Arlington Memorial Circle are symptoms of the phase of colonialism we are in. Gone are the days where the wars waged on African people here and abroad were obscured by the seeming benevolence of the Democratic Party. If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now.
That Trump is now affixing his settler-colonialist legacy into the very skyline and subsoils of a city that once was 70 percent African, built by African enslaved labor and whose streets once were strewn by slave markets is both a symbolic act of repression as well as a materialistic one where the city grows ever more unaffordable. It is a reminder these are shrines to the settler-colonial project that genocided Indigenous people and stole Africans from our homeland to work and die on their plantations.
It too is a reminder that African self-determination is not and cannot be a program of the U.S. government because federal resources or tax dollars (which based on Point 3 of the Party’s 14-Point Platform: African people should not be forced to pay) are dictated by the opinion of the ruling class.
In the face of these “America 250” superficial monuments and colonial shrines and propaganda, however, African people’s resolve will not waver. For our struggle for liberation and self-determination transcends the temporal boundary of the U.S.’s 250 year existence.
We also recognize that this bombastic strutting of this settler-colonial State are just poor attempts to paint over a decaying, dying system in deep crisis. The deepening economic crisis and the inability to successfully wage colonial war in places like Iran are the real face of this dying empire.
It is in its death throes, and through the work of the APSP, the struggle to put it to bed and create a future for the world’s peoples continues until it’s won.
Liberation in our Lifetime! Libertad, en Esta Vida!
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