Trump’s America is not so different
Trump’s America is not different from the America African people have faced for our entire existence. From the birth of this colonial project, our labor has been stolen and used to enrich the colonizer.
At times, African people may see pockets of job growth. Even then, African unemployment has remained the highest of any group since the U.S. government began publishing labor statistics by race and gender in 1970.
The August 2025 Jobs Report
It is no surprise that African women are being pushed out of the labor market at staggering rates. Each month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes its Employment Situation Summary, known as the jobs report.
In August 2025, the U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs. Economists called this a sharp slowdown, reflecting deep structural instability. Amid this crisis, the unemployment rate for African women jumped to 7.5 percent, nearly double the national average of 4.3 percent.
Federal job cuts have played a role. Since January, 97,000 positions were eliminated, hitting agencies where African women are concentrated. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley reported that more than 300,000 African women have lost jobs since February, calling it a “staggering loss of economic security and generational progress.” Her outlook, however, reflects the view of the African petty bourgeoisie.
Petit Bourgeois Illusions vs. Working-Class Reality
The African working class cannot afford illusions of reform or inclusion. Real progress will not come from climbing the colonial ladder. It will come from tearing it down by reclaiming our stolen resources, building African self-reliance and overturning parasitic capitalism.
The U.S. economy was built on the stolen labor of African people. From enslavement to the underpaid domestic and service work that continues today, African women’s labor has always propped up this system.
The Vivid Truth about Poverty Programs
It is African women in hospitals, schools, social service offices and federal agencies who are now being cast into unemployment lines, forced to choose between food and rent.
Social services are a clear example. These are institutions where African women are concentrated as both workers and recipients. During a recertification appointment for WIC—a federal program providing food and health support for low-income mothers and children—a worker admitted that my income, though low enough to qualify, was still higher than her own paycheck. This shows the colonial contradiction: African women employed by the State to administer poverty programs are trapped in poverty wages themselves.
The colonial State uses our labor to manage its scraps while locking us in the same cycle of deprivation. It demands that African women hold up its welfare system while ensuring that neither worker nor recipient can escape dependence. This is colonial capitalism waging economic war on African women, forcing us to subsidize the very system that exploits and discards us.
The nature of parasitism
This is parasitism. The wealth of white ruling class depends on draining the labor and lives of African people while leaving us in permanent instability. The jobs report is a reminder that African people must build our own future outside the colonial economy.
That means advancing African self-reliance. We must create cooperative economic systems and community-controlled institutions that serve us instead of the colonial State. It requires organizing the African working class, with African women workers at the front, because they feel the sharpest edge of colonial oppression and hold the clearest vision of liberation.
Rejecting reform, embracing revolution
We must reject the illusion that assimilation into the colonial system can bring freedom. No individual achievement or professional advancement will end colonial exploitation. Liberation demands the destruction of the system itself.
A recent Time article stated, “Black women are the canary in the coal mine on the health of the economy.” It warned that rising unemployment among African women signals danger for other workers. While this shows that African women are among the most vulnerable, it reduces our suffering to a warning sign for the broader economy.
It misses the deeper reality. African working-class women are not simply indicators of crisis. They are the very foundation of the parasitic system that exploits our labor and discards us when convenient. By stopping at reformist calls to policymakers, the article reflects the petty bourgeois outlook, seeking to better manage our exploitation instead of destroying the system that creates it.
The path forward: African Internationalism
The lesson is not that we are warnings for others. Our lived experience shows that the colonial economy is unsustainable and must be destroyed, replaced with African-controlled systems of power and life.
Our struggle must be carried forward under African Internationalism. African women in the U.S., in Latin America, the Caribbean, on the Continent and in Europe are united by a common oppression under colonial capitalism. Only through African Internationalism as our guiding theory can we claim a common victory.
UHURU!
