Signed on July 4, 2025, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (The Big Ugly Bill) was signed into law by U.S. president Donald J. Trump. The bill includes cuts to social programs, tax policies in favor of wealthy capitalists and corporations, labor & wage policies that reduce the protections for workers, reduced healthcare access and support of aggressive policing.
As a result of Africans in the U.S. being domestically colonized, about one quarter of us live below the poverty line. We are disproportionately represented in US social programs, making up 26 percent of food stamp recipients and 21 percent of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) recipients. Despite being only 14 percent of the US population, we account for approximately 30 percent of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
With the parasitic State passage of the “Big Ugly Bill,” it is a death sentence for millions of Africans due to the loss of healthcare and the threat to workers’ protection, such as overtime and minimum wage increase. Poor and working-class people are going to lose access to preventative health care and will be forced to use the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals as the main access to care, which will lead to mountains of medical debt. The aggressive policing policies proposed will lead to the worsening of mass incarceration and more State violence against African people.
Don’t lose hope, get organized!
The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) has been preparing us for over 50 years, and the call to be relentless should be echoing in our minds, hearts and spirits. African Internationalism teaches us that we need to raise our political consciousness through political education, build dual and contending power to place political and economic power in our own hands, disrupt the system with political action, engage in international solidarity with Indigenous and colonized people across the world and work to unite our African Nation.
We are not waiting 3.5 years for another colonial capitalist figurehead to lighten our oppression, or praying for the world to end. We must engage in long-term revolutionary organizing to dismantle this parasitic system and build the African socialist workers’ State. We must train for self-defense and build Black Power. We can’t vote or pray ourselves out of oppression.
We must show up whenever possible to organize African workers, women, children, queer and same-gender-loving people, develop mass campaigns with demands to defund State policing in favor of reparations and economic development for African people.
Dual power disrupts colonial-capitalist economy
Like the Black Power Blueprint project, the economic development of the APSP, creating liberated African spaces in North St. Louis, we must organize anti-colonial community-led programs for education, housing, food and healthcare projects everywhere that we are. The Black Power Blueprint is leading the way!
Fitness and self-defense groups, as well as community gardens can be built to increase the general health of our communities, and survival skills training to reduce our dependence on the State for policing and readiness to establish emergency response in the face of weather or other forms of disaster.
We need political education!
Raising the consciousness of the masses exposes the links between the State’s policies and the history of colonialism that has led to African oppression and exploitation. But it also gives context and theories to counter the misinformation and to highlight the history of African working-class resistance movements.
We must recognize that the “Big Ugly Bill” is colonialism fighting for its survival. We see resistance happening around the world, in the Sahel states of West Africa, and in the struggle for a free Congo, Haiti and Palestine. We must assume our role as leaders and organizers to seize this moment and deliver a deafening blow to a colonial system on its last leg.
We must take it to the grounds of our communities and be the vanguard, organizing the masses to revolution and African liberation. As Chairman Omali Yeshitela states in “An Uneasy Equilibrium:” “Not only is building the Party a crucial task of our organization, it is also the fundamental task of the African Revolution as a whole at this critical historical juncture.
