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I told y’all I was going live twice today. The first conversation was with Everton Blair — a Democrat running for Congress in Gwinnett County, Georgia — and that was a conversation about reform, about whether the Democratic Party can be pushed from within, about what Congress even does for us. If you missed it, go watch it. But this second conversation? This one’s different. This one’s about connecting the international to the local, the macro to the micro, the big to the small. And my boy Lavish Dope from Minneapolis is exactly the person to have this conversation with.

Lavish grew up a couple blocks from where George Floyd was killed. His grandfather was in SNCC before becoming a Black Panther. He grew up across the hall from a Palestinian family since the 1980s. The international connection wasn’t something he learned in a classroom — it was lived in a hallway. But as he told me, knowing something and knowing how to apply it are two different things. We didn’t know how to walk at one time either.

What made this conversation hit different is that Lavish has actually put his body on the line internationally — the Global March to Gaza, UN meetings in Brussels, solidarity missions to Cuba — and then come home to face the consequences. Detained at Newark for six hours after Egypt. Twenty people detained coming back from Cuba. Eighteen phones confiscated. Chris Smalls may never have gotten his back. And then having anxiety flying domestically within America because of what happened internationally. That’s the imperial boomerang in real time. That’s Aimé Césaire’s thesis playing out on your cell phone screen.

The Same Struggle, Different Geography

Here’s what Lavish laid out that I need y’all to really sit with. Before the blockade intensified and the genocide escalated, Cuba and Gaza shared something extraordinary: the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, the highest literacy rates in the world, and the highest ratios of doctors per capita. Cuba has 81 doctors per 1,000 people. Most of us in America don’t even know a medical doctor personally — the doctors we know got PhDs in philosophy. Feel me?

And Cuba is a Black-ass island. Majority Black population. That adds a whole other layer to why America hates Cuba so much. The monopoly can never sleep as long as Cuba and the idea of dignity and resistance that Cuba represents continues to exist. Because if the rest of Latin America wakes up and raises that flag of dignity the way Cuba has, but they do it collectively? American hegemony is done. And that’s what the Monroe Doctrine, McCarthyism, and Red Scare programming have been designed to prevent since jump.

The minimum wage in Cuba is four dollars a month. When Lavish brought portable chargers on his first trip, he realized an $80 charger represents twenty months of wages. They don’t need tech gadgets. They need toothpaste. Toothbrushes. Medicine. The blockade creates artificial scarcity of the most basic human necessities. And Americans don’t know that two million people travel to Cuba every year for May Day — the largest labor solidarity movement in the world. We don’t know because we’re not supposed to know. Research over MeSearch.

Democracy Will Wipe Your Ass Out

This country tells us that democracy is the freest form of government available to humanity. In real time, in 2026, they’re still selling that line. But we also have a history — documented, receipted, undeniable — that shows democracy will wipe your ass out if it feels like you’re a threat to it. Metaphorically or literally.

Think about it. Mormons can travel the world freely, push their ideology across borders, do aid work, extract wealth — nobody’s confiscating their phones at customs. But if you’re a little anti-capitalist? If you believe genocide is bad? If you think American imperialism might be a little faulty? Then your ability to move freely from border to border gets policed. Your devices get seized. You get interrogated about Hamas for three hours when you’re a citizen born in Minneapolis.

Lavish said something that stuck with me: the justification for American freedom has always been that you can say f**k America. That’s what ‘freedom ain’t free’ means — soldiers fight overseas so you have the right to dissent. But once they can use your same tax dollars to come hunt you down for exercising that dissent? The legitimacy falls apart. And we’re watching it fall apart in real time with task forces targeting anti-American ideology, with ICE functioning as a domestic paramilitary, with 3,100 agents deployed to one American city during Operation Metro Surge.

Fascism is nothing but imperialism turned inward. That’s not a new observation — Césaire said it, the Panthers lived it — but it hits different when you can see the 20-foot Skydio drones over Minneapolis that were deployed in Gaza last year. The same drones Kevin Durant invests in. The imperial boomerang doesn’t care about your political affiliation. It comes for everybody. That ain’t it though — pretending it won’t.

The Settler’s Move to Innocence and White Psychopathology

I got philosophical on the stream and I’m not apologizing for it. Some scholars call it the settler’s move to innocence. Some call it white psychopathology. I call it the machinery that makes cowboys the heroes and Indians the savages before anybody even starts arguing.

Think about it linguistically. Cowboys and Indians. Who’s the bad guys? The Indians. Always already. The word ‘Indians’ carries embedded savagery, an embedded understanding of being anti-human. We never view cowboys as being the invaders, the intruders. The language does the ideological work before the argument begins. And that micro lens — that childhood game — applies on a structural lens when we talk about settler colonialism everywhere.

The settlers in every instance always claim to be victims. In America, the Native Americans were scalping them, kidnapping them, pillaging them. In Israel, they have the right to exist and the right to defend themselves because everybody is always after them. You can bring it all the way to Emmett Till — the white woman as victim, the Black boy as threat. It’s 360 degrees. Same playbook. Same function.

Lavish told a story that crystallized it. His dad is fully Irish — grandparents born in Ireland. The year his dad was born, the Queen of England ordered one of the largest mass executions of Irish people in modern times. When Queen Elizabeth died? His dad mourned her. Whiteness superseded his brain. That’s white psychopathology in action. Even when you logically know, even when the evidence is in your bloodline, the settler’s innocence overrides lived history.

And here’s the structural asymmetry that makes it psychopathological: you can always separate white people from what they’ve done. Thomas Jefferson was a bad person, but he’s still the father of education and the Constitution. Winston Churchill committed atrocities, but he saved democracy. You can isolate the good from the bad. But Islam? Iran? Egypt? Cuba? You must view the entirety through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. No separation. No nuance. No immunity. That asymmetry IS the structure. Let that marinate.

The Magical Negro and Imperial Liberalism

I can speak to the magical Negro paradigm personally. As a first-generation brother from Bryan, College Station, Texas, who was always able to articulate himself with a certain ability, I’ve navigated this paradigm my whole life. The magical Negro is how you create exceptions to the rule. The system says: yeah, maybe being a nigga is bad. But all else fails, if you still have to be a nigga, can you at least be a magical one?

Good diction. Three degrees. Marry the right people. Go to the right events. Maybe then you can do X, Y, and Z. Ralph Ellison wrote about this in Invisible Man — the charismatic, exceptional Black figure who gets instrumentalized by systems of power. The magical Negro serves as a way to perpetuate the benevolence of the system. It’s how you justify the system around you that forced you to be magical in the first place.

And here’s where it gets real. Liberalism has commodified what it means to be a magical Negro in ways that have forced a lot of Black folks to buy into imperialism. Barack Obama was the embodiment. For him to be seen within the system of imperialism, he had to take the tools of imperialism and actualize them in ways white folks could never have dreamed of. That’s the reason why he’s lauded. His presidency mystified imperial violence for eight years. Libya. Drones. Deportations. But how dare you criticize him — a lot of people in the Black community have issues with Black leftists because we’re critical of Obama.

Kamala Harris is the same architecture. Lavish called her a Black slave catcher, and I understand why that language hits the way it does. Slave catchers were bad, but a Black one has access to the community. There are ways they can get in and disrupt things that a white person never could. And the question of whether you view that framing as accurate or offensive usually comes down to one thing: do you think the system can be reformed, or do you think it needs to be fundamentally transformed? That entry point — leftist or liberal, reform or revolution — dictates your description of Kamala Harris. Facts over feelings.

Purity Politics Is a Slur for Refusing to Settle

Carlos in the comments asked about purity politics, and I went off. I’m going off again right now in print because this needs to be documented.

Purity politics is a disingenuous terminology deployed by people aligned with oppressive power to make you not stand on what you believe because it’s ‘not pragmatic,’ because it’s ‘too idealistic.’ Lavish put it perfectly: I’m not asking for streets paved in gold. I’m asking for motherfuckers to have UBI, food stamps, the capability to feed their kids. That ain’t purity.

Here’s where I applied the debate framework. When somebody says genocide is bad and your response is purity politics, you’re making a straw man argument. Nowhere in ‘genocide is bad’ is there a demand for perfection. Nowhere in that statement is there a claim that purity is necessary or that we need a perfect candidate. You’re responding to a point that was never made. That’s textbook straw man argumentation, and I will call it out every single time.

But let me take it further because I defend this position to anybody — mama, daddy, homeboys, colleagues in social media. When you say purity politics, you’re debating about the comfort of white supremacy and you’re saying that I should be grateful. Purity politics means you being an ungrateful nigga. That’s what it means every time it’s deployed. How come you can’t be a grateful nigga for the imperial comfort that we have? How come this ain’t enough?

How dare you want a candidate that’s not genocidal? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t taking AIPAC money? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t funded by tech oligarchs and oil money? You’re being ungrateful. You’re being impractical. You’re being pure.

Nah. I deserve more. And you should be ashamed of yourself for deploying purity politics in the name of settlement. Because that’s what it is — you’re mad because I ain’t gonna settle. And I think conversations about purity politics illustrate ignorance to international relations specifically. You never hear purity politics unless someone brings up international solidarity. Whatever they’re calling pure, guaranteed, they don’t care about it. Israel-Palestine? Purity politics. But stopping Asian hate got unanimous support. Women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, climate crisis, Black rights — all of that is ‘partisan.’ Why? Because purity politics is about what the establishment values and what it’s willing to sacrifice. Research over MeSearch.

The False Dichotomy of Local Versus Global

I had three conversations in Atlanta this past weekend where people said international politics matters, but it doesn’t matter more than what’s happening here. And I kept saying: this is a false choice. We thinking that one of these matters more than the other is a false dichotomy.

The proof is in your gas tank. If Israel has particular desires to expand its borders, it brings American taxpayer dollars in and has us fighting with Iranians. When you see $70 to fill your tank and it used to be $40, you understand that what happens over there has a direct impact to what happens here. The international IS the local. The local IS the international.

Black people do not exist only in America. There are liberation movements rooted in Blackness that have succeeded in other countries. But American exceptionalism has Black folks in this country thinking our struggle is the only one that counts. John Henrik Clarke said it: the boat dropped you off here. Because the boat dropped you off over here don’t make you more special than dropped off over there.

The Black Panthers were in Algeria. They were in Cuba. International solidarity wasn’t a distraction from domestic liberation — it was the practice of liberation itself. If it was good enough for SNCC and the Panthers, it’s good enough for us. And Lavish is living proof that the model still works. From George Floyd Square to Havana to Brussels to Barcelona — the geography changes, but the system doesn’t.

Capitalism has incentivized a lot of us to be some selfish b******s. And as a result, we believe that politically things only matter unless it can be tied to the self. I would argue that is not only anti-communal — it’s anti-Black at its core. And it’s exactly what gets in the way of us being able to move forward and get the progress that we really desire. Education is elevation.

Where Do We Go From Here

Lavish is heading back to Cuba in less than two weeks for May Day — connecting with an organization called Belly the Beast, planning to bring 300 pounds of aid, and documenting the experience for a short film. His Instagram, Twitter, and everything else is @lavishmac. He just started a Substack for travel updates and dispatches from the field.

Me? Tomorrow I’ll be at Cullen Middle School in Houston, Texas — Sunnyside — talking to young Black students, especially young Black boys, about what it means to view themselves outside the paradigms being pushed on them. Because if they’re pushing the YN doctrine on all the young niggas, somebody’s got to make sure those young brothers see alternatives. That’s the work. That’s what Education is Elevation looks like in practice — in the classroom, on the livestream, on the page.

And to everybody reading this: you’re closer to somebody in Gaza who lost fifty family members than you are to the motherfuckers making the bombs. Money cannot be the goal. Money is an exchange of energy for something good you did in the world. When we reclaim that narrative — when the goal becomes wholeness instead of wealth — the rest follows.

The struggle is one. The geography changes. The system doesn’t. And the boomerang always comes back. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.

5 Key Takeaways

1. The imperial boomerang is real: drones, detention camps, and militarized policing deployed abroad are now operating domestically in places like Minneapolis and Dilley, Texas — what America allows overseas always returns home.

2. The “magical Negro” paradigm is how liberalism commodifies Black exceptionalism to justify imperialism — Barack Obama mystified imperial violence for eight years because his presidency made criticizing the empire feel like criticizing Black progress.

3. “Purity politics” is a straw man deployed to silence legitimate critiques of genocide, corporate capture, and imperialism — saying “genocide is bad” is not demanding perfection, it’s demanding a baseline of humanity.

4. The international and the local are not a false dichotomy — Israel’s expansionist desires directly impact American gas prices, taxpayer dollars, and military deployments, making geopolitical literacy a domestic necessity.

5. The settler’s move to innocence operates identically across contexts — from cowboys and Indians to Israeli victimhood narratives to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral — whiteness is always granted immunity from accountability for structural violence.

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This is an independent platform with no corporate backing. Every article — every piece of history documented, every legal framework analyzed, every connection drawn between the international and the local — is built without institutional support. I’m documenting the histories and frameworks that are actively being erased, building toward a community-funded resource with the depth of PBS and the freedom of having no masters. Fewer than 1% of the people who follow this work are paid subscribers. If this conversation between Lavish and me gave you something — a framework, a connection, a language for what you already felt — becoming a paid subscriber is how you make sure this work continues.

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Annotated Bibliography

Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40

Robinson, Cedric (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press

Ellison, Ralph (1952). Invisible Man. Random House

Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (1848). The Communist Manifesto. Workers’ Educational Association

Césaire, Aimé (1955). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press

Wilderson, Frank B. III (2020). Afropessimism. Liveright Publishing

Fanon, Frantz (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press

Clarke, John Henrik (Various). Lectures and Writings on Pan-African History. Various

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