It’s the end of 2025. The idea that America is merely “going through a rough patch” or “things have to get bad before they get good” has become an insult to the daily reality. What we are witnessing is structural decline, accelerated by political over 50% of the nation’s electoral choices, economic extraction to the point of omnicide, and racialized policy decisions that were always with us, but have been recently amped up to proportions similar to the 1800s. Not accidental, as many have convinced themselves that those were the good old days. For non-colored Americans, this year did not feel like an aberration. When liberals scream, “As real Americans, this is not who we are,” when they hear worshipful support for a leader who openly brags of grabbing women by their genitals being a cool way to behave, brown and black people (the majority anyway) remind us that this is exactly who we are. The behavior confirms what we have witnessed for 500+ years.
The American political system now operates with open hostility toward large segments of its own people. As the country meanders towards a likely violent autocracy, voter suppression is no longer covert. Gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, and legal attacks on the Voting Rights Act have created a managed, almost fake democracy where outcomes are engineered, not earned. Large corporations own politicians and pull their strings through the power of legal, yet immoral, donations and favors. Through their non-profits and lobby groups, they even draft legislation for legislators to back. For Black, Latino, Indigenous, and immigrant communities, political power is routinely diluted, delayed, or denied. A cool example was a voting office in South Atlanta that was conveniently placed in a police station, one where they had a reputation for police abuse of the people in that region. Sure, representation exists, but influence and actual power do not. Symbolism has replaced the agency of the wealthy.
At the economic level, 2025 reinforced a long-standing truth. That process, called the trickle-down economy, where as companies grow, were suppose to pass on some of that wealth to the main workers. Nope! Growth in America is not shared. It is painfully extracted. Wages continue to lag behind inflation for the people who produce and consume in a cyclical way to keep the economy functional, the working people. Meanwhile, asset holders benefit from tax structures that reward speculation over labor. Non-white households, already disadvantaged by historical exclusion from homeownership, capital markets, and inheritance, face compounding harm and an accompanying degradation of a sense of hope. Rising interest rates have locked many out of housing entirely. Please ignore the mortgage company bent on taking whatever equity you have by encouraging you to refinance. Predatory lending, inflated rents, and corporate ownership of residential property, forcing out mom-and-pop rentals, have turned shelter into a profit instrument rather than a social necessity. Pay or be homeless. Being homeless can lead you to prison, where you can be converted into free labor. Who is in the win-win position here?
Healthcare is no better. It remains another fault line. The United States still ties medical access to employment, a structure that punishes those in unstable or undervalued labor sectors. Many who want to be entrepreneurs and work for themselves often have to quit to get health insurance. Go work for someone else, help them get wealthy. Black, brown, and poor white workers are disproportionately represented in gig work, service industries, and physically demanding jobs with fewer benefits. In 2025, maternal mortality rates for Black women remained unconscionably high. I worry about family and friends who end up in this system. Environmental exposure, medical bias, and underinsurance result from this corporate profit game. They are features of a system that treats certain lives as expendable costs.
You think the labor market and health care are under attack? Education is, too. We used to believe that education was the great equalizer because we believed in a merit system. Once you have been educated and worked hard, you cannot be fooled, and you will be super productive, adding value to the economy and therefore being rewarded accordingly. Yet, even this has become another sorting mechanism. Public schools in poor communities remain underfunded, over-policed, and stripped of culturally honest curricula. Book bans and the erasure of racial history are now normal. American education was behind the rest of the world, even Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian countries, but efforts are underway and millions spent to make it even worse as fast as possible. There is little credibility left in the public education system. They are attempts to discipline and falsify memory, and to make people so ignorant that they can be easily fooled into submission. When a society fears its own past, it prepares to repeat its violence with cleaner language. America is now headed down this path. Repeat the even darker era of ignorance and false power. It’s false because it can only lead to unnecessary violence.
Committed a crime? Or not! Does not matter. Only the so-called white-collar crime (aka good, decent crime) goes unnoticed or gets a slap on the wrist. The criminal legal system continues to function as an economic engine built on containment. Private prisons, racism, and the push for free labor motivate mass incarceration and cash bail. Aggressive policing extracts labor, destabilizes families, and permanently reduces earning potential. Prison in America has never been for rehabilitation. In 2025, states expanded surveillance technologies while cutting social services. Foster more desperation to fuel the prison pipeline. Predictive policing algorithms, trained on biased data, reinforced the same racial outcomes under the guise of objectivity. Artificial Intelligence, programmed by non-colored-run corporations and non-colored coders, sends already biased law enforcement after people that don’t look like them. Technology automated profit through racism.
A country of immigrants, where everyone who is not Native came from somewhere else over the last 500 years. Now those same descendants of immigrants are attacking the people who built the country and who hold it together. Immigration policy has grown more punitive and theatrical. America has turned this into a big reality TV show. Non-coloreds seem to love to see brown people being chased and arrested by masked men armed to the teeth with weapons. Remember, the people they harass often don’t have weapons. They are picking the fruit as seasonal workers, factory and warehouse workers, servants, nurses, waitresses, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and construction workers, often working to care for the same masked goon squad soldiers or their families. Migrants are used as political currency, blamed for economic instability they did not create, to mask the incompetence or the non-colored people in political office making ludicrous policies. Black and brown immigrants face detention, labor exploitation, and legal limbo, even as their work sustains entire industries both as workers and consumers. America demands their labor while denying their humanity. Be enslaved! This contradiction is not sustainable, but it is deeply profitable for a tiny few people. It’s ignorance beyond proportions as they cut off their own national nose to spite their faces based on ignorant perspectives on the world.
Culturally, the bloody strain is visible. If you are brown, you are expected to perform resilience without anger, contribution without critique, patriotism without protection. Even though the king exhibits naked incompetence, tell him he looks really good, or die. Avoid showing frustration openly. It will likely be labeled divisive. They will take away your job, freedom, and good reputation. If you just remain silent, it is mistaken for consent. The emotional labor required to survive these contradictions takes a measurable toll on mental health, family stability, and long-term well-being. I have worked with people afflicted with this madness, and I can’t imagine how much worse it must be to work under the administration in D.C.
Here comes 2026. January will make 12 months of the more recent madness we are witnessing. As 2026 approaches, the question is no longer whether America can be reformed at the margins. We know that’s not possible. It will get worse because the stage is set. Will America confront the racialized foundations of its economic and political systems? They have killed what was essentially a false attempt towards diversity – DEI – a kind of pretend redistribution. It was cosmetic, yet even non-colored people, ignorant of their own biases, could not tell it was what one of my colleagues likes to call “lipstick on a pig.” Representation without power is a distraction. Reform without accountability is delayed. We can’t move forward with such madness, but I see no way out except for the country to continue to fuel its own empire collapse.
For Black and Brown Americans, it’s vital to be clear about what is happening. Don’t be fooled and don’t stick your head in the sand. I am not preaching pessimism. It is survival. Understanding how systems function allows for strategic resistance, informed exit, or deliberate community building outside hostile institutions. Some will fight to reclaim the state. Others will invest in parallel economies, cooperative ownership, or international mobility. None of these choices are failures. Sitting back to watch what will happen is an option only if you have no willpower to live. They are rational responses to a country that has repeatedly chosen hierarchy, money, and ignorant power over justice, harmony, and generational, universal progress.
For those who love life, allies, and observers, 2026 demands honesty. Many people sit on your back and eat your food, while you toil and never get your merited rewards. The comforts enjoyed by some are subsidized by the precarity of others. I have said this before in another article: neutrality is not possible in an unequal system. Silence is alignment and a willingness to be doomed. It will not spare you.
America likes to describe itself as unfinished, an experiment in democracy and the pursuit of happiness. That framing suggests patience. Just wait and watch, and you will see it works out. Just pray for guidance while you wait. But unfinished structures can still harm those forced to live inside them. You can still be hurt while you pray or wait. You are likely already feeling it and may not want to admit it, out of fear and panic. As the year closes, the task is not to renew faith blindly, but to decide where energy, labor, and loyalty truly belong.
Hope, if it is to mean anything in 2026, must be grounded in material change. If you expect things to be different, you must change your actions first. Otherwise, it is just another promise deferred.
