In a diabolical attempt to distract
from Pervert-Gate, and enrich his Wall Street
white-collar mobster friends, Trump has, in
his own words, declared war on Iran, and has
perhaps ignited World War III… He could give
a damn about Iranians and their freedom,
American citizens and our desires for how
our tax money is spent, or the US soldiers
he has to sacrifice to achieve his goals -
he’s all about Trump, to hell with the
world.
So, when Muhammad Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with
them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me
nigger,” he wasn’t
just cracking a memorable line for the
history books. He was slicing the whole
American fairy tale right down the middle
and letting the guts spill on the floor. Ali
was speaking for Black soldiers and Marines
who were shipped halfway around the planet
to “defend freedom” for a country that still
had them fenced in, redlined, underpaid,
overpoliced, and treated like permanent
suspects in their own birthplace. He was
saying what a lot of them were thinking but
didn’t have the celebrity armor to say out
loud: why am I risking my life for people
who won’t even respect my humanity?
Now fast-forward to this modern era
where every crisis gets “accidentally”
inflated into a potential war the way a con
man inflates a real-estate appraisal. You
can hear the updated version of Ali’s point
without even changing the rhythm: I ain’t got no quarrel with
them Iranians. No Iranian ever called me
the N-word. No Iranian ever depicted me as
an ape. No Iranian ever built a political
movement off treating people who look like
me as a demographic problem to be
controlled, deported, caged, or frightened
into silence.
Am I lying?
So no, Donny baby, a whole lot of
Americans of color will not line up to go
die in your little trumped-up “look over
there” war. Not because we’re cowards. Not
because we don’t understand sacrifice. Black
folks understand sacrifice better than the
people who lecture us about it. We’ve been
sacrificing since the first ship hit the
shoreline and some European accountant
decided our bodies were “assets.” We’re not
confused about duty. We’re just not
interested in being drafted into a con.
Because that’s what this is, when
it’s “contrived and contorted” to distract
from the raping, looting, and pillaging
happening right here, in broad daylight,
with flags and microphones and applause.
War, in this system, is a business model.
It’s a revenue stream. It’s a stock bump.
It’s contracts. It’s minerals. It’s
“strategic interests,” which is the polite
term for other people’s oil, other people’s
land, other people’s labor, and other
people’s future. The elites don’t go to war
the way regular people go to war. They go to
war like they go to conferences: suited up,
catered, protected, and paid.
Understand, if this war escalates
into more than a drone war, and boots hit
the ground, the bodies will
disproportionately come from the lower
shelves of America’s stacked little social
pyramid. Kids from the farms and ranches.
Kids from trailer parks. Kids from Black and
Latino neighborhoods where the school
counselor hands you a recruiter pamphlet
like it’s your scholarship letter. Kids
whose “choice” is a joke because poverty has
a way of turning coercion into
“opportunity.” Those are the folks who
historically fight rich men’s battles. The
rich provide speeches. The poor provide
limbs.
Ali understood that. He understood
it so cleanly it scared the hell out of
respectable people. They didn’t just want
him quiet. They wanted him domesticated.
They wanted him to smile for the camera,
sell the war, and go be “an example.”
Instead he did the most un-American thing
possible: he told the truth about America.
So let’s connect the dots in plain
English. If you can understand why Ali
refused to go kill Vietnamese people, many
of them people of color, to enrich the same
white power structure that treated him like
dirt at home, then you can understand why a
Black or brown kid in 2026 might look at
this current political climate and say: I’m
not going to die for the man whose movement
thrives on insulting my community, targeting
my neighbors, and winking at racist imagery
like it’s a punchline. I’m not going to die
for a leadership class that can’t even
pretend to respect my citizenship unless I’m
in a uniform.
And let’s not play dumb. All those
good ol’ boys: the boardroom aristocrats,
the “thought leaders” with their bloodless
white papers, the billionaire donors who
pull the strings and call it patriotism: the
cut-throat capitalist
military/industrial/technical complex could
not care less about you or your kids. You’re
not their family. You’re not their future.
You’re inventory. You’re a resource. You’re the disposable
labor force
for their national mood swings.
People can talk about “national
security” all day long, but when the same
government apparatus treats Americans of
color like a security threat at home, the
sales pitch starts sounding like what it is:
a hustle. You can’t spend decades
criminalizing communities, militarizing
police, building surveillance toys, and
stocking for-profit prisons, then suddenly
act shocked when those same communities
don’t volunteer to go bleed overseas for the
very machine that’s been squeezing them dry.
Which brings us to the last, ugly
piece: the punishment plan. Because the
people who run these games always have a
backup for when the public stops buying
tickets. If Americans of color refuse to be
pawns, they’ll call us draft dodgers.
They’ll call us ungrateful. They’ll call us
disloyal. And the way this country is wired,
they might build policy around that insult.
Maybe that’s why the prison warehouses keep
expanding like it’s a growth industry. Maybe
that’s why “law and order” keeps getting
louder whenever the powerful feel their
control slipping.
But here’s the thing: refusing to
be used is not cowardice. Refusing to be
bait is not disloyalty. Refusing to die for
someone else’s profit is not a moral
failure. It’s absolute clarity.
So let me be clear, since America
loves “clarity” right up until it tells the
truth. No Greenlanders, Venezuelans, Cubans,
Mexicans, Colombians, or Iranians ever
called me the N-word or turned my humanity
into a cartoon. The loudest disrespect has
always come from the same direction, wrapped
in the same flag, preaching the same
righteousness, demanding the same sacrifice.
And this time, Donny baby, we ain’t
going.
