A Black People’s Guide for Navigating Political Bullshit

Part 1: Communism

Before we get to Karl Marx, before we get to the Soviet Union, before we get to anything Republicans want to throw at you - let’s go back further. Way further.

Go back to the African village.

Every African village society operated on a foundational principle - the community’s strength protected every individual within it. Land belonged to everyone. Elders held wisdom for everyone. The harvest fed everyone. When one family suffered, the village responded. When an outsider threatened one member, the village moved as one body. Nobody called it an ideology. Nobody needed a manifesto. It was simply how people who loved each other organized their lives. Check out my Before the Chains series
on Substack.

That practice has a Latin name - communitas. Shared by all. Held in common.

We still know it now as Ujamaa. Even if you don’t celebrate Kwanzaa.

Black people carried communitas across the Middle Passage in the only luggage slavery couldn’t confiscate - memory, culture, and the deep understanding that individual survival required collective strength. We rebuilt it in the quarters. We rebuilt it in the Black Church. We rebuilt it in mutual aid societies after emancipation when the government handed us freedom with no land, no money, no infrastructure, and no apology. We rebuilt it in Greenwood, Oklahoma - Black Wall Street - where Black dollars circulated through Black hands building Black wealth until white rage burned it to the ground in 1921.

We have always been Commune-ists.

Not the Cold War boogeyman. The original. The people who understood instinctively what political theorists spent centuries trying to articulate - that human beings thrive collectively, and that collective power in the hands of Black people represents the greatest threat to a system built on our division and exploitation.

What The Dictionary Says

Communism (n.) - a political and economic system where the community or state owns all property and means of production, distributing resources equally among citizens with no private ownership and no class distinctions.

Now hold that definition next to everything you just read about the African village. Hold it next to the Underground Railroad - a full logistical network of safe houses, conductors, routes, and collective risk that moved hundreds of people to freedom. Hold it next to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program feeding children before school every single morning. Hold it next to the Black Church passing the collection plate so a family doesn’t lose their house this week.

See the distance between what communism actually means and what Black people have always actually practiced? Black communal tradition never demanded state ownership of everything. It demanded that people who share a struggle share their strength. That’s not Marxism. That’s motherhood. That’s village. That’s us.

They Saw The Power - And Built Systems To Destroy It

Here’s something history books skip right past: the white power structure recognized the strength of Black communal bonds from the very beginning. They didn’t misunderstand communitas. They understood it perfectly - and they understood that it represented an existential threat to a system built on Black subjugation.

So they built machinery specifically designed to destroy it.

They weaponized distrust. The slave patrol system rewarded enslaved people who reported escape plans, uprisings, or organizing among their own. Enslavers deliberately separated families, mixed people from different African nations who shared no common language, and created hierarchies within the enslaved population - house versus field, light-skinned versus dark-skinned - designed to fracture solidarity before it could form. Division was an engineering project. They built it on purpose.

They used violence as a communal weapon. Lynching was never just about the individual hanging from that tree. Lynching was a community message - a public spectacle designed to remind every Black person what collective defiance costs. The Tulsa Race War didn’t just destroy Black Wall Street. It sent a message to every thriving Black community in America: build too much together and we will burn it down. The bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985 - the second time the American government dropped a bomb on its own civilians - targeted a Black communal organization. The message was always collective. The terror was always intentional.

They infiltrated and poisoned from within. COINTELPRO - the FBI’s counterintelligence program - specifically targeted Black organizations by planting informants, sending forged letters designed to create conflict between leaders, spreading rumors, and funding internal rivalries. They didn’t just attack Black organizing from outside. They climbed inside it and rotted it from the center. The destruction of the Black Panther Party came as much from manufactured internal distrust as from direct government violence.

And then there are the rewarded ones.

Every system of oppression needs faces that look like the people being oppressed. Tokens. Shields. People who trade community loyalty for individual reward - a Senate seat, a congressional district, a record deal, an invitation to the table. Their job is simple: validate the system, attack the community, and collect the check.

Hey Tim Scott! A United States Senator from South Carolina - a state where Black people built generational wealth through their stolen labor - who stood on a national stage and declared “America is not a racist country” while the Republican Party systematically dismantled voting rights protections targeting Black voters. Tim Scott doesn’t represent Black South Carolina. Tim Scott represents the comfort of white Republicans who need a Black face to absorb the accusation of racism.

Hey Byron Donalds! A congressman who voted against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, against preserving the Voting Rights Act, and who suggested during Black History Month that Black families were actually stronger under segregation because the government hadn’t intervened yet. That’s not a political opinion. That’s a performance. And somebody is paying for the ticket.

Hey Sean Carter! This one stings because the talent is real and the legacy is enormous. The man who built an empire rapping about systemic racism made two moves that the community deserves to name directly. First - when Colin Kaepernick took a knee and the NFL became a battleground for Black dignity, Jay-Z partnered with the NFL on a music and social justice initiative. The optics were devastating. Kaepernick lost his career for standing up collectively. Jay-Z collected a business deal from the institution that blacklisted him. Then - while Black consumers are still actively boycotting Target for dismantling their DEI initiatives and pulling back commitments to Black suppliers and creators - Jay-Z announced a business partnership with Target. Not a word about the boycott. Not a gesture toward the community holding the line. Just the deal.

Nobody questions the business acumen. The question the community asks is simpler than that: whose team are you on when it costs something?

Individual elevation purchased at community expense has a long history in this country. The reward structure runs from the plantation to the boardroom. The price the community pays stays exactly the same.

The Commune-ists - An Honor Roll

When the government needed to destroy Black leadership, they reached for the communist label like a weapon. What they actually targeted was communitas - every time, without exception. These are the Commune-ists they feared most:

Martin Luther King Jr. - Built an entire movement on collective sacrifice and shared risk. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover wiretapped his phones, infiltrated his organization, called him the “most dangerous Negro in America,” and sent him an anonymous letter encouraging him to kill himself. His crime was organizing Black people collectively and demanding they be treated like human beings.

W.E.B. Du Bois - Built intellectual infrastructure for collective Black liberation across three continents. Faced decades of government harassment, had his passport revoked, got indicted as a foreign agent at 83 years old. Joined the Communist Party at 93 as a final act of defiance against American hypocrisy. The man never stopped.

Paul Robeson - Singer, actor, athlete, and global activist who used every platform he owned to lift the collective voice of Black and colonized people worldwide. The government revoked his passport so the world couldn’t hear him, destroyed his career, and broke his health. They were terrified of one Black man with a microphone and a conscience.

Bobby Seale & Fred Hampton - Built the Black Panther Party into the most sophisticated Commune-ist infrastructure Black America had seen since Reconstruction. Free breakfast for children every morning. Community health clinics. Collective self-defense. Fred Hampton was building coalitions across racial lines - organizing poor white people, Puerto Rican activists, and Black communities under one banner of collective power. The FBI assassinated him at 21 years old while he slept. Because organized, multiracial, collective Black-led power scared them more than anything else on American soil.

Bayard Rustin - The organizational genius who architected the entire logistical machinery of the March on Washington. Pure Commune-ist brilliance - and they kept him in the shadows because of his communist associations and his homosexuality. The man built the greatest demonstration of collective Black power in American history and history barely knows his name.

Claudia Jones - Trinidadian-born Black communist organizer who built collective power among Black working women as a political force. The government couldn’t break her so they deported her to England. She kept organizing from there.

Every single one of these people practiced communitas. Every single one got the communist label for it. The accusation was never about ideology. The accusation was about fear - specifically, the fear of what Black people accomplish when they
move together.

The Republican Playbook

Lyndon Johnson laid it bare in a single sentence: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man...”

He said that in 1960. Republicans have been running that play ever since.

Think about what the word “communist” actually does in a room full of people who can’t spell it and definitely can’t define it. It doesn’t inform. It activates. It triggers a feeling - specifically the feeling that something threatening is coming for what’s yours, even if you don’t have shit. And the moment that fear lands, rational thought leaves the building.

You don’t need a civics degree to manipulate somebody. You just need a scary word and a target. Republicans point at Black organizers, Black politicians, Black collective power or their own who have not bought into a white nationalist agenda and yell COMMUNIST! The poorly educated and - let’s be honest - some of the highly educated too, slap that label on everybody that even mentions universal healthcare.

That’s the whole trick. Johnson saw it in 1960. They’re still running it in 2026.

Every time Black people organize collectively for something that would actually improve our lives - reparations, Medicare for All, student loan relief, community investment, living wages, voting rights protection - Republicans load the communist label and fire. They want Cold War fear in your chest instead of clarity in your mind. The new Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is real for them, but it doesn’t have anything to do with voter fraud.

(Side note – Trump released documents proving that Russia interfered in the election for him! You stupid MF’s.)

They call collective uplift communism. They call closing the wealth gap communism. They call investing in Black communities communism.

What they really mean is - that money and that power was supposed to stay with us.

Know the game.

Trump, Putin, and The Last Word

Here’s where it gets almost too obvious to believe - except it’s happening in
plain sight.

Donald Trump calls everyone who opposes him a communist. Judges ruling against his executive overreach - communists. Journalists reporting his administration’s actions - communists. Democrats, activists, protesters, academics, federal employees who won’t bend the knee - communists. The label flies out of his mouth the way it flew out of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI memos - as a weapon designed to delegitimize, isolate, and destroy anyone who stands in the way of consolidated power.

But Donald Trump has never called Vladimir Putin a communist.

Putin - the authoritarian leader of Russia, the literal successor state to the Soviet Union, the man who imprisons political opponents, assassinates journalists, invades sovereign nations, and runs the most sophisticated kleptocratic regime on earth - gets praised. Repeatedly. Enthusiastically. Trump calls him smart. Calls him a genius. Expresses open admiration for how Putin controls his country.

Let that land for a second.

The man screaming “communist” at American judges, democrats, and Black organizers openly worships the leader of the country that invented the version of communism he claims to fear. Because Trump never actually feared communism. He fears opposition. He fears collective power. He fears organized people who won’t submit.

That is exactly what J. Edgar Hoover feared in Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly what the government feared in Fred Hampton. Exactly what every system of concentrated power has always feared in Black Commune-ists throughout history.

The label is a weapon. It always was. The target is always the same - people who organize collectively and refuse to be controlled.

They called it communism.

We called it a Tuesday.

Part 2: Socialism - Coming Next