Return to Your Primary State: Colored
Stolen land. Borrowed power. Manufactured outrage. The pattern holds.
By Taylor Allyn
July 3, 2025
The Bill Comes Due
The Big Beautiful Bill passed today—July 3rd, the day before we celebrate our independence. Three trillion dollars in deficit spending disguised as fiscal responsibility, tax cuts for the wealthy wrapped in populist rhetoric, and the systematic dismantling of the safety net that keeps 71 million Americans on Medicaid and 40 million on SNAP benefits alive. The irony is as deliberate as it is cruel. And now, as the reality sets in, as the true scope of what was voted for becomes undeniable, they come crawling back. Not with apologies. Not with accountability. But with demands for solidarity from the very people they abandoned when it mattered most.
This is not surprising. This is the natural conclusion of a decades-long performance that was always destined to end exactly here.
The Price of Mimicry
Let's be clear about what we witnessed in the lead-up to this moment. The most pathetic actors in this national tragedy were not the architects of destruction—those, at least, were honest about their intentions. No, the most pathetic were those who built their entire sense of safety and worth on proximity to power rather than power itself. Black and brown faces in pressed collars, mouthing borrowed language, believing that their careful articulation of respectability would somehow save them when the reckoning came.
They aren't well-spoken—they're rehearsed. They aren't refined—they're performed. They aren't exceptional—they're mimics, hoping that if they could just master the right tone, the right vocabulary, the right posture, they could orbit close enough to whiteness to be protected by its gravitational pull.
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