In 1963, a white Episcopal priest resigned rather than turn away Black Christians from his church. You were never taught his name. That erasure is intentional. And it’s why your marches and social media posts won’t stop ICE.

The Question That Indicts Us All

If you are unfamiliar with Reverend Dr. W.B. Selah, your resistance of Trump and ICE is performative and rooted in your own need to feel morally superior rather than to defeat this growing strain of Trump authoritarianism.

That is not an accusation. It is a diagnosis.

Who Was Reverend Dr. W.B. Selah? (And Why You Were Never Taught His Name)

In 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, Reverend Dr. W.B. Selah stood at a moral precipice that most Americans will never face. He was the rector of a prominent white Episcopal church — a position of power, prestige, and security in a segregated South. He preached to the city’s elite: lawyers, businessmen, Citizens’ Council members who were actively working to preserve white supremacy.

And then Black people tried to attend his church. A tactic of the Civil Rights Era that has been erased from history. Where Black people would expose the hypocrisy of White Christianity by trying to attend services at white churches. They did not come to create verbal outburst, that was not needed. Just trying to gain access to the sanctuary was all that was needed to reveal the fraud of these so-called Christians.

These erased heroes of the civil rights era came to hear the Word of God. They came to the house that proclaimed Christ’s name. Selah’s own congregation — his board, his vestry, his financial benefactors — demanded that he turn them away. They demanded that he maintain segregation in the sanctuary itself, that he become complicit in the desecration of the very God he claimed to serve.

Selah refused.

He resigned. He sacrificed his career, his position, his security — everything he had built — because he could not preside over a church that denied Black Christians entry to the body of Christ. In his resignation letter, he wrote words that should echo through every sanctuary in America: “I know in conscience there can be no color bar in a Christian church.”

But you were never taught his name.

You learned about Rosa Parks. You learned about Martin Luther King Jr. You learned about the sit-ins and the marches and the speeches. But you were never taught about Reverend Dr. W.B. Selah.

Why?

Because his story exposes White Christianity as a fraud.

The Myth of White Christianity

If a church bans people from hearing the word of the Lord because of their skin color, that is not the House of the Lord. That is a building filled with bigots wearing suits, dresses, and singing hymns.

Christ has never entered those sanctuaries. And if Jesus came down from Heaven today and walked into any of those thousands of white institutions that took His name in vain — that turned away His children at the door — He would do what He did at His Father’s house. He would overturn the tables. He would crack the whip. He would make all those so-called Christians scatter in terror.

White Christianity has spent 400 years performing piety while practicing racism. It has blessed slavery. It has sanctified segregation. It has provided the moral cover for every atrocity committed against Black people in this nation. And when confronted with the choice between Christ and comfort, it has chosen comfort every single time.

Selah chose differently. And for that, he was erased from history.

The Betrayal of Election Day 2024

Before we discuss what comes next, we must reckon with what happened on November 5, 2024.

No group voted for Kamala Harris more than the descendants of formerly enslaved people in America. Not a single demographic group matched our loyalty, our turnout, our commitment. Black women voted for her. Black men voted for her. We stood, as we always stand, in the breach.

And we were betrayed.

The Irish were not white until they were white. The Italians were not white until they were white. The Jews were not white until they were white. These groups know the fragility of whiteness. They know it can be revoked. So they scramble to prove their loyalty to it. They vote for Trump. They view his promise of a white America as their ticket to permanent belonging.

Look at what happened with the Somali Chamber of Commerce endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy despite everything he and the GOP have said about them. Look at Latino voters moving toward Trump. Look at Asian voters hedging their bets. They are trying to become white. They are trying to purchase safety with their votes.

But we know better. We will never be white. No matter how we vote, no matter what we do, no matter how much we compromise — we will never be granted that membership. So we don’t scramble for it.

We saw what happened in 2024. We saw the choice America made. And we responded not with panic, but with preparation.

Our Silence Is Not Resignation — It Is Resistance

You are watching Black America and seeing absence. That is your mistake.

What you are witnessing is not capitulation. It is strategic resistance forged in the fire of the War on Drugs, refined through decades of occupation in our own neighborhoods, sharpened by the knowledge of what happens when you give tyrants the chaos they need.

For Trump’s plan to succeed he needs chaos — that is why he tried to bait us.

He tried to provoke us in Washington, D.C. — Chocolate City, the center of Black political power in America. He took over the capital. He arrested people. He imprisoned people. He waited for Black America to riot, to burn, to give him the excuse he needs to declare martial law and impose full authoritarian control.

We stayed unbothered. We watched. We waited.

Trump does not fear our marches. He fears our organization. He does not fear our anger. He fears our strategy. Every police state, every occupation, every attempt at authoritarian control requires chaos — it requires the rebellion to be visible, reactive, emotional. It requires the occupied to do exactly what he expects so that he can respond with overwhelming force and claim that the occupation was justified.

We learned this lesson during the War on Drugs. We watched our neighborhoods become military zones. We watched tank-like vehicles roll down residential streets. We watched no-knock raids and civil asset forfeiture and mass incarceration. We survived it. And we learned.

Real resistance requires sacrifice. Real resistance is not comfortable.

What Real Sacrifice Looks Like

During the Civil Rights Movement, Black domestics would go to work for white families, listen to their white employers demand to know if they were participating in the bus boycott, and lie. They would clock out. They would walk miles — miles — from the white part of town to the Black part of town in solidarity. They did this after working a full day. They did this exhausted. They did this knowing that loss of employment meant loss of survival.

That is sacrifice.

Families during the Civil Rights era opened their homes to strangers. They shared meager food when they had little. They let civil rights leaders sleep on couches and in funeral homes and in churches. They worked a full day and then made meals for the protesters. They disrupted their own comfort to support resistance. They made economic sacrifices that cost them real money.

That is sacrifice.

Sit-ins at lunch counters disrupted business. Marches closed streets. The presence of Black people in white spaces forced those spaces to confront their own ugliness. The system felt the weight of our resistance. Not because we were loud, but because we made the operation of white supremacy more expensive — economically, spiritually, and socially.

That was power.

Now we have people thinking that posting on social media is activism. It is not. It is catharsis. It is personal therapy dressed up as political resistance. Posting about Trump on Instagram is not going to stop ICE. Retweeting a condemnation of fascism is not going to save anyone’s life.

 Real activism requires sacrifice.

The Work That Needs to Happen

Knock on 500 doors. That is activism. Listen to people at their doors. Listen to them in their kitchens. If you physically unable to knock doors then make 5,000 phone calls and hear the voices of people in your community. That is activism.

Dressing up in an inflatable costume is not protesting. That is cosplaying. That is performance art for your own benefit. The system does not care about your costume. The system cares about disruption.

Moreover, it is not lost on us that you can take out your septum ring, dye your hair a normal color and blend back into white society when you become bored.

You want to disrupt? Find the donors to the Republican Party. Find the people funding Trump and ICE. Go visit their churches. Sit next to them during service. Wear a shirt that says “God Is Good.” That’s all. You don’t have to say anything. They will know why you are there. “God Is Good” is too ambiguous for them to accuse you of being political — but they will feel the weight of your presence. They will know that their sanctuary, like Selah’s, is no longer a place of peace.

Find them at their gyms. Wear a “Good Trouble” t-shirt while you’re on the treadmill next to them. Send them letters. Write them letters. Stand in front of their homes. Not with signs, not with noise — just stand there. Make them see you. Make them understand that complicity has a cost.

ICE is prepared for street protests. They have riot gear and vehicles and training. Moreover, this is what they want. They are a hard target. But the people who donate to ICE — the wealthy Republicans who write checks to fund this machinery of deportation — they are not prepared for this. They think they are safe. They think they can donate to fascism and still live in peace in their communities.

Find their businesses and protest them. Make it expensive to fund authoritarianism. Make it so that the donors know they cannot hide, they cannot pretend, they cannot maintain the comfortable fiction that they are just “good people” with different political views.

They are not.

The Nazi Bar Parable

A man was visiting town for business and went to a small, grubby hole-in-the-wall bar to have a beer and kill time. He sat at the bar and shortly another man sat next to him and struck up a conversation. For about two minutes, they were talking. Then the bartender returned — furious. He grabbed a broken pool cue and beat it against the bar and told the Nazi to get out of here before he beat him to death.

The guy leaves. The new guy, shocked by the sudden burst of hostility, asked what that was about.

The bartender explained: “That guy was a Nazi.”

The guy remarks: “He seemed nice.”

The bartender explains: “Yes, they start out nice and quiet. Then they bring a friend and say something weird and racist. Then next thing you know, they bring two more friends. Then you have a full-on Nazi bar.”

Your Republican friend, son, daughter, brother, sister, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, uncle, is that nice, polite Nazi.

You cannot support Trump and not be afflicted with this malignant strain that is reverting America to its past ways. There is no such thing as a good Trump supporter in 2026. There is no such thing as a reasonable Republican. You cannot vote for fascism and claim to be a good person. You cannot support Trump and be a Christian — unless your aim is to be a member of the congregation that Reverend Selah turned his back on.

The bartender knew this. He did not engage in civil debate with the Nazi. He did not invite him to a dialogue. He did not try to understand his point of view. He drove him out.

That is the choice our country is facing. That is the choice every community is facing. You cannot coexist with fascism. You cannot negotiate with it. You cannot be friends with it and pretend that the friendship is apolitical.

Your comfort or fascism.

ICE Is Not the Gestapo — The Gestapo Was Modeled After What ICE Evolved From

Americans like to compare Trump to Hitler. Americans like to invoke the Gestapo when discussing ICE. But this gets the history backwards.

The Gestapo was modeled after what? After the machinery of oppression that already existed in America. After the slave catchers. After the mechanisms of control that hunted Black people for 400 years.

ICE is not the Gestapo reenacted. ICE is the slave catcher reborn. It is the same machinery, the same logic, the same violence — just with a different target for now. The same tactics that were used to hunt enslaved people and return them to bondage are now being used to hunt immigrants and return them to countries ravaged by American imperialism.

And when ICE comes for immigrants, Black America watches and remembers.

We know how this ends because we have lived this before. We know the playbook. We know the machinery. We know how to survive it.

And we are preparing.

A Letter to Those Not Descended From Slaves

Your performance of resistance rings hollow.

Your marches and your signs and your social media posts and your inflatable costumes — they are noise. They are catharsis. They are you trying to feel like you are doing something when you are doing nothing.

Real resistance requires sacrifice. Real resistance requires that you make yourself uncomfortable. Real resistance requires that you identify the people funding this machinery and make them understand — not through debate, not through dialogue, not through some fantasy of redemption — but through the cost of their complicity.

The descendants of enslaved people in America are not absent. We are watching. We are preparing. We are waiting for the moment when we must act. And when that moment comes, we will move in ways you cannot predict because we have been studying this system longer than any of you.

Your job is not to be concerned with us. Your job is to stop being the problem.

Find the donors. Make them uncomfortable. Disrupt their peace. Show them that complicity has a cost. And if you cannot do that, then stop pretending that you are resisting fascism.

You are just cosplaying.

And fascism does not fall to costumes. It falls to sacrifice.

Reverend Dr. W.B. Selah knew this. He sacrificed everything. And we erased his name from history because his story exposed the lie at the heart of White Christianity.

That is your warning. That is your instruction.

The question is whether you will act.