So . . .
According to the Department of Justice, the government is creating a formal claims process through its new “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” It will be complete with a commission empowered to review complaints and potentially award financial relief to Trump loyalists who believe they were targeted by the state. The public-facing portal reportedly is not open yet, but the machinery is being assembled right now.
Listen, I need everybody who has ever been brutalized, displaced, poisoned, robbed, surveilled, detained, sterilized, profiled, experimented on, segregated, deported, wrongfully incarcerated, dispossessed, terrorized, snatched by ICE, or casually crushed under the boot of the American state to get their ass in line the moment the federal government opens its new compensation claims process.
I need Y’all to prepare accordingly. Stretch first. Hydrate. And make sure you wear some comfortable shoes because that line is g’on be long AF.
Yessss Y’all. Pull up with them receipts that look like the Dead Sea Scrolls! Bring ya’ folders. Your flash drives. Bring Grandma n’em stories, the family Bible, that deed they stole, the map they redlined, the loan denial, the water report they ignored, and that one cousin who wears silk leopard print bonnets in public and knows how to act a fool at municipal buildings.
Black people should apply. Indigenous folks should apply. Immigrants should apply. Japanese Americans whose families were thrown into internment camps should apply. The descendants of Mexican Americans driven off stolen land should apply.
The survivors of forced sterilization programs should apply. The people poisoned in Flint should apply. The families of people killed by police should apply. The communities that had to watch viral videos of people being killed by police should apply. The children separated at the border should apply.
Anybody whose neighborhood got a liquor store, a jail, a check cashing spot, and no grocery store should apply. Anybody whose school had metal detectors before it had working air conditioning and counselors should apply. Hell, even the ancestors should apply. At this point, open a portal in the spirit realm. Because why not? Somebody call IT.
Even Candace Owens should apply, because being called “a nappy-headed” by Laura Loomer and a “bitch” by the president is still state-adjacent emotional damage, even if she spent years volunteering as the welcome mat.
And don’t come on this app accusing me of telling people to go commit fraud. That’s not the point. The point is that America has suddenly discovered that government power can traumatize people. Amazing.
Applications may require two forms of real ID, three supporting documents, and proof that the government ruined your life between 1776 and the present. And please allow 6-8 business centuries for processing.
Jokes aside, this country has spent generations snatching people’s land, children, wages, languages, water, votes, neighborhoods, bodies, and futures. And every time we said it, we were told we were exaggerating. We’re too emotional. Too angry and divisive. Too focused on the past. But now that the right people feel “targeted,” suddenly Uncle Sam is sitting in the claims office with tissues, a clipboard, and direct deposit forms.
Look at god.
But here’s the thing, America has never actually struggled to understand harm and intergenerational trauma. It has struggled to recognize certain people as fully harmed. This country compensated enslavers after abolition for the “loss of property.” It reimbursed white Americans for all kinds of grievances throughout history.
White homeowners received subsidies and protections designed to cushion them from integration. White farmers won massive discrimination settlements from the USDA. Industries get bailouts. Banks get rescues. Corporations get relief packages every time capitalism lights itself on fire. Police departments accused of abuse get bigger budgets. Political operatives get legal defense funds. America always finds money when the suffering is attached to power, property, or proximity to whiteness.
But when Black folk demand reparations for slavery, segregation, redlining, lynching, medical experimentation, housing theft, school apartheid, predatory policing, environmental poisoning, and generations of economic extraction, suddenly everybody turns into a frustrated budget expert.
“Where will we get the money?” “How would we determine eligibility?” “That was too long ago.” “It’s too complicated.” “We can’t punish people today for the past.”
Funny how complexity evaporates the moment the government decides that politically connected suffering deserves administrative attention. So yeah, maybe everybody harmed by the American state should prepare their paperwork. Because satire is sometimes the only way to force a country to confront its own absurdity.
And honestly, the funniest part about this whole debacle is that America just might accidentally create a reparations framework while trying to give political elites a taxpayer-funded fainting couch. Not because this country finally looked at slavery, genocide, land theft, forced removals, redlining, police violence, and racial terror and said, “Damn, maybe we owe some people.”
Nah.
Because the wrong folks got held accountable and immediately needed a claims process, a trauma vocabulary, a federal hug, tissues, smelling salts, and a commemorative weighted blanket all paid for with public money.
When that application portal opens up, I need y’all to hit that website like Beyoncé tickets in 2016. Crash the server with generational trauma and 400 years of unresolved receipts saved in a big-ass Zip folder. Now, of course we will all be denied, because this is still America. But for one beautiful moment, the federal government is going to have to log into a database and confront an inbox full of American history it never meant to reimburse.
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