“[I]f I can’t always get the mic, who can? If Edward Said cannot get the mic, if our children cannot get the mic, who can? Who has the permission to narrate?”
—Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims, 2025

There has been a long-standing campaign seeking to eliminate or otherwise drive into the dark those identities which stand in the way of Americanism. That is to say, the ideology and goals of the abstract American identity, culture, and imperial ambitions. This is the classic weapon used in virtually all instances of colonial occupation and settlement across the globe. It involves the placing of the settler culture — and by extension, identity itself — on a high pedestal above all others. Proximity, assimilation, and existing within the framework of the settler culture unlocks a degree of safety and privilege not found in those who exist on the margins of that culture.

Within the framework of the United States, the pressure to Americanize is omnipresent. This is not a matter of mere cultural exchange or “fitting in,” but the imposition of American identity on peoples who otherwise would not label themselves with American culture. It is the process of erasing people's histories, whitewashing the United States’ own history, and legitimizing the processes of settler-colonialism. When a culture is being erased and assimilation into settler identity and culture is encouraged, persisting in spite of it is a weapon. To quote the theorist Frantz Fanon in his work The Wretched of the Earth: “...the colonist only quits undermining the colonized once the latter have proclaimed loud and clear that white values reign supreme.” Assimilation into the American identity, and into systems of white supremacy itself, is the echo which has reverberated through the United States’ colonial history, shaping forms and adapting itself to fit the current condition, molding the concept of race itself to befit American foreign and domestic policy. Americanism is a mechanism which grants the state stability, building roots and foundations which keep the tower from crumbling. To some degree to another, the people see themselves in the profit and benefit of American empire, they see the state as an extension of their personhood when they have adopted Americanism.

Within this country, the history of systemic cultural erasure is perhaps best exemplified by the history of the land’s Indigenous. For many American Indian tribes, the erasure of culture was the literal manifestation of the encroaching American settler-colonial project and its conventions. Native spiritual traditions, foods, ways of life, celebrations, identities, and especially language, has been directly targeted as a mechanism seeking to delegitimize Native identity and sovereignty itself; seeking to reinforce — in Fanon’s words — “white values.” Native children were forcibly sent to boarding and residential schools where they were Christianized and taught the customs and culture of American settlers, always under the threat of violence and abuse. Land access and the imposition of the model of private property was systematically carried out to disrupt traditional ways of life.

To this day, many Indigenous people live on reservations, many of which historically served as concentration camps meant to segregate them under the domination of American settlers. The rights of these tribal governments as, in the words of the U.S. government, “domestic dependent nations” (the similarities of which to former South African “Bantustans” or the ongoing proxy “Authority” given to Palestinians in the West Bank is not lost on me) are flimsy at best, and remain routinely violated by the U.S. government.

Similar approaches of cultural erasure were practiced by the United States on numerous other communities to maintain white supremacy and the cracked foundations of American identity itself; numerous aspects of which survive into the modern day in one form or another. For as long as the colonial system has existed, the colonists have understood the value of culture, both as a shield for the horrors of colonialism, and as a social weapon of choice in propagating the “values” of the colonizer. Enslaved Africans were kept by American slave-holders from speaking their native languages, at times being deliberately kept away from others from the same region, as common language itself could become a weapon that could be used in slave uprisings against colonizers. Indeed, this was the case in the Amistad uprising in 1839, the New York revolt of 1712, and even to a degree, the successful Haitian Revolution where syncretic religious traditions and language itself (both being manifestations of collective cultural tradition) played roles in the planning of armed revolt.

The systematic erasure of enslaved peoples’ cultural backgrounds served as a conduit of dehumanization, and eventual Americanization. The descendants of the enslaved Africans today have a unique culture, one that is often stolen from and appropriated, or commercialized into Americanness when it is convenient, and degraded when it is not. As a comparatively small and regular example, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is often treated as “slang” by educators (despite being a fully functional dialect with its own grammatical rules), and is treated by some as a marker of being “uneducated.” The same goes for other traits which relate to racialization and Blackness in the U.S. The culture is often degraded or twisted for the purposes of uplifting American identity, or what is considered ordinary to white society, when it can be commercialized and/or appropriated; transforming a culture rooted in literal resistance to the wants of American imperialism into a husk of itself to the wider world. Traits that are part of cultures on the fringe of American identity are stigmatized or folded into American identity — and on occasion, whiteness — itself. Efforts from the Americans to claim cultures which are not theres’ to claim, and to commercialize the cultures into something they are not, must be critiqued accordingly lest they fester like a disease and permeate back into the original culture through the overarching American media and corporate voice. How many cultural traditions in the United States originate from peoples under the boot of American racial caste and other forms of oppression, that are now commercialized and turned into an aspect of American identity itself? Food, music, and countless other cultural expressions are routine victims to the robbery.

Pulling on the earlier example of slave-owners and the cultural genocide against enslaved Africans, there are numerous expressions of American state policy that can be seen today as reinforcements and propagation of the American culture to detriment of others. As an example, for centuries now, non-anglophone communities have systematically been made to drop their mother tongues whether through social stigma or outright law. Cultural expression in general has been criminalized en masse.

The Cajun-Creole artist Jourdan Thibodeaux sings the lyrics “Tu vis ta culture ou tu tues ta culture, il n’y a pas de milieu,” translating to “You live your culture or you kill your culture, there is no middle.” That is to say, all it takes is a singular generation failing to maintain a tradition, for it to completely die with that generation and familial lineage. The Creoles of Louisiana literally exemplified this, as during the interim of around the 1920s and until the passing of modern civil rights legislation, the French and Creole languages almost entirely disappeared from everyday vernacular due to Americanization and the imposition of English, with other elements of culture dying with the language in many lineages.

To extrapolate further, we largely learn culture from our family and community. If the family or community opts not to teach you something because of social stigma or law, such as your language, or how to cook or do traditional art, or the songs your people sing, who will? This is the difficult reality for diaspora and minority communities in the U.S. who have been subjected to pressures to acquiesce to colonial identity, to identify with the American state and uphold the values of its system.

Cultural death and assimilation was witnessed in some form or another in Gullah-Geechee, Latino, Indigenous, Arab, Irish, Italian, and even German communities across the U.S. during the 20th century as pressures to assimilate into American identity began to heighten in the era of mass-communication and public education.

Latinos in the U.S. are probably familiar with the concept of “no sabo kids,” whose families either failed to pass the Spanish language onto the next generation, or who consciously avoided learning and speaking it to avoid social stigma. Such pressures to Americanize have only further heightened today due to mass surveillance from the government (i.e., ICE and other violent policing institutions) which have extensively targeted those who are visibly Latino. In the last several years, there have been countless instances of evident racial profiling being conducted against Latino populations. When does speaking Spanish or having an accent put a target on your head, and to what extent does the American state want the Latino youth to know that fact; that they are unsafe if they choose to visibly express their own culture.

For Arabs in the U.S. at large, such pressures drastically heightened in the aftermath of the Iraq War, 9/11, the mass surveillance initiatives against Arab communities and masjids, and the racist rhetoric spewed towards Arabs and Muslims across mainstream media. In numerous parts of the country there were police, intelligence agencies, and informants spying on Arab community centers; for instance, New York City had what were called “mosque crawlers” which gave information to the police, and such practices of surveillance rightfully remain a fear for many Muslim and Arab communities today. Ordinary people were investigated, and sometimes charged with financing terrorism, for donating to charities that benefitted Arabs, Muslims, and most often, Palestinians specifically. This was not merely the case for a static moment in time, as we see the U.S. government weaponizes RICO charges and investigate those they allege are financing anything against U.S. state policy today. The playbook never ended. Being visibly Arab could mean unwanted police scrutiny, bullying, Islamophobia, racism, and this has continued onto this day with the American state’s subjugation of the Palestinian liberation movement and the racial profiling of those fighting against ICE detentions and Zionism.

As it pertains to Palestinians, there exists stigma against Palestinian identity itself, both in the occupied motherland and in the diaspora. The Zionists refuse to label Palestinians living in the occupied territories as Palestinians in the first place, opting to illegitimately call them “Arab Israelis.” Many Palestinians living under occupation are forced to learn sufficient Hebrew to avoid the full brunt of apartheid whether it be at military checkpoints where they are literally held at gunpoint, or because the occupation’s institutions demand a degree of assimilation from them for access to resources.

When being visibly identifiable as Palestinian (or other marginalized identities) has a cost, it may lead some families and people to shutter themselves away from culture as a means of survival, as an unfortunate number of colonized lineages have in history. However, this is not true survival, it is acquiescence and relinquishing of oneself to cultural extinction, and for many Palestinians behind the apartheid walls in the occupied motherland, they have remained steadfast in maintaining their culture even under immense scrutiny and surveillance. In fact, their culture has served as an explicit means of resistance, from using Arabic as an encoded language (as seen in folk song traditions like al-malwa’lala to communicate to the imprisoned) and numerous other expressions. In the U.S., there are Palestinians who may not speak or know how to write Arabic, or do not know the first thing about tatreez or dabke, nor how to cook Palestinian cuisine, or any other array of things that make up one’s culture. That is an unfortunate victory for those who wish to see Palestinian identity and the movement for liberation extinguished as each part lost is a ground that future generations will not bear their feet on. It alienates future generations from the culture and lived Palestinian experience, this can be extrapolated to virtually any other group facing such pressures. At one point is there so little foundation, confidence, and connection left that the child outright stops using the word “Palestinian” when asked what they are?

Effort must be placed into living one’s culture — even when inconvenient — in a world that wishes to see your culture dead and assimilated into colonial identity. Indeed, the Palestinian principle of sumud (or “steadfastness”) teaches lessons of perseverance, for it is a personal weapon against Zionism, it is the refusal to accept colonialism’s terms of acceptability.

In the time of early Palestinian rebellion to British and Zionist domination, the British sought to attack rural and Bedouin communities associated with the resistance, one identifying garment of choice being the keffiyeh. Instead of accepting the British terms of acceptability and letting the British label keffiyehs as “terroristic,” people across Palestine began to wear and sell keffiyehs as a subtle nod of cultural preservation and resistance. In other words, they refused to cede ground to British and Zionist interpretation of their culture, and let that interpretation be used as a social weapon by colonialism. No longer could the British simply identify alleged resistance fighters by garment, as the tarboosh of yesteryears had been replaced by keffiyehs across Palestine, even in metropolitan centers. The weight of culture as a tool that can be used in the fight of liberation — abstractly or literally — should not be understated, and it is a cultural failure to accept the terms of the colonizer, to forget or not practice culture to bring the colonizer comfort or security, to let their interpretations win.

In the aftermath of the Great Hunger in Ireland (sometimes labeled the Potato Famine in the U.S.), the Irish language and numerous elements of Irish culture itself were systematically decimated. The countryside was depopulated, and language, music, food, and cultural ways of life died horrifically with it on a mass scale. It should be noted that the Great Hunger was not merely a famine, but a man-made genocide conducted by the British. The British deliberately exacerbated conditions of famine, to the extent of ensuring food was exported from Ireland even during it. In the fight for Irish liberation, the maintenance and upholding of Irish culture played important roles in the continual work for freedom, and still does given the partial occupation of Ireland today in the North. Indeed, the Irish language was used extensively by militant groups fighting for Ireland’s emancipation from British rule (such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army), and Irish rebel songs comprised the soundtrack of many ordinary people’s lives who were otherwise uninvolved in armed struggle, blurring the lines of who the freedom-fighters were. Culture was a weapon, and with each person practicing the culture, it was a stab in the back to British colonial officers and propaganda which labeled Ireland a mere rebellious part of Britain. An established anti-colonial culture heightened the contradiction of colonialism’s interests.

The Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1910 of the British King in a manner which reminds me of the attachment many today have to colonial rights and identity: “We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”

This brings us to other minoritized cultures within the United States. By refusing to accept the country’s terms of acceptability, by insisting on living one’s culture and labeling yourself accordingly, you too stab the backs of propaganda initiatives which seek to legitimize American identity and impose it upon those under America’s heel. You refuse the notion that American identity is righteous, or that you have to subscribe to its cultural ideals, by and large, you refuse settler-colonialism’s terms of acceptability. Just as the Palestinian will not call themselves an “Arab Israeli,” nor the Māori of Aotearoa “New Zealanders,” or the formerly colonized Algerians “French,” what makes American identity so different from other cases of settler-colonial domination? Why should those subjected to colonialism and cultural homogenization here be made to act differently? If the material underlying has not truly changed, and the only difference is time, then there is no tangible difference at all.

I am reminded of the example of the Russian Empire, its dissolution, and the formation of the Soviet Union when speaking about this topic. Russia was itself a colonial empire, which over the course of centuries had come to colonize and often impose Russian cultural ideals over others. When socialist revolution broke out in the heart of Russia, largely conducted by the Bolsheviks, the socialists faced a rather interesting challenge. Not only were they handling the first ever long-term successful workers’ revolution, but they also were handed the task of dismantling Russian colonial power within an imperial core. In the Russian Empire, you were a Russian subject regardless of whether or not you were Kazakh, Ukrainian, Belarussian, or Kalmyk, and Russian culture itself was placed on a pedestal over minority cultures in a process that’s often been called Russification. This may obviously remind you of American imperialism, and how American identity is forced upon colonized peoples here, whether that be Native tribes, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and the countless minority communities in this land who too are made to pledge allegiance to the flag in schools and call themselves Americans.

The Reds — especially supported by those of minority backgrounds seeking representation of their people under a workers’ state — opted to begin a program known as Korenizatsiya (“коренизация, Indiginization), even though it failed in some of its ambitions, and some of its work had been undone in later decades. They divided the Russian Empire into different constituent countries, all belonging to a wider Soviet Union. Now, many colonized peoples in many areas of the former Russian Empire had tangible political autonomy and self-governance for the first time in many centuries. Now, in Ukraine, they were made to learn Ukrainian in schools and Ukrainians governed themselves within the wider framework of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. The same went for the other Soviet constituencies. Though not necessarily successful in its goals long-term, the process of Korenizatsiya is a fascinating model to reflect on for those within the American imperial core; a reminder that colonialism and American cultural chauvinism does not have to be placated to in such fashions, even in a literal multi-ethnic workers’ revolution in the imperial core, however unlikely that prospect may be within the contemporary American context.

In general, American culture is a weapon, but so is the culture of those brutalized by it. And not merely the abstract idea of “identifying” as something, but lived culture. When the colonial culture seeks to subsume another, that forms conflict between the interests of the colonized and the colonizer; something the colonizer knows already. From the onset, the colonizer has placed themselves in a multi-generational struggle for domination and the exploitation of the colonized and those on the culture’s margins. Each successive generation of beneficiaries to this system has to look beyond the thin sheet of American cultural values to look at the bodies underneath, to understand the role their continued compliance plays in the history of white supremacy and colonialism. The narcissism, self-importance, and insecure attachment to the imperial body itself propagates it further, delaying an understanding of the fickleness of what the imperial culture represents, that knee-jerk reaction itself is a weapon preventing transformation away from the horrific system. The reaction is the last scream of a dying animal, who sees death before its own eyes, and is faced with the reality of what comes next. Fanon perhaps states the process of this counter-reaction and struggle in more eloquent terms in his 1961 text:

“...Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. Their first confrontation was colored by violence and their cohabitation — or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer — continued at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire … It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject. The colonist derives his validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system.”