A Diseased State:

That is, before we continue to publish analysis after analysis of the USA’s national and foreign policy, let’s take seriously Tiffany King’s (2016) contention that we are moving too quickly past the violence of conquest. There is a much longer conversation needed compared to the often mentioned legacies of settler colonialism, even critical interventions which trace the neo-colonial dimensions of our present liberal democracies. In order to achieve this slow down, Black thought acts as ‘a form of chafing and rubbing up against the normative flows of Western thought’ (King 2019: 2), and we must speak about what precedes the current trumping iteration of madness. By doing so, we are not offering clean resolutions, but rather astute disruptions (Creed et al. 2025). Here, the point is to interrupt the violence of anti-Blackness.

Paying attention to conquest requires reckoning with the foundation of the modern world, broadening our scope of the conflict at hand and its impact. For Chipato and Chandler (2022: 1786), the onset of the ‘craziness’ in the USA can be traced to anti-Black sentiment, which signals ‘the violence of cutting, attributing, judging, allocating, assessing, deciding’. That is, anti-Blackness is the foundational element of modernity – of all conflict.

From this, Blackness emerges as something that both precedes and is negated by modernity (Moten 2013). Christina Sharpe (2016: 16) reflects on the target of anti-Black violence in the history of the USA, fixated on ‘bodies, to which anything and everything can be and is done’, while Chassot (2015: 102) foregrounds that such a condition spurs the birth of ‘new forms of social and cultural life’ which is always playing out in the ‘eternal present’. So in that sense, both questions are right – things are crazy in the US right now; they used to be too. Anti-Blackness roots the conversation into the present, and we must resist this temporal limitation.

‘things are crazy in the US right now; they used to be too’

The impact of conquest and anti-Blackness are far-reaching, and it is understandably difficult to articulate one distinctly coherent impact of them.

Yet I believe one valuable point of focus can be the American healthcare system – for this, I can only echo the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who, in 1966, said that, ‘of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman’ (in Pollock 2021: 138).

World renowned for its exuberant costs and poor health outcomes, American healthcare has been described as profit-driven rather than patient-centric (LiPuma & Robichaud 2020; Xavier Inda 2023). Of course, it would not be American if it was not steeped in inequality and conquest. Krumholz et al. (2022) reflect on the disproportionate death of Black people, as healthcare is socially manufactured: ‘Black people in the United States are more likely to die young—not because there is some intrinsic biological risk, but because of racism’.

‘The US has always been a diseased state – both a state of illness … and a state of unrest’

Notions of health emerge from the American context which stretch in both directions. On one hand, health and well-being remain within the domain of the so-called ‘Granola Nazis’ (Tebaldi 2023), or white supremacists who embrace wellness practices in order to strengthen the white race and ensure its continued survival (LeClerc 2022). Practices of health need not be this extreme or implicit – interpretations of health similarly valorize thin-ness, able-bodied-ness and, by extent, whiteness (Fritz 2023; Sanders 2019). All of these approaches to health sediment the anti-Black violence which is already entrenched in the American healthcare system. On the other hand – or rather, escaping its grasp entirely – notions of health and wellbeing emerge from Black Liberationists and Black Feminists, who are coming up with their own interpretation of what it means to be healthy amongst all madness (cf Frierson 2020; Khan et al. 2020; Monier 2023).

Of note, Khan et al. (2020: 241) share a vision of abolitionist health and medicine, wherein resources are diverted away from forms of policing and instead ‘invest in the welfare of all people, supporting movements for universal health care coverage, and establishing reparations for communities of color devastated not only by histories of unethical medical experimentation but also by institutions that have profited from policing and mass incarceration’. This is a vision which is already being enacted and is accessible to everyone, everywhere, both in the past and right now – by slowing down and taking it easy, ‘through our bodies, we are able to find rest, repair, pleasure, and community’ (Creed et al. 2025: 9). From this, it can be seen that conquest has borne twinned visions for American healthcare – one from which to rule them all, and one from which to free us.

‘Rather than continuing to be awe-struck by American politics … we must work towards treating the chronic disease of anti-Blackness worldwide’

As onlookers from inside and outside the USA offer their support and commentary, I implore them to view contemporary American politics from a wider lens. A history of conquest has gotten us here, and is no less relevant to non-American contexts. The US has always been a diseased state – both a state of illness (as in, literal disease) and a state of unrest (as in, dis-eased). We are merely witnessing a new stage of the pathology. Developing a critique from the perspective of anti-Blackness (Chipato & Chandler 2022) shatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. In other words, the American disease is contagious and it would be wise for everyone else to examine their own contexts for anti-Black violence before it is too late. Rather than continuing to be awe-struck by American politics and the latest distracting spectacle (who can keep track of the latest tariff rates anyway?), we must work towards treating the chronic disease of anti-Blackness worldwide, of which these disturbances are merely localized flare-ups. Given the tone with which people discuss presidential antics as of late - this is a hard pill to swallow.