I SPENT a total of seven years of my life living in Los Angeles as an illegal migrant. In that time I worked VIP security, looking after various Hollywood celebrities; was a doorman at the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip; got myself a Screen Actors Guild card and with it worked as a regular extra on Friends, ER, Alias, and also on a bunch of movies; and was Ben Affleck’s double for a spell. I had me a California ID, driver’s licence, bank account and never had a problem.

From Scotland, I learned that the real currency in the US is not the dollar bill but white skin. A country born in white supremacy, sustained by white supremacy, and forged in racism — such a country has had its mask of democracy and civility removed by Donald Trump. Not since the one-term president of the US Confederacy Jefferson Davis has such an open racist called the shots over the lives of so many to the detriment of so many as he is doing now on the American continent.

The rebellion that has erupted within working-class Latin communities against Trump’s fascism in Los Angeles is God’s work. I have marched with those people against the war in Iraq back in 2003. I have attended political meetings with them, organised alongside them, and I have listened to their stories. They represent the real America — a people with a historical memory that predates the continent’s invasion by a barbaric horde of white Europeans for whom mammon has always been king.

Trump is a fascist and a racist, let there be no doubt. He is the bloviating and bloated product of an American history in which the whip in one hand and the Bible in the other has been engaged in a struggle for dominance with its victims from the beginning.

This is precisely the struggle that is currently under way, in open form, in parts of Los Angeles. A risen people is a beautiful thing to behold — and boy have they risen. The flags of the global South being waved in the process are symbols of liberation. They represent a sleeping giant now awoken.

In the last analysis, it’s really very simple. In the hearts and minds of white supremacists, black and brown Americans are not “real Americans.” They are instead a threat to real Americans, white and proud Americans, and thereby dehumanised, demonised, and ultimately murdered with impunity.

With Trump’s election as president first in 2016 and again in 2024 the KKK and every card-carrying white racist and white supremacist in the US finally got their most precious wish. They finally got, in the White House, the first open racist and white supremacist since Andrew Jackson. And ever since it has been open season on black and brown people.

That said, let us not make the mistake of giving his predecessors a free pass. On the contrary, police brutality against black and brown people precedes Trump by decades. It was under Barack Obama, for example, that Black Lives Matter was born in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012; and indeed under the first black president’s watch a veritable slew of police killings of disproportionately unarmed black people occurred.

We must avoid lapsing into a simplistic understanding of white supremacy as a purely racial construct. It is also a ideological construct. Thus Obama, unconsciously or not, bought into its ideological proclivities with his embrace of the role of CEO of a US empire founded on the premise of might (white) is right.

Other creeds share these white supremacist proclivities too. The longstanding and ongoing oppression by the Palestinians by Israel is an ideological function of the white supremacist character of zionism. The oppression of Irish Catholics in the North of Ireland was an ideological function of Ulster loyalism.

The factor cementing both is, of course, settler colonialism. Where black and brown Americans are concerned this dynamic reversed itself — that is, they were originally forced to settle in the US as slaves and cheap labour, and thereafter condemned to exist as a colonised and entrenched underclass, which they remain to this day.

The issue of racial oppression in the US is also hugely important for people of conscience and consciousness living outside the US to grapple with too. For if the most powerful truths are the most simply expressed, then who better than Malcolm X to remind us: “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo.”

In other words, there exists a circular relationship between racial oppression at home in the US and US imperialism abroad. As James Baldwin so eloquently put it: “A racist society can’t but fight a racist war. The assumptions acted on at home are the assumptions acted on abroad.”

Staying with Baldwin, when he averred: “To be a Negro [sic] in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” he gave voice to the righteous rage behind the resistance to the ICE that is currently under way.

Another powerful black voice from the ’60s was Huey Newton, founding member of the Black Panther Party. As with Malcolm X before him, Newton was not a man given to beating around the bush, and just like Malcolm articulated the problem rather less delicately than Baldwin.

To wit: “The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the ‘rules’ of their game, written in the people’s blood, are beneath contempt.”

The unfortunate insult to dogs notwithstanding, the militancy with which Newton was writing in 1967 was forged by racial oppression. As these words are being written a new generation of Malcom Xs and Huey Newtons are likewise being forged in resistance to Trump and all that he and his represents.

Though I may have been born with white skin, I despise and detest white supremacy and all of its malign works. I come from poverty in Scotland and have always and will always identify with the oppressed and powerless, never with the oppressor and the powerful.

I was that security guard at the Marina Marketplace Shopping Mall on the westside in LA who unlocked the cuffs and allowed a young and terrified illegal migrant, who’d been caught trying to steal a loaf of bread and carton of milk from Vons supermarket, to escape. I was 25 at the time. It cost me the job, but what is a crummy job compared to the health of the spirit and soul?

When I worked as a bodyguard for rich people in Los Angeles, I always considered myself to be operating behind enemy lines. I would spend my downtime reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution.

I know whose side I am on  —  and so should you.