On June 14, police shot into a vehicle driving out of a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi, killing a one-year-old Black baby named Kohen Wiley. This was despite his mother pleading to cops that there was a baby in the car. The police suspected his mother’s friend, who was also in the car, had stolen a package of diapers from the store. 

This shooting is a crystal clear example of exactly whose interests the police protect under capitalism: multibillion-dollar corporations. Walmart made over $700 billion in profits last year, while tens of millions face poverty—and they will readily call the cops to defend a package of Huggies with lethal force.

This horrific act of police violence is clearly a racially motivated killing, an all-too-familiar occurrence under capitalism. In 2020, police murdered George Floyd over a counterfeit bill, sparking a new wave of the massive Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism and oppression, which spread globally. Fighting racism in Trump’s age of reaction will require nothing less. 

Trump’s stoking of racist divisions is monstrous beyond belief—who could imagine a sitting president posting an AI video of Obama and his family depicted as apes? His attacks on the Black working class have been devastating, from the firing of thousands of federal workers, the erasure of DEI programs, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. All of this further normalizes racism and the second-class status of Black people in the US.

Following the murder of baby Kohen, protests erupted in the small town of Senatobia outside the Walmart where he was killed. Activists have also organized a boycott of the store. The protests forced the store to close throughout the week, demonstrating exactly where we should aim our fire: corporations’ pocketbooks. We need these protests to spread nationally to win justice for all victims of racist police violence and Trump’s attacks. The biggest blow to Trump’s racist immigration agenda was the January 23 general strike in the Twin Cities, which is the type of working-class action that can fight for justice. 

We need to fight systemic racism with working-class action that unites working people of all races and resists capitalist divide and rule. This means tying this fight to a program to abolish ICE, slash the war budget, and tax corporations like Walmart and Target that are actively profiting off of racism, to fund healthcare, schools, and housing. Justice for Kohen Wiley needs to mean fighting the capitalist system that produces racism.