Racial imperialism caused blackouts in Gary

An imperialist structure seeking to extract maximum profit from land, infrastructure and Black communities recently led to massive power outages in Gary, Indiana, where on Sept. 3, CBS reported that over 7,000 residents lost electricity, many for as long as two weeks. The solution to this tragedy lies with a truth known by revolutionaries from Lenin to Mao to Malcolm X: Justice requires a dictatorship of workers and oppressed people over land.

Amazon has proposed a massive $15 billion data center project in Hobart, Indiana, not far from Gary, a center of Black culture and a former steel town that’s suffered from deindustrialization since the 1970s. Last October, in a bid to attract Amazon by creating enough electricity to satisfy the data centers, the local Northern Indiana Public Service Corporation (NIPSCO) created GenCo, a spin-off company that would be free from regulations and public scrutiny.

Kofi Mframa of USA Today reports that this arrangement resulted in residents’ electric bills skyrocketing to up to $1,447 per month, while NIPSCO made profits of over $500 million. (Aug. 25)

In late August, this emphasis on electricity for corporate artificial intelligence (AI) data centers over people’s needs came to a head as thousands of residents of Gary — a community where over 80% of residents are Black — lost power. Pastor Eric Boone of the Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary told the magazine Mother Jones: “Some people are 70 and 80 years old, in hot conditions with no air conditioning, and it’s 85 degrees in the house. … People who were already living check to check are now trying to put gas in cars and generators while needing baby formula and diapers. We’ve seen it all.” (Aug. 25)

The horrors of Gary were caused by the dictatorship of corporations profiting from the AI data center bonanza, especially Nvidia, which makes the microchips used in Amazon and other data centers. On Aug. 26, Amazon agreed to purchase 2 million additional chips for its data centers, including those planned for the Gary area. Nvidia is one of the most profitable companies on earth and is among the “Imperial Six” companies targeted by Iran as core foundations of the U.S. Empire. (workers.org/2026/07/93610/)

But this is about more than just AI. Like all companies looking to build massive data center projects, Amazon was attracted by something besides the electric grid: the availability of cheap land. And the area surrounding Gary, which had once been a center of steel production, now has plenty of it. 

Hundreds of thousands of Black families migrated to places like Gary during the Great Migrations of the early 1900s, fleeing racist terror in the Southern states and drawn towards good-paying jobs. Of course, Black families in the South were promised economic justice decades earlier, via the “40 acres and a mule” proposed after the Civil War. But this dream has been forever deferred. 

Investigate Midwest finds that while Black people owned 20% of U.S. farms in 1920, that number dropped to 1.5% in 2022. (Sept. 2) 

Instead, Black families fleeing to Gary and other cities have been faced with ongoing corporate extraction, earlier in the form of sharecropping and ongoing through for-profit prisons and predatory financial practices. Now, power outages caused by corporate data centers can be added to this list.

But there is another way.

Malcolm X said in his “Message to the Grass Roots” in 1963: “The French Revolution — what was it based on? The landless against the landlord. … The Russian Revolution — what was it based on? Land. … The Chinese Revolution — they wanted land. … A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation.” (freedomarchives.org)

Of course, even the land today known as Gary was stolen from Indigenous nations by the U.S. government.

Justice for Black and all oppressed communities, including those in Gary, depends on victory over imperialism. Free the land!