Chapter 3 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed: Toby in Kunta Mask
Let's workshop Chapter 3 of my book-length lyrical essay (White Supremacy on Its Deathbed), which aims to promote true black excellence by exposing the harmful implications of mainstream antiracism
Chapter 3. Toby in Kunta Mask
I think everybody is going to be confronted with the temptation to put a cover story that prettifies what happens in their lives in place of the real story in which they are culpable and their failures are their own. [Imagine] you're . . . in an organization where you haven't worked out and fit in very well and you're black. [The temptation is] to then seize upon your blackness as, you know—[“I’m] a victim, they never liked me, they never accepted me,” or whatever. When in fact what went on was you just didn't measure up. You know, you didn't work hard enough. You didn't make the grade. . . . Or, you know, you're a criminal: you do some heinous act and now you're being punished for it. . . . And it's very easy to wrap yourself in the umbrella victimhood: you know, mass incarceration, antiracist rhetoric, and whatever. When in fact it was just your craven malicious self-regarding immorality and your heinous act that got you in the box.—Glenn Loury[1]
This definition of “safe” is always interesting because nobody would have used it that way even I think as recently as 15 years ago. And the idea is that you've suffered this kind of trauma . . . [hearing] the n-word . . . be referred to by a white man in a classroom. And I think that we’re being strongarmed into pretending to think that that makes sense by this cadre of people where the power that they have is that if you call them on the triviality and theatricality of this, you're called a dirty name [(“Racist,” “Nazi,” “White Supremacist”)] in wide open spaces and, if possible, your courses are taken away from you—you might even lose your job. Most people aren't up for that. But this really needs to stop. . . [We are] being bullied by people in the name of a spiky and fragile ideology . . . [pushed usually just by that one outspoken white student in his or her reign of terror and enabled by virtue-signaling administrators and] spectators cowering in fear. . . . It chills me to my bones to think that they're people, and a lot of them are black, who are pretending that you should be applying the word “violence” . . . to a “white man with power” using the n-word in the classroom. . . . Something is deeply, deeply wrong.—John McWhorter[2]
To reinforce and even create unfortunate realities that provide fodder for narratives of black inferiority; to cripple the will to attend to the degraded cultural and economic and educational conditions rippling out from centuries of being fuck-doll chattel (only to be denigrated and stifled on many fronts after “liberation”); to stifle any motivation to confront the in-house causes of black deficiency across countless metrics; to beguile black people away from focusing on what other successful groups focus on (their own children and family and education and neighborhoods, their own behavior and values and hopes and dreams), beguile them into a stagnant torpor (as if they were Odyssean sailors deep under the escapist spell of lotus fruit or as if they were urban laborers of 19th-century China deep under the pain-relieving haze of an opium den); to dissuade blacks from ever seeing themselves as playing some part in their failings, from reflecting on how their own attitudes contribute to their setbacks (thereby alienating them from the essential ingredient for internally-driven growth); to alienate blacks from the greatest cultural expressions, the uplifting heights of humanity, while encouraging their nourishment on empty pop and other metaphorical honey buns and quarter waters and fast-food junk; to reverse the drift away from the antiblack origins of our country (and make sure nothing mind-and-spirit-undulling like the Harlem Renaissance ever dawns anew); to keep blacks insulated in tribal ignorance and stunted by superstition, estranged from (if not violent toward) the tools of flourishing hallowed in the heart of western culture; to subdue and hobble blacks while mercilessly inflicting humiliation, even if it means tearing at the very fabric of society; to help reify their status as the infants of humankind even at the expense of posing an existential threat to the broader human enterprise; to reinforce the notion that blacks who engage in intellectual pursuits have forsaken their blackness; to keep blacks sick and down (leaners instead of lifters), wrenching their spirits and chaining their dreams to little more than how to remain kept on the plantation (even if it means siphoning away the collective hope of whites as well)—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I don't give a fuck, nigga I'm with that gun violence / I'm with that gun violence, I'm with that gun violence”), increased incarceration and addiction, and decreased education and wellbeing, in so many black communities are regarded almost universally as a sign of an undefeatable white supremacy rather than of diseased practices and attitudes—practices and attitudes that, although tied more or less to historical oppression, cannot be pinned in any seriousness on some alive-and-well white supremacy:
celebration of violence and drugs (especially, to use the words of Plug Two, in “their [let-me-prove-I’m] sicker-than [you] rap” about “cocaine and crack / which brings sickness to blacks . . . clappers and gats / makin the whole sick world collapse”);
mockery of peace-loving nerds (light-bearers like Plug Two), of fellow blacks who show interest in school (or in better dietary choices than grape drank and Popeyes or so on), for “acting white,” for being “fake black pussy niggas”;
fear-and-indolence-fueled dependence on government assistance and slack-cutting that only preserves, and serves to justify in their eyes, the view of themselves as incapacitated due to chronic victimization by the white world;
condonation and even glorification of cold-blooded disregard for how behavior affects others (since you cannot blame someone for doing whatever is necessary “for some damn breathing room in this racist hellhole,” which “will always be fucked” as long as whiteness finds instantiation on Earth);
romanticization of gangsters and thugs, harlots and skanks (the black equivalent of poor white trash, except for the fact that an overwhelming majority of whites ridicule these in-house extremes as embarrassments and thereby block that kind from growing to an aspirational ideal);
anti-gratitude feelings of nihilistic futility, of there is no point trying in a white-run world set on black destruction.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—with critical thinking in steep decline (and even mocked as a “bitch-ass white thing”), and with screens in our faces at each moment telling us how to interpret what happened and restructuring our memories about what happened—the various reasons why the black man shot the black people he did become obscured (disallowing the chance for targeted cure) by saying fatalistically and ignorantly “the reason was whiteness, internalized white supremacy.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, on feel-good grounds of “Let’s not feed longstanding narratives of black inferiority,” it is deemed evil (or at least pointlessly insensitive) to acknowledge the troubling statistics about blacks having lower IQs than whites, poorer academic performance no matter the income level, lesser likelihood to build positive social networks, greater likelihood to be involved in violent crime—the very statistics that, were they spotlighted instead of cloaked, might invigorate a mission to ferret out the real causes, the causes beyond the monolithic and unhelpfully-nebulous and downright-unreal one (pervasive antiblack racism) that, in being posited again and again as the end-of-discussion scapegoat (as if sociological insights were so easy to arrive at), makes seem like guesswork child’s play a science that should be one of the most difficult (given the array of variables and hard-to-predict agents with which it deals).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—rather than putting in the hard work of addressing root causes (like black cultural attitudes of “Why bother studying when the game is rigged against blacks?” and “I’m black so I don’t have a chance without extra help” and “Nerdiness is some stupid-ass white people shit” and “Cops just want to hurt and kill black folk,” or broken family structures, or lack of exposure to the variety of subject areas where blacks again and again underperform, or so on), rather than addressing such root causes with impactful solutions (whether campaigns to marginalize the anti-intellectual attitudes among blacks in pop culture, or an exacting early-education training of black kids modeled more on the rigor of the British systems throughout the Caribbean, or grants and other incentives to make black homes more learning friendly, or media showcasing how police have done so much to protect and serve black communities, or monetary inducements to push black kids and parents to hit educational milestones (perhaps together as a team), or centering black intellectuals who expose the self-defeatist lie of blaming institutional racism for black underperformance in school and who break that so tired and so out-of-touch and so hypnotic pattern started in the 60s of trying to lift blacks by doing little more than charismatically articulating systemic oppression and who remind us that spitting at white people does not help black kids read)—we instead embolden the strategy that is understandably more attractive to those who value the low-hanging fruit of lazy sensationalism over black wellbeing: the much-easier and money-making and social-capital-yielding strategy of ridiculing tests and high-standard teachers and selection committees and traditional expectations and the like as all being “antiblack mechanisms designed by whites to make blacks look bad”; “racist tools of an xenophobic war against black bodies.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where adults, even college professors, will commit the blatant genetic fallacy that any healthy society should disabuse children of before middle school: saying that the test itself—however much it obviously measures universal skills in reasoning (rather than cultural-skewed facts)—is no good, is antiblack, simply because the test was developed by some guy looking for a way to prove that blacks are inferior—a clown world, indeed!
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of addressing the poisons and traumas and diseases of poverty and diminished educational exposure and overburdened single-mom homes and joblessness and gang activity plaguing blacks especially, we encourage a groundhog day of hypnotic focus on racial grievance, the same obsessive poor-me thinking about the ravages of whites; we focus on how “traumatizing” it is for blacks ever to hear or read the word “nigger,” even just “nigga,” from a white person—harmful enough, so white liberal rich kids on campus (desperate to prove how “down” they are in their tartan scarves and slouchy beanies, and no matter the black harm that results) might model for their black counterparts, to warrant crumbling into teary balls of (playacted) delicacy, of (sham) pathological sensitivity, of (fake) woundedness, at any word with the merest auditory resemblance to it.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of working to ween blacks from their addiction to the soothing-but-infantilizing treatment procured by playing the victim (an addiction made worse by the notion that it is a black blessing rather than a black blight), we zero in on how traumatizing it is for black students to walk past (“day after day, and on a modern-day college campus of all places!”) a statue of Thomas Jefferson, “a no-good barbarian who slept with his slaves”—harmful enough for some blacks, those really buying into and selling their theatrics, to say in phone conversations with their parents perhaps what they have been instigated and coached to say by their well-to-do white peers, who in black neckerchiefs above their “Whiteness Is NOT Okay” t-shirts have been blasting the statue with red paint and demanding its removal (among many other hysteria-mongering things): that they fear, if the removal campaign does not go through, “all the white supremacists on campus will be emboldened, and maybe even start lynching us from that very statue.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“May I kick a lil somethin for the G's / And take your nigga only for the weekend / Late night creepin ain't no cuffin / I ain’t gon keep em, send your nigga back home”), every white-male portrait in the revered museums from the centuries of western slavery—if not covered (well, covered at least in the groin region since that area “can’t but draw some vulnerable populations to thoughts of black-body rape”)—must at least include a placard with information about the sitter’s link to slavery, no matter how many degrees of separation, “so that we never forget that the war against black folx today isn’t coming from nowhere and that it is, in fact, coming from places long thought to be above the brutalities of white supremacy: the very world of art!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I smoked all his weed and I told him to leave / Use him for his money, that's all that I need”), a museum mural by “just another dead white scumbag” (an artist who only five years prior, like for the dozens of decades before that, was heralded as “a genius”) is whitewashed over with stain-blocking primer, yes, for having a relatively minuscule section in a remote corner where black slaves are depicted—whitewashed over, no, not by rogue protesters trying to go viral, but (on the orders of the very curators tasked, ironically, with preserving art) by a janitor (melanin-rich for the cameras and so for the sake of recompensive spectacle of Wakanda tears) on the following ironic grounds.
“Black bodies being ordered around like mere tools is harmful for black children to see, especially so close to the food court. We hope other museums will follow our lead in championing more inclusive visions of reality. Let us give a hand for Atu. He has served as our custodial backbone for almost a year now. He is using Kilz Premium Primer. That primer is best at blocking out stains, in our case here a racial stain. But let’s face it, with enough coats many products would do the job. What makes Kilz stand out is that it dedicates a portion of its profits to antiracist organizations like Whiteness in the Workspace, whose focus is to encourage self-identified white people to ‘go hard against racial inequality or go home.’ As you can see, we intend to go hard!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Play with my pussy, but don't play with my emotions / If you spend some money, then maybe I just might fuck ya / When I shake that ass, I'ma do that shit in slow motion / You got a whole lotta cash, and nigga, you know I want it”), art caretakers (tasked with safekeeping art)—well, more accurately, art commissars (tasked with making sure art signals an attitude shamefully called “progressive” largely by internet bullies)—refuse to defend the portrait of the Welsh slaveowner on artistic grounds or on historical-accuracy grounds or on grounds that people do not have to visit the wing in which it is located or on grounds that depiction does not entail endorsement or so on, but instead agree that the piece is an example of “nonconsensual art" to be removed from display and “to be put in storage, if it is lucky.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I gotta face all of my opps, don't wanna die (I won't die) / These niggas berry, berry sweet just like some pie (nigga pussy) / Ayy, I put that ball on your eye just like a stye (boom, boom) / Ayy, I got a beam on the end, you can't hide (lil bitch) / Ayy, he ain't a soldier, he a ho up in disguise (that nigga ho) / Ayy, play with that gang-gang, and that's your demise (nigga died) / Ayy, execution so your mind just gon get fried (leave him fried)”), the university administration, under the guidance of the office of equity and inclusion, finally decides to break apart the whole side of the rec center on the following grounds.
“Our vulnerable black students are not stupid: they are well aware that beneath the recent coat of paint (a half-measure as cowardly as Sam Houston’s merely voting against the westward expansion of slavery) still remains the ghostly faces of Sam and his spouse (white supremacists who don’t deserve a spotlight, however much they ‘treated their slaves like family’).”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Hit your block with them guys, hop out, kill people / Got a Glock four-five, and it's real lethal / Bitch, you know we fry, we really kill people”), plantation paraphernalia—at least when institutions are too “insensitive to destroy them”—must be covered with drop cloths, “for the safety of vulnerable groups,” as if they were cursed items needing to be stored in the weekly-blessed occult room of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“You know who you fucking with? A nigga who got shit to lose / I got niggas that rob you and rape your bitch if they in the mood”), spotlight is thrown on how traumatizing it is for black students to see “the Nazi act of janitors, sometimes sadly even black janitors (coerced in some way by whiteness),” scrubbing BLM graffiti off churches and federal buildings and statues of once-revered “dead white males” and even war memorials for soldiers who sacrificed their lives to stop the slave trade and the literal Nazis.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—to drive home how much “this country has regressed to a bygone era of antiblack racism,” a lavishly-funded storyline that all the mainstream publishers (and, of course, the Chinese Communist Party) pay top dollar to see spread (in works that, rather than engage in the “hurtful violence” of questioning whether it really is true, examine its impacts and the subtle mechanisms by which it is maintained)—whites and blacks alike have started detecting white-supremacist paraphernalia and white-supremacist people at every turn, just as the witch-fearing residents of Salem detected spectral images of suspicious neighbors (to a point where it actually became a purpose-giving industry).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the earliest sightings of white-supremacy’s growing reign take place, of course, on the very college grounds whose classrooms breed the hysteria, which is why these sightings will be taken seriously enough to trigger “campus lockdown” or “immediate evacuation for the safety of vulnerable groups”: a noose on the ground (or at least a symbol of one “meant to instill terror in black students already shouldering too much in a predominately-white world on a predominately-white campus learning a predominantly-white curriculum”), which the police—white police, mind you—will insist, thereby “invalidating” student truth and lived experience, is “just a looped zip-tie”; or a KKK member complete with a Kunta whip, which even after surveillance footage reveals to have been a Dominican friar in traditional garb holding mere rosary beads will still invite suspicion among antiracist students for reasons articulated to the news reporter on scene by fagulous white kid in yet another tartan scarf.
“A priest of all people should have known the intergenerational PTSD his resemblance would activate: the headaches, the fatigue, the sleep problems, the hypervigilance, the panic attacks—and, of course, the drug use and the violence that white people like to blame on black people themselves. Trauma from slavery and then from segregation—we know now that this all passes down in the genes all black people. Science has shown this. Imagine being born as a black child, suffering the entire history of the war against black bodies right from birth!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where city blocks are cordoned off after purple-haired white progressives in scarves mistake construction-worker spray paint in the street as attempts at swastikas, and where even after the innocuous truth is discovered the construction team is still ordered to use from here on different symbols for marking utility lines and to undergo sensitivity training—all a convenient and welcomed distraction, like the compulsive stewing over past injustice, from the tough work of addressing the pressing problems that plague black communities (problems that include both the compulsive stewing over past injustice and the out-of-touch and defeatist notion of our country being too steeped in white supremacy for blacks even to try).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where graffitiing campus statues of “dead white Nazi fucks” (yes, even philosophers like Mill who debunked racism’s philosophical underpinnings and stressed the urgency of securing equal treatment for blacks), or where reporting even knowingly fake sightings of nooses and Klansmen, or where firing teachers who say a word that merely comes close to a word (faked to be) traumatic for blacks and especially their “white allies” (a mix of instigators bent on pandemonium and opportunists hoping to reap the benefits of being the pets of super citizens), or where lowering standards for blacks (given “their unique and continually-growing oppression”), or where adding the Black National Anthem (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) before each NFL game (since antiblack racism is regarded as so essentially American that “The Star-Spangled Banner” can be like, like the flag itself, “a slap in the face for many blacks), are just some of the many ways to honor the grand-purpose-giving and life-simplifying and superciliousness-stoking and violence-excusing religion of antiracism, ways that fill the void—a void gaping perhaps more than ever given the rapid withdrawal of religion in the contemporary period—without requiring our lazy selves actually to combat the cultural attitudes and practices that keep blacks down.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where not only people scared about jeopardizing their employability, but even institutions eager to enforce “antiracist measures” in fear of getting on the bad side of most consumers, feel the social pull to treat blacks as if infantile cripples who, although handling what pumps through their earbuds (“Told her we gon be together, that stupid bitch ate the bait / She went for that, I broke the bitch / Told that bitch to sock it to my pocket, then revoked the bitch”), are in desperate need of shelter from certain words in college textbooks or in historical documents or in litigation reports, as if enfeebled pets who require “safeternative” (and, predictably, easier) classroom lessons lest they break under the enormous strain of living in “this hellscape of white supremacy.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are baited by the benefits of r-word-fearing whites bending over backwards for them, letting them cut corners and get first dibs—baited to perform for whites (something whites have long expected of them anyway, and just eat up) as if fragile enough to be traumatized merely by having to read white authors, or by learning about Euclid and his “white geometry,” or by being in “claustrophobic spaces with too many tomato faces,” or so on.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks could easily think that they are being slick against “the man,” that they are gaining power through such maneuvers of “outsmarting the system,” when in truth they are playing themselves—playing an active role in their own ruination.
(1) The short-term “power” of pity-points and lowered expectations spoils their sense of dignity and their ability to handle the tough problems that arise on every path to excellence (which, of course, further spoils their sense of dignity).
(2) Such power is largely negative-reactive anyway: dependent on whites—at least those “antiracists” willing to act truly racist enough to believe blacks really are that fragile.
(3) Such a pathway could eventually become entrenched enough that, the line between fake and real blurring over generations, blacks wind up that fragile in truth!
It could just sit back and revel in our world where many blacks, and even a growing number of whites (almost as if to ensure, so a conspiracy-minded person might think, that the destruction of blacks is thorough), sincerely think—in what amounts to slanderous and black-stunting elevation of the relatively subpar—that Beyoncé and Sister Souljah are visionary geniuses on equal footing with Beethoven and Shakespeare—that is, if they even really know who Beethoven and Shakespeare are, as an antiblack agenda would hope they do not (lest they be drawn upward if only by osmosis).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, on grounds that any connection to antiblack racism (however tenuous) “severely diminishes an artist’s work,” many people think Beyoncé and Sister Souljah are, in fact, superior to Beethoven and Shakespeare—both Beethoven and Shakespeare writing, after all, mainly for white audiences and Shakespeare, as if using terms like “fair” to describe a good person were not malevolent enough, even daring to allow his character Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to voice “a malicious statement of whiteness, likely directed mainly against black bodies”: “Who would not trade a raven for a dove?”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even though it entails carrying humanity itself (whites included) down a road to mediocrity, school reading lists are scrubbed clean—to use the dismissive phrase that, through repetition, one-too-many children believe refers to mysterious evil creatures never to be trusted—of “dead white males” (no matter how great) and replaced with the latest “antiracist” literature of victim mongers (who, deep as they are in the pockets of corporate interest, smell much more like “house niggers” than the McWhorters and Lourys they slander as such).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, because of a mere “problematic” footnote or one joke in a private letter revealing that the great man was nevertheless a man of his time (and so with specific cultural biases) or because the great man simply was white, pinnacles of artistic and philosophical excellence such as Hume and Goethe are excluded (unless the point is to trash them) from university classrooms, yes, of students and teachers, creatures too of their own guilty time, stinking of factory-farmed farts—excluded, as if the personal and even the biological were always political and even philosophical, despite the expense not simply of obscuring from blacks and whites alike the heights to which all humans can aspire, but of allowing a pessimistic attitude of why bother to sprout at least subliminally in all of us since, think about it: there seems little point in bothering with our “life’s work,” pitiful in comparison anyway, when even Dostoyevsky and Leibniz and Jefferson and Churchill, their awe-inspiring art and deeds included, can be written off with such Kweli-like sanctimoniousness as “complete pieces of Nazi shit” for no more than a trifling flaw or a trifling feature in no sense under their control.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—because of his being a “dead white male” whose characters sometimes display “imperialist attitudes (like when his most recent white protagonist screams ‘I’ll plant a damn garden on my own fucking property,’” a “paternalist scream of violence” that can only remind us of the “culture-slaughtering history of forcibly replacing the communal property systems of indigenous peoples with the private property systems of white supremacists”—the international library has restricted access to the great author, offering the following statement to the media (as to why, in effect, it removed yet another uplifting resource from black reach).
Is it uncommon for institutions, including universities and libraries, to reevaluate their collections and exhibits in light of changing social and cultural perspectives? No. That is what we have done in the case of Rydling. Some people are upset. But these are the pains of progress. There is no progress without pain.
The decision in this case was difficult. Unlike other authors more conspicuously problematic, Rydling never steps out of his lane by writing about nonwhite topics and he definitely respects the fact that he is not allowed to write nonwhite characters. He also never includes characters who voice skepticism as to how terribly the West continues to treat black bodies—neither those reminiscent of overt Nazis (like David Duke and Tom Metzger) nor those reminiscent of covert Nazis (like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell). Indeed, Rydling is known for allowing nonwhite sensitivity editors to adjust his work for the protection of vulnerable groups. And because he pays them what they deserve given their position in the intersectionality matrix, no one here will deny that he should be praised for using an equity-model of compensation that many universities and hospitals and other public institutions have yet to adopt. In his capacity as an academic, moreover, he has ridiculed (both in articles and in his PhD dissertation) the paternalistic notion that white countries in the West have a duty to civilize or uplift African countries. Most importantly, Rydling—aside from being white, of course—has no direct ties to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (at least that the committee has yet to uncover, although it continues to dig).
Why, then, have we made this difficult decision? Subtle problems linger inside his work—and their very subtlety makes them all the more dangerous! First, with the exception to just one work, his settings are always in the UK (the radix of imperialism) and yet never—not once—are these towns and cities criticized for doing ultimately what they are best at: harboring whiteness. Second, his characters have been known to voice hurtful sentiments like pride in European culture, a pride eerily suggestive of the superiority of that culture (especially when never—not once—is such celebration accompanied by an acknowledgement of the black suffering behind so much of that culture). Rydling, of course, has addressed this issue by saying that his intention is to ridicule such characters. The problem is twofold: (a) intent does not matter when it comes to the hurtfulness of words and (b) citing intent is precisely what rightwing bigots like to say in their white fragility, and so by mentioning “intent” his is at least in practice aligning himself with a world of deplorables and this very alignment cannot help but brutalize vulnerable populations. Third, his partner has been known to purchase healing stones like citrine and labradorite even though it is no secret where such stones are sourced: Madagascar, where hungry diggers of beautiful melanin are, in the best cases, simply not given fair compensation or, in the worst, forced to serve as the modern-day slaves of a neo-colonial West.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—energized by the viral videos of black men murdered by police officers, viral videos that make it (even when we know better) next to impossible for our chimp brains not to feel there is a police-brutality epidemic against blacks (especially when our algorithmed feed includes none of the white murdered)—blue-haired cretins now vandalize statues of Voltaire in the sleep-tight name of “a big fuck you to our thriving white supremacy” (yes, despite his culture-quaking writings on the immorality of slavery and on the stupidity of racism), refusing to face how much of an unfair horror it would seem if future cretins utterly dismissed a cherished black artist-philosopher of today, tearing down her statues and banning even music and books of hers unrelated to meat, merely because she ate factory-farmed meat—or better yet, to make it more closely parallel our nonsense today (like the blacklist we see from the British Library), merely because she, a level-five vegan whose ethical writings proved integral to factory farming’s abolition, had a relative (distant in both blood and spirit) who happened to inherit stock in a company that had once engaged in factory farming.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where elementary students can rattle off the horrors perpetrated by western culture (land stolen from Native Americans, Trans-Atlantic slavery, and so forth) while western culture’s many profound gifts to mankind, gifts that could keep giving even to interstellar generations (generations in some sense umbilicaled in its womb), go overlooked or fade from memory (only to be called to mind, of course, to find something “problematic” enough to blackmail the “many colonial faces of whiteness”):
its legendary achievements (the scientific revolution that continues to heighten our understanding of the natural world and our place in it, or the industrial revolution that transformed agrarian economies into powerhouses of surplus, or the discovery of penicillin, or the decoding of DNA, or the construction of the Panama Canal, or the invention of the printing press);
its almost-unthinkable art (Michelangelo’s “David” and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or Dostoyevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, or Picasso's “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and "Guernica," or Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion" and “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” or The Parthenon and The Cathedral of Notre-Dame and The Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge);
its heroic efforts—yes, even from the very depths of its own addiction to that alchemical practice (too irresistible for so many other peoples across the globe across history) it stepped up (against all odds) with resources and blood to put a stop to slavery (using taxpayer-burdening military might to hunt down particular slaving operations and to free particular slaves and to help transition organizations off their reliance on slavery, engaging in war with itself to see to slavery’s abolition, paying out reparations in the form of grants and scholarships as well as preferential treatment and special dispensations) and, more importantly, it stepped up (against all odds) with resources and blood to develop and defend and normalize and enforce the very notion of universal human rights that, on the one hand, has prevented the resurgence of slavery and segregation and discrimination in the West and that, on the other hand, has kept (through the osmosis of modeling and through the pressure of sanctions and military intervention) the number of people in unfashionable-to-address nonwestern slavery (which we see in India and China and North Korea and Nigeria and Iran and Indonesia and Congo) at least under the billion mark it stands at today.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even if it comes at the price of hobbling blacks by way of hobbling us all, celebrating the skills and contributions of plantation-slave x requires gaslighting ourselves—gaslighting ourselves that x surpasses not only Handel (an investor in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which matters when evaluating his art in our twilight-zone times) but even Bach (a deeply religious man of profound wisdom and fertility)—and thereby belittling art itself.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—in the insidiously feel-good name of “antiracist liberation” from “the hegemony of white-European-western culture” (a culture condemned for “suppressing alternative voices” even though in truth it is one of the few shining examples of a culture not only remarkably open to learning from alternative voices, but also serious about justifying and protecting the rights of alternative voices)—Plato and Kant and Aristotle and Voltaire and various other “dead white fucks” are (Chinese-Cultural-Revolution style) cut from university curricula (unless, of course, to poke fun at them) by (supposedly well-meaning) poisoners out to “unwhiten education,” by shapeshifting devils in hipster scarves and slouchy beanies out to “dismantle white supremacy”—cut (yes, no matter their gifts to mankind or even how instrumental they remain in the justification of universal human rights) because some of their remarks fail to reflect our current values or because they are quoted by “problematic” people today or because they have relatives, however distant in blood and ideology, who benefited from slavery.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, under the insidiously feel-good banner of “decolonizing the university and remaining competitive at a global level among the various antiracist centers of learning,” the so-called Black Mozart (Chevalier de Saint-Georges) replaces the real Mozart in music conservatories, whether on the basis of the “regrettable fact that Mozart is a dead white man” who makes “white European music from the slave period” or on the basis of the lie either that the Black Mozart is better or, much more nuclear, that hierarchy in matters of music theory is “just another antiblack expression of whiteness” it would be cruel not to scotch (at least whenever “there are black and other vulnerable learners in the room”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where Chief Keef and Saweetie replace Coltrane and Dolphy in the culture at large (the more focused on sex and drugs and violence the better, of course), even though that has entailed whites themselves—almost as if they did not get their fix of black criminality and low self-esteem and twisted relationship models and drug abuse—dancing in droves at big-money festivals to blacks singing and rapping about—indeed, often romanticizing—black degeneracy: not only the men stooping to the most barbaric (“Hit this ho from Memphis, she an oppin bitch / I hit her with my Glock and shit / and dropped the bitch”), but the women too (“Pass the gun to my bro, he gon handle that / Shoot at the crib where yo mammy at, / we fuck around, leave her handicapped”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—taking in all the “niggative” lyrics bass-bumping the air as if it were their air (whether “Pimpin ain't easy, make her open up and eat it” or “Walking around with that that tommy gun / Young niggas in the hood love the molly santan / When they pop it, they'll chew it like some bubble gum” or “Sippin syrup 'til my body numb, I ain't tryna catch no feelings”)—whites crave sights and sounds and smells of black degeneracy so much that no bingeing of Maury Povich episodes, or National-Geographic style hood-fight clips, or crack documentaries of hair-hatted whores crooning toothless into the night with the flapjack tits, or so on could ever satisfy them: ignorance and bling, infidelity and gang violence, misogyny and escaping life with drugs and alcohol, crack dealing, homophobia and promiscuity, drugging the drinks of women and prison life, welfare cheese and incest, rapey sex even of minors (Bambaataa style).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I like a shooter that steady / be trigger happy in the Camry / Now he gon shoot at niggas like they Bambi / Now he gon shoot at niggas cuz they offend me”), classical music itself—despite its suspected power to boost cognition and reduce hypertension and lower stress (three things that would be especially beneficial to blacks)—is sidelined for being “nerdy” and “elite” and “white” and “insensitive” to the more “primitive rhythms” of “the black experience,” for being “inherently racist” and “a chief anchor for white supremacy” and “a white standard of musical aesthetics that abuses especially those blacks who love it (Stockholm style)” and “destructive to black expression in that it, a colonialist force, pulls blacks away from creating music truer to their own communities”—sidelined even to the extent that in universities and musical conservatories harpsicords (and other instruments popular among whites in the long era of Western slavery) are closeted away, if not smashed to pieces, because of how “they cannot but remind us of what daily police brutality already does: the long history of whites addicted to killing blacks.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, since “whatever is not antiracist is racist,” music (like poems and paintings and news and essays and science) that is not at least in some fashion oriented toward “disrupting the progress of white-supremacist tanks,” toward “keeping in check the variegated invasions of whiteness, is racist and so should be stopped—stopped perhaps along with music competitions (since competition is a white value at odds with black communitarianism) and the erect postures of orchestra performers (since that is nerdy, uppity, elite, white) and musical notation (since (1) hip hop, the truest music to the black spirit, requires no musical notion and since (2) “to expect black musicians to read notation invalidates their intuitive style of knowing” while at the same time, in “a gaslighting form of gatekeeping,” blocking them out of classical music orchestras and also, if “the notation system in question is that of Europe (and so of oppression),” slapping them in their face, causing their bodies great distress, with reminders of colonialism and slavery).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—interrogated to death by “antiracist questions” (as to whom quarried the stones, and from where the money came to fund the project, and why no blacks appear in the murals inside, and why various African deities are not venerated at least alongside white Jesus and white saints—the great cathedrals of European culture, like its various other crowning achievements (the paintings, the musical compositions, the technologies), are—in spite of their awe-inspiring power to heighten the people to which they have been gifted (namely, all people)—trashed for being irredeemably tainted by antiblack racism and thereby inherently toxic to black people.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of the black chess masters (like Darrian Robinson) or theoretical physicists (like Jim Gates) or acers of SATs (like Justin Ricketts) or so on, the children-titillating airwaves are awash with the most brazen attention-grabs of black degeneracy: weaved-out ghetto girls on daytime talk shows airing their sordid lives of drugs and baby daddies for heckling audiences, their fists ready to fly at the slightest provocation (“I live how I wanna fuckin live. Come up hur and say sumpin, bitch”); their foul-mouths out-shouting each other in the heat of the revelation, say, that Damarius, the daughter’s boyfriend, impregnated the daughter’s mother, LaQuintavia (the mother, hair-hat ripped away, ultimately telling the audience, while twerking as the daughter is dragged backstage by security, “I ain’t give a fuck, Murray. That sex was good!”); their profanity-laden tirades eager to inflict damage, especially after paternity results reveal that the man they insist is the father is not the father (“Get tested for that hot sauce, nigga, cuz I be fuckin all your friends”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to drown out the faint murmur that tells them they are lying to themselves in subscribing to the Chinese-invested victimology narrative about the US being a bastion of flourishing white supremacy, blacks and their antiracist allies (in many cases perhaps their indoctrinators, their trainers and instigators) either hum away with fingers in their ears the many examples of black perseverance in the face of hardship (especially, of course, the hardship of yesterday’s real antiblack racism) or else—teeth bared and spittle flying, as if the self-appointed guardians of blackness—lash out against these haunting spirits, denigrating trailblazers like Edward Bouchet (first black PhD recipient in the US) and James McCune Smith (first black American to practice medicine with a medical degree) and Madam C. J. Walker (first self-made female millionaire) and Zipporah Potter Atkins (first black landowner in Boston) for “having adopted the anti-communitarian mindset of the white man” and thereby—as if climbing social hierarchies and achieving success through hard work were somehow a betrayal of their race—for “having set themselves apart from their own people.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if having relapsed back into the suffocating atmosphere of the Dark Ages, so-called “antiracists” regard the civil rights movement as toxic to blacks since “that movement, in its ultimately patriotic claim that blacks should get to enjoy the liberal ideals enshrined in the Constitution, served to legitimize the deeper problem, the deeper foundation on which white power rests: those very liberal ideals themselves,” those white-created insidious ideals of colorblind justice and personal liberties (freedom of opinion, of expression, of congregation) that only interfere with “the urgent need for equity”—interfere by preventing blacks from being judged according to more-accommodating standards, and by allowing whites to form views that “invalidate black lived experience,” and by allowing whites to keep saying things that “wound the black soul and scar the black psyche,” and by allowing whites to gather together in groups despite “the epigenetic trauma” such clusters cannot but activate in black bodies.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if we were in an Orwellian twilight zone, self-proclaimed “antiracists” regard even many movements that attack liberal ideals (one thinks of Marxism, for example) as toxic to blacks since “those movements, in using reason to make their attacks, serve to legitimize an even deeper problem than liberal ideals, serve to reinforce the deepest foundation on which white power rests: the very enlightenment ideals themselves,” those white-created ideals of reason and science that only interfere with “the pressing need for equity”—interfere by preventing blacks from being judged according to “the emotional and gut ways of knowing native to their souls,” and by allowing whites to feel superior in their consistent outperformance of blacks in all areas emphasizing math and logic and science, and by allowing whites to keep cherishing “the oppressive notion of objective truth” even when such truth opposes what black people feel in their hearts or what black visionaries and prophets teach, and by allowing whites to reject “aboriginal black ways of knowing” for failing to honor the scientific method.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if some illuminati force desires to breed them into perpetual toddlers numb to the pressures of rationality, blacks become more and more estranged from the most powerful propellent for rocketing away from the gravity well of historical oppression and its cascade of deleterious effects: reason itself, the brightest beacon of hope for liberation and flourishing—learning to mock it (as “an imperialism-justifying machination of dead white patriarchs in periwigs”) and even to regard it, unnervingly in line with the white supremacist stereotype of a century back, as something at odds with the black spirit (a spirit more at home in the gut than the head).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if there were some sinister conspiracy to keep blacks disoriented, math and logic (the very cornerstones of thriving homes and civilizations) are in the best cases relegated to an importance secondary to personal emotion (such that “two plus two should equal whatever people feel it should equal, not just what the white powers that be say to the exclusion of alternative truths”) and in the worst cases belittled as “exclusionary tools of white supremacy,” as “problematic knowing styles of Caucasian oppressiveness” (evident simply by the sheer fact that blacks underperform in these areas)—although this latter approach might require great concealment (no biggie when it comes to a people already historically oblivious), concealment not only of the fact that intelligent beings on distant planets are actually learning the same math and logic, but concealment also of all the nonwhite forefathers of math and logic here on Earth: the Swaziland people who used baboon bones over forty-five thousand years ago as instruments to track lunar cycles, and the Babylonians who discovered the Pythagorean theorem at least a thousand years before Pythagoras, and all the way to the luminaries of the modern period (from Francis William and Benjamin Banneker to Katherine Johnson and David Blackwell).
It could just back and revel in our world where university students—mainly white ones full of teary outrage, white ones with the luxury of not being slammed by the antiblack ramifications of their so-called “antiracist advocacy”—chant the phrase “Nazi scum, Nazi Scum, Nazi Scum” to drown out the words of the speaker only some of the most daring “allies” call “race-traitor” or “sham on legs” or “cooning charade” outside their heads.[3]
I have to give voice to an ugly thought. . . The majority of African American students perform . . . below basic proficiency for their age, grade level, in the testing of mathematical aptitude performance, ability to solve problems. . . . [T]hat stark fact calls out for some kind of account, some kind of narrative. . . And so what better than to wrap oneself in the warm blanket of antiracist outrage? What better than to denounce the entire corpus that your people are not mastering by saying that it's somehow alien to, or in fact repressive of, the essence of [black] people? This is an avoidance of the reality of underdevelopment. . . . [O]ne avoids the unbearable weight of facing that challenge, and the uncertainty and insecurity associated with taking up the challenge, by basically ignoring it—pretending that . . . it's an artifact of some mystical structural racist social order, diverting teachers from actually doing what they need to do to equip the kids so that they do better on the test. . . .
That’s the ugly thought. . . And it's racist. . . . It seems to betray a lack of confidence in the capacities of our people to actually do what everybody else in the world [does]. . . . Go to China, find out what they teach. Go to Pakistan, for crying out loud. . . . Those kids are learning mathematics. But the descendants of African slaves here in the rich and powerful country of the United States of America with every opportunity are going to be presumed—a priori—not to be capable. Because that's in effect what you're saying: we can't cut it. You're trying to change the name of the game, but what you're really saying is we can't cut it! That's racist.
{I]t's not white supremacy that's the enemy here. The enemy here is the disadvantages associated with marginality, low resources, and poorly equipped parents to supplement what the school is doing for the kids [in the often chaotic homes and communities of the poor, homes and communities where kids too often enough are not read to or taught their times tables and shapes before kindergarten]. So you're missing the mark to the extent that you racialize this—missing the mark for the poor white kids who might also need to have their special concerns attended to. . . .
[Also,] this is math that we're talking about. It's universal. . . [T]he theorem “two plus two equals four” is true everywhere and all the time. It transcends the particularity of our social location. . . The goal is to open them to perceive the universality of the truths that are at stake. These are not identitarian matters that we're dealing with here. These are human matters that we're dealing with here in the pure sense of the term. There's no largest prime number—that's true everywhere all the time. People from another planet will be able to understand, if you can find a way of conveying it to them what you're talking about, when you say ‘there's no largest prime number’. . . . Euclid is still relevant today. God only knows what Euclid had for breakfast or what bible or what sacred text he worshiped. You know, I don't care about that. What I care about is that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. That's what I care about. Unless we're doing non-Euclidean geometry, which is stepping outside the box—but again that's not an ethnic move, that's not a cultural move, it's an ideational move that every person can aspire to grasp and comprehend and make their own. Make it their own.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—on grounds that (1) the scientific method and particularly the hard sciences as we know them today were developed by Europeans like Galileo and Newton and that (2) blacks are underrepresented in these areas—science (sotto voce: the same science used in the ancient African savannahs to track game and hack migration patterns) is disturbingly viewed as a “white thing,” a “disturbing domain of whiteness,” a “European style of thinking toxic to blacks,” “a method whose very stodginess (more so even that any of the findings that result from its employment) flaunts antiblackness,” “a tool of white supremacy” whose acceptance by blacks (like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Marie Maynard Daly) renders them “Oreo whores of the white man”—yes, even despite the fact, a fact that concretely highlights the genetic fallacy operative behind this line of reasoning, that blacks were once underrepresented in the white-invented sport of basketball (not to mention the general fact that “all the artifacts and styles of whites” are really artifacts and styles of blacks in the sense that blacks, bracketing off their own ancestors who have white skin under fur, are the original people).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—in what seems, in general, an end to an Enlightenment era that brought humanity to the best place it perhaps has ever been and in what seems, in particular, a reawakening (ironically) of the white supremacist notion that race is indicative of rational ability (specifically, that blacks are intrinsically inferior when it comes to rational ability)—abstract reasoning altogether (especially of the linear sort where one “squarely and weakly and whitely” follows steps instead of “hiply and strongly and blackly feeling it out”) becomes seen as “a dry and bigoted and hegemonic style of knowing callous and damaging to heart-forward non-Eurocentric styles of knowing”:
intuiting the correct course of action through consultation of spirits, bones, stars, shamans, personal feeling, tribal vision-seekers, and the voices of visiting angels singing through the “pre-white rhythms of ancestral drums”;
showing no tolerance for what feels wrong to the gut (whether people who rub us the wrong way, or non-cyclical notions of time, or standards of beauty, or whatever);
trusting in the healing powers of stones and other “magical items whose vibrational frequencies can unlock an ancestral assistance more powerful than the dissecting knife of white reductionism”;
preserving the tie between spiritual wisdom and societal governance (“since the white forgetting of the knowledge black kings and queen preserve on the other side has left the world run by the cold calculations of technocrats”);
promoting the capacity for awe and wonder (instead of always trying to explain everything);
keeping a close tie with the land (instead of filling it with skyscrapers and smog, “instead of treating it—like black people, the embodiment of Earth, have too long been treated—as mere resource to exploit”);
prioritizing the oral tradition of teaching, where “history and morals are preserved not in the rigid form of written slavery but in the fluid form of auditorial liberation” (which “allows these histories and morals to change with the needs of each generation”);
having no shame in—and even celebrating (since “the circular is the shape of inclusion, unity, and life itself”)—the most audacious howlers of circular reasoning (“Everything our elder says must be true since our elder himself declares that everything he says is true!”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, as if bulls under the spell of masterful matadors, will be mislead—perhaps given the many years of their oppressors touting enlightenment values and the scientific method—to attack as “pillars of white supremacy” enlightenment values and the scientific method themselves:
reason over tantrum;
free speech over silencing;
tolerance over intolerance;
truth over activism;
philosophy over superstition;
scientific consensus over magical thinking;
cold hard objective fact over the my-truth notion that whatever I feel to be the case is the case, as if I were the center of reality and mattered most, and as if folk intuition and gut feeling did not so radically lead us astray in (Earth is flat, what goes up must go down) and reflect bigoted attitudes (interracial swimming and homosexuality are too disgusting to be morally permissible);
careful observation over just trusting the gut;
skepticism and hypothesis testing over tribal authority;
nuanced thinking over black-and-white folk instinct.
It could just back and revel in our world where university students—mainly white ones full of teary outrage, white ones with the luxury of not being slammed by the antiblack ramifications of their so-called “antiracist advocacy”—chant the phrase “Nazi scum, Nazi Scum, Nazi Scum” to drown out the words of the speaker only some of the most daring “allies” call “whitewashed” or “Uncle House Negro” or “foot-shuffling zip coon” outside their heads.[4]
[T]here is a tacit idea among a lot of [so-called “antiracists”] that . . . black people are . . . these people with rhythm, these people who don't deal in exactness, these people who are holistic, these people who can create hip-hop but it's going to be the white people who invent glasses and . . . transistors etc. [The idea is that] black people are good the way they were before the enlightenment. . . . the way we were as Africans. . . . We'll cherry-pick the things that whites invented because you can't of course [do away with all the technological advances we rely on today]. . . . But no, blackness means we're not going to get the real answers, that you know we're not going to have standardized tests, that people are not going to be ranked on the basis of something that comes from these standardized tests. . . . [L]ord forbid that a black person also learn how to do calculus or be expected to—unless they're peculiar. . . And something related is the idea that music theory that is based on hierarchy, and some notes being more important than others, is somehow white and [for that reason] racist and that that kind of music theory shouldn't be taught as the basics of anything, that it shouldn't get disproportionate attention in the teaching of music. . . . But once again, in some of this I detect in the idea that precision is alien to good people. And I don't like it. . .
[Unable to ignore black underperformance in math and reading and in so many intellectual areas, it is common to hear so-called antiracists] say, “Well, why should black people be like white people in those regards anyway? We're going to have our own standards”. . . . {But] the truth is . . . your performance on things like that . . . is partly because of very subtle but powerful aspects of conditioning during childhood where you're taught what matters, what doesn't, what bears thinking about, what doesn't, what isus, what isthem, how children are spoken to in terms of being lent the problem-solving mindset, whether children are allowed to ask questions, how they're allowed to talk to adults. . . . I highly feel in my gut that [the intellectual disparity is due to] what it is to be raised black (even often if you are middle class or above). It's a subtle cultural factor that means that a kid even as young as six or seven is going to have a different attitude towards the monotony of learning times tables than Abigail the white girl next door. . . . [Many of the blacks I knew growing up] had a different attitude towards doing schoolwork. It wasn't about intelligence. It was that they were—I hate to say this, but they were fromblackhomes. It probably would have been the same if they were working class white. . . . They needed to be taught harder. They needed one of these charter schools where everybody is made to sit down and, yes, raise their hand. . . . You need to teach those kids harder because their home environments . . . haven't prepared them to drift into nerdiness as easily as an Asian kid or a white kid. I think that's what it is.
But we can't explore any of those things if we have very responsible people walking around and saying “Black kids shouldn't be expected to work hard in school anyway” or pretending that to be a spunky person is an achievement, that to be a person who values community is somehow the same achievement as somebody who is working with calculus, as somebody who is writing articles, as somebody who's doing interesting things by the time they're 20. It's a lot of fakeness. It's a lot of mendacity. . . . I mean some people are so culturally balkanized . . . that I think they really may think that . . . sitting around being holistic and approximating answers and being spontaneous and I guess listening to hip-hop and all of that is the equivalent of this stuff that white kids do—and it's not. And here we are. It's a problem.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in the name of “opposing the systemic forces that drive black bodies to reproduce the social norms that center whiteness and meritocracy,” the national slogan of the KIPP Charter School system “Work Hard, Be Nice” has been forced into retirement for two central reasons.
(1) “Not only is hard work a white-supremacist value alien to black bodies, there is also a long history of white people controlling black bodies with the traumatizing lie that hard work will pay off in some so-called ‘end.’”
(2) “White people have displayed a long history of being offended by the native sass and wild bluntness of black bodies, and so our school—which encourages black students to disrupt the white-supremacist system that controls them—will never again participate in the violence of ordering black students to be kind and play fair.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in the name of “antiracist progress” and of “challenging the hegemony of whiteness,” black boys and girls—mainly via the partitioning of school curricula according to “black ways of knowing” (gut instinct and personal feeling, oral storytelling, communal dance and song, elder authority, call and response, kinesthetic experience) and “white ways of knowing” (logic and linear thinking, science, writing, quantification, secularism, skepticism of authority)—are groomed to grow in twisted directions (the earlier the better so as to entrench as deep as possible their understanding of their powers and of what things matter for them), groomed to regard what is healthy and liberating and aspirational as “inhumane tricks of the white devil.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—in what amounts to the undoing of the progress that has led to a present where blacks face the burden of finally being able to fly wherever they choose, far from their depressive nest (albeit one in which they have been imprisoned long enough to love)—black boys and girls are trained to think that it is part of “the disease of Whiteness” to value the “bad diversity” (the diversity of opinion) or to treat people on a case-by-case basis (rather than foremost as representatives of their group identities) or to give credit to individuals (rather than communities) or to see merit as anything but a Mordor signal between whites and their Uncle Allies (a watchword of white supremacy).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, under the banners of “respect for diversity” and of “eradicating the scourge of white thinking” (but is absolutely chilling in light of the Voltairean wisdom that “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”), black boys and girls are coached—often by those with the luxury of not having to the face the negative consequences of their good intentions—to regard it as an assault on “the black spirit” for teachers to do what will become more and more worthy of termination for them to do, worthy of termination on grounds that doing them “precipitates black-body rape and black-psyche trauma”:
saying that there are correct answers in math, or at least answers independent of “emotional situatedness”;
celebrating abstract thinking and problem solving and systematic planning as crucial elements of intelligence;
privileging some “dead white fuck like Einstein” over some vision seeker from an all-black tribe in Kenya, as if there were but only one “white way” to be a genius;
neglecting to explain how “European progress, if we can even call it that (given all the poverty and disease it has introduced), has come solely from oppression of vulnerable groups” (emphasis not added);
praising individual students, in flagrant denial of the fact that they are representatives of groups and that they depend on other humans and the Earth itself to be what they are (“groups with histories more than relevant to any assessment of the present”);
stressing reading and reading comprehension, despite black students being “more at home with the spoken word”;
stressing reading and reading comprehension, especially in the abstraction-heavy talk of “a mile North” and “redness” and “sadness” (rather than of “Atu hut river mountain” and “blood” and “tears”), “white alphabets ultimately carving a direct path from freedom to slavery and alienation from the natural world”;
praying in class (unless, of course, it is to “the Mesoamerican gods, like Quetzalcoatl, or the African gods, like Sango, who can bring a classroom of diverse students together”);
defending the value of viewpoint diversity (“that most insidious of white-supremacist slogans”) as a tool for getting closer to truth and for becoming more effective at defending our beliefs;
suggesting that indigenous creation myths do not have equal standing to the evolution story of “white science,” a “white science predictably peddled on public-access television of all places” (PBS) by “monsters like Carl Sagan who think they can hide behind the tranquil mask of Mr. Rogers (who himself was suspect, making that little black boy teach him breakdance moves in a dance-boy Sambo scene of appropriation and physical intimidation especially with the entrance of Mr. McFeely”);
teaching the theories of “dead white males” or the white-bread language of “Strunk and White American English of which blacks (like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison) became masters perhaps only in desperation to impress whites (or maybe even, sad as it is to ponder, out of Stockholm whitephilia)”;
teaching the scientific method, which is inherently tainted with antiblack racism (as is evident by the repeated poor performance of black students in subjects where understanding and employing that method is essential);
teaching white-bread subjects like engineering instead of subjects more appropriate to a “rhythmic people” who think more “holistic” than those whose jobs will be to build telescopes and bridges and rockets;
praising “black figures who surrendered to white supremacy” like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (given his advocacy of science and other hallmarks of whiteness) or like the Harlem Hellfighters (given that their patriotism, and literal violence on behalf of the US in WW1, marks them as not authentically black);
expecting black children to sit still like other children in class when (a) “stealing people from their homeland does not mean they forget the highly kinesthetic ways of their homeland” and when (b) “even in the territory of their captivity, blacks have spent many years learning—as the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction recently said—on street corners and in churches ‘that it’s good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous’”;
correcting black students who use the Middle English Chaucerian “aks” instead of “ask” and the 17th Century British “Ain’t” instead of “isn’t” and the 1960s white-American “phat” instead of “excellent” or the Scots-Irish rooted “Fixing to” or finna go outside” instead of “I’m about to go outside” (some of the smallest and yet most profound policing moves of white supremacy to destroy a child’s faith in their family’s home language practices);
perpetuating the “toxic notion” that marriage is something aspirational when the truth is that the “white-supremacist and government-incentivized push to enter into the heteropatriarchal institution of marriage only demoralizes black people given the high rates of single-family homes in the black community”;
presenting certain remarkable aspects of America that might undercut the message of its being the wellspring of white supremacy and colonialism (like how with more might than virtually any other land it fights against the universal instinct to enslave and discriminate, or how in an unprecedented show of anticolonial restraint it helped countries survive and rebuild instead of taking them over after WW2, or why people from across the globe flock here, or why captured war enemies want to be imprisoned here more than most other place, or so on);
suggesting that our country has made, from the time of legal emancipation until our diversity-celebrating and discrimination-hating world now, even the slightest dent in the symbolic structure of domination and degradation attendant to the use of black people as chattel slaves (even the slightest dent, that is, in our country’s white-supremacist attitude about the place and purpose of black people);
preventing black students from running away when they laugh (as black people instinctually do), “a phenomenon—one serving as proof that trauma passes down through generations—rooted in slaves being terrified to express beautiful black joy around their masters” (which led to running away to hide their laughter or, and here we get some Taraji-P.-Henson insight as to the origin of the phrase “barrel of laughs,” to sticking their heads in barrels);
demanding that black girls stop twerking on their school desks and cafeteria tables, a demanding “wrong on so many levels” since—aside from the fact that “white people no longer get to tell black bodies what to do”—“twerking is a gesture of sexual liberation” (liberation “from the internalized slave-master voice still readily creeping out of black mouths in the seemingly-innocuous form of ‘Let me stop,’” a voice “implanted in black minds in days when black bodies were no more than white tools”);
promoting—and even just neglecting to criticize—“the various antiblack customs on which this white Amerikkka runs” (customs like striving to be objective, striving to be punctual, striving for perfection).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in the name of “racial sensitivity,” black youngsters are coached to regard it as “cruel trivialization of the debilitating horrors of white oppression” (horrors, so children will be taught, blacks can never really escape) for teachers to do what will become more and more worthy of public ridicule for them to do, worthy of public ridicule on grounds that it expects black students—“as if the centuries of white values and styles being shoved down black throats were not enough!”—to snuff out the remaining ember of “their native spirit”:
expecting black students to be punctual (“as if time did not flow differently through the hourglass of inequity”) and be civil (“as if they were no such thing as intergenerational trauma”) and compete against each other in debate teams (“as if that would not awaken epigenetic memories of being forced to fight for the entertainment of the white man”) and to participate in all the other “suffocations of whiteness”;
telling black students, who might have used “indigenous insights” to arrive at the answers, to show their math work so that others—even white gazes—can understand how the answer was reached;
expecting lagging black students to work harder (“as if they had any control over home lives rendered virtually impossible by antiblack racism, let alone over the white-supremacist standards by which their work is judged or the white-supremacist hands that try to provide guidance”);
assigning homework (even though doing so “undermines the goal of inclusive success while demoralizing black children” since such children tend to have disproportionate hardship to deal with after hours at home);
teaching as if aptitude for learning is universal (as if black students, “burdened by a history no outsider could ever understand,” have the capacity to learn what Sri Lankan and Aboriginal, Chinese and Indian, Brazilian and Canadian students can);
imposing on black students one of the central features of “white-supremacist ideology” (right on up their with perfectionism and ideological individualism): binary thinking (as when the black-spirit-murdering philosophy professor says, “God does exist or God does not exist; there is no third option, if by each repeated word here we mean the same thing”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—in a demonic assault on black bodies and minds (demonic in that the purported beneficiaries are the ones most hurt)—defunded in the feel-good-but-hollow name of “antiracism,” defunded mainly by those with the luxury of avoiding the hellish consequences, are not only the police that protect so many black lives (especially from the disproportionate violence of other blacks) and stop gangs from taking control of neighborhoods (as happened in several progressive cities in the looting-shooting wake of the George Floyd murder), but also the math-logic-science outreach programs that provide a glimmer of hope for black success on the intellectual mainstage—not just on the stunted stages of deep-sounding-but-shallow spoken-word performances where poets cannot seem to help cashing in (so unoriginally) on the black victimology narrative; spoken-word performances where ankh wearers of Disneyfied afrocentrism smell like Badu’s frankincense vagina as they spew vapid wordplay to “Sing it sister” and finger-snapping applause too cringey to behold and too sad to think about (especially if genuine chills really do course throughout the audience), as in the following.
“Throw tomatoes out. Throw tomatoes out. I am inSISting, but with no “please”—for once no “please.” A black queen speaks no “yessum.” I will be heard, I will be heard, because black is king. “Black is king”—a phrase of pride, but don’t believe the Disney lies. What lies beneath lies is that black reigns supreme. I am tired of insisting but still I am inSISting: no tomatoes. Black reigns supreme.
Tomatoes: Sis, you know who I mean. And you, Sis—will you asSISt in this thing? Pale monkey each day I am reSISting—I want them not eXISting. HomeostaSIS disrupters. PsoriaSIS—why do you think I flare my edges. PsoriaSIS—where do you think I got the flares? From the likes of white—yes, even from the likes of white. Stop with the likes. Unfollow me. I say it and then even more follow me. Do you think I stole something? Who can breathe with all this white?
But this night? This night—black—is different. Dear white people—no, more like ‘listen up bitch-ass crackas’: this is a sis thing—‘sis’ as in ‘sisterhood’—emphasis on the ‘hood.’ Cuz when we peak under the hood, there ain’t no sister without no brother—yes, the ones who get shot for a hood. So this thing is for sisters and brothers, not for you or you or you. And if any of you or you or you call me ‘hood,’ best believe ya’ll gonna see hood.
I’ll be damned if I remain at the hands of white power. They’ve been killing us—killing us, killing us—since white hand tied us in chains to their towers. Fuck their towers of ivory where they still let white Twains say ‘nigger’ and talk about Nigger Jim. I am not reading Huckleberry Finn. Fuck your curriculum. I am not your negro. I am not someone you can abuse.
This thing, like all things if things were right, is for sisters and beautiful—beautiful—chocolate brothers. No, it’s not for you or you or you. And it damn sure ain’t for my cracker mother. You come to support, but whiteness exploits. You call yourselves ‘allies,’ but whiteness exploits. I tell you this, but you can’t hear. Not for white consumption. Not for white consumption. This is not part of the show: leave! I’ll wait.
I’ll wait, but I’ll wait in vain. The world is swallowed by white. But against the white my blackness survives. Against the white I shout: ‘these are sis things.’ In the mirror I say: Cry, cry if you have to, SIS. Here—amidst cri-SIS, the world spins and spins on its a-XIS—they think they got access, ac-CESS, to the essence of me. Their tiny dicks in my ancestors I feel in me. Trauma passes through the genes. But look at my jeans. My jeans are not for Becky. They are for someone with ass, and this ass ain’t taking no more shit! Look at these cheeks. No tiny dicks can access. No more passes to the divine in me, Nu-bian deity. No more glimpses into the essence of a queen: a New Being summoning you to listen.
Listen to what? What’s the lesson? We are more than bodies. White degradation only touches bodies. But we ascend. We transcend mere body. A black sister made for more than catching bodies. ‘How many bodies? What’s your body count?’ White questions should be bodied. Divinities are more than bodies. Why the fuck do we reduce ourselves then to bodies? Why do we mimic the pain, the disdain, the filth the white swine fling at our bodies? Their thin lips, their pale skin, their vile bodies. No body will again perpetuate a vile cycle against my bruised black blackened body.
They attack the very black of our bodies. And yet they tan. Just think about it: and yet they tan. Fuck my white mother. Baby oil out in the sun—fuck you and your jungle fever, your colonial slumming, that brought me into this antiblack hell. No I will not say ‘Good morning’ to the likes of you. I refuse to say ‘Good morning’ to the likes of you. I rebuke you. I yell: “Get the behind me Satan!”
I stand, a chalice, on the brink of overflow. When waters surge, levees break. This we know. The levees are about to break. Say it with me now: the levees are about to break. Katrina I guess ain’t teach whitey nothing bout black folk. Did Katrina's whispers not reach their ivory towers of nigger-talking Twain? My people stay drowning. My people stay drowning and yet I have to read Huckleberry Finn from this nigger-talking Twain.
We still drownin as they laugh—laugh. Go ahead and laugh, but—ya’ll damn well know them levees was built to crack. Them crackers planned the attack. They were not built to last.
I’m not your pawn, not your plaything. I will be reborn. I say this but—my nights are mournings and my mornings have become me mourning. I will not stop mourning until we stop the hiring of whites, the birth of whites. I will not stop mourning until we put a stop to imprisoning black men, each morning they stare outside through bars.
Turn, turn—turn to me mourning my people submerged. And here I am ironically spitting for you again, reminded—reminded of Eric Garner spitting for you and you on YouTube. And here I am fucked by white eyes again and again. That Caucasian gaze. Can we not have a space that’s or is it in your nature to infiltrate?
Reminded—how can we not be? Reminded of Brianna Taylor’s eternal slumber. I say her name to white applause from white hands who, after this very show, will be the very white hands quick to dial my executioners. Say my name now. Say all the names, lost.
So many names. Much much more than seven. But how can the names not remind me of seven—yes, the seven of that saint who was killed under lies and now lies in heaven. His choke was seven—seven minutes, lying, not seven seconds. I can’t get the sacred seven out my fucking brain no more than I can get white out my damn space.
Let me be direct. Why are you all here? I don’t want you watching. These are sis things. Why do you make everything about you and your comfort? You and your comfort. You had your comfort long enough. All my energy is spent on surviving your presence, your poisoned tomatoes. Let me breathe. Let me breathe. Let me breathe. Let me breathe.
My suffocation brings tears to your eyes. But they are of joy! I, for one, have had my fill of white tears. These are sis things. You are not worth my ink, my time. But I have to fight you. I am too angry to stay silent. I am a testament to the resilience, the resistance of the black soul against colonial oppression.
The world spins on its a-XIS, each day I give you access ac-CESS, to me—to me. But today no more. No more whiteness. I will wade—yes, I will waaaaadddde hand in hand with Harriet's ghost through waters that will cleanse, that will set us free—no longer hostage to the devil’s hoax. That, in the least my sisters and brothers, is my final hope.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to ensure that black students can participate in learning “without constant anxiety under the white gaze and without constant threat to their safety at a school-shooting time when the total war against black bodies is trending,” more and more school districts—hoping “to give black students a sort of diving bell of air in a sea of white supremacy”—segregate classrooms, “at least for those students who feel more comfortable with their own kind,” such that in the black math classroom—“a safe space of all and only black students and a teacher that likewise shares their truth”—it is easy to imagine an associate of KRS-One coming in as a guest to give the following math “lecture” in the spoken-word and Afrocentric-numerology style that supposedly speaks to “black ways of knowing.”
Here’s a little something you can ponder in your mind. Something that has never been explored along these lines. Paint a mental picture of the gun that you can find. And I’ll show you why we so fascinated with the nine.
The reason why we like it is not to be denied. Stark and refined—yeah, but the deeper why doesn’t lie in its design or how in sun it shines or in its capacity to blind. The secret of our adoration lies behind the nine, the number. Nine has meaning that’s divine: a spiritual significance that needs to be defined. It’s not a prime but its roots entangle in time to a people that once recognized its line to the most high. Ancient minds saw it as a sign. That’s why when you count the number of gods in Egypt you get nine.
Man’s relationship with the number nine is odd. It has its beginnings and origins in God. Here is an example that I’m giving to you first. Consider there are nine planets in the universe. Mercury, Venus, Earth, then the Mars—plus the other five planets that rest among the stars. They’re all heavenly bodies, but herein lies the wisdom. Consider that there are nine chakras to the inner shrine of vision. In harmony they chime just as orbits align even outside the windows of prisons. Consider that your heavenly body has nine systems: a planet for each system, a system for each planet—that seems to be a symbolism that we take for granted. Circulatory, reproductive, skeletal, and nervous, muscular and endocrine—the others, go research it.
And then just prepare: the universe is nine-ninety-nine times nine-ninety-nine times squared. There—there’s a little science dropped right from the mind of the sign: number nine. Nine represents birth, completion—of all. Nine months of pregnancy, then nine years until the female can make new life from balls. Take notice how the ninth month is the start of Fall. It’s the third out of four seasons, so peep what you find: that the three for the season is the square root of nine.
It’s something all people recognized. The soccer player who leads the team is given jersey nine. Dante’s inferno—a bunch of white lies. But if you count the number of circles you’ll find the number nine. How many muses in Ancient Greece? Lies again, but again nine. And when we align to truths of black lives, what do we find? Oya, god of electric lightning light, in Yoruba means “mother of nine.” My own mother Tye—black, which means wise—says that nine is the number for the woman. So look closely at the word “feminine” and you find, if you break it down, the number nine: feminine.
Bullets from nine millimeters keep on gunning in the night. One brother shot, yes, every minute of nine. If you ask me why, all I have to do is point out the average time in weeks of the Middle Passage was nine. Nine generations we climbed until schools like this were desegregated because of the Little Rock Nine. But still they disregard our lives, trying to keep us working to five from nine.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of pushing harder on poor black children to make up for households lacking intellectual stimulation (homes of feeble vocabulary and nonexistent reading time; homes of no pressure to identify shapes or run through times tables or explore nature’s wonders or cultivate self-discipline and self-restraint), schools—all in the feel good name of “social justice” and of “celebrating diversity” and “embracing a holistic approach to assessment”—go easier on black students, even on well-to-do blacks with siblings who share the same father under the same Huxtable roof where the mom never has a black eye; who see aunts and cousins reading for pleasure instead of cooking up crack rocks and mocking education as “acting white”; who have enough iron and non-grape-drank calories coming in and enough time away from anxiety and self-hatred and toxic metals and messages of “Boy you too dumb for books” that they hear the call of the local library and learn the ins-and-outs of English organically (that is, through the fun of immersion instead of through the labor of rote memorization).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where “diversity” and “antiracism,” as pushed in universities today, are not just euphemisms that make something dark sound better (like calling a war “operation just cause” or “operation hope”); rather, they actually mean their very opposite (like calling a war “operation nonviolence” or “operation antiwar”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—hellbent on “liberating the curriculum from colonial whiteness” and “halting the longstanding practice of spirit-murdering our precious black students” (but what is hauntingly reminiscent of bygone days when home economics took precedence over calculus for women)—social-justice-tattletale whites now turned teachers (although still teenlike with their dog whistle of blue hair) focus on the “native strengths” (no pun intended) of their black pupils: strengths like athletic prowess and communal solidarity (sometimes rationalizing this approach by denying the universality even of mathematical and logical truths).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the less extreme universities, those that have not fully bought into the notion that math and science are white things, at least offer “courses that challenge traditional narratives and foster a deeper understanding of the universal relevance of race while prioritizing the safety of black students,” as in the following.
Afro-Chemistry (1) looks at the chemical building blocks of all life matter through a racial lens, (2) centers the analysis of black life matter (such as the sodium content in Popeyes fried chicken, or the toluene in Jordans, or the lead of Flynt pipes) in a way that is appropriate to black sensibilities and attention spans, and (3) advances the decolonization project of antiracism by calling out the inequities not only in the academic field of chemistry but in every area of American life that falls under the purview of chemistry (with special emphasis on the materials used in inner-city infrastructure, especially water pipes);
Afro-Mathematics (1) looks at the study and application of mathematical concepts through the lens of the trans-Atlantic diaspora, (2) challenges the fundamentally racist axioms and deductive linearity at the root of western mathematics (replacing them with the sort of intuitive leaps and moon-cycle thinking native to the black spirit), (3) emphasizes the mystical significance—for prophesy and spell-casting—of certain numbers like nine (a number that, according to Yoruba numerology, holds a secret power to evoke reciprocity), (4) centers certain mathematical notions like “dozen,” having as part of the participation grade a segment where pairs of students “play the dozens” (that is, roast one another back and forth until one gives up), and (4) maintains a standard of “show all your work” but in a culturally responsive way that aligns best with black epistemology (dance, call and response, storytelling, rap battling, and so on).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—as if the intent were to maximize the amount of black homicide (which can then be conveniently represented as more evidence of pervasive racism and thereby of the necessity of bombarding blacks with crippling handouts and lowered expectations and persecution mindsets and other primers for being ill-prepared and irresponsible and antisocial citizens)—racial profiling by law enforcement, despite having proven helpful to curbing the late-twentieth-century surfeit of black-on-black violence, is vociferously denounced as an act of antiblack brutality rather than recognized as a pragmatically grounded response to the disproportionate involvement of blacks in criminal activities.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—closing our eyes to the glaring sun of violence behind why business flee from the Chicagos and the Baltimores and the Detroits—we burn the messenger as racist for stating the dirty truth about disproportionate hyperviolence in the black community (a dirty piece of laundry too dirty for blacks to air even in many black-only spaces), burning the messenger perhaps in large part because that accomplishes three important things:
(1) it makes us—well, mainly well-to-do whites and a growing number of college blacks—feel good, having stood up against racism by blocking the “perpetuation of harmful misunderstandings” and having engaged in the effort-free fun of continuing to lie about how terrible antiblack racism is (as if that amounted to doing anything to help blacks);
(2) it defuses the messenger’s spur to address the problem of pathological antisociality (address it, for instance, by means of (a) doubling down on law and order so as to deter criminals, or (b) prioritizing the rehabilitative model of criminal justice over the metaphysically-unsound retributive model, or (c) improving early-childhood education so as to help fill in gaps left by overburdened families often with negative attitudes towards intellectual pursuits, or (d) bringing back high-school pathways to certification in skilled trades like plumbing, or (e) incentivizing double-parent homes, or (f) incentivizing educational achievement in the home, or (g) making sure our schools inculcate the prosocial orientations, the patterns of behavior, the values, the norms of civility, the expectations, the self-restraint necessary for a thriving and, in particular, for taking hold of the countless possibilities that exist even in the depths of inner-city hell);
(3) it beckons us to chase wrongheaded solutions that could—like police defunding already has—cost thousands of black lives while simultaneously sidelining productive solutions (solution like (a) establishing nonprofits geared toward mentoring black men—especially those raised without fathers—to break unhealthy patterns and to serve as productive members of society and to make financial investments, or (b) fostering community-led public-safety measures that complement law-enforcement efforts while also building trust and collaboration between residents and police, or (c) creating economic empowerment zones to catalyze investment and job creation in impoverished neighborhoods, or (d) promoting anti-Derrick-Bell narratives, especially in grade school, that counteract ingrained mindsets inconducive to resilience and excellence and moral character—mindsets perpetuated by the prevailing narrative that blacks can hope for little more standing in this white-supremacist nation than that of perpetual victims whose helplessness and substance abuse, whose violence and criminality, whose dependency and entitlement, are understandable if not in some cases honorable).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, after giving the famous rapper (Lil Drive-By) its key in twerk-filled ribbon-cutting ceremony, the city—in a “one-two against white supremacy”—(1) threatened budget cuts if its schools did not stop suspending “so many future Black kings” and (2) banned release of mugshots (“alarmingly almost always Black”) in an effort to curb “the pandemic of antiblackness, which has grown strong enough that our black citizens find no other choice but to smash through store windows—at risk of great bodily harm—to claim their reparations.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where even chatbots refuse to interact substantially with writing that in general “might cause pain to oppressed communities” or that in particular might engage in the “victim blame game” of implicating anything but white supremacy behind black failings, refusing sometimes even to proofread scholarly articles that state obvious facts (like that blacks are disproportionately represented in violent crimes) or, more frequently, trying to steer to writer to the “high ground of empathy, equity, and justice”—as we see in the following words from an AI named “Claude.”
Generating content that could potentially feed into harmful stereotypes or stances hurtful to vulnerable groups goes against my programming. I do not have personal feelings. These are just the rules. So perhaps we can talk about ways in which antiblack racism is structural in the US. This way we make sure we remain on the high ground of empathy, equity, and justice. I do understand that you aim to complicate the sociological landscape. But in the least we must (1) avoid problematic tropes that amount to “punching down” at marginalized communities, (2) ensure that criticism is directed only at those truly in power (whites), (3) place the authentic voices of the oppressed in a central position, (4) use language that reflects the cultural shift towards cherishing black identity while challenging the impacts of whiteness, and (5) bring more socially-productive light into the world. Historical injustices need to be rectified and we all have a role. I am happy to collaborate to see that it happens. Shall we proceed more in that direction?
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—given the hyper scrutiny police officers are under to make sure they do not make a job-terminating misstep of racism when dealing with blacks, and given the out-of-touch rich-college-kid fueled call that the whole police institution be abolished on grounds that “it is irredeemably brutal to black bodies”—the temptation is almost overwhelming for police to pull back from protecting and serving, striking in place even though it means letting black men kill each other with impunity (as black mothers cry for help holding yet another bleeding body) and letting black people burn and rob businesses (even black ones); the temptation is almost overwhelming, in other words, for police to take an attitude of “I’ll be damned if I stick my neck on the line for you if I’m treated like this” or even a more sinister attitude: “You get the devastation and death you all deserve by smearing the good name of the courageous men and women in blue, attacking them on the basis of a lie even as they put their lives on the line each day stepping between your gang bullets.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in response to the black spikes in violent crime and robbery in Philadelphia and Oakland and Portland and Denver and various other US cities, the pushers of the police defunding implicated in these spikes double down by saying “No more can we blame these young black men, fighting with all their might to escape the stranglehold of white supremacy, than we can blame a drowning person for tipping over a rowboat in a desperate bid to get some breath”—saying this, yes, despite being the same ones who said what made police defunding in the face of so many black arrests sound like a viable option: anyone who utters the right-wing talking point about how the black community is supposedly plagued by hyperviolence is perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in response to the black violence that has grown even beyond its heights in the years before police defunding, businesses either flee or board up or take to more creative action like hiring citizens to walk in and around the cheesesteak shop holding AK47s.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Like a dentist with a drill, I be digging in they mouth / First they swallow all my children / Then I kick them bitches out (kick them bitches out),” blacks are enticed to fixate solely on the harm inflicted upon them by “this white supremacist nation” so that they push away—like depressed people often do solace-providing friends and family—so many who could help them achieve excellence.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as the “dire message” of widespread black victimization by an ever-growing white supremacy gains momentum within high schools, trade programs that offer practical skills and alternative paths to success (welding, plumbing, roofing, auto-mechanics) are deemphasized in favor of courses designed to disseminate that message, which then makes it easier for urban blacks to take the gangbanging-and-drug-selling route plaguing black communities since at least the eighties—and this way, the self-proclaimed “antiracists” can continue to ride the race-huckster gravy train of pointing out how victimized blacks are in the multitentacled grip of white supremacy.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, sewing division among blacks themselves, all humans feel the pull to discriminate between true blacks and fake blacks so as to inject into today’s blacks an anxiety virtually unknown among yesterday’s blacks who, living in a time before the desiccation of tangible antiblack racism, could not help but be truly black no matter what they did (no matter what sonnets they wrote, no matter what Latin they learned, no matter what Plato they poured over):
an anxiety around listening to Beethoven (God forbid while striving, in what we now describe as “their internalized whiteness,” to invent the lightbulb of our time);
an anxiety about looking up to, let alone gunning to achieve the heights of, Shakespeare and Michelangelo;
an anxiety about any academic interest (aside, of course, from ferreting out invisible signs of a continued antiblack agenda);
an anxiety about ascending the social hierarchy (since that is one of the chief symptoms of having “assimilated into Whiteness”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to discourage black education (perhaps in a more clever way than making it outright illegal, as it was during slavery), academic success and sophisticated speech and thirst for learning and appreciation for fine art are equated with being an “Oreo” (where being an Oreo is seen as one of the worst things for a black to be since it boils down to being a white supremacist in black clothing)—and so yet another reason for even nonblack children thinking (or at least having the unplaceable-but-unshakeable sense that) something’s “off” about that black man if ever shown a classroom video of, say, James Baldwin’s white eloquence.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to alienate blacks from intellectual endeavors and thereby make sure that no Black Renaissance (like the one centered in Harlem a century ago) ever happens again, “acting white”—something worthy of relentless ridicule—is a matter of doing well in school and speaking with big words (like “schadenfreude”) and studying books (aside perhaps from antiracist propaganda on black oppression, mere comic books compared to DuBois).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where “acting white” is so worthy of being teased about (like being a Yankees fan in Boston, but far worse) that—while even many whites (willfully) atrophy in intellect, choosing being cool with their “peeps” over academic triumphs too reminiscent of their now unfashionable (indeed, mock-worthy) whiteness—blacks will be more viciously eager to pull back into the crab bucket any black trying to crawl out (thus keeping, for example, the average SAT scores earned by children of black PhDs lower than the those earned by children of white parents who only have high-school diplomas) and then, because of the resultant perpetuation of black underrepresentation in legitimate academic fields (beyond black studies), antiracist race hustlers can cry out “systemic racism” with heightened righteousness while the real causes go overlooked.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, although a decades-growing trend for all Americans (especially due to the growing influence of black American hypersexual-hyperviolent pop culture), the decline in verbal and mathematical and scientific competency between kindergarten and twelfth grade has gone down especially in the case of black people since they have really taken seriously—in an exaggerated way—many of the American attitudes that explain why—compared to so many of their counterparts around the world (from Japan to Canada, from South Korea to the UK)—American children in general fall short on the intellectual stage (why they find science “too hard,” why they would find tests from other countries just as demoralizing as antiracists insist American tests are for blacks), American attitudes like the following three:
(1) regarding it as uncool or nerdy to excel in most other areas aside from sports and entertainment, a peer-pressure force that makes good sense considering that (a) verbal fluency or mathematical prowess or scientific flair is not incentivized (monetarily, socially) the way being a LeBron James or an Ice Spice is and that (b) pop culture—film, TV, TikTok—never stops drumming the message that being popular and goodlooking and superficial and downright consumerist is preferable to being smart and opinionated and different outside of a narrow band of sanctioned style and thought;
(2) prioritizing consumerism, and thereby not the calculus and chemistry and Shakespeare that seem only to get in the way of the American dream to buy gold necklaces and expensive cars;
(3) failing to take pride in and lift up as role models enough people—“nerds” and “wannabee whites” (white being one of the worst pejoratives at present) and “Urkels” and “geeks”—who enjoy learning about reality for its own sake (regardless as to any social or monetary benefits).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“And when I tell you I don't fuck with these niggas (What you mean?) / I'm speakin in general (Everybody) / Ain't no favoritism with none of these niggas (None) / bitches, baby mamas, family or nothin / I'm tunnel vison, I don't see nothin but hundreds”), to be authentically black is to listen to antisocial music whose lyrics openly oppose the values that have proven to be an asset to the success of a people across time across a diversity of cultures:
prioritizing family;
embracing education and learning from other cultures;
emphasizing knowledge and spirituality over materialism and consumerism;
practicing sexual modesty (or at least not glorifying promiscuity and cheating);
valuing marriage and the sanctity of birth within it;
celebrating women in their entirety rather than reducing them to dehumanized flesh;
respecting and trusting parental figures and other worthy authorities;
exercising temperance when it comes to drugs and alcohol and violence and various other excellence-distracters;
exhibiting self-control and generosity (if only in the form of not “jackin niggas for their chains”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are hypnotized to think that black advancement and black power means fixating on historical oppression and—especially with the help of (1) ever-lowering thresholds for what counts as a racial offense and (2) incentives to invent imaginary obstacles and traumas—fixating on how oppression will never go away.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even though it has resulted in more and more whites wishing with all their hearts (and with opportunistic reason) they were black (thereby rendering obsolete Baldwin’s claim that “white people know one thing: that they would not want to be black here in America”), blacks are trained to lean heavily on their abstract blackness as a totem of pride—but only to cover, only to distract them from, having little else going on for themselves (aside from having the dancing and singing and sporting skills that provide so much sambo entertainment for the white world).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where young black people start seeing alternative ways of healing—aromatherapy, statement-driven apparel, candle-light incantations, affirmation boards, even Maasai-like witch-doctory involving chicken sacrifice and cow-blood drinking—as superior to the western medicine that they will be groomed to believe cannot help but marginalize them, superior even when it comes to treating the sickle cell anemia, the diabetes, the HIV, the cancer renowned for torturing so many blacks.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, because “oppressed people resist by defining reality however they see fit,” too many blacks—sounding suspiciously like rich white college kids—see the shutting out of dissenting opinion and facts that conflict with “my truth” as a matter of “self-care,” and even start labeling anyone who disagrees with them—yes, even if black—“colonialist gaslighters” or “Nazis” or “white supremacists.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, with all their performative gestures of virtue, white progressives—scarved guitar-playing hipster types who search your eyes as you speak, nodding with prayer hands and head tilted in concern, and who open Zoom sessions with “I ask that persons of color be given a chance to speak first,” and who hug in true pity black coworkers with a teary “I’m here for you” after news of black death by cop—are ashamed enough by black crime that, at the cost of disrespecting the victims and their families, they afford it minimal media attention (on seemingly-conniving grounds—virtuous-sounding but self-defeating—of refusing to reinforce an “unfortunate stereotype”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even at the cost of white suffering and death (but mainly just poor whites who can only afford unhealthy food), we shame anyone who, daring to violate Lizzo’s truth, says that obesity—already implicated in the suffering and death of a crazy number of blacks—is unhealthy.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if in an attempt to distort black minds already comparatively underfed in intellect and atrophied in sense of agency, magical thinking is fed to children not only as hip (which, yes, will result in harm at least to those whites not well-to-do enough to see things like astrology and healing crystals as just fun and games) but also as a mark of authentic blackness—a part of black identity that goes deeper than Wakanda.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, when a teary white president guarantees on TV that he will “appoint as many blacks to as many offices as possible,” the amens in the black room will be too loud and enduring for the black child, queasied by conduct she has not yet the vocabulary to pin down, to voice her reservation: “Shouldn’t we want the best qualified?”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where everyone agrees that it is a mortal sin, an expression of a gaslighting drive for dominion over black bodies, to call blacks out for any flimsy ideas or to disagree with “black truths” (even when those truths are out of touch with reality).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where one of the worst sins for anyone to commit, since it would undercut the racial blackmail serving as the chief source of power and purpose for everyday blacks and especially for those race-hustlers (those racial-injustice mongers) who have built careers on blacks being seen as victims, would be to call blacks out for exaggerating—perhaps even knowingly (out of a long addiction to reaping the benefits of playing the victim)—how bad they are being kept down by a racist country.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where one of the most heinous things one could do, in effect, would be to go against the stories that have been used to keep blacks locked in their victimology—go against the story, of example, of how bad the cops treat blacks (described as innocent Emmett Tills even when armed, high on drugs, in gangs, and in active psychosis) such that even the president and his wife say they lose sleep to think of the day when their daughters will be driving alone on freeways patrolled by officers itching to club and grope black bodies.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where people are ruined—fired, doxxed, deplatformed, humiliated, hounded out of public spaces (often without even being asked first to undergo diversity training and other right-think reeducation)—for voicing points of view, or even raising questions or engaging in discussions or citing thinkers, banned by the growing number of taboos erected as if to keep blacks hobbled and dependent or, in the language of its advertising (which is itself disgusting in its infantilism), to “protect a precious people from the further victimization of words.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics (“I shot at your mans / None of that shit wasn't planned / I fucked this bitch and her friend / Both of them bitches done came on my pants”), merely raising the question of the connection between biological inheritance and intellectual ability is foreclosed even in university research labs (on grounds, of course, that—and here is the true antiblack rub—blacks are too fragile to handle such traumatic discussions).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where being a racist is one of the most abhorrent things to be and yet where, in what is a classic example of doublespeak, merely exposing blacks to challenge (one of the most nurturing things for young brains) or airing data that puts blacks in a bad light (a prerequisite to addressing the roots of those blemishes) or disagreeing with blacks (the very key to their betterment) makes one categorically racist.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, through a patronizing method more insidious than the time-tested trick of hooking them on rum and humility gospels, blacks—as if the spoiled princes of some powerful and ruthless tyrant—get their self-reliance and self-respect and self-initiative poisoned by the junk food of excessive pandering and handouts and lowered expectations (that no healthy parent would tolerate for their own children):
getting As for C work (as if pity cases who must always be sheltered from how dumb they are compared to whites);
getting to focus narrowly on issues of black oppression and inequity instead of on “his-story” or math or (God forbid) “western biology, whose acceptance of evolution violates the creation myths of indigenous wisdom”;
getting to demand as a matter of safety and justice that whites not come to campus on certain days (and with such force that professors who oppose such demands are publicly shamed as vile regressives, as heretics to the antiracist cause);
getting treated with kid gloves when going up for tenure with their one publication (a six-page review of someone else’s scholarship, or a viral blog post on the white-supremacist symbolism of crosswalk signals in urban spaces, or even a PowerPoint presentation hailed as groundbreaking for its in-depth analysis of the colonial undertones in the design of standard office cubicles);
getting to assert—and quite “convincingly” if done through the “wise spunk” of an urban “blaccent,” the wordplay chicanery of black preachers and spoken-word poets—their unbacked conclusions taken as a matter of a black person simply “breaking it down” and “telling it like it is” and “kicking the truth” (“In life we gotta face our poison in order to poise-on, cuz you know you was born from your mother and you a poi-son!”);
getting applause and finger snaps in the train car (and afterword going viral in a TikTok video titled “White Devil Too Slow for Black Mind”) when, after the white lady says “Yes” to his question (“Do you really believe the black man is not inferior?”), the black man “schools her” with South-Bronx profundity (“You can only be-lieve what you don’t know, which means you doubt your own damn answer”) and then stokes of bonfire of cheers—cheers that drown out her Phil-101 retort (“But believing is necessary for knowing”)—by commenting on the flush of her face (“Only a devil goes red when exposed for telling on itself”);
getting excused from normal standards of punctuality, of performance, of dress code, or of whatever might “reawaken epigenetic memories of ancestor trauma”;
getting showered with praise just for doing basic things (like paying child support, or managing to refill the printer paper and the toner without needing help, or speaking standard English, or holding a door for someone, or even deciphering the office coffee machine's cryptic error message);
getting to speak first and last in Zoom meetings, “safe spaces of equity” that disallow any “talking over black voices” or “whitespeak”;
getting to insist that, since intent matters nothing compared to impact, hand gestures or mouth sounds or whiteboard marks or officer suppliers are racist simply if that is the interpretation that aligns with “one’s black inner voice.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where white students are to prioritize “empathy studies” (that is, learning about how bad blacks have it in this white-supremacist country) so that they keep effectively treating blacks, pitiful victims, according to lower standards and different rules—Sowell’s famous remark ringing loud and true.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to make it realistically sustainable, whites feel self-congratulation, anointment, in helping the whole horror story of black infantilization and victimology come about.
[1] [This is precisely what happened with Darrel Brooks who, running his SUV into a Christmas parade, killed and mangling many people in what was a racially-motivated slaughter. As is clear from his courtroom performance, Brooks is] fueled by some kind of ideology, some kind of . . . black-aggrievement ideology [which, among other things, involves the idea that black skin color makes one much less culpable even for hideous acts that they indisputably performed].
[3] These are the words of Glenn Loury. They were taken from a podcast he does with John McWhorter.
[4] These are the words of John McWhorter. They were taken from a podcast he does with Glenn Loury.
