If you want to be Black and be an american in today’s society, you have to give into diversity. This is an interesting concept considering that the majority population feels threatened when they are forced to implement diversity and openly speak out against it. This means, for a Black person, that not only are we tasked with living among people who don’t understand us, we are forced to work with them, and educate them on our plight. It is the 21st-century task of america to erase race and converge culture. To create a mono-culture, rather: “American” culture.
If you speak about unifying, supporting, or working within your race, you are immediately branded as a racist. You are bred to enforce your own intraracial micro-aggressions. You are taught and raised to hide your Blackness. This is done to avoid confrontation with or aggravation of the majority race and to avoid intraracial conflict. One wishes to avoid confrontation and aggression from Blacks who are not members of our immediate social circle. This is all done in an attempt to maintain the status quo.
This is a strange side effect of psychological confusion generated by the oxymoron of living under american, white supremacy. america is equal parts “American” culture; unity, diversity, inclusion, community, and manifest destiny, and equal parts white supremacy; exclusion, racism, segregation, oppression, and xenophobia meant to maintain the status quo of white human beings as the majority. america is equal parts intellectual prosperity, and miseducation. A country that boasts some of the greatest institutions of higher education in the world, lags behind in rankings of public education and has one of the most misinformed populous’s in the world.
Essentially, we live in a country that promotes idyllic conditions for unity, while maintaining a thriving system that is constantly working to exclude and divide. To marginalize. Capitalism and racism converge perfectly to promote various systems of classism. These systems together have actively continued to create a paradoxical mechanism under which many Blacks and many other oppressed peoples of color must live.
However, as DuBois successfully analyzed, Blacks live under the guise of the veil. This veil still exists. We choose to reveal ourselves from behind the veil; from our place of comfort. This protective mechanism is still alive and well. We even actively use it against our own people. To protect ourselves from colorism and self-hatred within our own community. To protect ourselves from propagandists, opportunists, and those who advocate on our behalf in terms of respectability politics; as if these people still fail to realize after all of these centuries, that there is no proper way to be Black. There is, however, only one way to be human, and this within itself is the ultimate expression of freedom. To be human means to express all facets of yourself.
In america, they wish to destroy this. They want us to be “Americans”, which essentially means to be oversexed, indebted, consumers who all strive towards a predetermined american goal. It wears a uniform and we all wear it too, and well. It is a uniform of a false reality. And it still carries a guise of respectability politics, or more so, social politics. A certain look, style, and act that is dictated to us by social media, television media, and the news. We are living in a perpetual smog of overarching views, whose smoke and stench are suffocating. So suffocating, that we have taken to wearing masks and call what we are breathing air.
This is because of fear. It is much easier to call ourselves and those around us sheep, versus admitting fear. People are afraid because we know that organization against the status quo can only result in death. That is all we have seen. When people challenge the status quo, punitive measures are enacted. This stems from an ideology of political legitimacy.
If a state feels as though its power is in question, it will retaliate. If a state feels it is being threatened, it will vilify the outspoken. Malcolm X became a villain. Marcus Garvey became a villain. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Medgar Evers, hell, even Dr. King eventually and countless others. How many others have been murdered, exiled, and imprisoned for life for speaking out against the state? Even internationally, the oppressive power of our government can be felt. Revolutionaries throughout the last 240 years have been crushed under the magnificent footing that is our country’s ideology. Now, I do not mention all of these names here simply because I am living in the past. I simply mention them as some of the most obvious examples of people who chose to be the public face of these movements (movements of freedom or civil rights or human rights or otherwise). While I do admire these people, I am not suggesting that we live in the past or even follow their methods, we should have learned from them and established continual movements. Instead, they are reminders and examples of what happens when you speak up.
So how is it possible that Black people still live under the falsehood that we could somehow escape it? We were bred to live within this duality. It is our punishment for being born both american and the descendants of slaves. The only way to escape it is through continual education and expressions of freedom. Often times we seek education without fully understanding what it is we are studying, and other times we acquire an education with no real application. What good is knowledge-of-self if it is not comprehensive? In addition to this, we must be ourselves, 100% of the time. And we must willingly and voluntarily break free from the mental oppression that is destroying our community. It is a process of assimilation that has been actively in progress for over 200 years.