Black Excellence (For Whatever That Means)

TW: r*pe, p*dophilia, racism

Daniel J. Boorstin makes a valuable claim in his The Image, A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America published in 1962 that the image has replaced the ideological ideal in American culture and that, by way of colonialism & imperialism, it has and is effectively doing so around the world. This is because we believe, Boorstin posits, “that we can make our very own ideals”. Boorstin refers to this illusion of brazen pomposity as “the climax of our extravagant expectations” because we existing within the realm of American ideology do suffer a disease of bloated, insatiable expectation regarding how the world ought to operate in relation to us & overinflated egos. Boorstin establishes that we have varying concepts of God but that either conception is still a human manufacturing. I say that America & all those indoctrinated into its diabolical ideations are bereft of God regardless of religion -- their God is capital. Forget seraphim & cherubim -- the agents of this God are American institutions of politics, education, finance, arts & culture. Boorstin explores these realms in detail while the common commentator simply chooses to focus their interest on the media.

We speak often of how celebrities play a role in indoctrinating the masses into superficial relationships with life however I feel that thread has grown banal. Sure they are the face of the deception but what of the brains behind it? What of the invisible hand that crafts structures of oppression and continues to push along the very obvious agenda of genocide against indigenous peoples the world over? What of the legislators that abuse their positions to make power plays at the expense of the people they’ve been “elected” to protect? There are myriad other social institutions that prohibit the development of personal depth & critical thought, such as the white-washing of history within the classroom or normalization of a dominant hegemony that is inherently oppositional to most indigenous peoples cultures. Yes, they are the distractions but they are hardly the progenitors and it’s high time we nip the disease in the bud and be done with it once and for all.

As a society, celebrities & tastemakers within the Black community are constantly being brought to task about their relationship with material wealth however as a white supremacist, capitalist society I think those assertions are ignorant & unfair projections of the sick cultural formations that underlie a sick culture. Peacocking is an important part of many African cultures-- specifically West African-- so it stands to reason that those that have been created by people of African descent who have been scattered across the world by chattel slavery would also feature peacocking as a characteristic. That aside, Black people the world over are relegated to the absolute bottom of the global community’s hierarchy. In a world where capital & image reign supreme, flaunting wealth -- real or illusory-- is a means of establishing power. For people who are systemically robbed of their authority & self-sovereignty at every turn-- be it through rape, forced sterilization, scientific experimentation, state-sanctioned murder by public servants, racist laws encoded for continued economic subjugation, etc.-- it is merely a way of reclaiming some form of agency. It is simply a way of showing that regardless of how hard the world tries to exploit & ultimately exterminate us, we are still going to thrive some way, somehow. 

We rarely hear people denigrate the tremendous wealth of the Windsor monarchy or the solid gold Lamborghinis driven by Arabian oil sheikhs. However we are constantly reminded that hip-hop culture-- which was started by poor Black and Latinx kids in the burning boogie down Bronx and is rooted in Afrofuturism as every pioneer of hip-hop has openly paid homage to Parliament Funkadelic who helped pioneer the sound of Afrofuturism alongside Sun Ra-- is too flashy about wealth. It frankly feels like the classist castigations of the nouveau riche by the elite. We throw rappers who came from poverty & dared to aspire to material associations with power in the Empire of Images under the bus for their use of their wealth but in terms of people like Paris Hilton whose fame is not simply for being rich but also for making fun of the working class and the working poor, we deride them as being vapid & dumb. It’s important to consider that white media does not have any shows featuring a majority Black or brown cast of upper middle class or wealthy class standing but Gossip Girl in all of its juvenile mediocrity is a hit show. Perhaps this is because the white majority in this country can stomach seeing Black people in our “place” in positions on shows like The Wire but cannot stomach the idea of Black excellence for whatever excellence means within this system. Maybe that explains why there are two Black franchises of Real Housewives and eight non-Black ones. White people are allowed to be rich and that is considered normal but when it’s Black & brown people, it’s a problem. White people are allowed to be the most absolutely depraved people on the planet, but if they have money, they get away with it -- take Woody Allen for instance. Kevin Spacey, Terry Richardson, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton who alongside his wife vilified the victim of his sexual predation in the global public eye. It’s more perpetuation of the racism of this system, which is less okay to openly critique than the way Black people spend the wealth they worked hard to earn. It is less okay to speak openly about real live conspiracies such as the fact that the CIA has openly admitted to causing civil insurrection abroad to destabilize governments for their own means than to mind Black people’s business.

Hip-hop has been an avenue of liberation from poverty for a lot of Black people because entertainment was the only space that we were allowed to exist in. It has also served as the liberation of our spirits as it has often been used to tell characteristically Black stories & communicate our experiences with the world. In as much, it has served as a salve for those of us suffering under the tyranny of anti-Blackness that can be too much to bear some days yet somehow we continue to bear it, and not only bear it but exceed people’s expectations for what we are capable of doing & acquiring. It was Chris Rock who pointed out that for him to live in his neighborhood he had to be Chris Rock -- one of the most famous comedians of all-time-- whereas his white neighbor was simply a dentist. The fact that he is able to live in the same setting as his neighbor is in and of itself extraordinary considering their vastly different cultural histories. 

To be quite frank, I think absolutely everything Black people do is amazing. Not solely because we have to work exponentially harder to simply meet the same markers as our non-Black counterparts but because of the simple fact that we are still doing anything at all despite everything we as a people have been through and are still going through. Aspiring to a house on the Miami waterfront may not seem like much when it’s a rich, old, white person but for people of marginalized backgrounds-- specifically speaking to the majority of those who created & continue to enliven hip-hop & Black culture-- it is representative of so much more. It is representative of a peaceful life free of the poverty & violence that so often characterizes many in the industry’s past. It is representative of economic freedom to live life without fear of not being able to provide for oneself or one’s loved ones. It is representative of having gotten to the top of the system that has actively attempted to destroy one at every turn -- or at least as high up as someone like us can go.

I think the structures that need to be harped upon are outlined by Boorstin exceptionally well, but it seems that the general populace go for the low-hanging fruit. The piss poor education system of the United States of America intentionally keeps people ignorant in order to keep them from being able to see beyond the veil of illusion crafted by the media. The white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy being perpetuated in households across the country and the world is another deeper and more insidious agent of this illusion & the false god of capitalism. 

I’m not saying that hip-hop stars are not exempt from peddling the lie that success in capitalism is real success or that it will save any one of us from the beast-- the beast being capitalism. Black people didn’t make the game and we should not be decried for playing it well despite the playing field being dangerously disproportionate. What I am saying is that there are more insidious agents of destruction at work perpetuating more nefarious forms of damage to the people of this planet and the planet itself such as the human traffickers who are wealthy enough to own their own islands to rape children on and buy off public officials so that they don’t see any real justice that nobody wants to talk about. Or perhaps the white mainstream media that criminalizes Black & brown people while painting white people as innocuous & clueless, creating a media machine that distracts the majority from these very real, very disturbing issues.

Boorstin makes a great point when noting that most people do not clearly perceive the problem or the solution that is at work in this paradigm, and that we as a people acquiesce our power constantly by shifting the blame & refusing accountability. Black people won’t be saved from the clutches of the megalith of the empire by capitalism which is built on & perpetuated by our death & desecration. Nobody will. Communism-- the polar opposite-- will not save us because binary opposition is not the nature of the universe, which Boorstin points out as a true governing body. Nobody and nothing is coming to save us. We must engender the consciousness & characteristics necessary to save ourselves, which means divesting from our creature comforts and leaning into the great unknown with faith that by starving this system and redirecting our energies into one another, we may live lives better than we could have ever fathomed. 

Unfortunately that is often asking too much of people who are ruled by fear. Most of us do not want power-- that is too much responsibility. Most of us just want to live an easy life in which we never face our fears while many others of us otherwise want to be feared as a means of receiving some false power. It is unsurprising that Black people who have suffered some of the worst injustices in the history of our civilization want to live easy lives in which we never face our fears, however all Black people know that that is not our experience & never will be-- not in this lifetime. And while it used to infuriate me that not every other Black person was as radical a revolutionary as myself I came to understand & have compassion for the human condition at large. I had to in order to forgive, and I had to forgive in order to keep from killing everyone else or myself… or both. Many Black people cannot imagine a world in which we are free from the tyranny of this paradigm (which is the entire point of Afrofuturism which is a much more metaphysical practice than the spiritual could really understand). Few oppressed people feel they can even afford to think such thoughts lest they break their own hearts. Maybe it’s okay to settle on the next best thing -- a cushy prison cell with delicious food, a bad bitch, and a beautiful view.