« MAINSTREAM PRO-BLACKNESS IN THE WEST IS ROOTED IN CAPITALISM. NOT IN JUSTICE. »
The waves of protest regarding the death of George Floyd which began in the United States were orchestrated worldwide. Since the selection of Barack Obama in 2008, the normal world has been mentally prepared to live events through synchronicity, hence a total rupture from the traditional political approach of the 20th century. Such interpretation of politics highlights a new scheme when it comes to understanding new cycles of Western politics. Most events are coordinated in order to welcome a certain, higher political agenda, prepared ahead of time.
It took White European and American leaders seventy four years, since 1947, to mold our modern society. In that length of time, the progressive abolition of nationalism, the Americanization of the world, the development of technology and the first foundations of globalism through politics and culture were laid before our eyes. Indeed, it takes about fifty years for our leaders to prepare a new political cycle. In that sense, as time goes by so quickly due to an accelaration of events, generations are formated and misled on purpose by external factors. And in that case, a generation which fails to wake up from the illusion of the Western life will crush the chances of success of their descendants who will be more likely owned by the corporations which dominate us, whether in medicine, technology or in the music industry.
Social media became progressively more and more important in our lives as different generations decided to jump into the experience, for fun or more serious reasons. Yet, these platforms, whether Facebook or Twitter were promoted at a time when people could still make a difference between the real world and virtuality. Yet, such distance and dynamic disappeared by the early 2010s, a time when members of an irrelevant Armenian-American family from Beverly Hills showed the world the keys to capitalize off of narcissism. With a camera and good filters, anybody could become a king or a queen of the world. And in a society where the essence of the spirit of God has been crucified by the harsh brutality of capitalism, social media found its place. Indeed, capitalism favored a separation between the minds and the bodies of the individuals living in the West, a place where the well-being of the self has to be pushed aside as the preservation of the capitalistic structure has to be protected at all costs. In that sense, social media became a new way to compensate for the loss of the human essence in the West through narcissism and the savior-like complex of superiority attached to politics and activism.
Over the past ten years since the 2010s, the West lived the first era of simulation in the virtual world. Many of us have had businesses online -or still have- and in the near future, bloggers or any random Youtuber will be the new faces of daily news and information to the people as traditional journalism will be diversified.
Yet, in that specificity, Black people in the West were the first targets to have been used for the experimentation of technological advancement in the digital world, especially. Such issue was displayed by the Black Lives Matter movement. The actual original and authentic popular movement created by black activists in Ferguson as a result of the death of Mike Brown was known as Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, an organization slain political worker Darren Seals was apart of.
Such genuine movement would later be made to be forgotten and surpassed by the fabricated Black Lives Movement whose members, financed by shady powerful political figures, were looking for a way to extend their tentacles in Ferguson following the protests organized by Hands Up, Don’t Shoot. The movement of Darren Seals had thus been hijacked.
Black people all around the world believed they were supported, when in reality, no one really cared for them. They were, once again, used as another experimentation.
To understand the place of black people in the technological progress, one needs to fathom their place in the history of the West. Most of them descend from enslaved Africans who allowed the Western world to prosper. Yet, by the time the Industrial Revolution began, Slavery was abolished. The enslaved Africans were not freed out of love and respect but simply because they were no longer needed in the North (as illegal systems built on slavery carried on as late as the 1960s in the south of the United States). The machines delivered them. Yet, as they remained oppressed in the sphere, away from their roots, black people had never been exposed to the joy of mass consumerism before the 1970s. So when they were given the chance to enjoy such social changes fifty years ago, they entered the game of economics without understanding the dynamic of power. Indeed, as they were excluded from the life of economy for centuries, Black Westerners have a hard time evaluating power and often rush in the moment to buy as a way to compensate for the fact that they were always possessed. The digital world is one of the biggest insults towards them as the Western Black people are always encouraged to embrace celebrities as examples, not realising that in the hierarchy of power, entertainers belong to the lowest, most despised field. They are just present to dumb down the masses through entertainment.
The protests of 2020 proved two things important. The black and white opposition is now obsolete as the relations to power will be based on the embrace of global politics as a whole and the preservation of these institutions. As the selection of Indian-American Kamala Harris proved, minorities are being raised by the white global institutions to further the agenda of a dying white ruling class which will disappear in a matter of twenty years. A particular situation as we know that Whites in America will become a minority by 2050.
In the quest of power preservation, color is no longer an issue as long as the values are preserved and passed onto the next generations. Yet, it is still possible to exploit the black and white opposition to further chaos in a society, as black people are often selected and given a higher power when marking a social transition from a given order towards chaos. Indeed, the only purpose of Black people in the West is to be used.
Then, modern Black Westerners are not their ancestors and clearly understood how to manipulate the pain for profit and how to deal with pro-blackness through the spectrum of capitalism. Black Westerners are self-centered and their worldview is deeply rooted in a disdain for the southern causes of the third world. Indeed, many Black activists in the United States or in Europe, criticize the political schemes of the white countries they live in, yet they refuse to leave such nations and go back to the lands of their blood ancestors. Their anger is not really directed towards the social injustice as many simply want to change one little element so as to be included within the said white institutions of power. Most modern pro-black activists believe in the preservation of power through white institutions and consider their geographical space to be a shield in their quest for political advancement. They know that by going back to the land of their ancestors, they would be losing the privilege conveyed by being an American, French, British or German citizen. Black Westerners are the reflection of the white institutions which made them and that is why they aspire to be embraced by them.
The arrogance of the geography led to a real classification regarding the importance of black pains in the Americas. Most pro-black fights outside of the United States follow an African-American pattern when only Northern Black Europeans can claim a proximity to the Black American experience as they had the same colonizers. In that sense, the BLM movement was an insult to all the other minorities such as the Native Americans or the Mexicans who are also the victims of 1492 and its consequences. Worst, it placed the Black American experience at the center of global pain when in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Peru or El Salvador, 1492 is everyday. If the world had to be exposed to the face of George Floyd, no one barely heard of Camilo Catrillanca, a Mapuche Chilean activist who was also the victim of police brutality in Chile. No one pays attention to the experience of the Black Peruvians, the Black Cubans, the Black Ecuadorians or the fight of the Natives in Costa-Rica or Chile who die everyday at the hands of the police. Why? Because capitalism grants power to the minorities whose members belong to the most powerful political entities on earth. And the arrogance and self-centered attitude of the new digital activists from the mid 2010s are a proof of that.
There are, unfortunately, millions of Kim Kardashians of activism. Monsters who managed to create a sense of glory for them through their platform. The new saviors of black people who will never spend a dime on the creation of real structures.
V KY
(previously known as Victoria Kabeya)
French-Belgian author and historian of African and Middle Eastern heritage. Born in France, 1991, she began her career in 2015.
As a scholar, Kabeya’s work evolves around postcolonialism through art (mostly rap French music), the study of the Sicilian/Neapolitan subject in postcolonial Italian society, Blackness in the Arab world (Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq), the Afro-Caribbeans and Indigenous Natives in Latinized America, Race-mixing and the consequences of psychological trauma among young Black boys in the ghettos.