Kanye West, Steve Harvey, Jim Brown, Herschel Walker. An oval-office worth of HBCU presidents. A procession of Black men, Ice Cube most recently, habitually making the same unforced error. All spontaneously manifesting a perverse political pragmatism. An unfortunate accommodating affinity. A racial politic awkwardly aligned with white power.
What is it that drives these willful attempts to negotiate with, legitimizing in a manner, white racial terrorists? Efforts all ostensibly in service to Black financial-prosperity-as-liberation? The behaviors at once seem to express an internalized racial capitalism and mimicry of white male patriarchal imperatives and norms. Critically still, Black capitalism, Black patriarchy, or any other equally impoverished reproductions of structural whiteness’s underlying reasons for being won’t save Black folk, Black men, or anyone else for that matter.
This maneuvering has always been more about buying-in than “selling-out.” The insistence on and investment in a free-market fueled liberation that invokes the familiar spirits of capitalism. In the rampant, free-theorizing, heavy-handed apologetics of comments threads, other less prominent Black men sort the reasoning. Varied not-quite-on-the-nose takes about checkers, chess, even poker abound. Rarely though is so much as a dotted line drawn between the acquisitive, usurous impulses that produced the modern free-market and the ones that birthed the contentious legacies of racial whiteness. Only the thought of leveraging the former to break (free from) the latter stays prominent, never acknowledging that they are conjoined.
“You can’t conspire with whiteness to get Black folk free or secure vibrant, thriving Black futures. That isn’t what whiteness seeks or is functionally designed to ensure.”
Too many Black men quietly desire to appropriate the manner and traditions of white male chauvinism. To not only use the “masters’ tools” but acquire his status as well — a desire with a certain arguably seductive quality. In part, this aspiration renders some unwilling to contend honestly with racial whiteness, reluctant to disavow its modern socio-political, partisan manifestations and implications. It is the sort of uncritical conformity that whiteness elicits from those adjacent to or enriched by its benefits. These impulses leave some hopelessly complicit, estranged from more holistic notions of Black communal connection, wellness, and social prosperity.
Whiteness has never been an emancipatory framework or pathway and has always been antithetical to (Black) liberation. A tool intentionally conjured into existence to ensure validation of a particular, exploitative racial arrangement. A subordinating racist caste system that has always formally disenfranchised Black folks. Whiteness is militantly hegemonic, and history is rife with examples of how it contends with independent, whole, free Black bodies and communities. How whiteness violently rejects such possibilities and arrangements, conspires to preclude them; to reassert and insists on its primacy.
“There is no “seat at the table” that requires our continued exploitation or theft of our collective Black futures to remain erect, stable. Even if there were, you shouldn’t want to sit there.”
You can’t conspire with whiteness to get Black folk free or secure vibrant, thriving Black futures. That isn’t what whiteness seeks or is functionally designed to ensure. Whiteness is an anti-competitive syndicate, a racial monopoly whose driving impulses, like all monopolistic rackets, are: acquisition, extraction, consolidation, assimilation, subordination, and eradication. A resurgent, thriving, competitive Black body(-politic) undermines these objectives.
There are no good-faith negotiations to be found here. Whiteness always seeks its interests abhorring any right racial reckonings or reconciliation. And within historical and contemporary contexts, whiteness persists as a deliberate rebuttal to Black claims of full personhood or citizenship — the sole purpose-built justification for the ongoing (re-)production of Black trauma. It is the anti-Black project. There is no “seat at the table” that requires our continued exploitation or the theft of our collective Black futures to remain erect, stable. Even if there were, you shouldn’t want to sit there.
