On Black (continued)
Does black really mean the same thing as it always has?
When our ancestors used the word black as an identifier it was not tied to a global capitalist system that seeks to homogenise and aggregate those it considers the bottom feed. When our ancestors said black, they stood on their land observing the civilisations that they had created, and as they stood, glistening in the tropical heat, looked at their chests and arms, saw the colour of the very earth from which everything grows and likened themselves to it. When our ancestors said black it was inextricably linked to the natural abundance to which our physiology is drawn, camouflaging naturally in lush, tropical settings and sustaining on natural produce of little process. When our ancestors said black there was no game theory at play – no thought of a zero-sum binary that leaves no chance for peaceful prosperity. When our ancestors said black they could not have imagined that it would be co-opted and adjectified to their descendant’s detriment. When our ancestors said black, whiteness did not yet exist.
And so my argument remains; now that the imperial capitalist machine has caught up to us, the descendants of the ancients, and has successfully grouped a quarter of the world under one roof, we can not allow this upstart machine to re-identify us like a mis-purposed item on a store shelf. To the machine, black means second class citizen, worker, expendable, commodifiable and surplus. We can not allow this momentary blip (600yrs) in the human story (65k+yrs) to become definitive of our inner cultures thus damning our own descendants through our own inaction.
And the first task of the revolution needn’t cost you money or physical effort – it’s literally an administrative order. There needs to be a mental extrication from black as an identity to it becoming a suit of armor or a job. I often like to characterise it as Beyoncé becoming Sasha Fierce. When you can extricate yourself emotionally, spiritually and psychologically out of blackness and invest it into your individual cultural identity, it frees up your mental and physical strength for the battering your black armour requires.
Our flawed strategy is that many of us live with all of our faculties on the front line and so, in our war weariness, we have a tendency to either overly emote or become steely robots as an effect of the exposure. Make no mistake, in the zero-sum war that rages whether we like it or not, our black armour takes continuous bombardment. Not a day goes by that I’m not reminded of the damage that my blackness has to absorb whether it be against my own piece of the wall or if I see an explosion on someone else’s patch. Blackness links all of us on the receiving end of the firestorm whether we like it or not.
The defining moment of my life was when I realised I could set up my apparatus in such a way that I wasn’t always on the frontline. I’m always a soldier but I can fight smart as well as hard. I could automate my defences, freeing up energy for my individual pursuits without even the sound of artillery penetrating my quiet space. I was finally able to watch everything in slow motion, almost like from a spaceship window miles above the intensity. It was in this place that I finally had the stillness to recognise the extent of the war outside.
That stillness that I experience in my war-free partition is what real individuality feels like. Nothing from the war can penetrate and your mind can run free once all the inhibitors are off. It’s a luxury that not many of us on the black side of the war get to experience. This is the reason why so many people benefiting from the white side of the war’s actions are so loathe to even admitting the war is happening for fear of being drawn into it. Homogenisation brings you closer to the front line which is why most European people baulk at being called ‘white people’.
Being able to maintain a position of righteous individualism whilst also reaping the spoils of war is the ultimate psychological reward that whiteness has been able to afford for all of it’s subjects to date. Whilst the powers who have used whiteness as their shield to wage this war are happy for this buffer, it is still, ultimately, only a shield which is being slowly discarded but the unintended benefit (or maybe I’m being naive to think any of this wasn’t strategic) is that the decay of the shield is now toxic enough to sustain firepower on the black armour even as the powers leave for pastures even newer.
Decaying whiteness is the default posture and position of the world right now. Bailing out immobile institutions of the past with the labour of future generations is the unmistakable snapshot. There is as much a task on the long-term benefactors of whiteness to reinvent at this juncture of humanity as there is for anyone else. We have pretty much exhausted the trajectory of ‘modern man’ in this current image and any model of a human that has economic expedience in its core function is only a new version – not a new model.
I still envision, even if the chance is slim, that the zero-sum war will have to be abandoned in the ultimate war for survival – a dire picture of hope but I am raising my children to be soldiers of the new war whilst still showing them how to manoeuvre in this one.
