Some Black Americans are sitting out the LA protests
This is how fascism spreads and wins
Anytime there’s a riot or protest that’s gained national and international attention for a non-Black minority group, the bootlicking begins.
I know there will always be a detractors. However, there’s a vocal minority of Black folks who will come out of the woodwork advising other Black folks to sit out the populist festivities. This is weird and suspicious, indeed. Sometimes, they’ll even create content highlighting themselves enjoying some vapid activity in lieu of protesting to add a little cruelty to the mix. While shameful, to be sure, it is a symptom of the greater issues with Americanism and tokenism affecting us as black people.
Aside from being a mild form of COINTELPRO the United States government has deployed via sock puppet and AI accounts, it comes back to two things: The minority group at the heart of the protests hasn’t done enough for the black community and antiblack racism. I don’t blame those who feel the trauma of advocating for other marginalized people, only to have them join white supremacists in upholding the racist superstructure. It’s flawed thinking, though.
This is also one reason why Kamala Harris lost that election. Ah, don’t be offended. You don’t read my writing because you’re easily offended. You’re here because you want unfiltered truth, no chaser — and that is the truth.
First of all, self-preservation could be the first and only reason you’re out there fighting for liberation. This is an excuse to stay inside and do nothing. The same cops who beat Rodney King savagely, an act that would define his life until his tragic passing in 2012, are the same cops trampling protesters with horses and assaulting unarmed American citizens.
You don’t have to care about these barbaric, fascist deportations. You can cover your ears about the genocides in Palestine, Congo, or Sudan if you want to (weird!), but you should care that stormtroopers are being deployed to your neighborhood where your children and loved ones stay. I mean, since when has a racist, trigger happy cop ever stopped to distinguish who they’re shooting at when they pull the trigger?
It’s also ahistorical to say that no other group has helped Black Americans (I have removed the African because they have removed their African identity, hence their ridiculous diatribe about staying home and doing nothing). Asians, Palestinians, Hispanics, Jews, and Muslims, have all marched with African-Americans in the past. Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement being one of my favorite examples. Furthermore, it betrays their lack of revolutionary activity and underlines a certain cowardice and complacency with increasingly virulent white supremacy.
These people don’t believe other races were marching with African-Americans against police brutality, inequality, and centuries of human rights abuses because (aside from being COINTELPRO sock puppets in some cases), they weren’t doing shit — they were at home. They have never organized or mobilized against anything, instead embracing their own craven weakness when these glorified overseers in blue come a-raiding. If you had been there, you’d have seen everybody.
Oh, you found some racist Hispanics saying some racist shit back in the 1950s? Some Mexicans are rampantly anti-black in Los Angeles? Well, those people are also racist against the Black folks in their home countries. I love when I am told that Mexico doesn’t have a strong African heritage (especially on the Caribbean side) by clueless Mexicans who don’t know their own history. That doesn’t mean I’m going to bootlick ICE or Homeland Security.
Quick question: Did those telling us to sit out fighting for liberation ever hold Wilson Goode, a Black American mayor, responsible for the anti blackness that got MOVE Africa bombed in Philly back in the 1980s? Colin Powell died never being held accountable for his role in getting Americans killed for a lie in Iraq (many of them Black soldiers). Do we boycott other black folks then? When do we also start taking Black immigrants into consideration?
It comes as no surprise that for some detractors, fascism is just fine. I also know that many don’t even know what the fuck fascism even is. They either haven’t paid attention to what lead up to World War II, or they have fallen victim to the obfuscation and subterfuge rampant within the American school system (public and private) when addressing Nazi Germany and the Third Reich. Fully teaching Americans — especially African-Americans and Hispanics — about fascism would eventually lead to uncomfortable questions about the violent, evil nascence of this country. We can’t have that now, can we?
For some, mass deportations are fine because they have made peace with their status as third class citizens. If we shake things up any further, then that status may be threatened, so they’d sell others out to continue to sit at the table even if it is within a limited capacity or underneath the damn thing while waiting for some scraps to be handed down.
If black folks were out there fighting for justice, Trump and his mediocre goons would send the National Guard and the Marines to brutalize and intimidate us into going home quietly. We would want allies and we would fight back (as we did in Ferguson). Black immigrants are being rounded up as well. As it stands, this compromised vocal minority only cares about maintaining the status quo… Just like their white counterparts who voted Donald Trump in for the second time.
I met a Holocaust survivor who read the famous poem, “First They Came” by Pastor Niemöller, as we performed on stage for Holocaust Remembrance many years ago, and I never thought that we would ever come to a point where we needed to remind people, especially the descendants of enslaved Africans, that they will eventually come for all of us if we don’t help others.
You can organize and mobilize your community against fascism out of altruism or self-preservation, but doing nothing means investing in your own subjugation and that silence will be repaid tenfold.
