In this piece I speak to the black folk. A specific kind of the black folk. I speak to those who say they fight for the liberation of the black people,yet their commitment to this struggles is only seen on social media.
The kind I am speaking to here is the one that is not involved in any black community projects. I like to call them social media activist. I have many friends who fall under this category and I have never called them out, and I think today is that time. In a world where it has become cool for liberals to pretend as if they care for the poor, more and more people are popping out on social media with cool hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter or #RhodesMustFall. But you never see them in any on the ground work. And they spend a lot of their time in ‘cool’ white clubs in Long street or Claremont trying to show to their white friends how they are different from those radical blacks who think everything is about race.
It is time that we call out these blacks. I know people who would be so progressive when speaking to me, but when the same topic comes up with white liberals around then for some reason they have toned down on their rhetoric in less than a week. When you call out that racist comment from your white friend in a table when out for dinner, they keep quiet and never support you and let everyone portray you as the angry black… again. A day latter they will tell you in confidence that they also think that was racist.
The most interesting of this group is the one that is a vehement supporter of capitalism while on one hand say they are fighting against one groups domination over the other.
Earlier in the week I was having a conversation with some friends of mine about why I think Capitalism is bad for us.The response I got when I said “capitalism still asserts one groups domination over the other” was “There is a difference between confirming dominance and assuming dominance”.
This comment struck me. And it explained to me why so many of my friends who are very progressive in fighting the black struggle still support capitalism. People still think that white people assume their superiority without any confirmation whatsoever (In terms of scientific evidence etc) but when one accumulates wealth in a capitalistic world where all ‘opportunities are equal’ (Firstly, you can never have equal opportunities in a capitalistic world, but that’s a a debate of another day) they confirm their dominance because they went to school and all that bullshit.
To this kind I only bring up one point. Maybe we have been looking at white dominance in a wrong way. What if white people don’t say they superior because they white but because they are the conquerors of Africa. There is no denying that the white folk did beat us in military power when they came to colonise us. Frontier wars were fought for a hundred years but we lost in the end. what if then if the white folk uses this justification for their dominance? According to these black capitalist supporters logic we shouldn’t be fighting against this white domination then because they have “confirmed” they dominance.
As black people we are forced to live with contradictions, however, sometimes the contradictions are sharp ones and those should be called out. Being a black person fighting for black liberation and still support capitalism is a contradiction. A sharp one
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