Black People should fear our Enemies, but Our Friends Also
Human nature is tricky. Whether you agree with the more traditional viewpoints on its bias towards violence, exploitation, and criminality or if you happen to feel we are born and created the context of whatever society we are raised in…I like to feel as though some things go beyond these grander questions and are much simpler. Things like when a child is crying about bullying inspire a quick and emotional response. No one really stops to consider what context or factors have led to the teardrops on the ground. The fact is. There are teardrops on the ground. And that’s not good.
My first interaction with the Keaton Jones Story was probably the same as yours, aimlessly scrolling through the memes, gifs and the hilarity of Twitter when I saw this video of a young boy crying. His tears appeared genuine and his cries of this is ‘not okay’ were hard to swallow. For the majority of us that didn’t grow up popular or the ‘cool kids’ in our school days, it’s easily relatable to sympathise with this child victimised for nothing more than the differences that make each of us beautiful in our own individual way.
It was not just me who reacted with such dismay at the sadness of this child, in the same manner, all our beloved celebrities and the most iconic of them all, Snoop Dogg, noticed this story and decided to help Keaton. A movie screening invitation extended to his mother and himself from Chris Evans, who seems to enjoy heroism on the big screen so much that he does it in real life too, and the praise and support from much of social media managed to disguise one little, insignificant factor about Keaton and his mother.
Their white supremacism. Yes, in our efforts (I mean I only retweeted but that counts as moral support) to free this little boy from his torment, we were actually freeing a racist kid and his flamboyantly racist family from the stigma of being beaten up for saying offensive words. Apparently, and I really wonder who he could have learnt this from, Keaton called his black schoolmates the ‘N-Word’. The same word used by generations of racists and bigots for centuries to dehumanise and humiliate black people. The same word that the confederate flag his family so proudly hoisted in pictures on social media, denoted as the place for black people. Slaves and oppressed in a Southern white supremacist Confederate States of America.
On one hand I am surprised and disgusted, not because people initially reacted with kindness to a boy, who regardless of whether his racism is conscious or not, is an opponent of black people but because it was so many black people themselves that rushed to his support. Our community has a history of rushing to the defence of ‘white saviours’ who do not love us and do not value our struggles. As Malcolm X proclaimed a generation ago “The most disrespected woman in America, is the black woman.” And it is these same black women that voted 98% in favour of the Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, averting the election of a white supremacist who claimed America’s greatest era was the 19th century, “even though we had slavery.”
Slavery is not a footnote of history. It was Barack Obama, the former president of the USA who acknowledged slavery as America’s ‘original sin’. But it was the same Democratic president that persisted over 8 years of an administration that failed to comprehensively challenge police brutality in his own country and toppled the Libyan regime allowing the resurrection of open slave markets in the 21st century. Black people should be careful who we call our allies, and not only us. People of Colour worldwide should do our research before we rush to assist or support white saviours (or brown or black for that matter). Particularly when in our frenzy to prevent the most obvious enemies of progress, we allow smooth politicians with silver tongues and centrist politics to take their place.
Macron epitomises this. French politics in 2017 stood in an abysmal position. For the far right Front Nationale to enter the second round of the presidential election was already a catastrophe which had previously occurred 15 years prior. But in this election, given trends in Europe of xenophobic right-wing sentiment, many believed that while unlikely, a plausible route to power existed. And in that event, deportations, merciless persecution of foreigners, minorities and particularly Muslims would occur. And so, partially repulsed by the fascist narrative of Le Pen but also won over by the anti-racist, inclusive and even radical language of Macron in denouncing France’s role in the Holocaust ‘the state organised this’ and calling France’s history in Algeria “a crime against humanity.”
But this faux-‘wokeness’ doesn’t measure up in real life. Macron uttered the repugnant view that Africa’s problems are “civilizational” and that the challenges facing the continent arise from countries that “still have seven to eight children per woman.” It’s a shame one so well-educated can reproduce such ignorance of his own county’s continued neo-colonialism of former French colonies in Africa and their economic dependency. Likewise, with his remarks last week to an Arab youth that he should ‘move on’ from a colonialism “that he had never experienced.”
I am not a slave, but I feel the pain and trauma of the hate inflicted on my people.
My nation is no longer colonised, but we endure the exploitative legacies of the coloniser.
In our society, you cannot be a person who is black. You must be a black person. And while my skin colour means that I suffer racism and oppression, though not on the level of my ancestors, so ‘Monsieur Young White Male’ I shall never “move on” from colonial crimes.
And only when the reparations are jingling in our pockets, delivered freshly from our ‘enemies’ and our ‘friends’ will we consider that.
