By DJ Ferguson
The 2016 remake of Roots was quite the experience. It was better researched, had better production value, and the themes were more pro-Black and pro-African. Unfortunately, it was also bloodier and gorier, so viewer discretion is advised, especially if you’re tired of seeing that sort of thing on your social media timelines. But one of the most compelling takeaways from the whole series was close to the ending. A slaver antagonist tells Chicken George something along the lines of “I won’t never see a nigger be my equal,” to which the protagonist replies, “Don’t have no interest in being your equal.”
I had been juggling with the whole notion of “equality,” its various metrics and who or what we’re even using as a standard for years. What harmful assumptions about ourselves and the other are we leaving unturned and unquestioned when we reflexively fight and die, and die, and die, and die, and fight, and vote, and protest, and die, and die, and write, and shout, and scream, and march, and demand, and suffer, and bleed, and die, and die, and die… for “equality”? It’s as though there’s a line and white people are always ahead of everyone else when you add up all their stats, but who drew the line? Why is it going in one direction? Why is it on a flat, white surface?
We need to scrap this whole project.
Beneath the cries for equality is something else we need even more: we need to live, we need to flourish, we need to not be violated and brutalized, we need space to heal and on our own terms, we need to rebuild what was broken and upon that foundation build new things no one has ever seen before. Things that will help all the peoples, animals, plants, ancestors, and spirits of the world be in better, more harmonious relationships with one another, in ways that only the oldest Indigenous peoples in the world can do. We can’t properly remember who we are and do what we’re supposed to do if we keep putting humanity’s youngest psychopathic evil genius manipulator who can’t empathize with people of color on a pedestal, and we’ll be even further from that if we fail to realize that the same psychopath built the goddamn pedestal to begin with.
Seeking “equality” is to use the people who violated us as our North Star in terms of direction and position, wanting what they have—or at least our understanding of it.
If we envy the oppressor’s ways and status in the process of fighting them, we are still shaped by them, making our “victory” more costly than defeat. We might “win,” but we also might become worse in the process. This unholy admixture of social forces gives birth to men like R. Kelly when we sacrifice Black women and girl’s sexual autonomy on the altar of Black men’s equality to white men like Bryan Singer. Why would we want to be the equal to a sexual abuser, or to surpass him under the paradigm he created? I don’t want as many chances to fuck up as Kanye West, and I also don’t want as much impunity as Singer. I don’t want the same opportunity to engineer mass extinctions or end all life.
I don’t want us to have the opportunity to be an even more effective Liberal “good cop” to the Conservative “bad cop,” which is exactly what Kamala Harris would be in a world where all cops are part of a system that kills us. I don’t want us to have that kind of power. I don’t want more Black Stormtroopers or Black Imperials. I don’t want a Black Death Star or Black nuclear weapons.
What manner of “person” could want this?
I don’t want to be able to wipe out an Indigenous population and move in on the pretence of some past victimization of mine that they had nothing to do with. And, if successful, I don’t want to be celebrated for genocide by an entire cinematic genre. If this is “empowering,” then I don’t want to be empowered. I would be sickened by this. What kind of “person” wouldn’t be sickened by this?
I don’t want this. I don’t want more “respect” based on how much I contribute to a genocidal empire. I don’t want to be equal to wrongdoers, and I don’t want equal access to the spoils of their wrongdoing. I want to set right what they and their accomplices did, with or without them or their accomplices, by any means necessary. This is what I want for myself and for us, collectively.
Every time we lament that white men are given more impunity than Black men, we’re creating a new R. Kelly. Maybe this R. Kelly won’t be a serial rapist. Maybe he’ll be a cop, maybe he’ll be a president, maybe he’ll be a Fundamentalist Christian, maybe he’ll be a super-villain.
I am honored to be held to a different kind of standard than white men, both inside and outside our community. The rates of “white on white crime” or the impunity of Weinstein aren’t what I want to shoot for. When I’m held to a different kind of standard it means people expect better things from me than the men who sold the world. We are not them. We shouldn’t want to be them and we shouldn’t want what they have.
When people expect me to be “equal” to or with white men, they’re expecting a warped, doubly-conscious, version of myself that should have never existed to begin with.
But when people expect different of me, it tells me they see something in me that they don’t see in white men. Maybe that’s what it means to still have a Soul. That’s something that they can’t take from us, and it’s not something we should ever sacrifice on the altar of “victory” or “equality.”
Because without that, what’s the point of winning?
Is this even a victory?
Is this a gain?
Or is this just what it is sacrifice our daughters?
Is this what it is to lose everything?
Suggested Readings:
Black Skin, White Masks, 1952
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas), 2014
Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior
“DJ Ferguson” is a Black American (Akata), freelance writer who studied Philosophy at Ball State University. Would love to produce content like this for a living , so please help fund RaceBaitr!
