By Victor Bradley
Optimism can empower, as well as numb. Excessive belief in the inevitability of progress, and how much progress has been made toward liberation, can negate the need felt for action in the present—both by obscuring the enormity of the forces against us, and by masking how vastly different the world we need will be from the world we have.
Reality-as-curated by white supremacist media promotes such passive, false optimism, especially when such media comes superficially garbed in commodified Blackness. I am referring, of course, to “Black†media owned by white conglomerates, that all conform to norms about what is considered “good†news. Such enterprises receive intrepid assistance in their unfortunate work from small Black-owned operatives reflecting a similar ethos.
A story about a entrepreneur buying an athletics franchise, the election of municipal law enforcement officials, a building at an Ivy League school being named after a wealthy donor, students getting admitted to schools built on the backs of enslaved Africans; all are presented as “good news†for Black America, so long as the subjects happen to be Black. Why? The answer is a theory of social change that is so foundational to how we are taught to see the world that most of us interpret reality according to it without thinking about it, or even being aware that there is an “it†to be thought about.
In a blog post I published entitled: “Why I am a Black Separatist,†I present 14 unspoken theses of Black history that most of us unconsciously reflect while thinking about the past. Theories about how change happens are always theories about history and reflect the theorizer’s framework for interpreting what has already happened, and therefore what is happening and will happen.
Thesis 1 is applicable here: “The highest level of personal prestige which can be attained by an individual member of our community reflects our collective status.†If I may simplify a complex phenomenon, this is why Barack Obama’s election caused so much excitement. It was assumed that the mere fact a Black man could be president signified something profound about our place in American society. Such a notion made some sense under segregation, when most exclusion was formal. If one of us could enter, that indicated segregation was no longer the rule, and so, all of us could.
But even then, this “first Black xyz” model was deeply flawed. It is routinely said that Black folks couldn’t vote in the South before 1965. This is not quite true. For instance, in 1946, there were 5,000 Black registered voters in Mississippi. This was out of a total voting age Black population of 350,000, representing 1.4% of Mississippi’s eligible Black voters. Meaning it was only for all intents and purposes that Black people could not vote in Jim Crow Mississippi.
Imagine if the Chicago Defender, one of the most widely read Black newspapers of the period, had published a full page spread of Black voters from Canton, Mississippi, standing together under the headline: “These Mississippi Negroes vote in every election #Blackexcellence.†That would be absurd and lead readers to think Mississippi was making a constant, if languid, crawl toward full Black enfranchisement. It wasn’t.
Stories of Black Wall Street, the once thriving Black enclave of Greenwood, Oklahoma, get put to a similar use, as though we need only to create a few economically prosperous islands for Black America to shirk the burden of poverty and white exploitation.
We speak as if Greenwood did not suffer, and was not destroyed by white rioters and government bombs, because it was a rare island of Black autonomy in a vast sea of subjugation. We speak as if the flourishing enclave does not lie economically ruined to this day, precisely because it rose, stood and fell alone. Today, over 40% of the neighborhood is in poverty. Though the tenacious community staged a comeback, it was laid low again by the same forces that have waylaid Black neighborhoods throughout America.
Exceptions will never save us, and when they are built on personal success, they tend not to spread.
A more recent example of the pitfalls of individualized optimism is Robert Johnson’s 2000 sale of Black Entertainment Television. Johnson is still lauded as the first Black billionaire, even though he earned that title by selling the single most valuable media property a Black person has ever controlled to a white conglomerate.
Many have criticized BET for promoting negative images of Black Americans, as Aaron McGruder notoriously did in an episode of The Boondocks that was too controversial to air in the United States. After the 2000 sale, BET quickly jettisoned its public affairs programming and became almost purely entertainment. Johnson’s billions should be thought of as what they are, his personal wage for selling us out. This would be the case if so many of us weren’t analyzing the world through an outdated model of excellence.
It’s understandable that folks fixate on “positive†stories; life is hard, and harder still for us. Moreover, humans are wired for stories about individuals, not vast impersonal statistics. Consequently, the stories we see will always frame our reality more than impersonal statistics, even when we believe the truth statistics reveal.
If the news outlets we consumed were not produced by corporate propagandists, our news diets might consist of the species of good news represented by Cooperation Jackson, a Black nationalist, Pan-African, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, LGBT affirming, environmentally restorative consortium in Jackson, Mississippi. Cooperation Jackson is the future, and it portends a far better future than private capitalism ever can. Unlike tales of individual success in accordance with a racist system, the work of Cooperation Jackson is rooted in community empowerment—not as a potential side effect, but as its essential goal.
This is to be achieved through the creation of an integrated political and economic system built around community ownership of the means of economic production, and the democratic structures required to facilitate this. Community centered initiatives are where our liberation will be found. Individual wealth will never save the collective; personal enrichment or achievement under the systems that oppress us all will never dismantle those systems.
Liberation is always first, foremost and finally, a collective endeavor. This is what false optimism premised on individualist metrics would have us forget.
Reading Suggestions:
“The Wretched of the Earth,” Frants Fanon (1961)
“Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self Determination in Jackson Mississippi,” Kali Akuno (2017)
“The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972,” Leonard N. Moore (2018)
Victor Bradley is a Pan-African, Black separatist historian and guerilla essayist who blogs at negrosubversive.com and tweets @negrosubversive
