Construct: Discussion about Race & Identity

Those who come around pretending to care for you don’t necessarily have an intention to help you. I write this in light of what I have observed over the years and the mistakes I have made in my own life w. Let me preface this article by saying that I am hoping that all sides can read what I write not with a defensive posture but with an open ear and an even more receptive heart. I know this is the most sensitive of subjects–a third rail that burns all who dare try to grab a hold of this topic–but a conversation is needed nonetheless for looking the other way for the sake of pleasantry and not offending people is just not working.

The topic I am referring to is race and identity in America but this could be applied to any nation where the citizenry are not monolithic. The issue of race has been referred to for more than two centuries as America’s original sin and the color lines have been rightly pointed out by intellectual giants like Fredrick Douglas and W.E.B. DuBois as the United States greatest obstacle to overcome. The horrors of slavery has evolved from a life of forced servitude to systematic repression and continues to rob too many people from pursuing a life of opportunity and dignity simply because of their skin color. But too many look at one side of the coin and fail to see the true nefarious aspects of race that serves to victimize the ancestors of once political prisoners from the continent of what we now refer to as Africa and splinters the populace based on artificial constructs.

Let me state here that I am not privy to the generational struggles that have been at the root of “black” experience in America for I am am originally from Ethiopia. Because I was born in another country that did not experience the monstrosity of slavery and the evils it wrought onto humans who were turned into chattel by those who worshiped money over all else, I do not know first hand the effects of cyclical oppression that has kneecapped a large mass of “African-Americans”. True enough, I have and continue to experience the pernicious practice of being treated differently because of my complexion; but by in large the wounds of generational racism has not scared my spirits.

But perhaps my disconnect from the issue of race and the legacy of slavery is precisely what allows me to approach this issue from a nuanced and dispassionate perspective. The default conversation, it seems, is one of either resentment or defensiveness; between these two paradigms, the chasm of race continues to widen and swallow civilians and civility in the process. The irony of it all, the candidate who I thought would heal these divides and lead us on an “adult conversation” about race did no such thing. Malcolm X a long time ago warned of the devious nature of both Republicans and Democrats and he especially cautioned of the “black bourgeoisie” class who have no intention on helping their people and instead use the pains of the masses in order to enrich themselves.

Let me warn before I go on that what I am writing will give no quarter to the “black leaders” who have for generations stuffed their pockets with cash as they pretend they are about the cause. To me, these alternative humans are no different than the most rabid racist in the KKK and in some instances are worse for they peddle grievance as a means of gaining fortunes while deceiving the masses with their demagoguery. There is no need to be coy here, who I am talking about are the Sharptons and the Van Jones of the world and the endless number of “black leaders” who live a life of opulence and only run to the inner-cities or “black neighborhoods” when the camera lights are on.

To this list I add Obama too for he sure made a show of caring for “black folk” when he needed the “black vote” in Chicago and in 2008 only to throw his congregation and the rest of us under the bus once he got elected. While Obama might be beloved by the rest of the liberal class, he is not held in too much of an esteem by those who know him best in the south side of Chicago and the folks he stepped over in East Saint Louis before he even gained the national spotlight. I will expound on this issue a bit more, but I should have known that Obama was not about change the minute Wall Street gave him millions and the mainstream media pushed his candidacy. Truth tellers get silenced and true change agents don’t get the platform, only shysters and the toadies of the corporate interests get the megaphone of our bought and sold mainstream media.

It is within this context that I bring up the issue of the Black Lives Matter movement. Let me make one additional point of order here before I move forward, while I have no problems condemning those who sit at the table when it comes to policy and those who are given the megaphone to perpetuate the deception, I am in no way condemning the masses–those who are caught up in the struggle–for I too once was deceived not too long ago. So I hope you don’t read my words as some sort of pious or holier than thou edict. I am not claiming to be the truth, I am just stating my truth as I see it and at least letting people know that they are being lied to.

Now circle back to what I said about those who come around pretending to care for you or speak on your behalf. Unless you see these people walk with you and struggle along your side, automatically discount these people as frauds and demagogues for they are only using your pains to elevate themselves and quenching their need to be gods to other people. I speak of this through experience; every time I run into some liberal or conservative who tries to speak for me, the minute these people realize that I can do for myself and that I’m actually smart, their inner bigotry comes flaming out like a missile out of a howitzer.

It is this conniption of some to help people into dependency that I speak out against and bring to your attention those who funded the Black Lives Matter movement and the leaders who gladly took the cold cash of billionaires in order to gain fortunes while speaking out of both sides of their mouths. It is no secret that George Soros gave tens of millions of dollars to Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors to start Black Lives Matter. This movement started during the height of explainable number of deaths of “black men” at the hands of the police. A pretext was thus set in place to leverage the suffering of the people and let loose demagogues to peddle grievance and gin up conflicts. I will return to this in a bit but let me just say this; billionaires do not give a penny out of benevolence. Hyenas like Soros give their money either as an investment or as a means of creating chaos so they can swoop in to be the “saviors”. Alicia, Opal and Patrisse thus became the fronts for a corporate enterprise that sought to inject animosity between the races and push society closer to conflict. Once again, the pains of “black folks” were used to further the aims of powerful people as we keep letting ourselves be used as pawn by the elites who don’t give two licks about us. It was not just Soros who was behind this nefarious plot to create strife and to induce even more animosity between the races. This whole episode was deployed in ways that is too cunning to really understand. I only know of this playbook of divide and conquer this way because I have studied the blueprint of colonialism in “Africa” for the past twenty years and recently realized that his same trick is being deployed to fragment society into the cauldrons of grievance and antipathy.

Do you think it’s just a coincidence that the corporate owned mass media all the sudden became enamored with the Black Lives Matter movement as if they had a sudden infusion of a conscience and started to care about us? Hell no! They were given scripts to follow and they did just that; wall to wall coverage of discord and friction inculcated into the American public a sense of unabated outrage. I talk to people all the time and to a tee most people feel a sense of foreboding and more than a minority of these people think that we are heading closer and closer to some type of racial conflict. This is what happens when the most powerful weapon in the history of mankind–mass media–is deployed against the people and keeps feeding us conflict in order to garner ratings and keep us distracted by outrage.

It’s sad, all sides are enraged by the same locus of injustice that is tearing at the fabric of America and the world. Our nation has been hijacked a long time ago by an elitist few who have more money than most of humanity put together. Well call them all kinds of names–the 1%, plutocrats, elites, status quo–but we keep being deceived into thinking that we are each others enemy while the those who have amassed ill gotten fortunes continue to bludgeon us into either a life of indigence or perpetual financial anxiety. The middle class is being wiped out and poverty is the new normal as more than half of Americans are not working and a shocking amount are dependent on the state. In a country that has more fortunes than most of the planet combined, the gap between the .01% and the rest is mind boggling. This level of financial inequality is not sustainable; the house of cards will come tumbling down if there is not enough consumption to power our system of crony capitalism.

This is why conflict is being pushed; as long as we are fighting each other, we are too distracted to stop and say “what the hell is going on!” What is going on is that we are all being turned into indentured servants of the global agenda as we are becoming more and more dependent on corporatism to live our lives. To this end, the Black Lives Matter movement was birthed not through an upwell of civil disobedience but through the manipulation of billionaire’s bank accounts, the subversive acts of the founders of BLM, and the duplicity of our corporate own mass media that is beholden through and through to Wall Street and their wealthy benefactors. The BLM founders, and the rest of the “black intellectuals” who get paid to push grievance, are in this way are no different than the “Africans” who sold their own into slavery for the sake of a money and accumulations.

Black Lives Matter is a Trojan horse which was injected into the “black” community in order to get us to act with our emotions instead of our minds. BLM in this light is no different than one “black” organization after another that is funded by corporations, endorsed by the elites, and pushed by the media. If you want to separate the deception apart from the real, there is only one way to know who are frauds. If they are taking money from the rich or being pushed by the media, walk away quickly for these “black folk” who pretend to be speaking for you are really sell outs who are doing the bidding of their malignant masters.

The end goal of Black Lives Matter was made evident with the election of Donald Trump as president. When 70% of “white America” is put into a defensive posture as they feel like they are being wrongly maligned and their struggles are ignored or marginalized, they end up voting for their own shyster who spoke to their grievance like Obama spoke to ours. This is a game that is being played on all of us. Donald Trump just used the same playbook as Obama to speak grievance to “white people” and those who feel like their frustrations are not being heard.

This is why it makes no sense to say things like “white supremacy” or “white privilege”, we only turn potential allies into adversaries by using this type of rhetoric. Do you know that there are more “white people “on welfare than “black folk”, poverty goes after all and we only further the divides when we put an adjective in front of injustice. Stop trying to monopolize pains no matter how pained you have been in your life, those who do end up only in bitterness and alone. Besides, if it does not feel good when people say “all black folk do this or that” what makes it right to do the same in reverse and blame all “white people” for the sins of the past or for the excesses of the present system.

Those who peddle this nonsense of “us versus them” are doing so because they are getting paid a pretty penny to do so, I am no fan of people like Taneshi Coates who write books castigating “white folk” only to end up being embraced and paid by the very same people they were condemning. Understand a hustle and a shakedown when you see it, it’s like the 10% that DuBois spoke about have decided that the best way to money is to step on their own people. From the pages of the New York Times to the Washington Post to BET, we are bracketed by duplicitous carnival barkers who stay using race and our pains as a way to pay their mortgage while the people they supposedly speak for are wilting in perpetual poverty. You can add Alicia, Opal, and Patrisse and the rest of the “black leaders” who stay Tweeting one outrage after another as they use injustice and suffering as their means to cash the checks of their corporate patrons. We are inundated by prevaricating jackals who are pushed unto us as “black leaders” when in reality they are just leeches.

Malcolm X a long time ago was beloved by the same corporate and scholarly elites as long as he was pushing that “white devil” rhetoric. But boy did they turn on him the minute he disavowed the exclusionary language of “us versus them” and instead held to the notion of universal justice. This is when Malcolm was taken out, the shooters might have been “black” but trust me there were others behind the scene (Google COINTELPRO) who funded the assassination of Malcolm X. The same is true of Martin Luther King; as long as he was only talking about the “black cause”, the system loved him. But the minute King stepped out of the racial lane and started to advocate for universal justice, BANG! This is what the powerful do, you get rewarded for being a demagogue but you get silenced for speaking of unity and love. The powerful kill you then own your narrative, this is a playbook as old as divide and conquer itself.

The age of Martin and Malcolm long gone and dead, we are now led by a bunch of infants who continue to peddle grievance as a means of getting more followers and adding zeros to their savings. This is all a game to this maggots who feed at our cost but to the rest, to the huddled masses from San Francisco to Chicago to Baltimore and every city and town in between, there are folks who live in utter squalor and poverty that one could not imagine in America. Too many are shielded from this reality as we drive our cars to and fro to work and think injustice is when Trader Joe’s has run out of Merlot. But to the masses who are caught in generational destitution, what they are treated to is a life sentence of hardship and difficulty.

In this paradigm we are deceived into thinking that the enemy is “white supremacy” as enmity is whispered into our souls in order to keep our eyes averted from the sparrows. As long as we are splintered in this way and as long as the people are divided by color lines, the system of financial inequality and iniquity will NEVER end. The same way animosity is sold to us, it is sold to “white people too” as people like Hannity and Limbaugh convinces the “other side” that they suffer because of us. The truth is that the people in Chicago and Harlem have a lot more in common with the folks in the Appalachians and in Wichita than they do with their double dealing spokespersons who peddle victimization on Fox News and MSNBC.

When will we wake up to this mass deception? When will we understand that anger and hatred, regardless if we are the originators of it or the ones responding to it, are foolish and a fool’s errand? How long will we keep getting played by lying ass manipulators who use our suffering as a means to make millions? I’ve had enough of depending on politicians and pundits to lead us; we will have to be the Moses ourselves or else be content stewing in umbrage for yet another 400 years. For God’s sake stop listening to people who are trying are selling victimization. Just because you have been victimized does not mean you have to be a victim.

I say this to both “black” and “white” people, there is a reason I keep using these quote marks for these words were foisted on us in order to keep us perpetually divided. I go into more of this in the video at the bottom of this article, but I am begging you to please put away anger and treat each other as humans. Our journeys might be different but our pains are the same, if a child is hungry in Houston or in the Panhandle of Florida, does it matter what color she is? If a mother struggles to provide for her children, does it matter whether she is “black” or “white”. Do we want to eradicate injustice or do we just want to be mad and solve nothing for yet another generation?

I used to call myself a “black revolutionary” a long time ago, now I disavow both. I disavow the word black because I am self-aware enough to know that the label was given to people from the continent of Ethiopia (yes I said that right) in order to dehumanize us. And I disavow revolutions for revolutions in time devolve into the same injustice that gave birth to it. We need to stop pushing conflicts and revolutions and be solutionaries instead–the only solution is to counter hate with love and to see each other as fellow strugglers instead of thinking we are each others enemies.

Let us lead the discussion and talk to those who are radically different than us instead of preaching to the choir and thinking we are making a difference. Disavow those who try to feed you animosity for there is no change that comes by way of grievance and exclusion. It takes no courage to join the crowd, true courage is to speak against the crowd when you realize that a mob mentality is being fostered in order to Balkanize America and to create yet more acrimony. Courage and discernment; let these two be the north star towards redemption and above all fight hatred with love. In the end, we have a choice; we can either let race lead us or we can lead the race. #LeadTheRace

“Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” ~ Tennessee Williams

If you were moved by this article and want to start an adult conversation with others, share this article on social media using #LeadTheRace and let’s get the dialogue started. Watch the video below, it is jarring at first but when you finish, you will understand the love behind it. Peace and let’s be the change!

Tags: Al Sharpton, Alicia Garza, Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, Fredrick Douglas, George Soros, Ghion Cast, Ghion Journal, Lead the Race, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, Sean Hannity, Teodrose Fikre, Van Jones, W.E.B. Dubois, We are Not black