I wrote this in July of 2015 for my first blog, bwwrites.com and because its still relevant, I thought that I might share it here also, check it out.

For some time I’ve considered writing a post about this but never found the motivation to actually sit down and start writing, but the other day after addressing a post on Facebook and getting the typical response from so called “conscious” black dudes, I decided to finally pen this post.

So here’s the thing, Black people in this Country, the United States of America, have no true identity! We are the homeless, we are the disenfranchised, we are downtrodden, the oppressed! We seek to belong to something greater than this existence that we have right now in this place, in this space and time. We long for the glory days of our ancestors as if that is all we ever had, or ever will have. But I tell you that right here, right now, is all we have and will ever have here in this country, in this space, and in this time. Nothing else! The past is gone, yet it resides within us, and the future is yet to come, but it also resides within us. So with what we have right now, which is the past, the present and the future within, we should be able to create a future similar to our once glorious past!

But in order to get there, we need to come to a realization, one that will piss a lot of you off and others will accept wholeheartedly, and have no problem with. And that realization is the cold hard fact that the descendants of slaves, with African blood flowing through their veins, that we call African Americans, are Not Africans! Neither are we one hundred percent Americans!

We are an amalgamation of these things, these nationalism’s, these concepts, and these ideologies, and because these ideologies are viewed as opposing ideologies, our conditioning tells us that we need to embrace one or the other, not both. This programming is taught to us by our parents and elders as children; “right vs wrong”, “good vs evil”, “if you’re not with me you’re against me”, and re-enforced in church as the “you can’t straddle the fence” sermon. We’ve always been taught that you have to pick a side, and if we don’t, we’re the one in the wrong, there is no neutral position in life. But this is wrong when it comes down to the African/African American debate! (I chose to use the examples above to show how the thought process is indoctrinated into our psyches as young African American children, not to debate good and evil or right and wrong.)

This is why when we’re confronted with two seemingly opposing ideologies we quickly pick sides. Our programming says its either one or the other, and you will always pick the side of your highest understanding, the one that instills pride in you, which is the one that makes you feel the best about your Self. Therefore when one has to choose between African/Black, and American/White (even though American isn’t synonymous with white) we choose to identify with the African/Black and shun the American/White. Those that don’t choose Black first have been considered to be the sellouts and coons back in the day, therefore the “real Black man or woman is the one that embraces Africa over America! These so called conscious Black people lay claim that there’s no middle ground even if your mother was white and your father was Black, you must self identify as Black, ask any biracial American. But what they don’t seem to understand is that that very understanding is what the white man, or massa had during slavery, the one drop rule! And if you choose your white side, you’re considered a sellout, a coon, and a host of other derogatory names that seeks to take away your Blackness. And even if you don’t identify as white, or if you have two Black parents but don’t identify with being African, you’re put in the same category, because you have to pick a side, and if you’re not on their side then you’re against them, simply because you’re not with them.

So here we are in 2015 claiming to be conscious Black men but that conscious thought is built directly off the slave traders understanding of who we were to be in this country. The slaves were never meant to be Americans, and generations down the line we are too far removed from our African ancestors, that we are not Africans either, we are an amalgamation of the two. We are now a new people, a people manifested from the remnants of greatness that saw itself decline to the point of colonization and slavery to finally be back in control of our own destiny once again!

Malachi Z York called us NuWabians, some say we are the Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Egyptians, but I say we are all and we are none, therefore we must create a new understanding, a new people.

You can call yourself an African, an African American, or just a plain ole American, that’s up to you, but I will from this day forward, address myself and those in this diaspora in the US, as AFRIMERICAN!

Afrimerican: A people forged from the lowest point of mans existence as slaves, that fought to be free, earned that freedom and began to build. We have fought those that oppose us for over 400 years and we have made great strides. Our birthing pains have been great and there are still more to come. But we must understand and incorporate into our thinking that those that fight against and resist change will always end up on the loser’s side of history, it’s inevitable. Therefore we will always be victorious in our quest to change the things that ail our people, it just takes time!

A very large portion of The Black Re-Acitivist Revolutionary community believes that if you come up with an idea for a product, you shouldn’t be able to make money/profit off that product. They believe that you should produce the product and sell it at cost. If the company doesn’t do this then the employees are wage slaves, and you’re a de facto slave master! 

By equating laborers to slaves, they hope to get an emotional rise out of their followers and provoke anger so that their reasoning will be clouded, and they never get a true understanding of what capitalism really is. Thus they can continue advocating against capitalism, while not building the very businesses and institutions needed to sustain the Black population in this country, if they were somehow able to overthrow capitalism one day. 

Capitalism is referred to as the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”, and if you support it in any way you are called an integrationist, a sellout, a coon or an Uncle Tom, but they overlook the varying ways they support the system and give themselves a pass for what ever reason they see fit to give themselves a pass. Another thing that they say is that a Black owned corporation that wants to make a profit is nothing more than a white owned corporation with a Black face in charge! 

The reality of the situation is, most of them have not tried in one bit to create this utopian socialist community that they speak about; yet 100’s of thousands of them claim they want to see it come into existence. So I postulate that they really don’t want to try to create it because they know that opening a business is hard as it is, but once the profit motive is taken out of it, it becomes harder.

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many of them shun opening businesses themselves, they simply don’t want to put in the work that it takes to open businesses and create institutions if they can’t profit from them, but they wont admit that! If not, why else aren’t they doing it?

And no, its not because they don’t know how, they always seem to quote the authors that have put together socialist economic plans and have written about how to build communal neighborhoods, but very few have actually tried to reproduce them in the real world, not even the authors! The thing is, without the profit motive, 99.9% of people will not seek to take on the daunting task of creating a product or opening a business

So to put it short, the BRAR Understanding is molded by a flawed ideology that seeks to remove the profit motive from the economic viability of a community, which leads them to not advocate for their followers to create businesses and build institutions, less they’d otherwise be lumped in with the coons and sellouts that they call other Black business owners. 

So they’re course of strategy has been to advocate for Black businesses owners, the ones that they call sellouts and coons, to open businesses in the community that they don’t seek to profit from, to make white owned corporations shun their capitalist profit driven ways, and to demean anyone with a difference of opinion on what the Black community needs to sustain itself in the future. 

And as you can see neither of these things have moved us from wage slaves to I’m guessing, wage freedom. None of them has put as much as a scratch on the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”!

This is part of the mentality that drives the Black consumer to walk into a Black owned establishment and immediately feel like they should get a discount because they’re Black, as if the business owner owes you something for being born Black! Every Black business owner has had this happen to them at some point along there entrepreneurial journey.

The BRAR has successfully conditioned Black people to immediately discount each others offerings, while simultaneously holding full value for any other businesses products. They’ve been able to spread an ideology that states that corporations shouldn’t make profits in a way that makes it seem as if they are being the champions of the Black Race for standing up to the White Supremacy Capitalist System! And this is why so many Black people buy into it, it feels like the right thing, but its not! All it has done is decrease the value associated with Black Entrepreneurialism, and slowed down our progress. 

If we do not learn how to embrace capitalism for what it is, and utilize it to move forward, many of us will never move beyond the point that we are at today, and those that don’t will fully believe that some system and the racist that control these systems are the reason why they never moved forward. Never coming to realize that the capitalist system needs new businesses and ideas in order to survive, and there are millions of people trying to get to this country, and millions of people in this country that are already trying  to build that next idea into a business, so why not you!

If you don’t do it somebody else will, and you’ll just be a “wage slave” to them, so why not be on the other side of the coin, because based off the BRAR’s ideology and how they fight the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”, it will be around for at least another century! And guess what, we will be in the same position within it unless we learn how to use it to our advantage!

The Black Re-Activist Revolutionary will say that Black people that aren’t trying to bring down the white supremacy system are suffering from the illusion of inclusion, or something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome.

The illusion of inclusion is said to be believing that we are a part of American society, and that we are Americans. That we believe that we’ve been included therefore why fight against the system!

And we all pretty much know what Stockholm Syndrome is, If not it’s basically said to be when a person is put in a dire situation for so long they start to see the very people that have put them in the dire situation as their saviors simply because they haven’t killed them yet or because they stop treating them bad.

These things are true to an extent and some Black people do suffer from them, like Black RepubliCon’s and conservatives. Most of them believe that white conservatism isn’t in the least bit racially motivated, and that because they’ve been included in the system, everything is good for all Black people. This is 100% wrong. Most Black people just want to live there lives as best they can without someone trying to impeded on that process!

What the BRAR does though is project that group of people’s attributes on to any Black person that doesn’t agree with there ideology fully. They simply dismiss your understanding as akin to the person that’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or the Illusion of Inclusion, thus never fully understanding the knowledge you’re trying to impart on them.

But once you take a deep dive into the BRAR ideology, it’s not hard to see that they suffer from the same ailments that they claim the Black RepubliCon suffers from, but in reverse. They suffer from the “Illusion of Exclusion”, and Stockholm Syndrome too, it just manifests itself differently!

They willfully take themselves out of the “race”, their logic is that the race is fixed, therefore why run it! Sounds right, why run in a rigged “race”? But the “race” isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and there are many positions that you can come in, plus there are new races everyday! Part of Stockholm syndrome is getting to a place where you no longer want to fight against the power that’s over you, and thats where they think everyone else is, but fail to realize that they put themselves in the same position when they willfully refuse to run the “race”!

Is this not the same thing? Your “captors” have successfully conditioned you to not play the game before you even understand the full game, they have you believing that you’re running a sprint not a marathon. And guess what, in a marathon you can eventually catch up no matter how slow you started. And even if you never come in first place, there are a myriad of positions between 1st place and last place! And here’s the thing, you will always come in worse than last place if you never join the race! There is no possible way of winning if you’re not in the race and this is where the BRAR understanding resides. They have no possible chance of winning the race because they aren’t in it, and not because white supremacy won’t allow them in the race, but because they have taken themselves out of it because it’s rigged to begin with!

They’ve essentially given up, but there conditioning has convinced them that they’re doing the the thing that can save us all by trying to destroy the race from the outside! But that’s not possible!

We’ve seen this for centuries now, when we destroy one barrier in the race, they place new barriers in our way, then when we finally win one of the races, they change the rules for the next one. But the only people that know that the rules have changed are the people that are running the race. By the time those on the outside realize that there are different rules the race has already been going for some time. They end up fighting to destroy something that doesn’t exist the same way as it did when they started the fight.

Let’s take mass incarceration for example: The War on Drugs started in the 80’s, devastated the 90’s and we started fighting against it once we realized what was going on but it took until the 2010’s to start getting any real traction on ending it, and now in 2018, we’re still fighting to end it! But guess what, the damage has already been done, they got what they wanted out of it, a destabilized Black family, now we’ve become our own worst enemies!

So now that we’re seeing progress in stopping mass incarceration mostly due to low level drug offenses, they decided to legalize the very thing that they were putting us in jail for, but then say that you can’t participate in it because you’re a felon.

So the question is, what have they changed to keep the race rigged? Or better yet, what is the race?

So now they have a valid argument for being excluded, you see, they don’t want us to make money, which is true, but there are ways around the law, you can invest in a company that’s majority owned by someone that’s not a felon, or you can buy shares in one of the already established companies. Plus you can always start to advocate and petition state authorities and legislators to write new laws. It took almost 3 decades to get marijuana laws to where hey are today, and that’s with white people advocating with other white people. They knew the race for legalization was a marathon not a sprint so they ran the race with all the barriers, had they not ran the race there would be no legalization at all!

Where the BRAR goes wrong at is that they’ll see the obstacles say there’s racism then choose not to run the race, even though they can, they choose not to based off the fact that they believe that they’ve been excluded, and that white people will only include a few of us!

This pathology is disseminated through out the Black community as fact, therefore we all should remove ourselves from the race, and if you advocate to stay in the race, you’re a coon, a sellout, etc, because they believe the real fight is on the outside. 

But when confronted with the question, what has there BRAR ideology gotten done over the past 5 decades, they have no answer. At the end of the day all the progress that Black people have made in the past 5 decades came from those that decided to include themselves in the race and eventually won the the position they were looking for. Major League Baseball was segregated, we had our own league but the prize was to be able to play in the Majors, that’s where the real money was, and even though they were playing professional baseball and getting paid in the Negro League, they knew that the only way to make real progress was to get to the MLB and prove that they were just as good or better than they’re white counterparts. Had Jackie Robinson, who wasnt even the best Negro League player opted to stay in the NL because he felt like he was just a token, we may have never gotten to see the great Black players that graced the field since then. He knew the race was rigged but he chose to run it anyway because he knew that his choice would lead to more Black men being included in MLB down the line.

The BRAR’s of today would say, don’t participate, its rigged against you, and willfully take themselves out of the equation because they suffer from the illusion that they have been excluded, even though they know the history of Jackie Robinson, or Kenny Washington, or Earl Lloyd or Nat Clifton. All excluded at some point, then once included paved a way for a 75% Black NFL, or a 80% Black NBA. The MLB might not be predominantly Black at this point, but that’s because we have steered our kids toward the NFL and NBA instead of baseball, if we did the same there would undoubtedly be way more American born Blacks playing it nowadays, so that has nothing to do with not being included. The real sad part about suffering from the illusion of exclusion is that they use their logic in every part of their life.

Banks discriminate against Black people therefore don’t try to get a loan for a business or house, fully missing the fact that if you feel like you’ve been discriminated against because of your race when applying for a loan, you can contact specific agencies and report it, which will then launch an investigation into it. If they find that your credit score and job history is on par with other people who got a better interest rate, or that got the loan and you didn’t, you can sue and get your money back!

The same goes for trying to get an apartment, a job, in college, etc. if you feel like you’ve been discriminated against then there are agencies put in place to help you get restitution. The non racist white people understand that there will always be racist white people so they passed laws to protect our freedoms and liberties and rights so the racists can’t just trample on them. But the BRAR seems to dismiss this because they believe that things should be equal, don’t get me wrong, they should be, but since they aren’t, utilize what is necessary to equalize what you can.

Stating that things aren’t equal so I’m not even going to try, is defeatism at it’s best! And because they have this flawed understanding to begin with, that says removing yourself from the race is the answer to winning the race, they see they’re defeatist attitude as the correct attitude, they believe that they’re somehow the guardians of Blackness thus resulting in them categorizing any one that participates in the race as a race traitor, and then that diminishes any idea that the race runner presents.

They’ll say that you’re capitulating to white supremacy, you’re trying to integrate us into a burning house, you’re propping up white supremacy, etc! All the while they’re doing the opposite but ending with worse results than those that they claim are helping white supremacy thrive.

So even though they wear white owned brands, shop at white owned stores, buy white owned products, eat at white owned restaurants, use white owned wirelesses phones, use white owned social media networks and work for white owned corporations, all of which they say is upholding the white supremacy capitalist system, they see no hypocrisy in their own actions. The cognitive dissonance is unbelievable!

They say that you’re the real problem for doing it, because you don’t complain about the system being racist, as if complaining helps! And the reality about this is that they believe that what they post to social media is activism and revolutionary, although it actually amounts to nothing more than complaining, because they never do anything real about it!