By Too Black
Republished from Black Agenda Report.
"Black rage is founded on blatant denial
Squeezed economics, subsistence survival
Deafening silence and social control
Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul" [1]
- Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage”
"Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." [2]
- Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1
For stolen lands to remain colonized, for investments to remain profitable, for white capital to remain ruthless, Black Rage must be neutralized. Black Rage—the omnipresent force radiating throughout the anxieties of the State—is a boundless threat to the capitalist order.
Like a Big Bang, Black Rage began its expansion into colonial existence at the exact moment the first African was plucked from their roots and cast down into the sunken dungeon of the European slave ship. Its expansion is the survival of the human spirit, serving as a potential death knell to oppression—ringing its bell with smoldering waves of resistance quietly hissing in infamy. Black Rage finds expression in the assisted asphyxiation of the slave trader (accompanied by the seizure of their ship), the alleviation of the slave master's heartbeat (seasoned by the enslaved maid), the transformation of the settler city-state into a community fireplace (the riot of the unheard).
When politicized against white capital, Black Rage blossoms into an anti-colonial weapon. Black Rage harmonizes the anger that the colony tunes out, it synchronizes our struggles, it is an ode to the bold notion that our discontent is undeniably justified. Black Rage is justice—outlawed by the State.
The State, as defined by Dr. Rasul Mowatt, geography and American Studies scholar in his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence, is the “configuration of the power of government, corporate interests, classes of elites, and upper levels of a bureaucratic management class that implements the ruling class’ goals and aims that sits atop an accumulated economic base." [3] Thus, the State is incapable of coexisting with Black Rage in its most potent form. It's too combustible of a substance to tolerate in the open market. When unleashed on white capital’s economic base, Black Rage sets aflame all its market principles: genocide, dispossession, slavery, and profit.
Attempts to outright suppress this substance only further stoke the flames of rebellion. Conversely, supporting its unfettered spread is State suicide. So, whether it's suppressed or supported, explosion is imminent. As a result, Black Rage cannot be entirely controlled, only managed.
To manage Black Rage, it must be laundered like the Blood Money that birthed it. To launder Black Rage into the market, its potency must be defanged. The social capital it produces, the clarion call by the Black masses for a free and equitable world, must be snatched and funneled into the hands of the State; "cleaned" of the original people and conditions that manufactured its existence but still recognizable enough to appear untraced.
Laundering may manifest in a litany of forms including tax havens ,[4] structural adjustment ,[5] non-profiteering, municipal bonds ,[6] drug dealing, etc. but ultimately laundering is the logic of the State. Historically, as white capital was looting people, land, and resources, they gradually erected competing institutional fronts including government, commerce, media and religion to manage and codify their conquests i.e., the State. Henceforth, practically everything built under the rule of the western State is a front for white capital.
Ergo, what first appears to be inspired by Black Rage is reduced to simulacra: the self-determination of Black power is pigeonholed to front Black capitalism ,[7] the anger and suffering of the Black poor is liquidated to front rich Black entertainers' ambitions ,[8] the courage of Black militancy is strangulated to front State repression ,[9] and on the laundering flows.[10] At the helm of nearly each sheep-herding front squats the Black elite, feeding off the breadcrumbs bribed to them by white capital.
With each commodity, laundering repurposes the crimes of white capital and the opposing threats against their rule—to legitimate their rule. The imperial laundering strengthens with every cycle as the "illegitimate" crimes of the past fund the "legitimate" crimes of the present. Black Rage is the repercussion of each crime, the deafening echo from the past roaring into the decadence of the present.
To muzzle the roar, the State dispossesses the labor of Black Rage and harnesses it into a commodity that can be consumed harmlessly as if its original potency is retained. Stated plainly, Black people do not own our rage. More precisely, we are robbed of our rage with the coercive aim to legitimize the State.
This process supersedes everyone of good or bad faith, spilling its blood on all involved. A grand conspiracy need not be necessary when our immediate material interests are linked to the maintenance of the State. To further understand this metamorphosis of Black Rage an examination of money laundering itself is first required.
Laundering Deconstructed
According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN) of the US Treasury Department : “Money laundering is the process of making illegally-gained proceeds (i.e. "dirty money") appear legal (i.e. "clean").”[11] In accordance with FCEN, expert forex trader and head of content for wealth management at J.P. Morgan, James Chen explains how the dirty money must “appear to have come from a legitimate source. The money from the criminal activity is considered dirty, and the process "launders" it to make it look clean [emphasis added]."[12]
Hence, dirty money is never truly "cleaned," nor are the questionable activities done to accumulate it, just manipulated to make it appear as such. An undirting occurs. So, laundering is making something “clean” by simply moving the dirt or debris away, not by actual scrubbing. Thus, the original source of the funds cannot be redeemed.
To achieve concealment, the process of money laundering occurs in three steps: placement, layering, and integration. Chen explains the purpose of each step:
"Placement puts the "dirty money" into the legitimate financial system.
Layering conceals the source of the money through a series of transactions and bookkeeping tricks. In the final step, integration, the now-laundered money is withdrawn from the legitimate account to be used for whatever purposes the criminals have in mind for it."[13]
Each step is consummated to distance the source away from its questionable origins. Famously, we see this process transpire in the critically-acclaimed TV drama, Breaking Bad, when the meth chef, Walter White a.k.a. Heisenberg buys a literal car wash to conceal his "empire business ." We also see Walter try to redeem the source of his empire with the now infamous excuse , "everything I do, I do for my family." This type of rationalization of harm is common considering that money laundering is predicated upon an appearance of legitimacy. Yet again, the source cannot be redeemed.
Similar to Breaking Bad, money laundering is generally depicted as the actions taken by the morally corrupt who break bad from a flawed but otherwise "legitimate financial system." This conception of money laundering, like that of FCEN, Chen and even the United Nations with their emphasis on terrorists,[14] has its limitations. The pitfalls lie not in the description of the process, but in the amorphous categories that are ascribed to it. Typically, definitions of money laundering assume a clear line between good and bad that is easily identified: legal vs illegal, citizen vs criminal, clean vs dirty. Although so-called criminals may conceal their illicit activity, the definitions assume criminality—both the criminal and criminal behavior—is neatly defined.
These definitions fail to acknowledge how the State socially constructs the rigid categories of good and bad, and the subsequent laws that govern them. For example, the U.S. often facilitates the very activity it claims to criminalize such as laundering money to fund an anti-communist war in Nicaragua while outlawing laundering at home.[15] [16] Yet, since the State creates the law, it can pardon its own activity to make it look clean. So, what gives it legitimacy? What source makes capitalism a legitimate financial system?
The irredeemable source at the core of capitalism, endlessly breeding the entire structure, is conquest. As Pan-Africanist, psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon makes strikingly clear in his text Toward the African Revolution: "The colonial situation is first of all a military conquest continued and reinforced by a civil and police administration."[17] Put differently, the continuation and reinforcement of the colony is to launder the spoils of imperial conquests. With each conquest, industries were built and expanded around the globe with resources pillaged from the previously conquered. As expansion occurred, the integration of colonial production became inevitable. When speaking of European imperialism throughout the globe, Walter Rodney highlights this phenomenon in his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
"...sugar production in the West Indies was joined in the colonial period by cocoa production within Africa, so that both merged into the chocolate industry of Europe and North America. In the metallurgical field, iron ore from Sweden, Brazil, or Sierra Leone could be turned into different types of steel with the addition of manganese from the Gold Coast or chrome from Southern Rhodesia. Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to cover the whole range of capitalist production in the colonial period."[18]
Conquest begets conquest; crimes enacted on one population became seed capital for the next crime of capitalist production on another. Without stolen resources from stolen land, stolen people would be unaffordable, and vice versa. Laundering arises as the colonial act of legitimizing each conquest.
At its base, money laundering is capitalism. Early-stage merchant capitalists primitively accumulated wealth from "criminal" activities via slavery, genocide, and dispossession. As land, people and resources were being stolen, capitalists invested their felonious profits into constructing a State of fronts to do the laundering/management (Placement). These fronts established the necessary laundering institutions such as government, law, banking, commerce, education, tax collecting, media, etc. as well as the violent enforcement agencies of police and military, thereby concealing capitalists' crimes and making their blood money appear clean through reinvestment (Layering). By capitalists legitimizing themselves via the organized crime of State-making,[19] their nefarious behaviors disappeared through Heisenbergian rationalizations such as "a more perfect union" or "The White Man's Burden." Invaders became founding fathers, thieves became businessmen, human beings became chattel and indigenous lands became colonies (Integration).
Emerging from laundering is what Mowatt identifies as a spatially fabricated society, "built upon the indigenous, the enslaved, and that which is crafted by the labourer."[20] The enclosed cities of the State create a racialized and gendered division of labor alienating people from themselves and the source of fabrication. However, laundering conquest as a legitimate enterprise is no easy task to fabricate.
Whereas wealth is being accumulated, so is suffering and death. This contradiction eventually bleeds through the eyes of the conquered. It is in this colonial process of conquest, the dialectic between wealth and death, that Black Rage finds its form and which all Black Rage originates.
As Fanon articulated in: "The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery."[21] Black Rage, uninterrupted, is the opposition to conquest which is the protected robbery of white capital managed by the State. Consequently, in the inevitable moments when Black Rage migrates to the surface of the colony, laundering is set in motion.
Laundering Black Rage: A Short Case Study
In early June 2020, as contagious Black Rage was charring US cities in response to the enkindling police murder of George Floyd,[22] a sea of capital flooded the streets to cool off the raging heat.[23] On the government front, the Democratic Party broke their one-month online fundraising record raising $392 million just in the month of June alone via Act Blue, including a massive $115 million in the first four days of June, thereupon capitalizing on the rage from Floyd's murder which occurred only a week prior on May 25th. Posing as the "opposition" to Black Rage, and the hotbed for white rage, the Republican Party also saw a huge bump in the same month raising a respectable $131 million. On the philanthropic front, "racial equity " funding nearly tripled from $5.7 billion in 2019 to $16 billion in 2020.[24] On the corporate front ,[25] roughly $50 billion was suddenly pledged by "America’s 50 biggest public companies and their foundations" to fight so-called "racial inequality.”
Promising big transformative change,[26] the Democratic Party rode the 2020 wave of Black Rage to seize control over the White House and the halls of Congress. On brand, the Democrats failed to pass any legislation to address police violence including their own lukewarm George Floyd Policing Act. This need not matter since the toothless bill would not have saved Floyd's life anyway.[27] Still, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi merrily thanked Floyd for "sacrificing his life for justice."
This "sacrifice" also proved beneficial to the white rage party, as Republican controlled states exploited the fear of Black Rage by passing repressive anti-protest laws that criminalized protesters for assembling in the streets while granting immunity to the drivers who ran them over.[28] Skillfully, Republicans used the fear of what was already washed diversity programming to attack K-12 education with anti-critical race theory bills .[29] Obviously, neither CRT nor any critical Black history was taught in schools prior. Thus, Black Rage was but another commodity to bolster their racial fascism. Notwithstanding, bipartisanship proved to still be alive and well as frolicking party leaders vied to demonstrate their love for police.[30]
Ostensibly, Black Rage was raining down rewards for everyone but the ones who suffer and die for exercising it. Following a $90 million windfall of manna from the co-opt cosmos,[31] Black Lives Matter Global Foundation Network laundered and embezzled Black Rage to buy a mansion and enrich the family members of their top celebrity-activist leaders.[32] [33] Meanwhile, many local BLM chapters and Black families of slain police victims were initially left destitute despite it being the families and chapters who create the pressure for a donation to be sent to BLMGFN in the first place.[34] [35] As of this writing, the BLMGFN director is currently being sued by BLM Grassroots for stealing $10 million.[36] Whether the allegations prove true or false, these Spider-Man meme level conflicts obscure the fact that philanthropic foundations are repository fronts of “twice-stolen wealth”[37] for capital to avoid the taxation of their profits stolen from workers; what remains left is a struggle over crumbling bribes.
Quietly, Black legacy organizational fronts like the NAACP and the Urban League received more "racial equity"[38] bribes than BLMGF as they steered Black Rage towards enfeebled outlets already debunked by professor of communication studies, Dr. Jared Ball such as "buying Black "[39] and Black banking .[40] Prominent historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs ) also gobbled up bribes as some of their students slept in tents to avoid their molded dorms.[41] [42] [43]
Most of the funds pledged were about undirting the rage rather than scrubbing the problem. Of the $50 billion pledged by the top fifty corporations, only $70 million directly went to fight so-called criminal justice reform.[44] In comparison, $45 billion was "allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from." Much of this blood money intersected as the principal State fronts funneled their funds through their Black subsidiary fronts including the above-mentioned entities.
Often, the charge is made that said institutions are "profiting off Black death." This is only half true since Black people are killed daily with impunity yet not a single donation, grant, loan or thought is generated on most days. It is the threatening response to death—Black Rage—that activates the laundering. Black death is merely an ingredient.
At the core, Black Rage was the source indirectly financing the entire heist. The failure here is not in any one fronts inability to deliver but in the extractive structure that funnels the money in their direction at all. The general public may have believed a donation to these State carve-outs was a net positive for Black people, but white capital undoubtedly knew any serious resistance to their rule ceased with the first transaction.
Laundering Black Rage phases
As established prior, laundering is the maintenance and perpetuation of imperial conquests administered by the white capitalist State. Rage is an inescapable outcome of conquest. To enslave, steal, and kill is to become your own gravedigger. This is not lost on the conquering class of white capital. As Walter Rodney once said to a crowd of Guyanese comrades, "when you dedicate yourself to oppressing others, you cannot sleep."[45] This means long before police precincts scorch the stolen earth or the colony is amassed with revolution, mechanisms are developed to bring Black Rage to heel.
Therefore, what many call co-optation is the regularly scheduled laundering of the State developed over centuries of conquests. Materializing from this development are the three primary phases to laundering Black Rage: Incubation, Labor, and Commodification.
Incubation, via the State, places Black Rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for rage to be expressed and seeding the contradictions for it to be cleaned. Labor, sets mass uprisings in motion. Threatened by the Black masses, the State layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite overtop the illegal militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse the labor of Black Rage into the grips of capital. Commodification, the now-laundered Black Rage— managed by the Black elite—is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labor-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by white capital for the next cycle.
"The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet..."[46]
- Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
"Black is a classification of domination, and Black is a response to being dominated."[47]
- Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us
The specter of Black Rage pervades inside the colony like the calamitous ambitions of the runaway slave who eagerly plots their return to the plantation by raiding it of its human property and jarring it into a can of ashes. Black Rage is a grand marronage spreading the remains of oppression about as the wheezing flames wave goodbye to its blood shaving whips. Haunted by this specter, white capital hides behind the laundering body of the State as it attempts to transform the rebellious nature of Black Rage into submissive capital.
Incubation
The State provokes Black Rage by engineering the inhumane conditions that place it in motion. As Black Rage incubates, so do the guardrails to keep it from swarming to an unmanageable scale. This dialectic defines the laundering process.
In Avengers of the New World, historian Laurent Dubois chronicles how prior to the Haitian revolution ,[48] noticing the potential for small slave uprisings to balloon larger, the French crown instituted various reforms (1685 Code Noir , 1780s royal decrees) to curb the barbarism of plantation managers in the colony of Saint Domingue. The reforms provided the enslaved with off days, food and shelter, and limitations on the beatings they could receive. Reforms proved ineffective as French colonists in Saint-Domingue rejected them in favor of more bloodthirsty cruelty. Apparently, as historian C.L.R. James documented in Black Jacobins, pouring burning wax on enslaved bodies and roasting them on slow fires was seen as the best means of social control.[49] These tactics inflamed Black Rage, leading to the defeat of the most profitable colony in the Caribbean and the establishment of the first Black republic.
The colonial world took notice. Historian Gerald Horne documented the fear of the U.S. via Vice President of the time, Thomas Jefferson in Confronting Black Jacobins: "If something is not done, and soon done,” he advised darkly, “we shall be the murderers of our own children,” as “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us.”[50] Thomas’s fears proved real as a revolutionary storm of Black Rage via slave uprisings incubated worldwide, particularly in the U.S. post-1804.
To manage this colonial pandemic and “foster a new image” of power, white capitalist empires slowly began transitioning their rule from the iron fist of hard power to the unseen hand of soft power, as Mowatt describes “for the sake of capitalism.”[51] Mowatt also comments: “While the capabilities of hard power (force, coercion, and warfare) were always ready, the use of soft power (culture, values, and ideals) had become the preferred method of moving forward.”[52]
White capital embarked on the mission of stabilizing territories for smoother laundering. Among a few examples is the Congress of Vienna from 1814-1815 which balanced territory among warring European States,[53] the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which declared U.S. hegemony over the Americas landmass,[54] the U.S. Civil War from 1861-1865 which settled slavery and westward expansion,[55] and the “Scramble for Africa” via the Berlin Conference[56] from 1884-1885 in which white capital met “on long tables during catered meals” where, as Mowatt notes, “the continent of Africa was carefully carved up and re-designed for the purposes of extraction…”[57] Following these mobster-like parlays was an inflation of State power that better absorbed the opposition.
State-fabricated society expanded through now conquered territories, centralized in cities. The city builds the fronts—law, schools, media, religion, government, business, etc.—for the State of white capital that reaches to the countryside. The capitalist State, through the indoctrination of its fronts, becomes what Italian Marxist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci described as the hegemonic “educator ,"[58] thereby establishing the norms that govern the ambitions of the people. Correspondingly, State fronts also collectively act as the “organizer,”[59] performing as pre-existing institutions of consent disciplining the will of Black Rage over time. Fronts may serve legitimate human needs but their entanglement with the State jeopardizes any liberatory outcome.
Accordingly, when U.S Black liberal organizations of the 1940s and 50s colluded with the government to purge their organizations of alleged communists it later weakened the potential radicalism of the civil rights movement.[60] Similarly, when elite philanthropic foundations created African Studies fronts throughout Nigeria and west Africa to induce pro-western sentiments, subsequent anti-colonial struggles were compromised.[61] Thus, when Black Rage is structured by State fronts the primary frustrations may not always be with the rule of white capital but with exclusion from rule, the limited crumbs received underneath rule, or internal disputes over which group of Black folk deserves more crumbs leftover from rule.
Nevertheless, workers employed by State fronts or those with ambitions of managing one do not need to morally align with the interests of white capital to serve them. To feed ourselves we all must participate in the maintenance of the State to a degree because it controls the resources we require to attend to our material needs such as housing and food. Political theorist, Dr. Joy James astutely reminds us of this contradiction when speaking on the captive maternal ,[62] "as you stabilize your family , you are also stabilizing this predatory structure ." [63]
These contradictions effectively reduce everyone to launderers for the predatory State. Our pursuit to stabilize nourishes the State-fabricated society with our labor. We become socialized to launder simply by living our lives surviving the day-to-day mundanity of capitalism.
Bribes become a precondition for stability. That is to say, the more we stabilize the more susceptible we are to the bribes of the State. Bribes as wages. Bribes as property. Bribes as wealth. White capital shares these crumbs of theft to help stabilize the laundering.
Our pursuit of stability conditions us to greedily accumulate and hoard like white capital. We hope to accumulate enough bribes that eventually we can become the bribers i.e., capitalists. Predictably, this aimless lottery to achieve stability rarely involves jackpots for the conquered as the betting odds are not in our favor. The State is the house, and as they say in gambling, the house always wins.
Ultimately, the State cannot bribe everyone effectively with profit as the motive. To remain kicking capitalism requires the super-exploitation of cheap labor while it increasingly cranks out a global surplus labor population whom receive absolutely no bribes.[64] With this being the case, certain populations will never sniff stability which inevitably requires the State to still rely upon hard power methods of social control, such as police and military, as unstable populations jostle for basic needs. Recognizing it is their unbridled rage that could radically sunder the entire flow of capital, violence work stands as a stalwart for policing the crisis .[65] Constituted as an all-suffocating monopoly, white capital comes to own both the wealth we produce and our visceral response to their hoarding of it.
Labor
Similar to how workers do not own their labor, Black people do not own our rage. After white capital seized the means of production—land, technology, raw materials, and labor power—conquest did not neatly bleed to an end. Instead, by monopolizing these productive forces, white capital not only controlled the material resources for economic creation but also mutated to possess the domains in which the self-actualization of our rage is naturally expressed.
In this sense, Black Rage is labor that can either be exploited or liberated. Nonetheless, at the moment that Black people collectively respond to oppression—no matter the form—labor is exercised. Labor was exercised when Afro-Cubans led the revolution against the Spanish,[66] it dawned on the British as the Mau Mau rebels of Kenya attacked settler-colonialism,[67] it occupied Ferguson , Missouri by relentlessly protesting throughout the blood-stained streets after the police killing of Mike Brown.[68] Labor is exercised anywhere Black people rage against our oppression.
Problem is that this type of revolutionary labor is also illegal. Yet, while the State outlaws the explicit practice, it still exploits our labor to fuel its conquest economy like a Black-market drug that funds a "legitimate" business. Herein lies the laundering. To break our labor, the State funnels our rage through their fronts, pacifying it with bribes and crushing it with repression. The internal contradictions the State-fabricated society creates serve as perfect fodder for this process to occur.
Although Black Rage universally burns throughout the diaspora, the motivations and actions that arise from the debris when an uprising occurs tend to be shaped by class interests. The Black masses (unemployed, proletarian poor and working class), receiving minimal to no bribes while experiencing the constant exhaustion of instability are the most likely to unleash their rage against the State like prisoners at their wits’ end taking hostages and occupying the prison. The Black elite (petit-capitalists, upper-level professionals, and middle-class aspirants), the most bribed and stabilized by the State are the most likely to repress their rage and/or sell it for more enhanced bribes and stability like jailhouse snitches copping to a plea.
bell hooks, the late Black feminist author and cultural critic, lamented a similar observation in her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She describes two distinct forms of rage: militant rage and narcissistic rage. She defines the militant rage of the Black masses as, "the rage of the downtrodden and oppressed that could be mobilized to mount militant resistance to white supremacy." She juxtaposes it with the narcissistic rage of the Black elite as, "not interested in fundamentally challenging and changing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply want equal access to privilege within the existing structure."[69] This critique of the Black elite echoes Malcolm X's condemnation of this class, "These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation."[70]
The Black Elite function as double agents with dual access to contradictory classes. They function as a professionalized buffer for white capital, and as it follows the unelected leaders of the Black masses. Their shared racial identity with the masses lends them legitimacy. When the labor of Black Rage produces social capital for any type of change, they become the benefactors. It is this social capital that grants them dual access and makes them valuable to the State.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, defines capital as "accumulated labor" that allows "groups of agents" to "appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor."[71] He later defines social capital as the "aggregate" that "provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a 'credential' which entitles them to credit..." In the case of Black Rage, the "accumulated labor" of it creates a "credential" that credits Black people to its fruits.
Bourdieu goes on to discuss the implications of representation "when the group is large and its members weak" their social capital "contain the seeds of an embezzlement or misappropriation of the capital which they assemble." Therefore, the Black elite is a "subgroup" existing as a "nobility" that "may speak on behalf of the whole group, represent the whole group, and exercise authority in the name of the whole group."[72] Per their nobility, the Black elite possesses the capacity to embezzle the social capital of the masses.
By owning the means of this embezzlement, State fronts utilize shared Black social capital by layering the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the militant rage—the "dirty" money—of the Black masses to conceal the transfer of wealth. Thus, when the masses perform the bulk of the labor—organizing, rioting, revolting, rebelling,[73] thereby igniting the fear of God in the State—the Black elite inherit the chunkiest crumbs of the surplus value. They arrive at the scene of the fire, like scab labor reps, flaunting their State-sponsored credentials. Next comes the bribes in the form of token jobs, flag independence, loans, investments, donations, grants, sponsorships, property rights, and sometimes even semi-protection from the rabid right-wing who will punish the masses for their dignifying audacity.
The Black Elite shriek at the fate of the rebellious slaves, the western-backed coups and assassinations of Black leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Malcolm X, but still recognize the need to project a similar militancy for popular appeal. They are incentivized to crave freedom without sacrifice, so they legitimize their bribes as Black liberation. To maintain the delusional front, this labor aristocracy bullishly appeals to racial kinship.[74]
As the fallen soldier, Jonathan Jackson wrote to his brother and political prisoner, George Jackson in Blood in My Eye, "what better way is there for them to sell themselves to us than to scream Black, Black, Black, Black." Observing the laundering of Kenyan independence,[75] Jackson warned how vague appeals to Blackness can shield State collusion: "Like Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.I.A. was to redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing more compatible with the interests of Western Businessmen."[76] Perhaps, this type of State-sponsored embezzlement is why years prior the Mau Mau did not limit their rage to the British but extended it to the African British loyalists as well.[77] Racial kinship is useless when the proclaimed "kinfolk" is colluding with the enemy.
For laundering to be most effective, Black Rage must be flattened to reflect the class interests of narcissistic rage while cosplaying as militant rage. When labor is strong, flattening fails. When the French tried to offer equal rights to free people of color in Haiti to control the rebellious slaves, it backfired immensely.[78] The rebels were too organized to succumb to any flattening other than the total demolition of slavery. But when labor is weak and engulfed in contradictions incubated by conquest, Black Rage is flattened, its militancy demolished with its ashes valorized into commodity form.[79]
Commodification
Now that the labor of Black Rage is broken its only exit valve is in the marketplace. This commodification occurs due to the initial colonial act that inspired Black Rage—conquest. Returning to the means of production, white capital holds a monopoly on the use of force necessary to overthrow them (weapons, police, military) and the resources necessary to build independence beyond them (land, machinery, raw materials,). If labor is unable to wrestle away a sufficient share of these resources, it has no immediate option other than to sell itself back to capital for material subsistence.
Following an uprising, the State either constructs or upgrades outlets for the people to exercise their rage. To avoid war during slavery in the Caribbean, occasionally colonial administrators granted amnesty to hand-picked maroon camps—communities of runaway slaves—in exchange for them capturing fresh runaways for the colony.[80] Thus, when the enslaved exercised their rage by escaping the plantation, certain maroon camps became fronts for their recapture.
Fronts for recapture (State fronts) are essential to understanding the conversion from rage to commodity. It demonstrates how the rage ignited by the knee of the State compressed ten minutes on a poor Black man's neck transformed into corporate pledges for diversity and consumerist slogans to "buy black " almost immediately.[81] Of course, not too dissimilar from runaway slaves, some Black people naively ran towards these fronts to exercise our rage. Unfortunately, the narcissistic rage of the Black elite was already waiting on the other side with iron collars and keys to recapture our rage and hand us back to politicians, corporations, and nonprofits.
Fronts for recapture go by another name too—reform. Reform is when the boot tells the neck that oxygen is on the way. Reform is also when the neck is forced to believe it. George Jackson named the necessity of the facade: "Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses."[82] Thus, when the neck begins to remove the boot, the boot may loan the neck oxygen to recapture its foothold, but if the boot slips the floodgates of rage pour into the colony.
As a red sea of Black Rage grew to an almost insurmountable threat—colonial dams bursting at the seams, Black revolution drowning empires, social movements sinking racial apartheid—neocolonialism emerged as the fundamental front to withstand the tidal waves of Black Rage.[83] Post World War II, White finance capital gradually began conceding puppet control to Black elites in the form of political and corporate representation while still maintaining control over the resources that govern the institutions Black elites purportedly represent. In Africa, the bribe of flag independence absorbed Black Rage while International Monetary Funds and World Bank loans flowed through the client-states of the continent and out-flowed commodities to power phones and drill oil.[84] In the US, Black Rage was squeezed by token integration as the State poured brain drain funds into Black communities and out-flowed neo-colonial "First Black s"[85] as human commodities selling consumptive commodities of Blackness in media and entertainment. Civil rights activist and current political prisoner, Jamil Al-Amin formerly known as H. Rap Brown, said it best : "White folks will co-opt dog sh*t if it's to their advantage!" [86]
Once Black Rage is recaptured and the commodities are produced, they become ideological tools i.e., propaganda for incubating against the next uprising. The more white capital can use these commodities to convince the masses there's hope in the imperial State and/or that it is simply too powerful to overcome, the less likely the masses to destroy it when Black Rage inevitably boils over again. Each cycle differs in character depending on the historical conditions, but conquest remains the end result.
Conclusion
At the root, Black Rage is the logical response to being conquered. All other targets of rage—discrimination, inequality, bigotry, bias, poverty—emerge from the initial colonial act of conquest. Laundering throws Black Rage off the scent. The red herrings of this State-fabricated society either obscure that conquest ever occurred or imply reconciliation through the same apparatus that set conquest in motion. No matter, the source cannot be redeemed.
Laundering is unsustainable. The State-fabricated society cannot continue to legitimize its death-marching actions without collapsing on itself and crushing the rest of us beneath it. The growing multi-polarity, creeping techno-feualism and looming climate chaos guarantee so. Hence, notable ancestors prophetically warned against integrating into a burning house . [87] They understood there was no reasoning with firefighting arsonists.
By continuing to reason, the Black elite of today is more subdued by elite capture than prior generations.[88] They are tranquilly bribed to confuse arson for firefighting. Thus, they peddle racial patriotism amidst white nationalists’ reawakening, Black luxury amidst financial collapse, and escapist Black joy amidst mass suffering and death. Their only redemption comes by vacating their narrow class interests and locking up arms with the masses they are otherwise bribed to propagandize.[89]
The struggle for Black Rage is an exercise in class warfare. White capital is not some mythical force oppressing us from the heavens but a ruthless ruling class that perpetuates itself via the State. As Mowatt remarked, "(State) Power repeats itself, not history."[90] Unlike the mythmaking of history, State power can be seized and forged to wither away towards a post-western world . As Black studies scholar, Dr. Yannick Marshall argues: "We need the rage we feel after looking out at the charred remains of our earth under centuries of Western rule to mature into an act. The act of putting the West aside."[91]
To put the west aside we must reverse launder what it has stolen. That is to flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures it so religiously outlaws. The instructions for such acts lie beyond the mission statement of a white liberal non-profit front or the "decolonizing" syllabus of a bromidic academic. We cannot formalize what is illegal. The answers rest in our collective Black Rage, the conspiring rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all towards a life-affirming post-western communist world. Anything less is a reconstruction of fronts.
Too Black is a poet, host of the Black Myths Podcast , member of Black Alliance For Peace , and communications coordinator for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 . He is based in Indianapolis, IN and can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.
References
[1] Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage,” YouTube (YouTube, August 22, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_sdubWaY5o&ab_channel=GO .
[2] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1. (London: Penguin Books, 1976) 341.
[3] Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us. (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2021.), 2.
[4] Vanessa Ogle, "The end of empire and the rise of tax havens: How decolonisation propelled the growth of low-tax jurisdictions, with lasting economic implications for former colonies." The New Statesman. 09 September 2021. Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2020/12/end-empire-and-rise-tax-havens .
[5] York W. Bradshaw, and Jie Huang, "Intensifying Global Dependency: Foreign Debt, Structural Adjustment, and Third World Underdevelopment." The Sociological Quarterly 32 no. 1 (1991) 321-342. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120911 .
[6] Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)
[7] In Black Awakening in Capitalist America Robert Allen lays out how in the late 1960s co-opting American state fronts such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and National Alliance of Businessmen were attempting “to equate black power with black capitalism.” By reducing Black Rage to a failure of the exclusionary market Black Power could be redefined. Robert L Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1969.)
[8] For a clearer view on how the contemporary Black poor provide involuntary labor for the Black elite and Hollywood see Bertrand Cooper, "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?"Current Affairs, July 25th, 2021. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-createblack-pop-culture .
[9] The FBI COINTELPRO Ghetto Informant program, although minimally effective, provides insight into how spaces for radical gathering were turned into fronts for capture. Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Ghetto Informant Program 75-76, by Frank Church and John G. Tower, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf
[10] Fedaral Bureau of Investigation. Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers. Fedaral Bureau of Investigation, by FBI Counter Terrorism
[11] Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, “History of Anti-Money Laundering Laws,” FinCEN.gov, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.fincen.gov/history-anti-money-laundering-laws .
[12] James Chen, "Money Laundering." Investopedia, May 18, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/moneylaundering.asp .
[13] Ibid
[14] For UN definition on money laundering see “Money Laundering Overview,” United Nations: Office on Drugs and Crime, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html .
[15] From 1981-1986 top officials in the Regan administration were secretly selling Arms to Iran to “illegally” fund the right wing contras in Nicaragua against the communist Sandinistas. This is also known as reverse laundering where “legitimate” funds are used to fund illicit activity. For more on Iran Contra see Robinson, Teresa Simons. 1991. "FBI knew BCCI financed Iran-Contra deal, bank official says." United Press International. 22 October. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/10/22/FBI-knew-BCCI-financed-Iran-Contra-deal-bank-official-says/3522688104000/ .
[16] The Money Laundering and Control Act of 1986 was apart of the larger War on Drugs bill, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The Anti-Drug Abuse act disproportionately criminalized crack-cocaine. Coincidently or not, much of the cocaine used to make crack was imported by CIA sponsored Contras. For more see William J. Hughes, “Money Laundering Control Act of 1986,” Money laundering control act of 1986 §, accessed June 15, 2022, https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5077 .
[17] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove, 2004), 84.
[18] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018), 357.
[19] For how capitalist states monopolize the force of “crime" see Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge etc: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 169-191.
[20] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 108
[21] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 191.
[22] Derrick Bryson Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” The New York Times, May 30, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html .
[23] Elena Schneider, “Record Cash Floods Democrats, Black Groups amid Protests and Pandemic,” Politico, July 7, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/actblue-june-protests-coronavirus-347492 .
[24] “Foundation Maps Racial Equity,” Foundation Maps, July 24, 2022, https://maps.foundationcenter.org/#/advancedsehttps://maps.foundationcenter.org/home.php .
[25] Jena McGregor and Tracy Jan, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” The Washington Post, August 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/ .
[26] Cassella, Megan. 2021. "‘Part of the fabric’: Democrats say Biden’s sweeping changes will be hard to undo." Politico. 28 April. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/28/biden-100-days-lbj-public-life-484830 .
[27] For the uselessness of the George Floyd Policing Act read, Derecka Purnell, “The George Floyd Act Wouldn't Have Saved George Floyd's Life. That Says It All ,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, March 4, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/04/the-george-floyd-act-wouldnt-have-saved-george-floyds-life-thats-says-it-all .
[28] Adam Gabbatt, “Republicans Push 'Tsunami' of Harsh Anti-Protest Laws after BLM Rallies,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, April 12, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/12/republicans-push-anti-protest-laws-blm-demonstrations
[29] Kiara Alfonseca, “Map: Where Anti-Critical Race Theory Efforts Have Reached,” ABC News (ABC News Network, March 24, 2022), https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/map-anti-critical-race-theory-efforts-reached/story?id=83619715 .
[30] Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha, and Donald Judd, “Biden Says He Doesn't Support Defunding Police,” CNN (Cable News Network, June 8, 2020), https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/joe-biden-defund-the-police/index.html .
[31] Nicholas Kulish, “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html .
[32] Sean Campbell, “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House,” NY Mag (Intelligencer, April 4, 2022), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html .
[33] Morrison, Aaron. 2022. "AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter has $42 million in assets." Associated Press. 17 May. https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-race-ethnicity-philanthropy-black-lives-matter-5bc4772e029da522036f8ad2a02990aa .
[34] BLM 10, “Tell No Lies, Statement from the Frontlines of BLM,” Statement From The Frontlines of BLM, July 8, 2021, https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/no2/ .
[35] Imani Perry, “Stop Hustling Black Death,” The Cut, May 24, 2021, https://www.thecut.com/article/samaria-rice-profile.html .
[36] Orlando Mayorquin, “Activists Accuse BLM Foundation Leader of Siphoning $10 Million in Donations, Lawsuit Says,” USA Today (Gannett Satellite Information Network, September 6, 2022), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/06/black-lives-matter-foundation-10-million-lawsuit/8003798001/ .
[37] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 41-51.
[38] Black Lives Matter Leaders Defend BLM's Decision To Buy $6M Home, Condemn Claims Of Mismanaged Funds, YouTube (Roland Martin Unfiltered , 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSndlf8kPF0&t=923s&ab_channel=RolandS.Martin .
[39] Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020).
[40] Jared Ball, “Buying Power and Black Banking Revisited!,” iMWiL!, May 5, 2020, https://imixwhatilike.org/2020/05/05/buying-power-and-black-banking-revisited .
[41] Black Alliance for Peace - Mid-Atlantic, “The Neocolonial Collusion of Hbcus and the State,” Hood Communist, October 28, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/10/28/the-neocolonial-collusion-of-hbcus-and-the-state/amp/ .
[42] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Education
[43] Hannah Joy, “Atlanta HBCU Students Protest, Sleep in Tents for Better Campus Conditions,” TheGrio, October 22, 2021, https://thegrio.com/2021/10/20/atlanta-hbcu-students-protest-sleep-in-tents-for-better-campus-conditions/ .
[44] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Criminal Justice
[45] Walter Rodney, “The Struggle Goes on by Walter Rodney,” History as Weapon, September 1979, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodnstrugoe.html .
[46] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 54.
[47] Rasul A. Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us (New York: Routledge, 2022), 46.
[48] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London; Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University, 2004), 61-63
[49] C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 12.
[50] Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 79.
[51] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 130.
[52] Ibid
[53] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 (New York: Grove, 2001).
[54] James Monroe, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” National Archives and Records Administration, accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine#:~:text=The%20Monroe%20Doctrine%20is%20the,further%20colonization%20or%20puppet%20monarchs .
[55] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1st ed., vol. 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[56] Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law 3, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): pp. 31-59, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrv002 .
[57] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 122.
[58] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Dehli: Aakar Books, 2018), 260.
[59] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall and his co-authors rebuke overly simplistic explanations of the capitalist State that reduce it to the ‘executive committee of the ruling class.' For them this proved too conspiratorial and obscured the independence of competing capitals under capitalism. Thus, for Hall and his co-authors the State functions as the organizer of capital by mediating the conditions for capital to succeed. The capitalist state governs the masses through popular consent with the looming threat of coercion. The State universalizes the interests of capital as the interests of all through economic, legal, social, ideological, and political hegemony, thereby building consensus. For more see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: Red Globe Press, 2013), 202-203.
[60] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s,” International Journal of Africana Studies 19, no. 2 (2018), 77-112.
[61] Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 266.
[62] Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal,” Challenging the Punitive Society: Prison Notebooks 12 (2016): pp. 253-296, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf .
[63] Joy James, "We Are Not Our Ancestors' PT. 3 w/ Joy James," August 26th 2020, Black Myths Podcast, produced by Black Myths Pod, MP3 Audio, 10:27, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-our-ancestors-pt-3-w-joy-james/id1504205689?i=1000489212555 .
[64] Homi Kharas, Kristofer Hamel, and Martin Hofer, “The Start of a New Poverty Narrative,” Brookings (Brookings Institute, March 9, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/06/19/the-start-of-a-new-poverty-narrative/ .
[65] For police as a counterinsurgency force see Micol Seigel, Violence Work State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke Universities Press, 2018).
[66] Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
[67] David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).
[68] Associated Press, “Ferguson Protests Erupt in Violence as People Lob Molotov Cocktails, Police Use Tear Gas (Slideshow) (Video),” Cleveland, August 14, 2014, https://www.cleveland.com/nation/2014/08/ferguson_protests_erupt_in_vio.html .
[69] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 27-29.
[70] Malcolm X, “Message to Grassroots,” Teaching American History, transcript of speech delivered at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit , Michigan , November 10, 1963, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/message-to-grassroots/ .
[71] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241-258
[72] Ibid
[73] Joshua Clover notes how the riot is “the other of incarceration.” A response to the “othering” of racialized surplus populations, Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2019), 162. For a scientific comprehension on rioting see; For scientific distinctions between rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and coup d'etat see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
[74] During an outtake conversation on the web show The Last Dope Intellectual Africana studies professor, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly referred to the Black elite as a “labor aristocracy” and in further correspondence through messages with author. Charisse Burden-Stelly, text message to author, July 15th, 2022.
[75] Gerald Horne , “Barack Obama's Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to ‘Recolonize’ Africa during Early Days of the Cold War,” MR Online, February 10, 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/02/10/barack-obamas-father-identified-as-cia-asset-in-u-s-drive-to-recolonize-africa-during-early-days-of-the-cold-war/
[76] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 37.
[77] Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 200
[78] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 89.
[79] Borrowing from Karl Marx description of the valorization of labor in chapter 7 of Capital Vol. 1. For Marx the laborer transforms nature and them self through work. The capitalist intervenes in this process and extracts the surplus value of the labor by valorizing it into a commodity. This is exactly what happens to Black Rage. White capital extracts it’s value to serve as a commodity and then sells it back to us to be consumed for their interests. Here Black Rage is transformed from labor to the commodity of labor power. Marx, Capital: Volume 1. 283-305.
[80] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 54.
[81] In the summer of 2020 and 2021 the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre was used as a front to promote “Black wealth” and buying Black despite the actual community of Greenwood having little to no wealth in 1921. For more see Too Black, “From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism,” Hood Communist, June 3, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/06/03/from-black-wall-street-to-black-capitalism/ .
[82] Jackson, Blood In Eye. 118.
[83] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1984).
[84] York W. Huang. Intensifying Global Dependency.
[85] Too Black, “‘The First Black,’” Hood Communist, February 25, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/02/25/the-first-black/ .
[86] Jamil Al-Amin, Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 132.
[87] In his memoir, Harry Belafonte said Dr. Martin Luther King believed Black people in America were “integrating into a burning house.” In response on what to do he said “I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.” Malcolm X had been warning about the volcanic nature of America years prior. Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), Epub, 806.
[88] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., “Identity Politics and Elite Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/ .
[89] For analysis on class suicide see Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Marxist.org, January 1966, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm .
[90] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 64.
[91] Yannick Giovanni Marshall, “The Future Is Post-Western,” Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, May 20, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/20/the-future-is-post-western .
