Pray For Black Millionaires Too
Regardless of economic status, black people are constantly performing to satisfy and survive the whims of American society.
I feel bad for black people of any economic status (I’ll admit, black billionaires, got my compassion muscle working hard as hell) because our whole life is implicitly centered around performing based on societal expectations.
The main area we see black people celebrated in media (aka propaganda machine) is entertainment. Whether portrayed as rappers, athletes, or actors, our most visible forms place us in the public sphere to be mindlessly consumed by the masses.
Black “elites” (society’s view, not mine) success revolves around being on public display. Many young black people aspire to follow in their footsteps because it's their only vision of how someone who looks like them might succeed. I will not make a direct comparison to our ancestors being placed on stage at slave auctions but… your worth (ability to make money) is tied around the subjective opinions of the public. When your worth is tied to your ability to be consumed by the masses, rather than your actual humanity, everything you do revolves around the comfort of someone else.
We must make sure that our hair isn’t too long, because we need to be clean cut to garner respect. We have to make sure we don’t have visible tattoos because that means we’re one of the wild ones who are not to be trusted. We are pressured to perform in the office and in school because people see a singular black person and act as if they represent the whole race.
Everything is for the next person. Everything is an attempt to be seen as docile and approachable. Then we can sell our limited life spans for enough money to find a place to live and food to eat. Maybe even afford some of the luxuries we’ve been raised up to desire. We are dehumanized on the basis of our skin color, something outside our control, something we were born in and had no say in the matter.
Is it any wonder that an athlete like Antonio Brown constantly operates in the public sphere? Sending tweets, making Instagram posts, having to SHOW people? It’s a double-edged sword because social media gives us the opportunity to add our own story to the media-created narrative, but you still have to give situation energy that could be utilized elsewhere. It could be true that Brown has been lying and is trying to save face by injecting his side of the story but that’s not the focus of my discussion. The focus is the fact he felt he had to address it in a public sphere, that he had to defend himself.
That’s how many black people walk around America and the wider diaspora that is also inherently racist (hope yall ain’t think it was only in America, America is just the Tom Brady of racism). They’re in a constant state of defensiveness because this white supremacist society is always picking at us, telling us we’re not good enough through explicit and implicit means. It does not matter how much we try to conform to their standards, we are reduced to an object. They refuse to see us as an individual actor.
This inherent defensiveness transfers into how we raise our children. The black community is ripe with hypermasculine ideas that are championed and upheld as if they weren’t poisoning every root of our family trees. We teach our young black men they need to respond to every slight, stand up to every adversary, or they’re “soft” or need to “man up”. These ideas of faux toughness do not only affect our young men but our young women as well.
Ignoring emotions is not a healthy way to face adversity. We are trying to teach our children to be resilient, but instead teach them to disconnect from their feelings, which leads to a cycle of emotional denial, usually resulting in mental health challenges from a lack of self-knowledge.
This does not teach our children to be confident in themselves, which is the key to perseverance. It teaches them the opposite because it instills a lack of self-trust due to them feeling as if they’re weak for experiencing emotions. In other words, for being a human being.
The smartest thing to do in most cases is to save your energy, realize you can’t control other people and focus on your own personal journey and growth. Reacting gives others control over you and what you do because you’re not acting from a place of conscious decision making. You’re making an emotional decision based on toxic ideas that have been passed down through the abuse black people have received from a white supremacist nation.
This win at all costs, cut another man down if it means I get ahead mentality, is not our history. It is the ideology beaten into us by the inherently violent system of exploitation and control that is capitalism. Slavery was a function of capitalism. The best way to increase your profit margins is to not pay your workers and only give them enough to survive while you work them as hard as they can be worked. Anyone willing to open a history book and their mind (the whitewashing of history in the American school system is well noted and insidious) can see that the economic conditions black people find themselves in today can be directly tied to the institution of slavery, a heinous cross-section of racism and capitalism.
Ever since we’ve entered this culture, the majority of black people have been kept in survival mode. We are perpetually in a state of fight or flight. You cannot focus on a level necessary to induce growth when you’re mostly focused on trying to survive.
This survival mode mentality can be maintained even when you make millions of dollars as an athlete because your well-being and money (which is seen as power, self-respect, freedom) are still in the hands of other people for who you have to perform. It takes a great shift in mentality for people to realize their life is theirs alone and not to be dictated by those who see them as an object, a plaything for their personal entertainment.
People feel justified in judging public figures and throwing rocks from their glass houses because these figures operate in the public sphere. So many people feel invisible in their everyday lives, they’re jealous when you reach a certain level of fame and think you’ve transcended your humanity. Sometimes public figures feel like this as well. Both parties are so wrong. We cannot transcend what we embody, which is the human experience with all its ups and downs. No amount of money or celebrity can change the fact you bleed red and breathe air. Even if you live a life different from the majority of people.
What really saddens me, is the majority of black people feel they operate in a public sphere and are similarly stressed. They feel their worth as human being is always up for debate. What do we expect, when our country is still so racially biased in its treatment of the black community? When our parents and grandparents had to fight our “For the People, By the people” head ass government for Civil Rights just a few decades ago? Not even human rights, just the ability to eat, drink, and exist in the same places as white people, without being assaulted verbally or physically. They were debating our very humanity in the media and in the courts as if our personhood was akin to some bullshit bill discussing taxes because we happened to be born with darker skin.
I hope that as a people (and I hope this for all races as well but this article was mainly about black people, which I promise is allowed) we can learn we are inherently worthy of self-respect and don’t need to defend ourselves constantly from those people rushing to judge us. Especially if they don’t know us in the first place. We need to build our confidence in ourselves so we can stop feeling like we are ripe for public consumption, and put in the work of bettering ourselves so we can confidently step out into the world and chase our dreams. Part of your dream should also be to contribute to the greater good, but I think that’s a natural result of healthy self-love.
But this world makes it tough to do so. So no matter how rich an athlete is, or an entertainer, or even an IG influencer becomes, it's a sad life to have your worth, either financially, personally, or frequently both, to be tied to your ability to perform for the public. I pray for a time in the future when the black community’s dancing shoes are reserved for times of their choosing, rather than being a necessity just to make it in this country.