There is no Black political class.
No, celebrities don’t count.
Ever since Barack Obama perfumed our American stench with “Amazing Grace” biracial charms. Ever since Cosby/Diddy traded media power for pills and deviance.
Ever since Malcolm X pointed out that Negroes were the only fools choosing musicians and actors as leaders.
Ever since Bob Marley got shot for singing freedom songs in an election year.
I love that Dave Chappelle joke “Where’s Ja Rule?” because it ages like wine.
Chappelle, Black culture’s most potent satirist, is now the subject of his own punchline. We care what he thinks of women, race, and money because we lack and we are starved.
Black people lack politics. Worse than that, we lack a political imagination.
The best and most useful Black celebrities parrot talking points from Rupert Murdoch’s news and scold you for saying you deserve to eat.
Bree Newsome said you can tell they’re scared we’ll act up when they send out Jay-Z, Obama, and Oprah to pacify us.
There is no Black politic. There is Black distraction. There is a Black circus. And we are the clowns.
Unless your suffering can be sold back to you in pissy jobs and rap songs, you will keep crying over 50 Cent’s campaign donations and Beyoncé’s tax breaks.
Saying Nick Cannon and Amber Rose were talking about their political views is like saying a tortoise and a bird were talking about how to fix the Iran oil crisis.
Sure, I’m surprised the tortoise and bird are talking. But frankly, I’m stunned that you’re listening!
What are their qualifications?
Doesn’t it bother you that the first facts you know about singers and dancers is how they think you should vote? Doesn’t it worry you that the most vocal — and platformed — voices of Black politics are reality show stars and Instagram shills? There is nothing they solicit that’ll benefit you to give, save the joy of the show they put on to soothe you momentarily during our collective slide to hell.
As you may know, Chilli from TLC has allegedly donated to Donald Trump in the past. And the news has been omnipresent in social feeds. She relies on you talking about her to bring in the bucks.
These are our heroes. Loud but voiceless. Visible but harmless. Brazenly incomplete.
We want celebrities to shoulder the blame for our lack. Let me show you something real quick, though.
I just opened my phone and four different Black celebrities told me they hated being poor in four different videos.
That’s half-true.
They hated themselves and they hate you too.
When the rapper reminisces on the projects, he wants you to buy the Black pathology myth. Everything was desolate. Nothing impressed or motivated him. He had to get out.
When the stripper takes you back to that oily stage and the chunky heels, it’s through the lens of her infinite shame, a gyrating, embodied urge to escape.
But they will neither critique nor notice the conditions that put them there. They’ll soft-sell self hatred and make you believe it’s the only reality. It’s to remind you these are your only options.
Unfortunately for us, as we circulate Toni Morrison quote memes and misquote James Baldwin, we’ll fold up into an inconsolable ball when Pharrell says politics aren’t real.
Because we will our own ignorance forward instead of, say, reading Morrison and Baldwin. We fish for likes on this app or that one, and ground libraries into dust as the battery drains from our phones.
The truth is, if you had even the single ounce of temerity it took to put your phone down when the monkey and the bird talk politics, you’d reap the marvelous pain of catharsis. The grown-up realization that the people who hate themselves and teach you to hate yourself will never know what it means to deliver a better future.
They make too much profit off the opposite.