Nigga, Don’t Be Dense

 Nigga, Don’t Be Dense

“Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation.”

- Frantz Fanon (your fave freedom fighter’s writer), The Wretched of the Earth

    Phew, y’all are not going to like me for this one.    

    In this period of post-grad life, I have spent a lot of my trying to find ways to 1) continue to stay educated about the world and 2) make some motion with it. If you’ve been following me long enough you’d recognize that it’s my motto: know then do. So between the existential poetry and pages upon pages of Fanon (don’t worry he makes his yani_reads debut here), I’ve had a lot of time to digest the digital movement (a very, very kind descriptor) taking place before our very eyes.

    Today, it was the AI “All Eyes On Rafah” template post on instagram garnering over 30 million reposts.  A lot has preceded that though: the celebrity block list, the countless BDS lists, and those aesthetically pleasing ceasefire pins that your faves wear on red carpets. For many people—and I will admit myself included—these were huge for us. It’s a win to know that your fave is against genocide! You can pat yourself on your back for reposting that hideous AI image. You sleep well knowing you didn’t go to Starbucks, or McDonalds, or whatever! Israel, be damned because you are a good person.

    

    Nigga, don’t be dense.

    

    You are not a good person for reposting a picture. You are not a good person for reposting a donation page. You are not a good person for passing up on your favorite chai latte or a Big Mac. And it is pitiful to see you grovel at the feet of your favorite musician who says one thing about a ceasefire (and not specifically for a free Palestine). You are not a good person by keeping your activism to yourself.

    And not that we are comparing apples to oranges—because if we’re honest, the strange fruits are hanging from the same tree—but let’s for a second think back to 2020. Global pandemic, everyone on their phone, and all of us bearing witness to those 8:46 seconds of horror. If it weren’t for the inexpediency of the “court of justice” or the millions of white people plastering Back the Blue stickers on the back of their cars, the most frustrating thing to so many Black Americans at the time was those damn Black Squares. The small #BlackLivesMatter in white celebrities’ bios. Because to other white Americans, it made them feel good. They could sleep well at night knowing that they did something, and hey, that was enough for some of us!

So, let me ask this to you now: did those posts help keep foundational DEI programs in your schools? Did they protect affirmative action? Or maybe lower Black maternal morality rates? Nope.

   

    "But it helped Black men in prison?" No.

    "Okay, but what about pay disparities?" No.

    "At least they’ll remember us in the history books.” And won’t.

    “Well, no one else was killed like that since Floyd, right?” …

   

 

The world you wish to see cannot and will not happen if you continue to cozy up to the one that every day works hard to prevent it from coming to fruition. Revolution does not happen cuddled up on our sectional or spread out on our comforters between TikTok posts. It can’t. It’s like a liberation law of physics. I’ll need Fanon to help explain. To start, basically, niggas have a lot going on in their heads:

    “the complex of frustration, the complex of aggressiveness, and the complex of colonizability. The conlonized subject is upgraded, and attempts are made to disarm him psychologically and, naturally, with a few coins…"

    Talk to ‘em, Fanon,

“...the colonized subject,”

      

    A lot of you niggas

“...is so starved of anything that humanizes him, even if it is third rate,” 

    HAH!

"that these trivial handouts in some cases manage to impress him…the colonized subject is at constant risk of being disarmed by any sort of concession.”    

    Decolonization is not a quid-pro-quo. It is not transactional. It is supposed to be uncomfortable, and hard, and damn near feel impossible. It is more than a post on instagram, a quick TikTok, or even a late night blog post like this. Decolonization must move you not just from ordering your #5 off the menu but to push you into community and into knowing. Tweeting about a genocide won’t end it.

   AND

    Before you start all that rigamaroo, stop believing you are incapable of helping. I’ve seen so many righteous people in every condition have the courage to stand up against their governments to protest their complicity to genocide. Doing good requires us to be creative. Get guerilla on those pigs! You are PRIVILEGED whether you like to think it or not and Palestinians, the Sudanese, and the Congolese deserve more than a 24-hour ig repost.

    AND FINALLY

     If you respect yourself enough, stop shucking and jiving at the faintest wisp of “progress”. They don’t lose any sleep or any dollars making their logos red, green, and black or rainbow every other business month. Become their greatest fear because…you already are.