The “cultural fungibility of Black American identity” describes how Black American
culture and identity are treated as interchangeable, transferable, and consumable
by outsiders as though they were commodities rather than rooted, lived
experiences.
We’ve all heard it at some point. “Black Americans have no culture.” Probably by
someone imitating Black Culture. Why has Black American Culture been
universalized? I need you all to understand. There’s groups of people right now
that are heavily influenced by Black American Culture (ie Black Culture) yet they
have ZERO contact with Black Americans. Their experience of Black culture is
through a very narrow lens exported by media. I call this identification Neo-
Blackness (social media driven Black identity where the commodification and
performative blackness is adopted) our cultural is practiced without the context
and the crazy part is it’s being infused to express their cultural identity.
Do you understand this? We are a blueprint yes, but they are building their identity
on top of this while infusing it with their cultural tokens. Completely detaching it
from its context and reshaping it to fit into their cultural frameworks. BAs have a
huge culture of F U. Cultures evolve and change all the time. It is not static. They morph combine
delineate etc
They imitate what we do but what’s not talked about is how they replicate our
cultural tokens in the form of trends. We change up constantly. We constantly
evolve our culture and you might not understand how unusual this is on a global
scale for an ethnicity to do so.
A lot might think this isn’t important at all but don’t miss the plot.
Fungible means something that can be exchanged or substituted with something
else of the same type (like money). Applied to culture, it means treating Black
American identity as if it can be borrowed, swapped, or imitated without cost,
consequence, or authenticity.
Dewey’s Dilemma is an example of this global redefinition of Black Identity due to
its massive influence. This creates a paradox. Black Americans face systemic
oppression, while their culture is simultaneously celebrated, copied, and profited
from.
How can we have their rhythm without their blues?
Our cultural products are detached from the conditions that birthed them.
Blackness is consumed as an aesthetic and adopted as a trend.
When CAD and WIAC populations infuse BA culture into their own, it mutates into a
hybrid identity a double consciousness. Over time, these hybrid forms can be re-
presented as if they were never uniquely BA to begin with which is feeding back
into the myth that “Black Americans have no culture.” This creates a version of
performative Blackness where global communities adopt BA identity tokens but
filter them through their own lineage diluting the source.
Take a good look around
Black Americans have consistently created new cultural forms. American media
exports Black culture as the “cool” aesthetic. Across the globe, people consume
Black American culture as a way to project “realness,” defiance, or modernity.
Black American Cultural (BLACK CULTURE) tokens literally are adopted by non BA
groups and in the end when those generations came to age it will be generalized
as their cultural tokens. “We have always done this”
Saying Black Americans have no culture is a way to undermine our identity as an
ethnicity in order for non BA groups to enjoy the fruits
You are being actively erased under phenotypical conflation and divestment
strategies.It has always been the colonial strategy to erase Black American
identity. Genocide by absorption and reclassification. Paper genocide.
The cultural fungibility of Black American identity enables the world to consume
our creativity while denying our existence, reclassifying us out of our own lineage
through appropriation and erasure under the guise of celebration and context
shifting.
Blackness is real estate whose equity was built through the blood of a people that
other’s mock. We invested and created this concept. Sociopolitical, Sociocultural,
Ethnonational. We don’t have to share space. Nobody can redefine who and what
we are to suit their paradigms
One of the greasiest tricks modern society has gotten away with is changing
the definition of Racism and divorcing it from its historic context. They
whitewashed it.
I said what I said
Racism is an ideology. A worldview. A paradigm that is tied to uniquely to European
thought. They have tried to make racism out to be something that humans just do
when the very idea and development of “race” developed in Europe. It comes from the idea that animals can be organized into taxonomic systems based on attributes. “Race” referred to animals especially horses and dogs. It denoted a bloodline, pedigree, and or a breeding stock. It wasn’t until the 15th–16th centuries that the word was applied to human groups, and even then it meant
family lineage. This would go on to mean stock or nation and then later evolved
into phenotype based classifications. Oddly humans were being conceptually
aligned with livestock.
One might have said in those days that I come from the noble race (lineage or
bloodline) of the Julia family. This concept was interlinked with Horse Breeding especially and what’s a little golden nugget is elite horse breeding manuals and noble bloodline records were
often read by the same people who pioneered early “racial science.” The idea of
“the human race” as a competition carries the same echoes of horse racing.
Divorcing Racism as a philosophy, a science, an art, a religious belief, a worldview,
a paradigm, etc and conflating it with “hate” or “prejudice”
Racism was in practice the fundamental idea that the “White” Race was superior
or “human” (evolved or more advanced) to the other “races” especially the
“Negro” races who was not seen as a Human. They also weren’t seen as an animal
but as a being in between animal and human (ie Sub-Human)
Their argument is that White “races” were the next iteration of “man.”
The act of dehumanization in the form of hierarchal classification models is
Racism: Seeing a group as fundamentally sub-Human. In order for racism to exist you need Race Theory.
A racist is a believer or practitioners of race theory and to a degree we all practice race theory just under a different guise as the system has been rebranded. Racism is simply the ideology that the White Races is more evolved in comparison to the subhuman “Negro” races. The core of the ideology was never hate as they would’ve had you believe, but a belief in the evolutionary superiority of one group.
It’s a lie, a myth, a delusion based on an organized belief system that positioned White Europeans as the apex of human development.
This is what they believe and what they still believe.
This why their dog whistles are super effective. The color dichotomy we use (the
black white matrix) has origins in religious beliefs and thought but that’s another
story. Remind them always that just like how they love to claim Capitalism and
Democracy that in the same spirit their forefathers concocted one of the biggest
moral copes known to human history: Race Theory
