Black Americans are “expected” to be inclusive because honestly everyone looks down on Black Americans and our culture. They simply dont respect our boundaries and feel like our culture is free game. They feel entitled because they **participated**. Do you understand how insane this is? I can only imagine the confusion of cognitive dissonance upon realizing that our culture is GLOBALLY popular.
Inclusivity becomes an exploit when it stops being about accuracy or respect and starts being used as a political tool to redistribute credit, ownership, or authority away from the people who actually created something. It’s becomes the backdoor exploit and allows others to source us while simultaneously downplaying us.
People use Black American history especially the history of enslavement and resistance as a symbolic credential because here the enslaved person was positioned at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy. They feel the Civil Rights movement entitles them to us.
In a lot of cases, “inclusivity” is framed as kindness or fairness, but the result is dilution. The originators get blended into a vague collective. Their contribution becomes “one of many.” Their identity gets softened so others can feel comfortable inserting themselves into the story. It’s not about expanding the truth as much as it’s about smoothing the edges until nobody can claim anything clearly.
This is how cultural extraction works in the modern era.
It doesn’t always arrive through theft. It often arrives through language first. Rewriting the narrative so that the group with the strongest historical claim becomes just another “participant.” Institutions love inclusive narratives because they make ownership less concrete and easier to redistribute. If something wasn’t created by a specific people, then anyone can step in, reframe it, profit from it, or claim equal stake.
So the exploit isn’t the idea of people participating. Participation is real. The exploit is the rhetorical move where participation gets retroactively turned into creation and the original creators get pushed into the background under the banner of unity, diversity, or multiculturalism. Inclusivity becomes the mechanism that hides who built the foundation while elevating everyone who arrived afterward.
In other words: inclusivity becomes exploitative when it’s used to protect feelings, rewrite credit, and flatten history instead of telling the truth. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition have been hard at work for decades.
Rome Conquered the Greeks Black America, but it was truly Greece that had conquered Rome. For now, we’ll give them bread and circuses.
