Real Talk
In 2016, I wrote about a phenomenon I was witness.
Neo-Blackness was shaped by algorithms and mass media.
It is commodified, digital, and performative and it created a universalized version of Blackness/Black culture that exists as spectacle rather than lived reality.
People who had no direct contact with the Black community learned how to “be Black” through algorithms. They learned it via memes, dances that went viral, slang from online and video games, and curated aesthetics.
These caricatures became the basis for their adoption. What emerged was a sort of simulated blackness. It was the culmination of our cultural tokens being pooled and exchanged between us via our online interactions and online community building in such a way it became a hyperreality of Black Culture that felt realer than real. We were exchanging information with each other across states but now it is detached from the nucleus of its origins and morphed into a sort of independent digital media conscious a NeoBlackness that took off during the BLM movement. This movement is responsible for exporting Black identity globally just as the 1960s Black power movements did.
What we didn’t know was there were observers. Watching, learning, incorporating, adopting elements of these exchanges. In 2013 the culture was commodified by the Black Elites who fought for representation instead of reparations.
This NeoBlackness thrived on visibility and consumption. It was produced for the timeline in order to get optimized for likes and shares increasing the marketability while Blackness simultaneously was being stripped of its historical symbolic meanings.
It was easy to mimic. It created this illusion of progressiveness and unity while in truth it was diluting appropriating and displacing deeper forms of self-knowledge in turn rendering black culture into an endless cycle of commodity trend and resale.
I noticed this back in 2009 and felt a need to write about it as I seen it fester for years.
Neo-Blackness allowed outsiders to appropriate with ease because the digital template is there for anyone to copy. It gentrify identity in the same way neighborhoods are repackaged and sold making the culture into consumable symbols.
They generalize our tokens to fit their formats making it slang “the cook-out” becoming a phrase anybody can use for their own gatherings
The danger is not only in its export but in how it blinds even insiders the same who support it via phenotypical conflations and intertwine it within Pan-African framework.
While those who are immersed in the media generated version of Blackness, people confuse visibility with liberation and performance with transformation. They inherit memes instead of the cultural memory that produced them. It created outrage instead of strategy, and validation instead of substance.
Neo-Blackness is not a natural evolution of culture but the product of a carefully curated performance that sustains the very system it claims to resist.
OLD ARTICLE
Black Culture is the result of Black Conditioning (social programming-project)Black is a sociopolitical conditioning to meet certain goals that this society neededTo activate their POLITICAL ideology
It all boils down to how society moves. Since about 2009, I have seen the rise of a peculiar phenomenon. I attribute this to the internet becoming more accessible. Neo Black people are the social media produced hipsters that originated within a digital collective conscience. It produced the BLM, Black Twitter, and WSHH. To me, these neoblack people are a new model of the socially manufactured kind. I call them “internet niggas” because, like Timmy Turner, everything they do, all their thoughts, their style, etc. comes from the internet. It creates a space where this is how Blacks are “suppose” to be. We kind of created these types of black people, when we collectively started using social media. They are fraudulent ass hell. They are always doing shit from the gram and don’t even realize it. They are the epitome of followers following followers. They are like clones, with a hive mind. They are engrossed and progressive in the gentrification of Black people. They are dissociated from “real” reality, and live within a “Media-Reality,” just like the media whores. They are copy-cat niggas to the fullest degree and have a very distorted sense of self. The result is the fallout of black culture being digitized, another being making it more accessible to exploitation, and other races being pioneers and discovering aspects of our culture and exploiting it. I see why China was like how they were back in the day, lol. Now here is where it gets crazy to me.
The collective social media influence has affected the actions of some people, where they start “living out” the memes, and giving off the appearance of it through mimicking it. They dress like others people they follower, especially celebrities. They are essentially “acting” and they get lost in their character. The game of follower the follower has been going on for decades, however never on a scale this large. Digitized black culture programs new social media users into a “frame” of what it means to be black. It turns black culture into a commodity or “trend,” that is consumed and marketed. These “new black people” appear to be “progressive, but IMO they are just having fun and trying to be accepted by associated unity, or Culture. It’s not genuine to me based on those facts. That’s why shit like dashikis are trendy now, and you can ask that same nigga, what year did slavery end and they would look dumbfounded. You could ask a person screaming BLM who was Marcus Garvey or Musa of Mali, where is Timbuktu, and they would look dumbfounded. They say things like oh your melanin is popping because it is now trendy to be black. That’s why a lot of these artists and now happily endorsing it within the media because it makes money now. Prior they were all about colorism, etc. All it did was recycle due to how easily influenced the masses are. New black people aren’t progressive as they appear because it is not the cultivation of knowledge of self, or of one’s history, it the cultivation of a trend that will die. That explains how everyone “woke” up after Trayvon Martin through memes, not textbooks, through anger and not love.
That explains how they can scream BLM then bump the grimiest, most self-destructive trap-mumble rapper song and say oh it’s because he’s fun, ignorant and real. Or how they can gravitate to culture vultures, who are the products of good PR, and who’s playing the role and putting on a show, filling a niche to make money. All of this stems from Social Proofing, the herd mentality. We have to, all humans, learn to investigate and question things beyond FACE VALUE. This is why we are in this predicament. We easily fooled into believing the visual, face value bullshit, like the news and media, hell even politics are now based on entertainment. It’s all the appearance of, and lacking true substance. But hey, we were raised on Advertisements, on “reviews” Sadly nowadays the Wolves don’t dress as sheep, they are now in shepherds skin. I disagree with BLM, to me, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I believe BLM comes from mass media. How they effectively use them as a tool to push their political agendas if you can get the media to falsify reality, and get people to believe that reality. You hold great power. We have seen again and again the dangers of the Herd Mentality(conformity) throughout history. It’s time we wake up.The New Black people give the appearance of self-knowledge, but if you question them, you will find its built of bullshit and that the ni**a mentality isn’t eradicated at all.
They believe in shit like purple people or color blind racism, yet again at the heart of this is internalized racism and colorism manifesting. We as a people have to focus on the issues that are plaguing are communities and get at the root of them. We have to stop pouring money into the Media Puppets. Ask How can you trust and follow somebody who doesn’t write their songs? Or politicians who don’t write their speeches That message is PR. F the Hype. Lets Nation Build. For all these years they did NOTHING for the black communities, and took no risk or made no sacrifice until they were tired. They had the voice all these years but did nothing. Now we got people taking a knee in defiance, but ask, what does that achieve? How does it open a dialogue? A sacrifice would have been to not play because at the end of the day when you still play on that field, who still getting paid? If he made a “real” sacrifice, they would have done everything in their power to destroy him. Again we accept the “appearance” of progressiveness without being progressive. The New Black people are the fruition of the African-American. Believe it or not, it’s white-washed.
You can never squeeze apple juice from a lemon. The American Social Order at its roots is built upon Black people being Sub-Human. This racist Ideology has been propagated over and over, repacked and revamped. We cannot gain equally and justice from a system in which its foundation was forged to disenfranchise you. Remember African people the world over, was dehumanized, now we dehumanize ourselves. We first have to grow within ourselves, make ourselves strong again, together. Then we can fight the system and change it at its roots. You don’t change the mirror to move the objects; you move the objects. No matter how many times you replace the mirror, the objects that the mirror is reflecting will remain. Pull it out by its roots, through truth and knowledge. Don’t fall into the “traps” of the “project.” The power structuremanipulates the privileged order of American Society(whites) to fear and demonize black people, to erase the guilt. They then use media basis to propagate the belief. The situation is created by the same elusive force, the people who herd society. The influences are subtle, but they are there if you open your eyes to it. White Americans fear retribution for their unjustified privileged positions. That’s why the keep niggas locked in the jungles of the inner city. Things are changing, though; I cannot say for the best or the worst. Only time will truly tell. Maybe if a leader, a real leader arise and lead from the heart, we’ll see true change.
