I’m listening. Watching, reading a lot about black people in the US. I’m sort of studying that stuff. Through documentaries, articles, Wikipedia, musician biographies –we are really over-represented in this area-, blogs, everything.
I said earlier this year that I was kind of loosing faith about the situation. Well I guess it didn’t change!
Look at today’s situation for a black dude on earth. Africa has been looted forever and now the continent is a terrible mess with wars, famines and poverty. Middle-east? Arabs and black people are not that much into a friendship. Asia doesn’t know black people more than what the US are sending as cultural references, basketball players and rappers. For the rest, describing black people as monkeys is pretty OK for them and like everywhere, stupidly, the lighter the skin color, the better.
Australia? It’s considered as one of the most racist country in the world (if you’re white you don’t really notice that I guess). America Latina? Chile? Less than 1% of the population is Afro-Chilean. Argentina? 86.4% of the population self-identify as being of European descent. So yeah there are Black people in Brazil and it’s the country with one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world with 10% (almost exclusively white) of the population earning 28 times the average income of the bottom 40% (mostly black). Oh, and there’s a trend that shows something; 1835 Brazil black population: 51.4% of the country. 2000: 6.2%.
So there’s Europe and Russia. Both are kind of cold in large parts though. South Europe is not that cool with black people. North Europe is not that cool with black people. France in the middle, has the largest European black population. Makes sense.
And then there are the US.
Let me sum it up: arrived as slaves in the South. Got free, moved to the North, got jobs. Got fired, moved to the West. Got jobs, houses, palm trees and still heavy, grinding segregation. Got fired again, sold crack. During all that time, every single movement trying to change black people’s lives for the better is a failure. Assassinations, murders, black leaders have it all, even the FBI is involved in some cases, like it’s totally OK. Hope’s dead. People are tired, they just want to be happy now, not start a revolution. The 70s/80s are the decades in which a few black stars are going to hide the truth to the world about black America’s actual state.
From there everything goes down, more jobs get axed thanks to technology and under-educated black people, money has to solve everything, start of the crack-cocaine. Black men flowing to prisons, being killed (12 cops spraying an unarmed drunk dude’s car with 100 bullets a few months ago). Generations of black kids growing up in this shit and bam, you have a 50 Cent or a Charles Cosby. This is where I understood the hustling thing. I got it. You have to get your ass out of that hell, you need money for it, you do whatever it takes to get that money. It’s simple, it’s about survival. Nothing personal. It just became cultural. During that time, after ten years of the more-than-white Bush (remember Katrina?), Obama is the new black star like the 70/80/90s ones (The Holy MJ’s). He’s a tree hiding a dead forest (statistics are too awful, I’ll let you wikipedia it).
And that is all one of the freest country in the world with multiple ethnicities from the start, has been able to pull off for black people: a promise that it’s going to suck. It’s like being a lefty! Through history, all across the world it’s never been a good thing to be one, in practice or culturally.
I happened to be both. I’m pretty sane for someone conscious of all that. Or maybe it’s killing me softly.