There’s a lot going on in the United States, right. So there’s a legacy of structural racism that’s been impacting Black communities in the United States ever since we were kidnapped from Africa and brought to the United States. And so what we’re seeing today is actually a continuation of the racist policies and practices of the United States. We’re seeing state-sanctioned violence with impunity on black people.
Archive
So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super-open, absolutely non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.
A couple of major platforms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, have become in many places around the world a de facto public sphere. Especially in countries that have less than free Internet, less than free mass media. And these countries have transitioned from a very controlled public sphere to a commercially-run one like Facebook.
It’s paramount that our society recognize the role of anti-black structural racism in the US. And that our 21st century multiracial social movements uplift and centralize the issues of those community members who are impacted and are living at the margins. We know that if we do, we’ll get closer to real justice for all of us. Moreover, it’s been widely documented that the gains made by and with the black community have always led to better standards of living for all of us.
Black folks have consistently been denied the rights to privilege that come with citizenship that so many of us take for granted. And that’s why so many of us are no longer satisfied with the compromises and negotiations that happen behind the scenes, that continue to leave out too many people whose lives depend on the ability to participate in the decisions that impact their lives.
Afrofuturism is really about the black body and the black mind seeing itself put into a space that is beyond the white supremacist structure that we’re currently in at the moment.