Recently, I lent one of my friends a move called “Goodbye Uncle Tom”, just to fuck with his head. Be warned, this is really NSFW, as it is a depiction of American Chattel Slavery, with graphic depictions of stud farms, torture, castration, and industrial scale graphic rape of black slave women, by both whites and blacks.
This film has apparently affected him deeply, as he now sees themes of slavery everywhere. He watches that bleaching show that came on recently , he sees Willie Lynch Syndrome”. He even sees office workers as modern slaves in a cubicle plantation.
Amazingly, this type of thinking, that modern Jamaican society is just an extension of 19th century chattel slavery seems to extremely common amongst Jamaican Millenials – just look at this post from Javed Jaghai. I, mean, Jaghai hits all the right points that make People stand up and cheer: The Evil Uptown Families who don’t care about us, the Plantation Society that we are in today, and the Poor Ghetto People parading with their semi-literate pleading, who don’t know what’s good for them.
Do I even need to explain why this is bullshit? We are not rural slaves under a totalitarian system with all our needs taken care of by Massa. We are, mostly, urban serfs in a corporatist society, held in captivity, not with chains, but with a salary just low enough that we only have enough for our basic needs. I mean if the workplace is a plantation, why the hell are so many people applying to go to it – even when its for a shit job? Just look at any call center Job Fair. Over a thousand people applying for forty positions. In other words, The System turns the whole, Jaghai, Mutabaruka style critique on its head. You run to the Plantation , not away from it. Instead of the Church and Massa brainwashing you, you put yourself in debt to the Student Loan Bureau to be deskilled by our Universities, with their bullshit (Mis)Management Degrees. And instead of hating our blackness, our blackness becomes an irrelevance, or even an annoyance, as it makes our tattoos hard to see. This last point was made all too clear by that recent bleaching special, where the Downtowners articulated their Post-Black position , by emphasizing that they do not hate being black, but that blackness was, more a complexion better suited to the summer months.
To put it simply, Chattel Slavery is NOT Wage Slavery!
So why do still have young people like Jaghai talking the same old Michael Manley , Farrakhan, Malcolm X shit, when that is no longer relevant in our society, battered by failed infrastructure projects, IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, a neo-feudal ghetto system , and the neo-liberalization of the workplace and education system? Well, because they have no new ideas to help us with. They’re too stuck on old ideas, and old YouTube videos to see that the world does not conform to their ideas. Not only that, but they are victims of the very same system that they claim to oppose. Some, like Jaghai, are servants of that very same system!
If we are to solve the political impasses, technical follies, and economic dead-ends that our predecessors have initiated, we young people will have to focus using and creating new ideas to solve our problems. That will we be the main focus pf this blog.And naked black women.
Beast of No Nation 