I'm really excited to be delving into Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism by Dr. Brian Kwoba, who will be joining us for our discussion October 28 at 6 pm ET.
There is no time like the urgent present to be engaging with Harrison’s pathbreaking work. As Kwoba writes:
“In the face of the superexploitation of working people by the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan—the capitalist robber barons of the Gilded Age—Harrison crystallized a secular Black revolutionary Socialist politics. In so doing, he theorized the role of anti-Black racial oppression in preventing the emancipation of the working class from the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.”
Because history repeats, especially when there is willful intent to rewrite, hide, or outright destroy it, here we are rinsing and repeating blatant superexploitation from the Tech Oligarchy, aka Capitalist Robber Barons 2.0, who are wielding a sledgehammer to the menial safeguards that allowed some of the working class to squeak their way out of poverty.
One of the most frustrating and frankly mind-bending aspects of what they’ve achieved is that their methods of oppressing and exploiting us have been normalized to such an extent that not only is there a stunning lack of resistance but an acceptance that our lives under the massive exploitation and theft by the robber barons is just “the way things are.”
Last Saturday, a friend sent a text to one of my group chats (the place that has come to be something like a communal water cooler where friends/family pop in with everything from jokes to prayer requests to breaking news, asks for help, or support), that morphed into more than the usual exchange. What started out as a casual Saturday evening ki-ki led to me sharing, and frankly unpacking for myself, issues of wealth, capitalism and why we are where we are today. * Note: In the following screenshots, my texts are in blue.
Shortly after this fairly benign, serious/unserious, self-deprecating commentary on our own state of wealth or lack thereof, I hopped over to Instagram for a casual scroll where I saw a post from writer Kiese Laymon:
His caption:
My fingers damn near tripped over themselves to get back to the group chat:
Excuse my French. But that’s exactly how I felt/feel. Then I spent the next few hours, off and on, texting about the violence of representations of wealth and wages in popular media and how our imaginations, celebrity culture/worship, notions of Black excellence/Black faces in high places (word to Ruha Benjamin) are harmful and directly counter to our liberation. Below I’ve summarized a few points I made to my friends, one of whom told me about three of my very long texts in: “You need to write about this!”
What follows is a few more texts from our chat with some expanded thoughts. I’m looking forward to unpacking and building deeper analysis and context on many of these ideas as we read over the next month. Given the absolute, willful strategy to influence our thinking and imaginations about work, wealth, and wages, it is ever more clear how important Harrison’s work and legacy are, and why Dr. Brian Kwoba’s work is such an important read now.
More from the group chat….
Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don’t Lie: On the catastrophe of equating progress with representation
Nope. They tricked us by constantly featuring the few who did make it and by putting a few Black faces in high places.
Our imaginations have been co-opted with a false equation that elevation by the visible few has translated into progress for the many. As the wealth gap graphic shows, Black people as a whole are in dire straits. But the images and narratives in media obscure that reality for the masses. This is dangerous because not understanding our actual position prevents us from resisting. To quote Lil Wayne, “men lie, women lie, numbers don’t lie.”
And psychologically, we want to believe it to be so. Cause we’re tired. The symbolism of Obama’s ascent to the presidency secured an even deeper belief that Black people had entered a new era of progress and prosperity. But that belief rested in hope, not fact. So no matter how much Obama, Oprah, Jay-Z, Beyoncé [insert other popular, successful, and wealthy figure] have shaped our imaginations about Black progress and wealth, the actual numbers tell a different story. And of course they do, because racial capitalism reigns relentlessly supreme.
It was, and still is, all a lie. This is going to be painful and take a lot of work, but we have to divest from ANY notion or aspiration to be Black bourgeoisie. We also need to seriously divest from celebrity culture/worship.
Who’s Blaming Who: On how wealth and poverty are warped in the collective American imagination
How many Black people have actually climbed out of poverty? And how many of the so-called middle class are just one paycheck or accident away from landing right back into the poverty they barely escaped?
We don’t have honest conversations about poverty because it’s viewed as failure or evidence that people aren’t willing to work hard. One reason why that idea is so thoroughly entrenched in the American psyche is because traditional media reinforces it so successly. An example is how often it highlights narratives that people are constantly on the take, and successfully gaming the system. I’m thinking about the so-called welfare queens of the 80s or, more recently, the stories of people accused of living lavish lifestyles from PPP loans distributed during COVID. Dozens of stories featured every day people who had scammed the government.
Much rarer were the stories about the billionaires, country clubs, and celebrities who received the same loans.
But that kind of coverage doesn’t serve the billionaire class, whose bidding is done by corporate media, to highlight the theft and excess of Capitalist Robber Barons 2.0. It’s much more effective to blame the average Joe for daring to step out of their places of being quietly and dutifully exploited through wage theft, inflation, the constant erosion of workers’ rights, and the nickel-and-diming of consumers at every turn.
Stories about working-class people accused of financial malfeasance are more prevalent not because of how often it happens, or even the actual amounts involved, but because the narrative keeps us blaming individuals instead of looking at where the real harm is happening. Because ain’t nobody getting over like these corporations and billionaires. Not by far!
The people at the bottom are being exploited far more than anyone else. But we allow it in part because, in the popular imagination relentlessly shaped by media and propaganda, those are the same people seen as lazy, not trying hard enough, or trying to “get over.”
A Billi is Much More Than a Milli: On the crisis of understanding numbers
Another thing we must wrest from the popular imagination is both the fascination with extreme wealth and the idea that a billionaire is just a slightly wealthier millionaire. I’m convinced that’s another key factor impeding our resistance.
Billionaires aren’t possible without massive exploitation. Mainly through wage theft. Particularly slave wages paid to workers in the global South. But even in the global North, and the U.S. especially, people aren’t paid a living wage.
This explains the assault on education. If enough people truly grasped what a billion means, we would revolt, because why are we allowing 0.00023% of the population to rob, starve, and kill millions? Meanwhile, those billionaires are literally hoarding wealth wealth they can’t possibly spend in their lifetime, or even the lifetimes of their kids, if they tried.
But this basic failure to contextualize wealth and resources is the result of a persistent feature of a pervasive anti-intellectualism coupled with assaults on education, book bans, and the all too familiar practice of murdering (Malcolm, Martin), jailing (Assatta, Mumia) and hiding (Hubert Harrison) our Black radical revolutionaries.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Toward the end of the evening, this text came from my friend.
I broke into a huge grin while texting her back. That’s abolition! 😊 Everybody’s basic needs are met (housing, food, water, utilities, healthcare) FOR FREE as a human right. And the gag is, all the money and resources to do that already exist.
But the billionaires gotta go.
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With love and solidarity,
connease
Join us on October 28th at 6:00 PM ET when we’ll be joined by Dr. Brian Kwoba to discuss Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism.