Snippet: The Mask of Pro-Blackness

If you’ve been paying attention to my social media accounts, @lithiumtolashes on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you should know I have set up a Patreon. I’ve also lost my former part-time job and as I’m looking for another I decided to try and make a couple of bucks with my work.

I know it may seem kind of weird to some people to either subscribe or pay per creation for small-time writers, but it really does help us to A. survive and B. create more content. So today I’ll be giving a sample of what it is I do over at Patreon. I also over various rewards for Patreons which you can see over at https://www.patreon.com/lithiumtolashes

For now here is a snippet of my latest post. 🙂

“This topic has been on my mind for quite some time. However, it just didn’t fit into my blog’s realm of topics, despite them being all over the place. I’m reminded of this issue almost daily when I log onto social media. It isn’t anything new though. It’s in the same neck of the woods as respectability politics, but it is slightly different. It leans to the side of militancy at times, but is still devoid of historical context, nuance, and just reality in general. I call it “the mask of pro-Blackness” because it is just anti-Blackness masquerading as empowerment, cooperative economics, and self-determination. None of these are negative goals, but I will explain what I mean by them being used in anti-Black rhetoric.

As we say often, Black people are not a monolith, despite how many of us had similar upbringings and experiences, we do not all share the same sociopolitical views, the same religion, the same goals in life, etc. Our fictive kinship only goes but so far. This also applies to other races of people as well, but the stereotypes of their behaviors and values are most often kept alive by people outside of their groups, as opposed to many Black people who have internalized the disdain targeted towards us and project it. We will oftentimes bring up other races of people as being superior in their community relations, wealth building, educational attainment, and behaviors.

You will frequently hear, particularly when a racist incident against a Black person at a non-Black owned establishment garners attention, how if we would just build our own we wouldn’t have these problems. If we just cared about and looked after each other like the Asian Americans who set up shops in our communities we wouldn’t have to beg to be treated like human beings. This narrative ignores that Asian Americans are not a monolithic group, that there are Asian Americans living in poverty, that they aren’t in some secret Illuminati type organization that orchestrates all of their collective well being.

This line of thinking also ignores a large swath of history. While yes, Asian immigrants came to America and were treated with similar hostility as Black Americans, over time the “model minority” myth came into play and racial animosity towards Asian Americans, while not abolished, was reduced. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/19/the-real-secret-to-asian-american-success-was-not-education/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a8fd797b23d0 “