I Was Afraid To Be Considered Anti-Black, Until Today

Race has a funny way of messing with your mind. There are unspoken rules of racial engagement that most people play close by in order to maintain one's citizenship within their assigned race at birth. A popular semi-serious notion in "Black Culture" is the greatly sought-after "blackcard". An all-access metaphorical key card to being considered authentically black by the prevailing culture. Folks might jokingly say that if you have raisins in your potato salad then your blackcard could be in jeopardy. The status of the blackcard could also hang in the balance on contentious socio-political issues of our day as well. 

In January 2021 when then US vice president Joe Biden, said to popular black cultural commentator Charlamagne Tha God "black voters ‘ain’t black’ if they’re considering Trump", he said what many black people around the world felt too. I certainly believed that at one point myself circa 2016. If you supported Trump, who was supposedly a white supremacist, you were literally endorsing anti-blackness in the worse possible way. 

Black Trump supporters were viciously mocked and called uncle Tom's and other racist epithets. Your blackcard would invariably be revoked for putting the x on Trump for the presidential ballot and you'd be a bigger fool to be surprised. Now in fairness, many people across the political spectrum pushed back at Biden's remarks, sparking Black Twitter into a frenzy all of which led Biden to "apologize". We all knew that while his quip was a clumsy racial stereotype and presidentially ridiculous, he was only getting pushback for saying it because he was white. 

The blackcard might not exist in a concrete sense, but until you do or say something for which "the culture" thinks you no longer deserve it, ignorance is bliss.

In essence, the blackcard is most threatened by ideas, speech, affiliations, or behavior that is collectively believed to be anti-black. If you question negative aspects of certain "black" cultural norms, challenge racial victimhood narratives, and question some of the popularized assumptions about police brutality and its most prevalent victims, you are at risk of your card being revoked. There are social dragging ceremonies that frequently occur in the belly of Black Twitter, where the latest perpetrators of anti-blackness are dismembered. I know because I once participated in some of these draggings when I was on the Left, and most of the ones I recall were of those who "blacking" wrong on political matters.

I've had a long journey on matters of race and I've previously detailed my shift in political and racial ideological concerns in previous articles in this publication. I think I've had another epiphany about some of the frivolous accusations from my own experiences of being called anti-black for thinking differently on racial issues. I've started to recognize that while there are legitimate victims of racism, there is a disproportionate amount of black victimhood that dominates "the culture" and being critical of it threatens your blackcard with a fierce and swift blacklash.

As much as I've come to the stark realization that our society is mostly confused and distracted by racialized thinking, stereotypes, and assumptions, I don't see my assigned race as critical to my core identity.  I reject the notion that I'm anti-black because I despise black victimhood.

The penny dropped when this thought blindsided me:
If me being "anti-black victimhood" means I'm anti-black, that tells you everything you need to know about "the culture's" obsession with being incarcerated by victimhood.

Black in the pop-culture imagination is synonymous with a lived experience of racial victimhood. The orthodox belief concerning the black experience is that the ultimate meaning of our existence, how we see ourselves, and our hopes are framed by the omnipotent machinations of white supremacy. 

In a weird sense, having been called anti-black too many times to keep count in recent weeks, I've finally got immune to the charge and I feel a strong sense of sympathy for those who haplessly hurl that accusation towards me. 

Being free from my own sense of racial victimhood has been such a liberating deliverance in the last few months.  Today, not only do I feel resilient to any further experiences of racism, but I feel immune to charges of being anti-black by the spokespeople of the culture of black victimhood. When will "black" people be able to critique "black culture" without being called racist names by other "black" people?

When will we stop playing victimhood games with race?

Being called anti-black is just another way a culture of normalized racial victimhood gaslights you for standing against the current, by dangling this all-access blackcard at you for you to regress back into that poisonous mentality.

I am no longer afraid to be called anti-black by other black people as that word doesn't define my identity politics any more than being black does.