After a performative summer, the forces of anti-blackness knew they had to cast someone in the lead role. This “someone” was Kamala Harris, who, echoing Tim Scott’s claim, made waves last week following her claim that the United States is “not a racist country.”

Not only do these words deem civil rights activists “complainers,” it, once again, relegates those who built this country to amorphous invisibility. The very existence of those who descend from enslaved Africans is because this country is racist. Additionally, both Tim Scott and Kamala Harris (regrettably) remain relevant because this is, in fact, a racist country.

• 

• 

It is no accident that this proclamation comes on the heels of Derek Chauvin’s conviction. Though the media framed Chauvin’s trial to suggest that “black lives matter,” Scott and Harris’s words indicate that Chauvin didn’t kill Floyd because Floyd was a black man, but because he was a bad cop. Thus, the danger in this statement is not that it’s untrue and collectively humiliating, but because it abridges the complete form of racial complexity. This perspective also guarantees a formidable transition between their black faces of white power and the political face’s inevitable return to the occident.

What I mean here is that Harris and Scott are seat warmers. Their job to spew white nationalism behind the face of legal blackness is a transient methodology. This transient methodology fulfills an integral task for the African-adjacents to follow, because the suggestion that America is not a racist country makes racists feasible leaders.

Nevertheless, Harris nor Scott harbor the intentions for this post. This post intends to point out that Tim Scott and Kamala Harris articulated a belief that many enacted last year.

Yes, I reference those who illustrated a similar belief in “voting out” a (n) (overtly) racist man under the disguise of “checking” a racist system. This behavior proves commensurate to the suggestion that this is “not a racist country.” It suggests that all is fixable with hard work, which incites the myth of meritocracy. This mythos produces media favorites like Stacey Abrams, who gained esteem for her work to maintain a broken system under the farce of reform and civilian diligence.

As evidenced in the celebratory outcry to the Chauvin verdict, which mirrored a bamboozled joy in late 2020 under the belief that “we” “hung” a white supremacist dictator, the black community collectively hung ourselves and forfeited our moment to actualize true power under the farce of symbolic progression.

After last year, what was always 80-20 regarding those enlightened with honest ambitions to empower, revealed itself dwindled to 95-5, and I believe I am still quite generous. 2020 showed that despite the red summers of 2015-2020, a history of racist laws, and an overall corrupt government that cyclically delivers hollowed promises to the black community, many remain fixated on “good” followers occupying leadership positions.

From Barack and Michelle Obama, to CNN Anchors, to Black Panther and LoveCraft County, the preference remains for “blackness” of white creation, symbolizing freedom within bondage. Freedom within bondage is, of course, not freedom at all. In America, the liminal space that “freedom within bondage” embodies, is what the black collective calls “citizenship.” Nevertheless, the fact that white men authored the most celebrated component of contemporary black culture and that the first “black” president was a white man’s choice and grandson, illuminates that this is in fact a racist country.

Whether T’Challa, the Obamas, or Kamala Harris, it also remains evident that our anti-black adversaries have misled us many to believe that someone is coming to save us because we could not possibly do it ourselves.

What is perhaps most troubling about these now-viral assertions, is that this country may be more racist than its ever been. My point is easily elucidated by the way many overlooked Biden’s Crime Bill past in TWO monumental elections. The way the nation reduced white supremacy to a single man and his following and, as a result, enabled white nationalism to implement their terrorism through detachment and the cavalier disregard many gifted to a woman whose whole career reinforced anti-black terrorism.

This behavior cements that many truly believe that racism is circumstantial not default. What’s scarier than collectively relinquished our plight to justice and collective empowerment in acquiescing to attempts to socially and systemically assassinate us, is what’s next.

What’s next, if we do not learn and organize to overcome, is the complete erasure of “us” as a historical collective. An erasure where “black” leaders are racially ambiguous or white (this is happening already), “black” becomes a label of America’s racist past, and where blacks are migrants who caught a pre-historic Uber (or Lyft) for a “better life” in the states.