Gaza and the United States Ain’t as Different as You’d Like to Believe
I am a Black marginalized person who has grown up in the amerikkkan propaganda machine that continuously distractes me with ridiculous psychological and physical check points meant to assess my willingness to cosign on my own oppression.
I learned from a very young age that to survive this system, I needed to be silent. I needed to be obedient. I should never ask questions and just do as I’m told. I learned that when I was quiet and obedient and people harmed me, it was always my fault. It was my fault for being noticed, for doing what they said, and it didn’t matter whether or not I spoke up about it. My options comprised of carrying the shame in secret or telling others and carrying that shame and their scorn publicly. The lesson: learn to never let it happen again. I was supposed to figure out how to protect myself without making it obvious that I found people dangerous and harmful.
My options for navigating this fuckshit known as amerikkkan culture have always been complete garbage.
Black people who know our history in this violent ass society know that we have been terrorized since our ancestors were trafficked to this land. That every attempt to liberate ourselves, even using their rules, have been met with swift and overwhelming violence. Everything from the tone of our voices to the way we walk is heavily monitored and punished by the settler colonialist dictators for daring to be different from their prescribed norms. We are perpetual victims of violence perpetrated by people who refuse to acknowledge their violence. They truly see the world and every person, place, and thing on it as something that had to have demonstrable benefit to them just to be tolerated. And by tolerate, I mean used to death. If your existence does not benefit them, they will destroy you. This is not hyperbole. This is historical fact – something they keep working to suppress and currently failing to do.
The propaganda machine teaches us from childhood that we owe the oligarchs our labor. That we must work to benefit them and they tie our survival to it as much as they can. We are tracked under the auspice of receiving benefits, but considering how Black people have been intentionally excluded from national benefits, even basic employment, we know those benefits were never really meant for us.
There have always been social rules in amerikkkan society, the classism of their british roots – roots that demand people shed their individuality and embrace a white identity that would provide the illusion of shielding them from violence while granting them provisional access to the benefits that white power manufactured. For people who do not physically match the physicality of settler-colonialists, etiquette is used to separate the controllable from the rebels. Our adherence to these rules determine whether we can get even fringe access to shelter, food, and clean water and those who cannot be obedient are forced under penalty of death. The police are the weapons used to enforce this.
The reality of amerikkkan life is that none of us are free. We are trained to comply from birth. Our parents train us to conform out of hope for our safety. Conforming guarantees nothing for us, but for those who have created a “survive or die” society, it makes the population predictable. Manageable. Controlled. It’s how they can poison an entire town’s water supply but still have the majority of those poisoned people go to work and pay their bills. We are expendable assets in a global game of Risk – a game that becomes less and less risky as we both conform and violently punish those who do not.
So, as much as you want to claim that we are different from Gaza, we are not. Indigenous people were and continue to be massacred by the same western settler-colonialists whose descendants are currently committing genocide in countries all over the globe. We’ve just been taught to accept fascism under the illusion of democracy from a country that used said fascism to become “great”. A people who claimed to represent their residents while abducting millions of Black people. A country that currently enslaves millions of people under the guise of justice. They are the same. The israeli government is yet another violent arm of the united states and they don’t care that we can see what they are because they will use every tool they’ve created over the years to silence us.
They can and will ruin you financially. They will physically harm you. They will murder you. As great a tool as social media is, they are actively suppressing posts supporting Palestine. The news media is using the old school template of refusing to report on what’s actually happening. They are murdering journalists. They have unleashed the police to quell protests supporting Palestine. The united states has openly pushed for genocide of the Palestinian people, going so far as to label any defense of Palestine as anti-Semitic. And they are willing and able to go farther.
It’s been happening in African countries for centuries. It’s been happening in the united states since inception. They punished the fuck out of Haiti for hundreds of years, all for daring to successfully resist. White supremacy drives this shit. That settler-colonialist ideology drives all this. People, white people specifically, literally deputize themselves to enforce the laws and social rules they have been told everyone must follow. When white people step out of line, they often get warnings. When Black people step out of line, we are often punished to the fullest extent of the law.
It has never been about the people – only about those who seek to control us. And control us they do, which you’ll admit if you’re willing to be honest about it.
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