Bloodstained Podcast| Episode 7| "Black People Should Not Be Capitalists"

American gangster is a 2007 American biographical crime film directed and produced by Ridley Scott and written by Stephen Zillion. The film is loosely based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas, a gangster from Lagrange, North Carolina, who smuggled heroin into the United States, on American service planes returning from Vietnam. Before being detained by a task force led by Norge Detective Ority Roberts, the film stars Denza Washington and Russell Crowe, with co-stars Ted Levine, John Ortiz, Josh Brolin, and Cuba Gooding Jr. The movie American gangster is something that I recently watched and I loved. I loved the mafia, I loved mob shit, that's something that I'm deeply entrenched in, deeply into. But it was my first time seeing that film and what I saw was probably the most apt example of capitalism, money, the economy, and black people all wrapped up into one story that ended with a bow. Between black exceptionalism, white fragility, exponential growth, stamped out by Wiley, mad that you're doing cutthroat capitalism better than they are, complete with a crazy rise to prominence, followed by a subsequent quick fall from grace, and of course a little black betrayal sprinkled on top. But the point that I'm trying to make is even when the money is legitimate, the wealth is hard work for and well earned, they still view our money as drug money. And just like they took Frank's life from him so quickly, and forcefully, they do the same to those who aren't like Frank, even just being able to break through the ceiling to have the thought of the opportunity to build wealth for our community is so rare. Look into the insane disparities when it comes to loans, house appraisals, venture capitalist funding, even the countless stories of sabotage that black farmers have to deal with by their white neighbors, it's all documented, it's all there. Black people and money have a very complicated relationship, mostly because we used to be the money, we used to be the capital, and even generations later, there are still white people who look at us as if we are sentient sacks of money. Ready to be exploited. Welcome to bloodstain episode seven black people should not believe in capitalism. Let's talk about it. All of this exists in a positive feedback loop. Do you know what I mean Protestantism leads to capitalism with a centering of evangelical Christianity, both of these institutions are used to dominate and control black people and our existence and tell us what to do. How to do it when to do it one is you to justify it while the other is used to extract our means of production in order to see insane amounts of wealth. So to think that capitalism would somehow make a space for you when even in 2024 we are shown again and again that doesn't matter how much money make or how you make it, you're still viewed the same by the system that you were once the money that they were making from it period. It doesn't matter if you're making money now with that money last, it doesn't matter if you're you have more money than all the other black people you know, is it your money or is it them allowing you to have money in participating capital, capitalism by their rules. This is going to be a conversation about a lot of my feelings about black people and capitalism. This is going to be of course a little bit of a history lesson about how intense and deeply ingrained black people. Were to the building of most western nations in the building of the wealth of most western nations that they use to control our world as we know it. We're going to talk about it all because a lot of people don't even know the half of how important slavery was to building up a lot of these countries that like to dominate us to this day. If you haven't noticed it by now, capitalism is a snake that is biting its own tail. We are existing in late stage capitalism and as you see, everything is starting to crumble around you, all the infrastructures, all the things you were promised, all of these things were really promises based off of a debt that is just growing by the day. There's like one of Asop's fables. I don't know which number it is, but it's a pretty simple fable. Basically, a country man comes, uh, uh, a stumbles upon the existence of this special goose and the special goose is able to lay a golden egg. Now it doesn't lay a ton of golden eggs. You can't force it to lay a million golden eggs a day. It lays one golden egg a day at a specific time of day and that's just how it works. Right? Okay. Well, the man sees a golden egg. He's excited about the golden egg. He's starting to think of the possibilities of this golden egg. And as he's thinking of what to do now with this new found means of money capital, he begins to brainstorm how he can sell the golden eggs at the market. So he waits a while collects a bunch of golden eggs from the egg and goes to show goes to the market to sell the eggs. The eggs sell out and he's out of inventory. So now he wants the goose to continue to make and produce eggs. The issue is the demand for the eggs is growing, but the production of the eggs is still staying the same. This is the only goose he knows that can do this. It can only create one egg a day and now he has a crazy customer base that wants the eggs every time he shows up to down. He can't do that. He can't fulfill that need. So what he ends up doing is his group. He allows his greed to take over and he kills the goose. Thinking that if he kills the goose, then there will be more golden eggs inside. He will figure out how the golden eggs are being made without the goose and this and that. But what ends up happening is he just kills his entire ability to provide for himself because he overpromise, he underdelivered and he killed his only means of production. He didn't understand that this was a finite resource that could not be exploited and he decided to just murder his one chance, his one ability to fulfill the needs and create demand and quarter the market because he's the only one with the goose. And the goose was consistently langled in eggs. The point of this story is definitely it's a story about greed, but what I take from this story is like how I view capitalism as a whole and how it functions. This idea that once you find something that is actually profitable, the way in which the systems that be continue to basically murder the goose in order to be able to make the most money possible, right. Slavery is one of those instances where the people murdered the goose. The idea of enslaving people not paying them, treating them horribly, treating them like machines, treating them like cattle. In order to get the most that you can out of a crop because you're not paying the labor force, he's exactly what killing the egg is. And the result of killing the egg, killing the goose is what we're living through at this point in time. Capitalism is a true crime story for everybody that is involved in it. It has a huge body count worldwide. But specifically talking about how capitalism and the concepts of capitalism continue to underscore the justification for slavery in that time period and what it did needs to be discussed more. I've said this before, but I'll rewind it again. There's something I took a class called on nations and nationalism and college. And in that class, we discussed wholeheartedly this idea that nations are created by man and then the mythos around those borders are created and then you convince the population to believe in that mythos. Overargingly in America, what we believe in more than anything is capitalism, no matter what they say, no matter how they say it, no matter how they put it, no matter what they put in front of you. That is what end all be all it's about the money and period. So when the idea of what America was supposed to believe in what America was going to be, the foundations of American are based in the foundations of Protestantism as a religion. I've talked about this before. I'll go through it. Look up Martin Luther. Look up how he basically went against the Roman Catholic Church because they were a hell of corrupt, all of this stuff. They took advantage of people or trying to get people to pay their way to heaven, which obviously couldn't be guaranteed. Martin Luther had issues with that. He made the 99th thesis or something like that. He went to the Roman Catholic Church in his area and banged them and put them on the door of the Roman Catholic Church. Basically Protestantism was created and from there the tenants in the Church of Protestantism came after. A lot of Protestants were some of the early people who came over to the United States. Because of that, as people are kind of creating, coming, killing the native populations that live there, creating a bigger place of their dominance and stuff like that, establishing the United States. Like I said, an identity needs to be formed. And because a lot of these people were Protestant, the tenant of Protestantism started to leak through into the foundation of what we'd later consider to be capitalism, which is the foundation of America as we know it. In Protestantism, your award for working very hard, being very pious, being very non-vain, humble, all of these things, and the more you work hard, the more God sees that you're working hard in his image, he blesses you. So that it got interpreted once the secular nature kind of got a whole of that mindset. That got interpreted as the harder you work, the more money you gain, it's a clear indication that God likes what you're doing and he's blessing you and your family with abundance. And because of that, the idea of money, the deification of the wealthy, and all of those things, whether or not they deserve it or not, whether or not they were good people in getting it or not, whether it was moral or not, that doesn't mean anything. The simple fact that they have that money is proof that God is blessing them in their family, which in turn leads us to this easy slippery slope of deifying the wealthy, which we deal with on a daily basis. Look at how Elon Musk's view, look at how Jeff Bezos is viewed in the United States. People will follow an assort any day to support what they got going on when it's grossly immoral. I say all this to say all the foundations of Western society, specifically America are cutthroat capitalism point blank period money over anything because in their mind money meant that God saw what you were doing and you were doing your big one. Right. Enter in slavery, which is obviously one of the grossest most apt examples of capitalism being completely removed from anything near morality, the idea of dominating people, the idea of using all aspects of society to dominate this group of people to make sure they're indoctrinated in a very specific way to make sure the world and society around them is indoctrinated. Very specific way in order to view them as a means to an end and through that system, we don't care if you die, we don't care if you get sick, we don't care if we, you know, break up your family, we're going to use tactics to continue to manipulate you because even though we think you're subhuman, we're treating you as if you're human because we know exactly what would break apart a human psyche and that's how we're treating you, right. This is a foundation. Okay. This is a foundation cutthroat. No feelings involved because at the end of the day, if I make the most money, that indicates a lot that brings me a lot socially that brings a lot to me and a lot of power in a society that rewards that it's not about the how you got it. It's about do you got it or not right now. Okay. That fable that movie, all of these things tie into just the tenants of greed when it comes to capitalism in the case of American gangster with Denzel Washington, he is a drug dealer in his community, but he also has the duality of filling in a role that society was not filling he was doing Turkey drives, he was helping people out, he was making sure people in his community had money. The kids were taking care of the kids were looked after he was filling a role that society would not fill because of the racial hierarchy that came out of slavery. So instead, he built he built his own way and because of that, his dualities, yes, he was in the drug trade, yes, he was violent, all of these things are true, but at the same time, he was still providing something that the government wasn't even providing for his own people. So what does that say if he's evil, right, if he made money the way he made money through selling drugs, through human trafficking, through killing people, through stealing, then what does that mean about the American government and if he's using that in order to help his people and his people alone and amassing that to provide for the communities that are not provide for a bowl in his own eyes, you know, obviously he sold drugs. You know, what does what when we look at it at the individual, it's pretty easy to say, oh, that guy's a gangster, that guy's a mafia boss, that guy's a bad guy, he deserves to have everything stripped away, but when you look at what he did for his personal community, and you look at what white people white settler colonialist did for the government and for the system of America to exist, and those things start to match up, it starts to be like, okay, well, this isn't about morality, this is definitely about a race thing, and if we're going to have that conversation, then we can. Because if it was really about a morality thing, you would be taking a ton of people to tax for what they're doing, and that's just not the case, the, the world of justice is not placed on everybody the same way, and for black people, there's a, I think truly a humiliation, ritual, when it comes to how we get it, when we get it, and what we do with it, and how they make an example out of us, you are not getting money within the confines that we allow you to, then now you're off script, and now you deserve to be making it made an example of. The people who are in charge of slavery, the people whose descendants exist in our unit, in United States, the state still benefit holy, holy from the existence of slavery to this today, okay, and we, it does not behooves us to try and walk around this on thin ice to try and act like this isn't the case, this is 100,000% the reality and the case. The people who exist in this country who are related and descendants of slave owners continue to reap the benefits of slavery, living in the United States to this day, and I will venture off to say that most people don't really know how much they, the foundation of slavery helped their existence in 2024, a lot of people don't know how much they owe to the enslaved population of this country period. Cotton as a crop of cultivation goes back hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years, American cotton dates back to the early years of the colonies, it begins in cotton fields, tobacco fields, sugar plantations, rice patties, everyone knew it had potential to be a cash crop, right, it just wasn't created in an efficient way, the system to extract money from cotton as a cash crop was not created yet. It was extremely tedious to harvest cotton because of the seeds that were in the fibers of the cotton, so people could not produce it enough at a big scale, even though there was a need for it, even though it was valuable, even though people could definitely use it, it could not be produced at a big scale because the cotton gin hadn't been invented. It took about 10 hours for an enslaved person to take out all the seeds from a single pound of cotton at a time, and that is disproportionate to the cost of those being sold for, so for it to be worth it, something had to give when it came to the production of cotton, for it to be profitable. Of course, there was the invention of the cotton gin, and that basically created this cotton boom. Eli Whitney created it, it basically was an instrument that could be used to remove the seeds from the cotton in a very efficient way, and then the cotton industry exploded, and it took over the entire country. Now the issue started to become, now the new issue was there wasn't enough land available for people to produce cotton, where did they find the land? Oh, they took it from the Native Americans, of course. They stole it from the Native Americans, of course. Basically, the American government dispatched the army into specific areas in the south, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida to name a few, and it acquired the lands from, not acquired. It stole, murdered, cheated, stole all the land from the Native populations in those regions, and sold the land back to white people on the cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, okay? The United States had millions of acres, all of a sudden, that could be cultivated for cotton production, all of a sudden. Again, things don't happen in a vacuum. The history between Native populations in this country and Black people in this country, specifically Black and saved people are deeply intertwined, are suffering as deeply intertwined as we are created as a tool, as a means of production, to create the wealth in this capitalistic society that they're going to draw from from generations to come. The Native populations at the time had control and a monopoly over the land that was required in order for that to happen. So, as we became more useful as a population of people being dominated and enslaved, the Native populations became more of a nuisance than anything in a boundary between exponential capitalistic growth and not having that and not having access to that because they owned the land. You know, we had the production, they owned the land, so now it was time to figure out how we could own the land and the means of production, right? And it was violent and it was disgusting. This is a white privilege though. This is the generational wealth that that we be talking about, right? Because they sent the government sent armies to get land to sell to white families on the cheapity cheap. Some of these families still have this land in their family line to this day. And this is what we be talking about, that extra that extra help that you guys got in terms of the economy. I'm saying help capitalistically. It's obviously wrong and immoral to steal people's land, but you know what I'm saying? This is where you get the edge. This point in history that people rarely discuss. Now, this is when the slave trade completely, completely takes off in the United States. Like, it goes from zero to a thousand because once they got the land that was needed and then they also harness cotton as a cash crop. Now it was about the population of people, the slave labor force that they needed. So in 1790, we had about 700,000 enslaved workers. And by 1850, that number had skyrocketed to three million enslaved workers. And the booming cotton industry was driving most of that growth. Now, even though we are taught about the cotton gin in a very specific way, like monetarily, right? Monetarily, the cotton gin was that thing was that bitch that turned this little experiment of the United States into something that actually could be something, a place that could actually have the money and power to dominate the world, which is what it did. People look at the cotton gin as a turning point economically. But the truth is people don't consider what it meant for the enslaved populations. Now that there was a more efficient means of production, right? That meant their quotas got higher. That meant that slavery was way more brutal because quotas needed to be bent because cotton now was king. And there was a scramble. So in order to compete now with all these people who had land, got it from the cheapity cheap, from the government, now we have to really put you in gear and work you so hard so that we can squeeze as much production out of you. We're not paying you, we're not feeding you, we're making the most money we can. This economy, centralizing the cashiest king, cotton being king, relentlessly focused on increasing cotton productivity at the direct detriment to the enslaved Africans daily lives, right? I've said this before in earlier episodes, but people don't understand that there's a distinct areas of slavery. Slavery isn't a model, even in its time. Like yes, by definition, slavery is a certain specific thing. But the slavery of the 1619s versus a slavery of the 1850s are two different slaves that need to be discussed as such. There are two different situations with two different levels of domination that change as a social conditions change as the cotton gin became popular and the ability to harness cotton became central slavery went through another metamorphosis into something that was way more brutal and focused solely on productivity. A lot of people look at that time frame and think like, oh, they were enslaving people brutality. They had no means of understanding true bureaucracy. They were not rational because of these things. But the truth is the way in which the cotton plantation actually works, like in the economy, the structures that be the different levels of management that were required to actually have a productive cotton plantation were very, very similar to that of a regular corporation to this day. They said this in 1619 as well, but it's something that people just don't understand. There was control. There was people who actually understood what they were doing. This was brought down logically to the tea. This was mathematically calculated about how much production, how much food, how much is everything was based on this economy. So understanding how intricate, intricate it actually was in its functionality at the time would be who it would be who people to really understand that because this wasn't just like, oh, you know, the slaves did the cotton. It was like, okay, there's middle management. They're peeping track of quotas. They are making sure people met their quotas. There is this, you know, corporal punishment in these specific ways. There is hierarchy within the white people on the plantation. And you had to know that like this was a very constructed situation. We are sold a very specific version of slavery. Like slavery is like, oh, it's a family plantation. It's grandma's farm. This and this and this. This is how we do it. You know what I mean? It's passed out from generations and that may be true. But specifically in the Mississippi Valley where, you know, these plantations were massive. It was more attuned to a corporation of today than it was attuned to like a little family farm. And we have just a couple slaves. No, it was corporations. It was corporate. It was super corporate annuals were developed. Courses of study were developed in order to make your plantation as productive as possible. Things and tactics were developed much like a corporation, much like all of that people books were developed. So plantation owners could read that and learn on how to be a more productive owner of enslaved people on their plantation. That is how much a entire economies, other economies were developed based on this. Okay. The idea of a corporation is very much attuned to the creation of a slave plantation during this era where cotton was came. The quotas, which is something that if you have ever been in service, if you ever, you know, even work to job that was based on commission, you understand these quotas, right? It's important to meet these quotas in your job so you can keep your job. But there were quotas for the slaves. And it was this thing of like, you know, there's quotas for the slaves. And if you did not meet your quota, you would get beaten senseless. And that was the backbone of this entire economy, the ability to terrorize and physically torture these people into these positions, into submission. So a lot of times these beatings would be very public. They'd be put on display. They'd be brutal. They'd be long. People would pass out, wake up, vomit, pregnant woman, you know, would be forced to, you know, if they were slowing down because of their pregnancy, you still had to meet that quota boogie. So they were no one, no one was exempt from getting beat in terms of not meeting their quotas because it was a part of a greater economy, a greater system. When the prices rose on the English market for cotton, enslaved workers were punished and beat more in the West. Do you see what I mean? It was about squeezing the productivity out of these individual people as hard as you can in order to extract the most that you can from them. So when things were good, you were getting treated worse on the plantation. Like I said, this is an incredibly important point because none of this stuff is happening in a vacuum. The economy, the pricing of cotton on the global stage is affecting the individual relationships that people have on the plantation and how it affects their material circumstances, which goes to show how intertwined, enslaved people, what happened on the plantation, on the micro level had an impact on the global economy. These things are intertwined deeply. But as you see this and as you understand this story, you start to see parallels in your life in corporate America, these certain expectations, there's no work life balance. You're supposed to extract extract extract and work and work and work. You can sleep when you're dead. All of this is based out of slavery as the blueprint for a lot of these corporations and how they treat their employees. Now you're called employees before you were called slaves, okay? You are expected to produce work under this system and you are monitored and controlled in a very specific way. That is attuned to how they would control and monitor the production of their slaves. And the goal of slavery was to squeeze as much work out of you as possible until you died working. There have been so many examples recently about how the corporations don't actually care for you. They can say what they want. They can sell you a bunch of lies. The goal is the money. They don't care if you work there for 40 years or two seconds. They don't give a damn about you if you're unproductive and you're not bringing them the mula. So it's important to understand that connection because if slavery was a blueprint, what are you? What are you working in corporate America under these same cannons, you know? By the beginning of the Civil War, the average enslaved person picked cotton at a 400% increased rate than their enslaved counterpart in 60 years earlier. This is important. Okay. Like I said, in many episodes, the last episode slavery and Christianity, a lot of slavery is in a monolith. It ebbs and flows. It does its own thing depending on the context of the time. Cotton is king now. So now a 60 years prior to cotton being king, things were different in terms of how they dominated and controlled slaves. But that's not the only like bureaucratic thing that came out of slavery. The idea of corporate work and how that works and hierarchy within corporations and how that works. Slavery is a blueprint for that. But on top of that, different things that we don't attune or associate with slavery were very much deeply intertwined with slavery at this point in time. Slavery is expensive. You have to feed people, have to close people, if you do a lot of things. And the average plantation owner did not have that but a much liquid cash to be able to provide for an enslaved population as, you know, people assume that they would be. So what did they do? Banks, banks. If you were a potential plantation owner and you wanted to expand your operation, you needed more money, you needed more capital. They turned to the banks and they took out mortgages on their enslaved population. Yes. Yes. Yes. We typically associate mortgages with home buying. If you can't afford a specific house, you get a mortgage mortgage out on that house alone with a bank to be able to pay for that house and then you pay the bank back for what you borrowed, right? You leverage the physical acid of the house against the mortgage taking out through the bank to buy it. So if you can't pay your mortgage, your house gets taken away. That's what foreclosure is. The concept of mortgages has been around for a long time in this country. But in the early days, it wasn't about mortgages. It was about enslaved people. Plantation owners would ask for money from the bank and leverage their enslaved workforce against that loan. That is super important. What we are told about slavery is characterized as backward, a backward time with no rules and nor morals and there was no infrastructure and there was no this and there was no that and people were dumb and it was back in the day and everyone was doing it. All of the excuses they characterized it to be. But the concept of a mortgage also came out of slavery. The concept of borrowing money, all of these require intricate systems that are still in existence to this day and a lot of that slavery was a blueprint for those systems to exist on a wide scale, right? So instead of leveraging your house or leveraging your enslaved population for those who were enslaved, mortgaging your enslaved workforce was easier than mortgaging your homes and other assets. Land was not worth as much as it is today. They were giving it away on the slide. They mortgaged enslaved workers to buy more enslaved workers in order to cultivate more land and to great more wealth for themselves by allowing people to mortgage enslaved people. People were mortgaging people and allowed global markets to get invested in the slave trade. So even if you weren't directly involved in slavery having slaves on your land intending to them and being in the economy of slavery and farming and shit like that, you could still buy into the institution of slavery because you could participate within that economy in the free market. So what they would do is the national, this bank would give a slave back mortgage to a few plantation owners, then they would bundle that debt and make something called a bond. Then they would sell that bond to investors all over the western world. They can be a part of that and make money off of slavery without actually being involved in slavery. For so long, slavery has been framed as this moral mistake in this blight in our history and its human nature and all of these things. But then you start to pull back and see all of the systems that were created in place to hold onto slavery as a means of production, all the things that reified slavery's existence, that proved that it wasn't just a moral flake, it's failure. It was a failure on all aspects of our society, not only that, but it created its own form of systems that have been used since then. Though it was created out of slavery, hierarchical racialized hierarchy, ideas about corporations and how corporations were, mortgages and how you're able to mortgage your home and all of that's based in slavery. All of these things continue to exist today. But people don't talk about it within the context of slavery. So people don't understand how important slavery was to the development of our modern life, not just monetarily, but just the systems that exist within our life today, right? Banking, modern banking loans, all of this stuff related to slavery, 100%. But what it goes to show is how intentional all these aspects are to our day-to-day lives. These people had the mind to do this in the context of slavery for a reason for a purpose. And so to act like you can have these institutions without acknowledging that their basis is within slavery and understanding how because of that, those institutions inherently have biases that excess out and continue to persecute us on the economic stage, you know, as black people, as a black population. It's just so disingenuous. Like you cannot remove these things from slavery. All of these numbers can be traced. All of this work can be traced. All the bureaucracy can be traced to individuals who thought of this. And instead, we do, we try and add, you know, oh, nuance and misty, oh, we can't we can't trace. It was just how people thought of at the time. All this morality and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. It just was of the times when you can actually trace these things to individual places and individual people and trace the wealth that was created back to chattel American slavery. These numbers can be traced to show that the majority of credit given out was from England. Years after they abolished the slave trade in 1807, they were still directly funding slavery in the United States. So you see the hypocrisies when you follow the money. You see how capitalism has no morals. You see that because the same people that will pontificate and say England was ahead of the United States and abolishing slavery will not discuss how England was funding slavery and benefited from slavery still existing in the United States at the same time after they abolished it in their place. They just weren't directly involved with it, but they were still investing in it and getting money off of it. Slavery allowed America to develop into what it is today. Slavery gave was like what spinach is to pop by. Slavery is what you know steroids are to you know, WWE wrestlers and bodybuilders like that is what slavery was and people need to address it as such because a lot of the shit that you're comfortable with the fact that you even have a country that goes from coast to coast all related to slavery. The money that was created, the exponential wealth that was created generationally in slavery times did not just disappear. It had to go somewhere. The money went somewhere. There were entire systems created from that and from that system, it enriched the entire Western world. Slavery enriched the entire Western world and we're not exaggerating when we're saying this society was built on our backs and our labor. We're not trying to say that just to be dramatic. You wouldn't have America as is, had slavery not existed and the Western nations in Europe would not exist or would not be what they are without the wealth that they extracted from the triangle trade as well no matter what they try to tell you about how they're not racist. It's all related to each other and so it all kind of boils down to this idea of corporate greed and capitalism and those concepts of being the only, being the most powerful, being always trying to extract value for the sake of value, for the sake of having the most. That's how Western dominance became truly dominant. There was times when it was shaky. We were born in a time when it would just always existed for our people but the truth is slavery was that girl that swapped it and really solidified Western domination in the world. That is why as a black woman, as somebody who you know understands like who has a being in sociology, it's hard for me to like blindly support the idea and the institution of capitalism. Of course I participate in capitalism in order to survive and I'm trying to participate in it in a way that can at least educate people and hopefully provide information or provide a basis of information for people to look into. But the truth of the matter is, as a black person, capitalism was not created for you to participate as a human being in. It was for you to be bought and sold within, right? So at that point, when you realize that, fundamentally, the people that still control the strings of capitalism are not going to let you participate and succeed within it without some sort of repercussion unless you're showing up in the way that they want you to show up. So when we talk about people like Diddy or Kanye or Jay-Z, these people who've been able to amass massive amounts of wealth in this society, even though they're trying to rebrand themselves to be for the people and about the people, the point is they're playing the game and they're definitely invested in the status quo continuing. They're invested in the scarcity mindset. They're invested in those things because if they are not invested in those things, then their accomplishments don't mean anything. They're invested in the status quo so they will never inherently be revolutionary. They will never inherently lead you to freedom because that would mean what they've amassed. Wouldn't mean anything anymore because there will be different rules of engagement. So it's important for us to understand not only how important enslaved people were to the economy on the global stage, not only how many intricate systems and economies came out of slavery that we still use to this day, but also how it amass the wealth that changed things for the Western world to become powerful and dominant. But also on a black person, a black person, a notechad or a person, a person, a no period because now everyone's suffering from the fucking teeth of capitalism. It's not just black people. It's not just marginalized people. What I will say to you is capitalism doesn't work. It's a top-down thing. It doesn't work when everyone's winning. It's scarcity. That's the point. So if you are trying to engage with capitalism right now, particularly as a black person with that history connected to that history, it will never save you because you are still going to be in control. You are still going to be controlled by those who control capitalism and those who control capitalism are the white people who created it and directly benefit from it. If they allowed you to make that money, that's because they allowed you to make that money. To preach that as revolutionary action is a problem for me, and it goes to show how deeply ingrained this idea of capitalism being king and how capitalism truly is a true crime story and how our fraught relationship with the economy and with money really revolves around the fact that we aren't supposed to be making money from the economy at all. We are the workers. We are the workers. We are the people. We are the capitals to be bought and sold. And if you don't agree with that and if you don't understand that, I don't know what to do for you, babe. The constant deliberate attempts of working us to death and unaliving us and mass quantities make a huge case for cultural genocide and capitalism is one of the drivers, one of the biggest drivers of death in our entire legacy, the existence of capitalism. So to think that it's going to save you if you participate by the rules that white people set and you don't think that they're going to pull that rug from under you, you have got to be mistaken. And there's a reason why those very specific people that are named are used and touted to speak on behalf of the black community because they are doing it right. They're indoctrinating you. That's the point. These are your leaders to look up to. We killed maimed ex out all the leaders that were talking about true revolutionary action. These are the leaders, these rappers. So whenever there's a political thing, we're calling snoop. We're calling iced tea. There's a reason for that. It's all a concerted effort to keep us ignorant about our truth, about our power, what we really contributed to this land. You know, for free, what we are owed, it's all part of that. That being said, Black Lives Matter free Palestine till it's backwards. Check me out on all my socials. Link in the bio for all my socials to follow me on all of those things. Make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Make sure to five stars as if you're listening to the audio only five stars as podcasts. Leave a review if you like it. Please, please, please, it helps me out. I want to be doing this full time. So the more you do that, the more I can leverage that to make sure to do this full time. That being said, I love you guys so much. Please donate to the humanitarian links in my bio as well as helping Hassan and baby Judy escape Gaza and help the migrant workers stuck in Lebanon escape Lebanon, the African migrant markers. I love you guys.