The image of black people has been egregiously tarnished by Western media, the most powerful of which operates within the United States. It is responsible for promulgating noxious and fallacious rhetoric about Black people on the world stage on a daily basis.
Through a eurocentric lens, we have been psychologically conditioned to associate black with bad… we often wear black to mourn the dead, and labels such as blackmail, blackball, blacklist, black sheep, black Friday, and Black market carry negative connotations. It is engineered to subliminally reinforce that Black people must always be looked down upon — the permanent underclass.
A melanated skin though favored by the Sun is vilified by those lacking melanin. Such poisonous dogma has corrupted the psyche of melanated people where skin whitening creams and pills are highly desirable in places like Brazil, South East Asia, and sadly on the African continent. As for India…the caste system is still in full effect. This cancer is deeply rooted in colonialism.
Just recently, it has been purported that a certain breed of monkeys in West Africa were transmitters of the monkeypox disease. The U.S. media wasted no time disseminating images of Black people infected with the disease — images that would tacitly arm non Blacks with the ammunition to further abscond Blacks. But the spurious cacophonous propaganda was interrupted by Black people on the continent who saw through the deception. Their swift tongue lashing prompted me to mimic Homer Simpson’s signature catchphrase, d’oh! Black people asserted that the images were repurposed from years prior when monkeypox was previously identified. They further clapped back with recent images of European-looking people covered with the disease. Double d’oh!
An article published in Forbes stated that the disease had “accelerated evolution,” further claiming that it had mutated fifty times from the previous outbreak. WHO’s website shows a chart outlining the infected regions. Europe and the Americas ranked high among the 42 countries hit by the outbreak. Yet the “caucasity” that the West would levy blame on Africa…. shameful and racist!
The face of the pandemic, the face of Asian hate crimes, and the face of mass shootings in the U.S. are not Black despite what mainstream media ostensibly posits. Thanks to the Black grassroots media, there is a litany of evidence to support my declaration.
Such insidious narratives are detrimental to the Black nation as a whole. We Black people must keep a perspicacious eye on the media and any political group who pride themselves on publishing this playbook, and fugaciously sound the siren by discrediting and relentlessly admonishing them publicly. We must demand primetime and front page retractions — not apologies for intentional and egregious acts — otherwise our retributions will come in the form of boycotting advertisers all the way to votes or lack thereof.