Beyond Affirmative Action, Toward Black Unity | Black Agenda Report

While there are differences between affirmative action policies in higher education and business, in our economy and socio-political reality, incorporation into the neoliberal university more often than not sets Black and other racialized students down a path for incorporation into at least the lower rungs of participation, management, and/or investment within the machine of profit- and war-making that is the United States. This is doubly so when those students and graduates are saddled with massive amounts of debt in order to get that education – the debt itself is another conservative tactic to demobilize student movements. As opposed to previously, when Black/African people primarily considered ourselves separate (if at times, unfortunately, subservient) from “white America,” now every piece of patriotic “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) propaganda tells us that we, too, can be part of the white supremacist, settler colonial project. Even the term “African-American” is a subtle tactic to suggest that we should see ourselves as part of this machine, this empire.

Emphasis mine; this is exactly why I prefer terms like Black and New Afrikan. (I'm even kind of souring a little bit on 'Black' if only because why define ourselves with what settlerdom sees as 'their opposite'? The aim should be to break that particular dyad to be able to define ourselves, from where I sit.)

The sooner that we recognize that no political or entrepreneurial hero is coming to save us, the sooner we refuse to participate in the U.S.’s ongoing project of white supremacist capitalist domination, and the sooner we stop accepting bad checks from charlatans who use their identity or affected cultural cues to hide their crooked motives, then the sooner we can unify against this death-dealing machine of U.S. and European empire and exploitation. If we have urgency for anything, it should be for this.

As this article lays out, this is hardly a defense of the bad check that affirmative action was; but a call for unity in the face of the Empire even being willing to bold-facedly renege on that, too. The settler giveth, and the settler taketh away, on some Old Testament YVWH shit. This should be where and when the lesson is learned.