Jay-Z was ours. Our poet, our scribe and griot of the thrown-away places. The warehouses and containment camps where colonial society has stored the undesirables—euphemistically called the projects, the slum and the ghetto, the colonized sector, the hood. One who made it out. Spectacularly so. Not only that, he recorded his and, vicariously, our inner dialogue, transforming our get-out-of-this-neighborhood plots scribbled nightly on twin beds and kitchen tables into epic. 

We who come from the corners of the world where clothes are hung out on clotheslines, and are not considered unsightly—or where, despite pressing your lips into as genuine-looking a smile as you can muster, you still walk home in the rain, soggy resume in hand, knowing you lost them as soon as you entered the interview room—we who do not have office break rooms and golf courses to loiter in, and so settle for stoops and street lamps—we reached out for Jay-Z. We did not look up to the back-of-the-cereal-box Black History Month figures we were offered and told to be inspired by and content with, so that we too could aspire to be inoffensive. To become the Black bootstrap-pullers who “didn’t let the past hold us back,” and shooed away all the fuss about anti-Blackness and structural racism almost to the point of holocaust denial. Black forgive-niks ever-forgiving, ever shoe-shining the “American Dream” and ready to hurl their success at any Black person starved and punished into delirium who confesses they are having a difficult time. We were not blasting audiobooks of the life and times of George Washington Carver in our Walkmans. It was Jay-Z’s Life and Times we listened to. And Nas, and Biggie, and Pac. And Lauryn. We decided upon our own mentors and heroes, and saved the boring selections of unproblematic “blacks” for our homework assignments—themselves soundtracked by the drug dealers’ bars in our headphones. 

Jay-Z spoke cinema. One that ran counter to the forever-mugshot of ’90s-00s news discourse, which presented underclass Black neighborhoods as crime-infested wastelands of near-people who had no culture but crime and dependence on government handouts. In the news, American discourse laundered the minstrel show, making respectable both depictions of the sentimental and dopey slave crooning for mama, as well as the criminal “black” only robbing, loitering, replicating, and threatening the otherwise idyllic plantation homes. Jay-Z, instead, painted a picture of us in our vitality. His albums showcased a multi-hued Blackness of individual lives set against the dismal and treacherous, but nevertheless picturesque, surroundings of our informal imprisonment. 

Self-appointed ghetto spokesman, and deservedly so, he presented Marcy Housing Projects in Brooklyn where the “news cameras never come[…] where the grams were slung, niggas vanish every summer, where the blue vans would come / we throw the work in the can and run,” and where there are “chicks wishing they ain’t have to strip to pay tuition.” He smuggled our self-authored hood narratives in hit singles. He humanized, and so revolted against American caricature. Grabbing the mantle from Richard Wright and James Baldwin, he defends the Black poor’s humanity, rebuking the media on “Renegade”:

I give you the news with a twist, it’s just his ghetto point of view

The renegade, you been afraid, I penetrate pop culture 

Bring ‘em a lot closer to the block where they pop toasters

And they live with they moms[…]

How you rate music that thugs with nothin’ relate to it?

I help them see they way through it, not you.

We loiterers and job-resistant were in his verses depicted, finally, in our own likeness. Where we could be proud, even if angered, that we were warehoused in places like “Marcy Houses, where the boys die by the thousand / back when Pam was on Martin[…] when Slick Rick made Mona Lisa[…] fat laces in your shoe, I’m talking bustin’ off the roof.” He busted through all of the new Blackface papier-mâché, all the narratives about “uneducated street thugs and welfare queens,” “pet-eaters and AIDS carriers,” and our homes and cousins were there beneath, and the corner store, and fat laces and rooftops, rec room DJs and buildings. “I started in lobbies, now parley with Saudis / I’m a Sufi to goofies, I can probably speak Farsi.” Colonial racism preaches from every podium it can find that the lobby-dwellers, the single mothers in salons, the crack dealers and smokers are single-cell, uncomplex and so disposable, nuisance organisms. He was in our ears reminding us that the devil is a liar.

Of course, we had other griots. Those of use who were curious about Black liberation at least as much as we imbibed Black sub-working class poetry had the understated pan-Africanism of Jay-Z’s New York City rival, Gordon Parks with a pen, Nas: “I’d open every cell in Attica, send them to Africa.” Lauryn Hill would encourage you: “sweet prince of the ghetto, your kisses taste like Amaretto.” Queen Latifah would defend you, Sister Souljah and Dead Prez would arm you, Mos Def and Talib Kweli would articulate the colonial border-transgressing community we all felt to be in under the Pan-African rebel flag of the Red, Black and Green. 

In fact, it is difficult to find a serious Hip-Hop artist in the ’90s that did not consciously set out to provide a counternarrative to the colonial depiction of Blackness standard in American society—whatever the angle. Oscar Micheaux, James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange weren’t dead or inaccessible. They lived on in translation, were committed to memory and recited leaning on the hoods of Acuras or while pointing to a du-rag on the wall above the convenience store clerk’s head. Jay-Z was but one—often a reluctant one, certainly an underappreciated one—but one of our documentarians against white power.

The reason he is not often counted as one has nothing to do with the force and influence of his literature but because of a respectability politics even among we, the “Black conscious.” The conscious being we, the self-appointed defenders of Black communities—perhaps less deservedly so. We who read Marcus Garvey and did spoken word with Ausar Auset references and flooded the African street festivals. We who, above all, were conscious of the fact that the United States, or Europe, or even post-apartheid South Africa did not contain the necessary ingredients to pull ourselves away from anti-Black governance, and so theorized and organized in defense of our communities against society. For many of us, the conscious, who “stayed woke”—who stay “woke” despite the racists now telling us not to—he was a drug dealer. Worse, he was a drug dealer for whom art often seemed almost an afterthought. This made him dirty.

Can’t Knock the Hustle

“Nine-to-five is how you survive, I ain’t trying to survive, I’m tryna live it to the limit and love it a lot.” —Jay-Z, “D’evils”. 

Jay-Z, quite literally, announced his arrival into popular consciousness via the declaration that he is that Black man on the corner dealing drugs. The “hustler” from the socially dead places of the slums and projects intrudes into the public eye with the first track on his first album, Reasonable Doubt: “Can’t Knock The Hustle.” The song is a conscious defense, and glamorization, of rejecting the strictures of a working-class life and choosing the more perilous, more condemned, high-risk, high-reward drug dealer’s life: “Yo, y’all niggas lunching, punching the clock / My function is to make much and lay back munching.”

It is this category of life that Frantz Fanon, theorist of settler-colonialist society, describes as the lumpenproletariat: peasants and descendants of peasants chased from the countryside into the town as their land is stolen and they are dispossessed. Ordered to get a job where there are no jobs, they become sex workers, street hawkers, numbers runners, scammers, artists, pimps, welfare and student-loan recipients and carjackers. Jay-Z represented a perspective from those who instead choose to make their ends meet, at least in part, through the illicit or “informal economy.” 

  The full-time hustler is not, as the state and social services describe, “unemployed,” but anti-job. Conscious that they do not want to subject themselves to the half-life of capitalist exploitation—or, worse, the quarter-life of racialized and gendered exploitation in the legacy of a colonial world, where they are told through emails what their foreparents were told by signpost: that they need not apply. If there is only one life to live, the hustler’s philosophy is that it should not be spent in subservience. One should not condemn oneself to the purgatory of the working poor. Especially as having a job-while-Black is job insecurity. A job can be slapped out of your hands. It is where salaries are guaranteed to be unequal. Where your mannerisms and speech must be flat ironed out, and Karens watch through the blinds of their cubicle for any false move, after you’ve made it past the Karens who snitch on those trespassing the color line that separates the “inner city” and arts districts, suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods. Then and now, jobs are not the rosy experiences depicted by the 3C-haired Black people in the TV commercials—they are probation. And the only way out is through meteoric rise through superhuman talent. “At my arraignment screaming / All us blacks got is sports and entertainment, until we even / Thieving, as long as I’m breathing / Can’t knock the way a nigga eating, fuck you even.” As hustler, Jay-Z violently rejects parental advice, the judgement of law and society, the capitalist machine reducing the worker to replaceable tendons and nerve-endings, and is proud of exerting vengeance, not a demand for change, against apartheid’s inequality.

Whether pimp or numbers runner, fake bag seller or skin-bleach selling hair braider, however, the shadow economy is not exempt from the predations and cycles of the society that birthed it. “You know in more than one way cocaine numbs the brain / All I did was think about how the funds once came,” Jay-Z says on “You Must Love Me,” reflecting on how the love of money so ruined his empathy it led him to sell his mother crack. By Jay-Z’s own account, a successful escape from poverty and exploitation required inhumanity, be it shooting his own brother or failing to contact his lover for months doing business in small towns—to say nothing of aiding and abetting that colonial technique of quelling revolt through the distribution and management of intoxicants. 

On one hand, colonies banned “natives” from consuming liquor when it undermined their production on settler farms in Kenya. On the other, they allowed liquor stores to flood the ghetto, performed MK-Ultra mind control experiments with LSD in American prisons, and ensured the rising Black nationalism of the ’70s was hampered by heroin and crack a decade later. It is now easily said that the raised black fists of the ’70s collapsed into addiction and weak will, and that revolutionaries like Huey Newton “died a crack addict” rather than were stealthily assassinated. As in police shootings of Black people, our movements are also framed for their own murder. In their confessional “Drug Dealer’s Anonymous,” fellow rapper Pusha T—also known for his association with cocaine—is able to stuff down his guilty conscience: “hush money balances all this drugs and violence.” Money is an intoxicant too.

The colonized’s sector, or the “hood,” is a place cursed by settler society, where apartments are squeezed tightly together and you can die from anything, anywhere. It is stomach rumblings, ulcers, poverty-induced anxieties, dead high school friends. Perhaps above all it is the feeling that one has been trapped on an island, caught on the outskirts of life, window shopping it. Watching people eating in cafes one would feel uncomfortable to enter, and in any case could not afford. A purgatory where one is never fully quenched on the opiate of the church’s promise of a brighter day of heaven, or school’s promise of a brighter day in adulthood, any more than the quietly insubordinate enslaved could trust in the slave master’s promised emancipation after good behavior. Jay-Z didn’t represent what he would sometimes later portray, the pity-seeking “I had to sell drugs because I had no other choice.” He did not embody the ghetto youth’s predicament which he outlined in “No Hook”: 

“Stay out of trouble,” Mama said, as Mama sighed. 

Her fear, her youngest son’d be a victim of homicide. 

But I gotta get you out of here, Mama, or I’ma die inside. 

And either way, you lose me, Mama, so let loose of me.

On the contrary, he represented a decision. One taken after examining one’s life. Choosing whether to punch clocks or risk it all in a place where it was likely to be killed or go to prison—the more intensely punitive hood. Jay-Z made the decision to get rich or die trying. A rational choice for many who recognize that the permanent stagnation of poverty is already conceding one’s life. 

The Black worker is not merely working-class. Anti-Blackness is working-class suffering multiplied. The Black worker is not just exploited, but has inherited the memory of legally sanctioned fourth-class citizenship—the apartheid lives of our colonized parents. Whether in the Jim Crow South or the informal Jim Crow North or the Jim Crow of colonial Latin America, Caribbean and Africa, millennials’ parents were often workers who were banned and punished by unions, banned from upward social mobility, forced into domestic labor for people who called them “boy” and voted for their being bitten by dogs in the streets of Alabama, or flogged by white settlers and left to die tied to a post for not answering a question in Kenya Colony. None of us want to live lives mirroring our enslaved ancestors, an amputated existence, short and brutish, welded to capital and mocked by the slur-shouting mob.

Of course we dream of running. Of course, we reject the finger-wagging of conservative pundits like Tomi Lahren— “your husband was a drug dealer”—and the spitting crowd shouting criminal. Jay-Z is a runaway—which is why so many locked up in the slum celebrate him. The Black outlaw blends in with the fugitive slave, who knew full well the consequence of escape was likely re-enslavement or death, but ran anyway. It is this epic we kept in our headphones, not merely bars and beats. We nod our heads to the fugitive from the factory, and the call center and maid’s quarters, enjoying tales of an illicit survival for which the consequence is likely prison or death. In Jay-Z, this is not understated. “House nigga, don’t fuck with me / I’m a field nigga, go shine cutlery / Go play the [slave] quarters, where the butlers be / I’ma play the corners, where the hustlers be.” Hustling is not a sin or a crime, but a brave and even ethical rejection of the life of the servant-worker, who aids the society now developing new prototypes for white-only water fountains in the Oval Office. 

What’s more, Jay-Z was never caught. As he memorably puts it:

I ball so hard, motherfuckers want to fine me

But first niggas got to find me[...]

Ball so hard, I’m shocked too

I’m supposed to be locked up too

[If] you escaped what I escaped

You’d be in Paris getting fucked up too

“No Street Toughs Allowed”

If white supremacist society dismisses the Black criminalized classes as violent refuse, then the colonized Black “conscious” are often in tow, echoing them, caricaturing the Black lumpen class as ignorant and hurting their own communities. Seemingly in pre-emptive self-defense against these narratives, Jay-Z is always explicitly reminding us that he is intelligent. “I don’t know what you take me as, or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has,” he proclaims on “99 Problems.” Street hustler and high school dropout, he must contend not only with the discourse of Black lesser intelligence, but also the related conservative strands in Black conscious thought. He is confident in his reply to racist society, as seen when he’s pulled over by a cop, whose indignant voice he also narrates:

[Officer] Aren’t you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or somethin’? Somebody important or somethin’? 

[Jay-Z] I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a lil’ bit, Enough that you won’t illegally search my shit. 

When he speaks to Black thought, however, his tone is more explanatory. “Hustlers and boosters embrace me and the music I be making / I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars[…] Truthfully I want to rhyme like Common Sense / But I did 5 mil, I ain’t been rapping like Common since,”he says in “Moment of Clarity.” But even his explanation is dirty. This supposed trade-off of talent for profit is offensive to the intellectuals, and the self-appointed gatekeepers of so-called “real Hip Hop.” Jay-Z betrays Black power for his money machine.

  Jay-Z had uttered into the world a militant determination to break out of poverty’s birdcage by any means necessary, even if those means create a trail of new poor in escape’s wake: a slums theory where poverty is not an individuated experience of class oppression but a cellie knife fight. It is a politics of self-annihilation in order to secure temporary relief—as he dramatizes in the second verse of “The Streets.”

It’s a cold-cold world, but I blew my hand

I drew first ’cause I knew that man

I knew what he would do if I didn’t draw first

And I couldn’t stand the thought of my momma steppin’ foot inside a church

All I try to do is try to get up out the dirt

Guess he’s tryin’ to do the same, told me get up out his turf

I wanted to talk to him, but that shit’d never work

We was cut from the same cloth and what was under his shirt was his

Momma’s rent, his young brother’s clothes

My nephew’s food, and with that I squoze, and with that I froze

Now my life is frozen in time behind these iron poles

And this story is told for young soldiers who never choose the life we chose 

From Jay-Z’s first album, he admired the radical aspects of Hip-Hop and Black consciousness, even if he was never accepted into that particular country club. ’90s and early 2000s Neo-soul and conscious rappers built a sonic architecture of Blackness the inverse of racist caricature: a Black aesthetic where D’angelo would croon about the desirability of Brown sugar, Wu-Tang would build out a “Shaolin” Afro-futurism, The Roots made Pan-Africanism of Parisian Ethiopian—Black Philly love connections tangible. But while Common described life on the corner, Jay-Z was on it. His kind could be advocated for, but not invited in. 

Jay-Z isn’t part of the conscious rapper club because he is not merely from the slum but an assemblage of it. He remained too poor and too traumatized for the luxury of anti-poverty rap and time-wasting Black consciousness. In the telling skit “22 Twos” he and his crew make a tribute to Hip Hop and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It”: “To all my brothers it ain’t too late to come together / ’Cause too much Black and too much love, equal forever.” Then the host of the event “smells some reefer” and begins the common Black conscious litany of complaints: “See, that’s why our people don’t have anything because we don’t know how to go in places and act properly” and is interrupted with “Shut the fuck up!” by someone in Jay-Z’s entourage. 

As in his career, Jay-Z is pro-Black in principle—but when the street meets the conscious respectability, the streets win out.

The Pitfalls of Black Excellence 

“I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them.” 

— Jay-Z, “Moment of Clarity”

“A nice peace-fund ideas for people who look like we

We’re gon’ start a society within society

That’s major, just like the Negro League… 

Generational wealth, that’s the key… 

Legacy, legacy, legacy, legacy…

Black excellency… someday we’ll all be free.” 

— Jay-Z, “Legacy”

Jay-Z was right about the vapidity of Black conscious respectability politics. But the tragedy is that, judging by his own life, those respectable Black conscious folks and the “good politics-having leftists” have a point: politics grounded in slum escape can become parasitical. If we were defending the drug dealer, especially against the Tomi Lahrens of the world—if we were willing even to overlook the strewn bodies and excavated lives his activities left in his wake, quoting “I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me”—we have a harder time defending him now. In Jay-Z, Black lumpen politics have shown to deteriorate, and whatever field negro attributes the lumpen outlaw once possessed have led him straight back into the house.

I remember feeling that there was a momentous change when it was announced that Jay-Z would become president of the Def Jam record label. Before then, Jay-Z was street rich turned famous rapper rich. Even his association with Rocawear seemed like an extension of hustling and cultural capital. It got me too. Back then my most expensive piece of clothing was an oversized Rocawear shirt with the Tuskegee Airman print. It made me feel tuned in with modern, “urban” Blackness, counter-cultural, and stylish all at the same time. But it seemed a different beast altogether when Jay-Z assumed the captain’s seat at the helm of Def Jam. Before he was using the machine; as president, he became it. 

The inner workings of corporate power were as obscure to me then as they are now, but it came as no surprise that not long after this announcement, Jay-Z’s status shifted. He was regarded less as a griot of the streets and more as a New York power player. Less Nas and more Trump. He was on the inside. And like every secretly bourgeoisie-aspiring, liberal non-white university student that promises to land a good job then “take the machine down from the inside,” he was steam pressed into a suitable cog. 

The 2000s saw Jay-Z turn from a man who hopped fences running from police to an informant. He sat down with the Commander-in-Chief and the originator of the put-down-Black-protest-through-understanding police tactic, Barack Obama, all the way from his 2008 campaign to the White House. He moved on to sit-downs and strawberry milkshakes with Warren Buffett. He obtained stakes in Uber, cognac and champagne brands, bought and remade the Tidal streaming service, and invested in art, real estate, etc. 

Inevitably, the forces of capital led Jay-Z down to the basement with the white supremacists. He would brush shoulders with MAGA, the movement which did not launder drug money but American neo-Nazism, and ascended to the Presidency instead of the executive offices of a record label. Whatever distance he now attempts to hold from Ye’s (formerly Kanye West’s) MAGA hat closes over the deal-making table. To get where he needs to go, Jay-Z must work with MAGA’s Democrat New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, who works hand-in-hand with the Trump administration, in order to ensure he can build his casino in Times Square. He must work with MAGA billionaire Jeff Yass to get an in with private school money. He must build a Black neighborhood market for Bitcoin and be silent as his protege Ye stands out on a ledge trying to woo Elon and Trump, offering as much free ventriloquizing of neo-Nazism as he can in hopes of a silver coin. That is, he must align himself with the task managers of the Trump administration even as he is still reluctant to openly side with white supremacy. 

But every deal with the “D’evils” quite literally builds the devils’ world. The truth is, even if he is able to give his daughter a million-dollar piece of artwork, Jay-Z must, at the same time, bequeath her a world where Black children will be called “n—gger” in the streets and have their assaulters enriched by it. He might give his nephew property in DUMBO, but he is also a junior architect of the world in which it is once again normalized to use castration as punishment—in a society which disproportionately punishes Black people. How much will that artwork be worth after his business partners successfully ban all Black intellectual products as “improper ideology,” and it becomes law that there is no such thing as Black art, and that all art that is not line dance or flattering to the Confederacy’s Messiah is contraband?

Today, Jay-Z is on the colony’s street corner, at the intersection of state and capital, now selling harder drugs, with people nodding out, strung out, huffing colonial hope in brown paper bags. He’s serving them Bitcoin and the Brooklyn Nets. He is glad for the scraps off the trillionaire’s table as the restored Confederate administration wheels in the hanging platforms in the background.

In the background of every attempt at Black excellence there stands an overseer. Black wealth accumulation does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a white supremacist world order—at the pleasure of white power. Ask any freedman who set out with the same “community development through Black excellence” program and was forced to give up their land at the point of Jim Crow’s gun. Ask the Black grocers Will Stewart, Tommie Moss, and Calvin McDowell of the People’s Grocery in Memphis in 1892, when a local white man decided he would no longer tolerate market competition from “blacks,” brought in the police, and had them jailed. A lynch mob would break them out and shoot them to death in a railway yard days later. Ask Black Wall Street how the dreams of economic self-determination from within white supremacy panned out. How it felt when the bombs came from the sky. You can, for that matter, ask MOVE in Philadelphia too. Ask those still mourning the site of their foreclosed-upon homes, the redlined, those split open by freeways. Ask the homeowners who lose half their property’s value when they come out of the closet as Black. This is not a country. It is a colonial society. As a seeker of racial justice here, you are no better off than the greyhounds they race around the track. You will never catch the mechanical rabbit. 

But maybe this time is different. Maybe “race relations” have progressed. Maybe anti-wokeness is not at all the reincarnation of anti-integration, which in turn is not the reincarnation of anti-abolitionism. Maybe the mobs shouting at us in those red hats do not sound familiar; and maybe Elon Musk did not really Sieg Heil, he was just waving. Still, you must admit it is curious that they’ve brought back the gas chambers in prisons in the South. Plan your picnic. Maybe the society reinstating white-only refugee programs and chasing Haitian migrants with lassos and blood libel will wish you bon appétit. No. There is no society of the colonized within colonial society. No tolerance for Black excellence in an anti-Black state. It is fatal not to learn this lesson. “I bought some artwork for one million / Two years later, that shit worth two million / Few years later, that shit worth eight million / I can’t wait to give this shit to my children,” Jay-Z raps on “The Story of O.J.” After the Holocaust in Europe, Jewish family heirlooms were piled in trays. 

A billion dollars is not an army. Especially not for a Black man in the United States. It is a pact made, that as long as you continue to do your enemies’ bidding, your lifestyle will be honored. But it is a pact made with a con artist. When you have been squeezed of all your usefulness, they will point you to a wall and empty your pockets. You succeed only as long as you are useful to them. As long as you promise to stand in front of “the blacks” and stop opposing the police, and you remain a mascot for Trump supporter’s private school ventures, or give the mayor his walk out music, you will be humored. But you will never be free. You can never speak out of turn. The fine line you think you are deftly walking is your leg shackle. 

  You cannot invest your way to freedom. Nor can you “give back” your way to freedom. Nor donate to whatever shiny new American progressive product is out there stump-speeching under the slogan “this time we really mean it!” your way to freedom. If you excuse your dealings with American Neo-Nazism as “just business,” instead of investing in resources for those who take an uncompromising stand against genocide, one morning the apartheid police will ram through your pretty mansion door. In a colony, if you are Black you are never an entrepreneur. You are always hired, to be fired at will. You are not a business man, you are a business, man. Do you think your daughter and your daughter’s daughter will be able to keep that Basquiat in a lynch mob society? The society that is preparing to turn the water cannon onto the National Museum of African American History and Culture for sheltering Harriet Tubman’s songs in the attic. The society that is publicly billy-clubbing Harvard for showing some opposition to Jim Crow while berating African heads of state with Dylann Roof’s talking points? This society, this society you’ve helped to usher in, will not let your “seed” keep that Basquiat any more than the seeds of wealthy Reconstruction-era Black southerners were allowed to keep their land. You cannot invest in anti-Black society. You can build nothing here except your hanging tree. You are a Black man investing in the white supremacist settler-colonial society. There has been no worse investment made in human history. 

Black capitalism, Black self-sufficiency through building generational wealth now remixed as Black excellence, is built on a delusion about the political situation. It believes in the neutrality of racists and the racist state. It presumes that the same people who were content to let you live in state-sponsored squalor—and benefited from it—will allow you to achieve your dreams unmolested. As if the men who were content to keep the rats gnawing at your sister’s nail in 1970s Marcy, or 1920s Chicago, are opposed to them biting you now. It imagines itself to be a novel idea—as if there have not been a thousand other Booker T. Washingtons, who also miss the overseer in the background and believe that all that exists is their determination and grit, that the only limitations are the ones you invent for yourself. But you are not Scarlett O’Hara looking out to the promise of sunrise over the Civil War-ravaged Twelve Oaks plantation estate, determined to rebuild it by the strength of her own two hands. You are a sharecropper doing too well—surrounded by the Klan. 

It is not just that whatever you build in prison will be stamped out by the guards. Or that no legacy is possible in a society that has an addiction to stealing Black land and redistributing the spoils of a lynching among the racists. It is that Black wealth accumulation facilitates Black dispossession. Of course, capitalism facilitates class dispossession on a mass scale, and so the building of the Brooklyn Nets stadium drove up rents and gentrification in Brooklyn—quite literally facilitating Black dispossession. But that moral chiding is not always convincing to people who have been forced into multiple “it’s them or me” situations. The trauma of prolonged exposure to colonized sector conditions can damage one’s ethical code. Jay-Z is trying to rejigger W.E.B. Du Bois “Talented Tenth” plan to train the “best” ten percent into becoming an educated, relatively wealthy, Black elite who would eventually uplift the entire “race.” “Generational wealth, that’s the key / My parents ain’t have shit, so that shift started with me[…] I remember, like, listening to Wu-Tang / and they was like ‘your seed marry his seed, marry my seed’ / that’s how we keep Carter money all in the family.” But Du Bois placed this idea in the trash as soon as he realized the Black bourgeoisie or Black wealthy families do not commit class suicide, working to abolish the privilege they enjoy. Nor do they even generally take up any leadership beyond paternalistic preaching, shallow “encouragement” and scholarships designed to invite one poor individual up from slum life. They are not vanguards of the dispossessed. They clink glasses with the dispossessors, and seek not revolution but a greasy existence as a perfectly contented house pet. Du Bois left them alone and became a communist and a Pan-Africanist.

Black capitalism is in cahoots with that political force that is trying to bring back the time when you could take Black people “down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damned rope,” as a Republican county commissioner in Oklahoma said he would like to in 2023. Black Excellence, for all its independence, happens to be the bedfellow of that movement that thinks Civil Rights Law is too uppity, has re-established federal executions, and sees an Auschwitz in El Salvador and an Austria in Greenland. No amount of Basquiat collections can stave off the world being (re)built, where every free Black person is assumed criminal, and the only place for a Black man or Black history is with hat in hand. You’ve said we’ve moved past kneeling protest, as you inked the deal with Roc Nation and the NFL. The Black uprising has never “protested” from the supplicant position. Have you? Before we lost him to colonial delusions and rooster-walking in Klan robes and swastika chains, your protege Ye said it best: “And for that paper, look how low we’ll stoop, even if you in a Benz you still a nigga in a coupe.”

Save Jay-Z

I have lost count of what wave of Nazism this current moment is, but whatever it is, the global Black uprising has had enough of it. And there are no more people willing to stomach another Chief Waruhiu or Chief Justice Thomas. Nor is this generation echoing that old Black conscious proverb “we need to be patient with the people.” Not when the gas chambers are back and the president’s men are advocating for the freeing of Derek Chauvin. Everyone has picked a side, or their side is assumed. The people in Marcy have lost their patience, as have the people in Mozambique. Black Minnesotans burned a police station. Black Burkina Faso kicked out the French army. Immigrant and Black Los Angeles showed the Soweto Township raiding, MacArthur Park stalking anti-immigration brigade that LA can be taken back to 1992—or Watts 65.

There are not a lot of people on this side of the apartheid line trying to save Jay-Z. There are no elegies written; effigies will burn of him, like they are already burning of all the other bosses. There is a quietness in the plantation. Nobody is cheering when the master’s favorite rapper is trotted out. I, personally, can think of no one who would agree with me that we might hold out a little while longer and save Jay-Z. In fact they would look at me with the same suspicion, and rightfully so. But there is a generation who had his posters on their wall, and for whom Jay-Z is not merely another predatory gentrifier and capitalist, but was once part of the soundtrack of their lives. But it’s a cold world. Revolution is revolution. Everyone is expendable. The slums made Hov. We can make another Hov. In fact, I might have met one the other day. Tried to sell him on ghetto philosophy and the complex places the search for Black excellence and self-ownership comes from. I gave him your CD. He did not know what it was and waved it off. Asked me if you’re the one who said, “I’m leaning on any nigga intervening with the sound of my freedom machinin’.”