The Wealthy Black Elite Won’t Save Us
Written by Tef Poe, Artwork by Nic Vasquez
Article from WARTIME Issue No. 4
The Black elite want us to think that money creates an invisible cloak of protection from the realities of our own identities.
But I was always told if somebody wants to take your life, there’s next to nothing you can actually do to stop them. In reality it doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire because anybody can be touched. The well intentioned belief that money offers us a safety-net isn’t real. If you throw a dollar at a rat who is backed into a corner, the rodent will still be trapped.
In fact, no matter how much money you throw in its direction, the assumption of danger will still be there for the rat. Freedom from the bondage of our enemies is the only solution capable of empowering the generations of free thinkers who are bound to be born after us.
Right now, the entire world is praying for our demise. The loathing fear of a Black planet has consumed the hearts and minds of evil doing white men worldwide. White Supremacy is woven in the fabric of our daily Black lives. Money doesn’t make you bulletproof. When my father was on his deathbed dying from stomach cancer, all the money in the world couldn’t save him.
No one wants to see the next person come up while they’re stuck in poverty. The ongoing struggle to change your life financially and then also stay alive while doing so is like walking a tightrope. Black Men aren’t safe in this society. We’ve been itemized down to nothing and it shows in the ways we relate to each other when money isn’t involved. We have to challenge the myth that money can protect us from ourselves. If we can’t quell the violence amongst our brothers, how can we expect to suddenly see a world where Black Men are free to admire everyone else’s humanity? How many brothers are walking around our hometowns everyday with a price on our heads? If anything this actually should tell us the white man’s money is often our top opp.
Does it matter if you have $200 million in the bank— if you can still be touched by a $2 nigga? You don’t have any real power.Does it matter if you have $200 million in the bank— if you can still be touched by a $2 nigga? You don’t have any real power.
In Los Angeles there are over 45,000 active gang members. They only needed one of those gang members to touch the great Nipsey Hussle. Memphis Tennessee is home to over 13,000 active gang members. Young Dolph was one of the richest, most powerful, and influential voices his community has ever known. But his money couldn’t insulate him from the bullets of the inner city Taliban.
Black people in the United States need organization – without it, we are nothing more than a lost tribe searching for a home. Organizations move the power scale by cultivating resources and influence to their favor. But only organized money can attract organized power. Black elites won’t save us: A loosely defined group of modern day negro oligarchs with zero collectivity is nothing but a mirror image reflection of the white people who gave them the money.
We need a nation builder mind state– so we need resources of all sorts. Money alone can’t defend a nation. The same way the gun alone won’t get it done. We minimize these conversations on both sides of the coin. Many Black Amerikkkan Movement leaders think they’ll be able to rely on George Sorros, Ford Foundation, and Harry Belafonte forever. The trenches tend to think Jimmy Iovine and Jay-Z will find them and free them. Oprah Winfrey has never fed one single soul in my neighborhood. The frats and sororities are useless organizations when the blood is on the pavement in the ghetto.
The streets know we have to save ourselves, but we’re still searching for the proper methodology. Money often offers us the illusion of sophistication. Young Dolph putting on for his hood is what we need. But if he can’t sway the 13,000 active gang members in Memphis to turn their guns towards the police, how are we ever going to build a sense of collective power? Capitalism is so demented that it would drive our youth to kill a Black father in cold blood while he’s visiting his neighborhood cookie shop. The pigs who showed up to remove his lifeless body from the scene are the real opps. This decrepit healthcare system which makes it impossible for even a multi-million dollar nigga to get patched up in a timely fashion after being hit up by an assortment of gun fire is the real opp.
Under the current system it doesn’t matter if you’re Young Dolph or Martin Luther King Jr. both of these Black Men were gunned down in Memphis.
Neither one of them had enough power to stop the shooters from executing their plans. Both of them are in the grave – dead and gone. The final conclusion is Black men of their stature remain an unorganized force. In any war you don’t quietly raise your hand and ask someone to stop killing your soldiers. If you don’t have the power to end the onslaught then you deserve to die. We want you to get money, but we want you to train, spend it on guns to protect your family, employ your Nines and move militant. But above all, please stop trying to turn the career bankers into shooters. We must cease with the lie that everyone Black is fighting for the same exact objectives.
We’re playing a dangerous game merging the bourgeoisie with the hungry. Naturally the streets need leadership, the money is supposed to be a part of our war chest. But if we don’t build it then no one else will, and the only way to build the actual mechanisms WE need is through our intentional aspirations for revolution.
Somebody gotta be willing to be the Patrice Lamumba of the trap in order for this to work. Capitalism sets us up for our conclusion to be nothing more than martyrdom through retweets. Death by way of branding is the ultimate curse for today’s activists. But we fight for a different type of reality, we understand nobody is going to give us anything for free. And we also realize there’s a difference between a liberator and a landlord.
Every dollar has to be matched with a bullet. Every cent spent has to be matched with political education. Every drop of blood should be backed with the impunity of free health care. Our relationship with money has soured our connection to the Earth. We must understand we are an oppressed people. Only knowledge of self can set us free. We believe in a political ideology that says we can effectively feed our families, we can grow together, and prosper as a people but the fallacy that capitalism will save us has to be dispelled by our own rigor. Amerikkka’s entire economy is destined to collapse. We’re witnessing the last days of capitalism as the dominant economic system on planet Earth. A system which was given a 500 year head start–an all white ensemble which was designed by the free labor of stolen Africans has no right to brag about its success.
We’ve officially entered the final countdown, the economy is nothing more than a cheap Nintendo game. You press one button and the ponzi scheme instantly exposes itself. The expensive cars, the designer clothes, and the jetsetting trips across the globe all have fleeting value.
One day you’ll wake up and Instagram won’t work, social media will likely become a forgotten concept. The stock market won’t offer us much refuge from the rain either. Mining Crypto won’t turn you into Nelson Mandela. The ruling class will be prepared for war and I pray to Allah we’re capable of responding accordingly. The entire richness of this experience known as life, cannot be supplemented by a few pieces of paper with the faces of our fallen slave masters on them.
Real power comes in the form of self assurance and equity, knowing we can do whatever we want to do for the sanctity of our children, rather than crawl and beg the white man for an opportunity to work for him.
Our collective mission is to get everything we’re owed and then some, yet we envision a world where this is possible without the tired rhetoric of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. A fully loaded AK-47 has done more for my life than any of these coinbase apps advertising the possibility of a brighter tomorrow in my Twitter algorithm. A box of books can feed more Black families than a 100 million pennies. We would root for everybody Black, but everybody Black ain’t poor. Everybody Black ain’t principled enough to be honest about their own aspirations with the money. Everybody Black ain’t from the bottom, and we’re here to make sure the trenches eat.