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Unfinished Script from an alternate universe where Kamala won
🕑 Added 2024-11-12 14:01:08 +0000 UTCSo I was really expecting Kamala to win, and was preparing for a world where we had to openly be in resistance to a black democratic president in a way that wasn't possible in 08.
And then it didn't happen...
So this script that i wrote last Saturday may not ever see the light of day. It's about the future of black conservatism and maybe parts of it will emerge at a later date, but i figured to not let it go to waste and share it with you all.
My scripts are always rough and raw until i do one last review before recording so please excuse the many typos or ideas that don't' quite come together. You're looking at a very early point in my creative process.
-So I found myself watching a kidology video the other day… please, just just leave it alone.
I have long since let go of the now very one sided beef. To the point where I’ve allowed her to take numerous shots at me without responding. This is NOT a response to any of that so Please PLEASE don’t go bothering her, the only reason im mentioning her is that it would feel messier than needed to not point out that this idea came from watching her video on Kelly stamps. I send my subliminals when needed, im worst than drake in that regard. THIS is not one of them.
In fact in some ways the thoughts that came to me after watching this video are in some ways going to show Kidology in a good light, but we’ll come back to that.
Even though this video is coming out after the election, im going to call that we are living in a post Donald trump era, which is an era where hopefully the uniquely horrifying threat of Trumpism is no longer politically or culturally relevant.
Moreover, in the wake of a Kamala harris victory, she ran as essentially a moderate republican, I have so sooooo many thoughts on the current political moment and what it means to a lot of things, but today im going to stick to youtube and social media content in general, well not in general, as it pertains to black creators, and what im calling a wave of black neo conservatism, or probably more accurately neo black conservatism.
I don’t feel confident on whether I truly understand what neo conservatism is, the little I’ve read seems to work, but I don’t think I have a good hold on the neo black part of the second definition, partly because it’s something im making up based on my own studies and experiences.
I won’t name many names or show many faces, cause good lord I don’t want those types of problems in my life right now, but you probably have seen some new myelinated faces pop up on your feed in the last year or so if you are politically inclined on youtube, whether black or otherwise, in fact probably very much otherwise. But I’ll get to that in a second.
They make videos like, The problem with black youtube, or why hood culture is embarrassing, maybe the react to Thomas sowwel videos, or they’re making their “why I stopped being a trump supporter videos. Maybe they have podcasts that present themselves as moderate or centrist, but when you do a bare bit of research you realize they’re funded and educated by conservative think tanks, or in the case of Kelly Stamps, every so often complain about the collective rejection of black people when they recognize that your’e not invested in the plight of black folks. It’s interesting and complex and it’s important to get some thoughts out there cause as I just alluded to, in the wake of Kamala becoming president, there’s going to be a political and ideological scramble for power around black people that will either set back black progressive and radical thought decades, or swell it to levels that havent’ been seen in a while. Let me explain.
So on the main channel I’ve already made two videos about black conservatives, they’re some of my most popular videos so im gonna assume that many of you watched them, but for those who are new, the thesis of those videos is essentially that people like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Candice Owens, and pretty much any black republican that holds office do not in any relevant way represent the political ideology of black people and in almost all cases they are completely removed from black thought and spaces other than in the most superficial way. For example, for all of the black republican congressmen out there, and there has been an increase as of late, almost none of them represent predominantly black districts, They would be unelectable in districts where actual black political power is relevant. A lot of these traditional or as I call them conservatives with a capital C are what at their core im going to call trash pandas, because youtube really hates when I say the nickname of this creature. These folks tend to be bizarre and greatly unhinged creatures who pander to a very specific type of white supremacy that, if the death of Trumpism is any indication, doesn’t have a lot of value in it’s future. I’ts a dying wave. Candice Owens is at the top of the food chain, and still has moments where she rakes in significant viewership, but she also consistently has videos that don’t break 500k views which is still a lot don’t get me wrong, but is less than 25% her nearly 3 million subscribers. The rest of these weirdos like Jessie Lee Peterson, are barely breaking 10k a lot of times.
This one of the reasons why I’ve never spent a lot of time talking about this crowd, I’ve almost never had any black people asking me to talk about Candice owens or Thomas sowell, it’s always white people because those types of figures are only relevant to white people who have little to no knowledge of black political thought or history. Very few black people make up the audiences to these types.
BUT! There is a legacy of black conservatism that is culturally relevant to black people. These are folks that you would be hesitant to call a trash panda because they know how to talk the talk and in some cases they even walk the walk. They are clearly of the culture they criticize in some ways, and don’t tap dance and shuck and jive for white approval, at least not in the traditional sense. In my second black conservative video, I mostly point out this groups connection to capitalism, and their opposition to black radical thought, but I also spend time talking about another prominent black issue that is very relevant to these neo black conservatives, which is respectability politics.
Respectability politics is a complex issue because id’ argue it’s relatively a political in nature. You don’t have to be a republican to engage in respectability politics, you can even be somewhat of a radical and still engage in respectability politics. I am not above having moments where I start to be critical of some ways that black people show up in the world. Like I didn’t say nothing, but I can’t lie, I wasn’t ready for the amount of cheek that I’d see with the whole bubble skirt controversy during homecoming season. Im getting too old for that much cheek in public at a picnic.
And see that’s how they get us. Cause nobody says anything about Raylin and Sarayah at their picknic with super short shorts on cause raylin and sarayah’s bodies aren’t sexualized like that, and they’re not expected to uphold a standard of respectability lest they be seen as a detriment to the entire race and gender.
This is where kidology’s video on Kelly stamps struck me. I was a fellow product of the pandemic youtube bubble, where a lot of creators blew up out of nowhere because the pandemic presented an unprecedented amount of eyes on the platform allowing a lot of people to explode on the scene and really reshape a lot of youtube, especially for some black creators. But for every D’angelo Wallace, someone who was talented and creative enough to maintain their wave after the pandemic bubble burst, we also have a Kelly Stamps who got to half a million subs in a year and then very quickly began to lose views. Kidology refers to this as being shadow banned, but that’s really not the case in my opinion. Shadow banning isn’t really a thing. Kelly’s audience moved on. Everyone’s audience moves on over time, they change their views, they change their watch lifestyle, they disconnect from the thing that brought them to you, you say something that pissed them off, the found you because you did a thing that you don’t do anymore, or they found you because they did a thing that they don’t do anymore. With kelly’s specific brand of femm focused motivational/hustle culture content in a lighter skinned, skinny black body with softer features, she had a big wave initially, but it was never going to be easy to constantly keep an audience because a lot of them did not find her explicitly for her. They found her because she did a thing that they are into, and during the pandemic, a lot of black women specifically were tyring to change their lives and escape from a world and framework that was toxic to them. We also see the rise of soft life and femininity coaching type content at this time. A lot of black women blew up during the pandemic, only a few are still relevant today, and there’s a lot of factors regarding that, and none of them have much to do with youtube not wanting a certain type of content being successful.
This may seem like a tangent but it’s actually really important.
In response to this Kelly went anti woke, not complete like 2015 anti woke, but anti woke for her, she also started making her Christian faith a more prominent part of her content which doesn’t automatically make one a conservative, see Lil Bill and CJ the X, but it does make it highly likely that you will be conservative. As far as I can tell, this has not garnered her a huge new audience, but it is an interesting twist that if she were more cynical, she could easily parlay into a new larger audience. And we see that in the rise of these other neo black conservative figures, some of which see seems to be connected to.
The connection between losing and audience and respectability politics is that anti blackness is evergreen. It is a literal infinite money glitch on social media, that is whether youre’ doing genuinely anti black humiliation content, which is a term I stole from Pill boy and his video “there is no “black youtube” which you should definitely watch, or if it’s anti blackness in the form of pointing at said content and complaining about it, shouting how your’e not like that to the world.
Stamps does this as does a lot of her contemporaries, and this is gonna be a pretty dangerous thing going forward because of how youtube works and the audiences involved here. One thing about anti blackness is that none of us are immune to it, that’s one of the reasons it’s the gift that keeps on giving in media.
There’s this fanon quote that I’ve heard 100 times that’s really appropriate here. Franz Fanon being one of the most important voices in the history of black political thought and leftist thought period.
“the oppressed will believe the worst about themselves”
However, when I tried to effective attribute this quote I actually couldn’t find it anywhere. I think that’s a product of translating as well as the nature of how “great quotes” from big thinkers arecommodified but either way, when I went to find the real piece of writing allegedly in Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s magnum opus, the closest thing to it actually comes in the preface written by Jean Paul Sarter, but clearly inspired by Fanon.
Sarte writes-
This repressed rage, never managing to explode, goes round in circles and wreaks havoc on the oppressed themselves. In order to rid themselves of it they end up massacring each other, tribes battle one against the other since they cannot confront the real enemy-and you can count on colonial policy to fuel rivalries; the brother raising his knife against his brother believes he is destroying once and for all the hated image of their common debasement. But these expiatory victims do not satisfy their thirst for blood, and the only way to stop themselves from marching against the machine guns is to become our accomplices: the very dehumanization process they are rejecting will be speeded up by their own initiative. Under the amused gaze of the colonist, they protect themselves with supernatural safeguards, sometimes reviving awesome old myths, at other times tying themselves to meticulous rituals. The colonized, therefore, in his obsession, shuns his deep desires by inflicting on himself odd rites that monopolize him at every moment.
What’s being pointed out here can engage with a lot of elements to the black experience, especially here in America, where the overriding influence of whiteness and white supremacy has us constantly existing in a state of struggle, constantly being faced with the result of that existence, and constantly reminded of this by the outside world.
There is an enduring pressure for black people to separate themselves from the image and concept of blackness that’s why you see Kelly Stamps imply heavily at times that she is not like those other black people. That is why so many of these other creators that make this type of content put in a lot of effort to point at and denigrate those other types of black people making that other type of black content. There’s minimal effort to engage in the commontality, or speak to the bigger forces behind the scenes, if there’s one thing all conservatives tend to hate its any type of systemic analysis. Of course.
But the problem is, anti blackness is so strong and so entrenched in us that this works, or it can work, especially with younger black folks, which if you pay attention to a lot of these types of videos, tend to be the ones making and watching them.
Younger black folks don’t’ have a ton of life experience in life, only know what they see on tv and youtube, they don’t know how curated and false the images they see on tv and youtube are, they don’t know how algorithms work, what they do know is how these images make them feel, they know how it feels to be black in an anti black world. If they’re one of the flies in the milk, they know how these images embolden their white peers to debase and disrespect them.
So of course they endeavor to construct and identity that seems to create distance from those images. And of course they will make content that furthers that goal, and of course that content will resonate with other young people like them who have the same pain points, the same insecurities, and the same un processed internalized anti blackness.
And this is why im worried about this new wave of neo black conservatives. See, because they aren’t the typical buck dancers of the past, they have the capacity to be much more appealing to people in this vulnerable state. They appeal to an idea of centrism, air quote common sense approaches to black issues. Yeah racism is bad, but how long are you gonna be a victim? The police shouldn’t shoot unarmed black people, but why wasn’t he complying. They also point to folks like myself as too radical and not to be taken seriously, and now under a Kamala Harris presidency, there is possibly going to be a lot of opportunity for this type of grift to develop.
And there’s where I’ll show a little love to a Kidology and some like her vs a Kelly Stamps and others I haven’t named. For all the criticisms I could make of kidology’s politics or in her words a-politics, they’re not the worst, and more significantly I do think they’re mostly genuine. Kidology could make a lot more money by actually being the U.K Candice Owens. Some of you might have seen me do some talks with Khamal who’s also taken some shots at me. I have a lot of issues with his politics but again, I think they’re genuine, and as he started to develop the whole anti woke persona he recognized that he wasn’t really trying to go there. A lot of these young people making the “black people so ghetto” videos that are blowing up their channels but nothing else seems to be hitting” Im preaching patience and calling in as opposed to calling out with them.
On the other end, they are fertilizing the ground for other types of grifters to scoop in and do the classic move with a different twist. The algorithm will reward them if they make more anti black content. Real conservatives and right wingers will use them to further an anti black agenda let alone a right wing agenda which Kamala has pretty much assured us she is fine with over the last few months with her plans for fracking, harch immigration laws and what’s happening in Palestine.
One question I often get from some likely white viewers is will the republican party ever gain real headway into black voters. And my answer is always no, don’t be dumb. This is because the republican party at it’s core is racist and black people at their core are not stupid. Republicans can trot out as many tap dancing trash pandas with bad haircuts and hard wigs as they want, it doesn’t really make a difference.
But this doesn’t mean that black people are incapable of leaning into conservatism, especially the type of social conservatism that can be pulled from the type of content that im talking about here. This same dynamic was in place in 1994 when the Democrats pushed forward an intensely anti black crime bill that made prisons explode with black people for 20 years. They thought that they were different from other black people and wanted something that illustrated this, they didn’t think of the consequences for those black people, or the consequences for them cause class status has never been a garunetee that you won’t be a victim of racial discrimination, even Kelly stamps knows this.
There’s a lot more here but this is a light work and it’s getting extra long
Comments
Molly HD
"Even though this video is coming out after the election, im going to call that we are living in a post Donald trump era, which is an era where hopefully the uniquely horrifying threat of Trumpism is no longer politically or culturally relevant." GOD I wish we lived in this timeline
Mobius Scarf
I'd say there's a lot here worth preserving. The “the oppressed will believe the worst about themselves” bit feels relevant in the wake of all the finger pointing. It feels like a video about respectability politics in a Project 2025 reality may still be relevant.
