cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3289280

The use of Black and brown puppets to distort the racial optics of exploitation was a standard part of colonial administration, and it has remained as a central element of neo-colonialism. It is not at all surprising then that imperialists would use the same strategy in the U.S. where some have characterized the country’s African population as an internal colony of sorts. Amilcar Cabral disagreed with the idea that the predicament of Black people in America is a colonial one, but he also said: “That is not to say that the aims are not the same. And that is not to say that even some of the means cannot be the same.”

If you don’t recognize the man in the header image of this article, this is Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, the “first Black movie star in Hollywood”. In the near-constant role of ‘Stepin Fetchit’. A literal Vaudeville minstrel, billed as “the laziest man in the world” across more than 40 fuckin films.

Stepin Fetchit is the very face of the Black Misleadership Class. Shucking, jiving, and tapdancing sellouts to the White empire. Genocide minstrels. Imperialist rentboys.

Traitors, in a word. These misleaders will sell anyone and anything for a crumb of ‘getting theirs’. Ten years ago? It was Syria and Libya. Today? Palestine and Haiti. Tomorrow? It could be us. The misleadership class might share our skin, but they are not our kinfolk. We need to recognize that, and begin cutting them out with even more rigor than what we used to mind our own with.