As we celebrate the life of the ancestor Huey, I find myself meditating on a perverse, pervasive lie of capitalist thought: that all things are zero sum — a gain for one must come at the expense of another, and those gaining are always and only those I can see.
So many people, too many Black people, buy into this ridiculously reductive ideology at the expense of not only benefiting other cultures, but, ironically, of benefiting Black people.
For none of us is free until all of us are free.
I hear your refrains.
“We March for them but they don’t March for us.”
“They don’t suffer like we suffer”
“They don’t. We do.”
No baby no.
Everyone suffers. Not the same, no. Not proportionally. But everyone suffers something. And when we make the world a better place for one person, it makes the world a better place for all people.
Empathy, it turns out, is the best long term strategy for selfish gain.
There are, of course, people of all colors and backgrounds who are anti-Black. People whose partnership with the disenfranchised is mere performance: Blacked out profiles in June that voted for Trump in November.
We know.
But we don’t judge a people by it’s scum. We don’t advocate for people only out of reciprocity.
We do what is right because it is right. It is right to stand in solidarity with our East Asian family. It does not take away from my advocacy of my people; it aids it. Informs it. Nurtures it with context and resources.
So please, engage with and listen as the best of their forbearers did for ours years ago.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
And we all still have miles to walk before the gates of freedom we can see.
