Black Sweat

There have been a number of arguments had about how nobody wants to work, and there have been several references to what kind of jobs Black people should be taking. People roll their eyes at the demand to address slavery, while also expecting some credit for not owning slaves. However, those same people will not acknowledge that their minds have been imprinted with the image of Black people building up a sweat and getting nothing for it.

For any job paying a living wage or offering a legitimate way to have financial stability, there are logarithms designed to weed out BIPOCQ applicants, and all the major corporations know it. There is way too much financial stability advice that discusses money that nobody has, and Black people have been trying to work around this need to keep us perpetually poor. Despite getting educated, practicing trades, and coming up with independent educational systems, people are still doing everything possible to keep us from getting anything other than low-paying, unstable jobs.

While discussing education, I remember–and so does everyone else who went to school beginning in the 1980s–that everyone was directed to college. In reality, everyone should not have gone to college; that was just the barrier to getting decent jobs. Consequently, a lot of older people have developed a bad habit of insulting every college degree outside STEM, despite elders telling everyone to get a degree, regardless of the major.

The main reason for the new reluctance about education is to discredit any cultural stories that counter the dominant narrative, and a lot of BIPOCQ students learned information outside of indoctrination in college. Now, there are a bunch of BIPOCQ workers who learned the truth outside of indoctrination who are eager to make changes–but are forced to work menial, low-paying jobs because a bunch of older people enjoy mocking their education.

Right now, the United States is also launching relentless attacks against administrative workers, sneering at people who were consistently spending money, and telling them to compete with the rest of the peons. The government has been recklessly firing people, regardless of responsibility or if it has the legal authority to do so. Businesses are obsessed with using AI to automate all lower levels of white collar work, and telling everyone to get a job, while mocking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. All of these efforts can only mean one thing.

The true interest of the administration is getting BIPOCQ back into highly physical labor with less pay. This is the only way the dominant narrative understands work for BIPOCQ employees, and despite being unwilling to pay for the labor, people still demand that the work get done. This mindset of “Black sweat” is going to crater the economy, because no one wants to keep working for free while being told to “manage our finances better.”

I have not lived alone since 2017, and whenever I have been at home not working, there has been an obsession with what I plan to do to get back to work. The idea that Black people should ever stop working and actually strategize is abhorrent to many. The main reason we are not taking part in the protests is because we know that whenever we show up, our very existence in public spaces is treated like a threat. See, Black people figuring out how to avoid the dominant narrative is also viewed as a threat, as opposed to “willingly” offering our Black sweat. We are supposed to be batteries, just like all the migrants who “everyone” needs to send home.