By Trevor Coleman II
Two centuries of the assimilation and monetization of the many facets of black culture have distorted the true intentions of original movements that correlate to our empowerment.
Detroit Techno was a form of music that furthered the ideas of an advanced society. It is a black art form that looked towards futurism and self-exploration. This original outlook has since been romanticized by white American/European club scenes and festivals that indoctrinated a new target audience and made the true history (and purpose) of the music lost to purported statements of a European substructure.
The concept of Afrofuturism is picked at, molded, and assimilated by white societies in a search for humor, entertainment, and a source for their self-assurance from understanding “niche” subjects or practices. Futurism is fundamental within the creation of techno. Building towards a musical aesthetic that focuses on the growth of a new civilization from Detroit in the 1980s, a city stricken with de-industrialization and suburbanization that distorted a display of cultural identity associated with the city.
The black artists that perform at events not only include techno or house but rock music as well and are listed as “unique” or “retro”. These genres have been so saturated through white assimilation that we forget that they formed from our culture. By the early 1990s, the first wave of techno artists had been disassociated with the reformation of the genre in Europe where it was advertised to white youth in the United States as an emerging European genre. This began the generation gap that split Techno’s creators from the youth culture it now represented and the irony of white American disassociation of the genre’s African American founders by viewing them as adapters to a supposedly imported style of music.
We have seen in the past month that a black issue can fall subject to white monetization. Something created as a release with an interpersonal message through activism, the arts, sciences, and philosophy is made into a meme; or a statement that now includes participation from companies that say the words but do nothing to initiate change within their unequal infrastructure. Nike and Adidas retweeting their Black Lives Matter statements but having all-white executive boards and exploiting the labor of black and brown people in all corners of the world is one example of “showing up” and creating a false alliance solely for when the time comes.
This was further proven by the convening of the Democratic Party members in Congress kneeling and wearing Kente cloth as a photo-op in alleged support of the Police Abolition Movement on June 8th this year. This sort of appropriation of African culture, insinuating a faux ally ship in a sociopolitical movement by instilling the largely symbolic JUSTICE IN POLICING ACT OF 2020 that seeks to reform the same racist system of law enforcement in ways that are largely ineffectual towards the ongoing police brutality.
Such as banning the chokehold and prohibiting “federal, state, and local law enforcement from racial, religious and discriminatory profiling,” something that cannot be carefully enforced within the local or state police departments. This is the kind of assimilation of black art forms and that replaces the original message of police abolition to police reform, changing the subject towards a conversation that would continue benefiting the oppressor and retain their goals of an unequal justice system.
The assimilation of black art forms stem from the transition of a movement from the exclusive or smaller settings where it was established to a larger audience and corporate distribution. The message of the movement is no longer in the control of the creators but of the agents of labels and corporations that present it to consumers in whichever way the deem most profitable.
This is the time where the proprietors of these institutions that we speak of abolishing and target our demands begin to suspect that the worst is over. That the cries of social justice are waning once more as they do until the next police officer is exposed to killing one of our brothers or sisters. For this cycle to end the fight must continue. Black people’s voices must be heard; we must be at the front of these marches for the betterment of our future.
Black issues and black culture must remain under the complete control of Black people. Our economies must control the wealth that stems from our minds and determine the future of our communities. The separation of these art forms from their original intentions are ways of suppressing the power that comes from our creative expression and demand for sociopolitical change.
