Pimpin Aint Easy Mo Money

Trauma Pimpin: Mo' Money, Mo' Money, Mo' Money

The exploitation of Black pain is as American as the White exploitation of Black talent. Since America's enslavement of dark-skinned bodies, white-skinned bodies have put Black experiences in a sifter to see how they can get Mo' Money from Black life.

The commodification of Black American life truly has no boundaries regarding financial exploitation and eludes no form of being, including the development of black thought. In education, African Americans are statically "behind" all racial and ethnic groups in every academic area. Looking at statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, assigned and perceived academic deficiency can easily be associated with the cognitive abilities of Black students. However, looking deeper into why and how we got our modern educational disproportionalities, it becomes clear: slave codes and anti-literacy laws were intentionally designed to create long-term gaps in educational achievement or Gloria Ladson-Billings more precisely describes as "educational debt." The assimilation of dark-skinned bodies into an equitable American society is, not a common sense.

Presently, African Americans are blamed for the effects of long-term oppression, and those effects are used to rationalize white benevolence in the form of educational interventions. Educational intervention, for Black people's acquisition of white ways of knowing and being, is a billion-dollar industry that pimps the painful consequences of hundreds of years of academic repression.

American education systems are failing African American communities, but lifts White American women. If Black students are reported to have educational gaps, and White women are 77% of the 3.8 million teachers, then why isn't the rhetoric of failure about White women's inability to teach versus Black students' ability to learn at the center of achievement gaps? The national average teacher salary is $61,000, and the educational intervention industry makes over a billion dollars. Whose financial status is smothered if educational interventions for Black students are no longer needed? The African American achievement gap is based on the value gap in the lives of genres of Americans and masked as a Black deficiency.

Pimpin ain't easy, but somebody's gotta do it.

The educational system is not the only game being pimped for gains by way of Black failure. The Wayans brothers Mo' Money comedy captured America's obsession with neoliberalism, the idea of "gaining wealth and forgetting all but self," as stated by Noam Chomsky, the professor emeritus at MIT and political dissident. The characters in Mo' Money would do anything for money.

As many of us watch the coronavirus suffocate Black America, the pain of viewing the NYPD officer squeezing out eleven statements of freedom from Eric Garner, looms. COVID 19 is not the only thing attacking the lungs of Black society. Black people have fought to breathe since their introduction to European imagination.

Even as a Black man, I can't imagine the acquaintance with horror stemmed from human bondage Africans arriving at what is now America in 1619. I can imagine that it was breathtaking. The asthmatic reality of dehumanization and psychological terror left many who were enslaved, holding their chest, exclaiming to God that they could not breathe.

The murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not from a civil rights fight, but from his support of the public-sector workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee. That means that he was fighting for the economic power of poor Black people and White poor people. The acclaimed statement catalyzing Malcolm X's death, "get yo hands out my pocket," which Spike Lee inscribed into my brain, explained the monetization of the social justice warrior and attacked the lungs of Black America. The two assassinations again left Black bodies breathless. The perpetual traumatization of Black folk in America has always been for the benefit of whiteness. And if history tells us one thing, Black experiences in the world of COVID-19, along with the physiological and psychological consequences of being quarantined in Homz N the Hood, will somehow be rallied around white profitization, per usual.

The profit of Black trauma

When black bodies came to the thirteen colonies, it was to toil for the progress of a burgeoning republic under the commodification of their misery. Forced to, what Ta-Nehisi Coates coined as, a life of "task," it's hard to believe that traumas were mitigated. Before they arrived in America, Africans were people living their lives, the way they lived.

Slavery has had a profound influence on Black and White American lives. White people developed a corrosive psychosis of thinking, which relegates white ideology, morality, and values as supreme to people with different skin pigmentation. Black people have been moved by the psychosis of dehumanization and objectification, which pitted humans as things to be used, disposable, and sold.

The hard truth is that Black people have internalized the value put to their beingness by the very group who devalued them. The internalization of racist thought lives within dark bodies in two forms. One form is the way Black people see and think of themselves. In a society rooted in white supremacy and Black inferiority, Black minds have been conditioned, through many forms and mediums, to believe themselves as an American underclass, an American less than, an American subgroup. The second way is in the physical body, which comes out as stress-related illnesses.

There has always been trauma in the lives of dark bodies in America. But what is happening now, is a shift in the conversation, and White Americans are starting to notice how racism is hurting them. Heather McGhee's TED talk, "Racism has a cost for everyone," captures that cost seen in bad public policy. In the true form of White perseveration and a heightened sense of the effects of trauma, Black trauma, historical and current, has become of great interest. With trauma being the latest buzzword, Black pain will surly become of White interest.

With a coat hanger?

Dave Chappelle's, "that's some cold shit" joke performed on his Netflix special, "Dave Chappelle: The Bird Revelation" captures trauma pimpin, and what I fear will be slated as false benevolence, toward black trauma in the COVID-19 era, using a Donald Goines' imagination expressed by the character, a pimp named "Iceberg Slim." The beginning of the joke goes like this:

Chappelle: "Iceberg Slim breaks down some of the coldest capitalist concepts I've ever heard in my life. He describes in detail how these men break women so that they will give them the money that they make with their own bodies. There's a story in here so cold, it makes me shudder to think about it. Iceberg Slim is trying to control the woman that he finds uncontrollable. So he asks an older pimp how he can rein her in. And the older pimp says, 'Oh, that's easy, Iceberg. All you have to do is beat that bitch with a coat hanger. And then run her a bath. And give her some pills. She'll be so grateful that you fixed her, that she'll forget you were the motherfucker that beat her in the first place.' That's some cold shit."

Understanding the consequences of trauma, from current exposure to historical inheritance, is a relatively new phenomenon. Posttraumatic stress disorder did not receive relevance until the 70s. And, it is not until Dr. Joy DeGruy's theory of "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome" that historical consequences from the transformative brutality of American enslavement entered the purview of Black America. DeGruy believes that African Americans are currently impacted by the history of trauma their enslaved ancestors endured. In addition, the science called epigenetics is developing the language that explains how trauma is passed through genetics and generations. Now that's some cold shit.

Research is being done to recognize the transgenerational effects of trauma on Holocaust survivors and how biological systems, like health-related illnesses (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders), which are known to make the hosting body of COVID-19 more susceptible to die from the disease. Although vulnerability and damage are not the only information transferred through the harsh realities of traumatic experiences, wisdom, resilience, and flexibility are also transferred.

It is with the wisdom of Black resilience that I warn Black folk to pay close attention to the pain profiteers that will attempt to pimp Black trauma experienced from this unprecedented quarantine. We need to use the wisdom of our American experience, recognize the negative impact of abhorrent bondage on our current bodies, continue to advance through transgenerational resilience, and improve on our continued survival.

If we are to survive the epidemic of American racism, white supremacy, the pandemic of the coronavirus, and future pandemics, then Black America must make it a national response to these existential threats to dark American bodies by focusing on our health. Believe it or not, what we eat and our physical fitness will help us as the first defense from an alien virus or an alien-human in the future. If we focus on all aspects of our health, including mental health, we will change the pimp game of our trauma from Mo' Money, to no money.