I have been following up with the Black Lives Matter movement since the killing of George Floyd and I have tried to make sense of what the movement stands for. When it came out I found out that on the website of the Black Lives Matter about page it was clearly written that this movement was a neo-Marxist movement.
I was building a long-distance relationship with a girl in pain at the time and all I had were questions about the whole movement. I was still on its side I just wanted to understand what she thought about it.
She was a more religious supporter, she had earrings with the BLM on them, and she would join protests there in Spain.
I wanted to know what the was neo-marxism really meant. So I would read a little and ask her any questions, because, I really worried about her and the affiliations she would be forming with this movement.
That was when I realised that you had to separate the statement from the movement. Which to me seemed a bit odd.
I called more and more BS to her raising the facts that some of the so-called "token blacks" had brought up as points against the movement. But she would remind me of how she felt living in Spain.
I never told her about just how privileged I thought she was to be in Spain funded by her parents because to her she was less privileged simply because she was black.
She told about how she was searched in an airport terminal and how Spanish police would look at her while she walked on the road simply because she was black. All the while it seemed to me that she was reading these people's minds because how else did she know that was why she was searched and that was why they were looking at her that way?
To this day I never got to address these issues because the more I questioned the movement the more she got irritated.
Knowing that I was not a victim of oppression in this day and age and wanting her to have a similar resolve cost me that relationship. Which sucks because other than her support for this movement which was based on fear...she was an awesome person.
Fast forward to now...I realise that if the police had it particularly bad for her at the terminal they could have planted weed in her bag or done something more despicable to make sure she ends in jail.
I realise that the police who were staring at her may have been admiring her or something else but if they really wanted to kill her and hide the evidence...they could.
I'm not saying I support any of these things but we live in a world where things like this have happened and will continue to happen. But what particularly made those people a threat were stories and not facts about them.
The black lives matter movement did nothing for the black communities around the world but it encouraged people to kill, steal and destroy. They made their way with billions of dollars in contributions from black people, black businesses and big operations that knew what was going on.
During that protesting black on black crime was on a high. Black people killing black people....but so long as a white person is not involved nobody cares.
Black people destroying businesses in their neighbourhood...make all of this make sense...
Watch short
The sentiment is that so long as a white person was not involved there is no need to raise an alarm.
Can a black American explain why when a Nigerian goes abroad they don't have the same problems the blacks over there have?
Can you explain why black Africans do not face the same racism as you? We share the same pigment in fact I would argue that most of the time we are blacker hence we are supposed named as the most vulnerable to white oppression.
If systemic oppression were so real we have "blacker" names and black people get segregated from whites based on their names right? That's what I was educated to believe during the George Floyd protest.
But this is not the case. Black men make up most of the prison population and very few of them are African.
It's not the skin... it's the mentality...
So if Kanye west and Candis Owen wear white lives matter T-shirts I say it's about time.
People need to wake up. Stop being the victim. Pick yourself up. What kind of mindset are you giving to your children if you tell them that they are oppressed and they need to fight that oppression every day?
Don't you think that will hinder them from having goals and aspirations?
Don't you think making a better life for yourself should be a bigger priory than fighting imaginary oppression?
I refuse to take this mentality with me, I am not a victim of colonialism, I am privileged to be in Nigeria where the cost of living is not high, I am privileged to know my way around in life enough to survive, and I am privileged to be healthy and more so I am privileged to be able to climb higher to places that have better.
