The Wayward Scholar

In a meritocracy, the established values and institutional functioning is based on one’s merit, abilities and personal talents or ‘winning’ characteristics. In this type of governing society those who offer abilities of greatest value have access to greater opportunity, status and social positions. The operations of a meritocratic system may evidently influence several dimensions of a society on both the micro and macro levels including social, economic and political functioning.

These relationships contrive a function based on merit that may have dangerous implications in which civil and human rights are organized around the ideology that all that we have must be earned and only some, not all, are deserving. In a nation that systematically stigmatizes and persecutes the ‘other’ it is arguably relevant to discuss how in our meritocracy; one has to earn civil rights, human rights and freedom. It becomes self-evident that a meritocracy in its raw form largely contradicts democratic assumptions or expectations and in fact reproduces the oppressive cultural bias that continues to hamper progress and liberation.

I am enslaved. I fight daily to be in control of my own body and to control my own mind, however despite my internal and external resistance I am still drowning in the sea of racism and classism. Regardless of my best efforts I find myself bound by daily expectations in which I argue as slavery. Although it is quite relevant to the discussion of slavery I am not going to thoroughly discuss human and sex trafficking, child labor or forced slavery through violence, physical restraints and isolated geographic locations. I am referring to a slavery as being beyond economical but also psycho sexual and sociopolitical.

It is a hold of the mind by capitalism; anti-blackness and white supremacy, the mechanisms in which are designed to use my body as human capital then dispose of this body through annihilation or imprisonment (in which profits are continuously gained while occupying a cell via labor exchanges).

The story of freedom is a thinly veiled exchange of custody from slave owners and massas of plantations to employers and corporate institutions. When we strive to be free, we are necessarily striving towards liberation. Freedom is only reformed chattel slavery – it is the black codes, Jim crow laws, mass incarceration, housing segregation, employment and labor discrimination, educational disparities, lack of access to healthcare and nutrition, it is forgotten and neglected communities.

Black folk breaking their backs enduring social, physical, spiritual and emotional violence laboring to constructing homes, bridges, railroads, tending farmland, caring for children…etc. without pay is slavery. Being emancipated and “hired” by the same white men to work the same jobs for pennies, for dollars is freedom. How much money would it require to be considered liberated?

He pitied their souls
CRACK! – no more chains – you are Free!
Now get back to work.

Liberation is can be achieved when we begin to acknowledge the limitations of our mobility and freedom struggles.

I am enslaved to working a shit job generating continuous profit for large companies, businesses and executives. I maintain their facilities, interact daily with their costumers, I file the paperwork, I manage, assist and train my colleagues, I follow all orders and requests and yet I am disrespected, underappreciated and underpaid. I work for wages when analyzed comparatively to the amount I help the company earn; is equivalent to nickels and dimes.

I work 40+ hours a week and at the end of that pay cycle; my income is taxed by our government (local, state and federal). Which are white power structures designed and operate to continuously attempt to control, dispose and terminate my body while disparaging, disenfranchising and denying my basic civil and human rights. I pay the system that circulates abuses, oppression and state-sanctioned violence both historically and contemporarily as a means to uphold white supremacist, white power structures and racial domination.

At the end of this pay period, I will need to surrender my pay to my white property owners. Provide checks for fuel to the White controlled electric and gas providers. I hand over my wages to greedy outstretched pale hands for my phone bill, to the cable and Internet white empires. I must surrender those wages to pay for food and groceries at the chain grocery stores.

Grocery stores that ironically have likely obtained the fruits, vegetables and spices through agricultural industries that frequently take advantage of free or cheap labor while our country simultaneously supports and spits racism and xenophobia. I pay for car insurance with increased interest rates, for white owned health insurance companies to provide me with white doctors who think I am too tough, strong and powerful to get sick and rarely treat my conditions appropriately.

After being mugged by all of these enterprises I am left with almost no money to spend on myself perhaps for self-care, hobbies, emergencies, vacations or even counseling. I am continuously robbed of my time and energy to engage in activism, civic participation or engaging our community members. I work and earn these wages to give it right back and therefore it appears that my labor is essentially free. For when I rarely save enough for my own devices, I find that I am encouraged and given really only one option to consume goods, products, and useless amenities, which are often explicitly owned by (you guessed it).

If I were to resist and undo my own shackles and take a step out into the light and breathe in freedom, to fully embody being unapologetic. I would ultimately lose access to everything including my home. Imprisonment, homelessness, state violence are weapons used to ensure that we “stay in our place.” Paternalism, which is the practice of asserting authority over others and declaring that their subordinate position is what is best for them. That we should be grateful we were ‘given’ opportunities for employment and education. That we should be grateful to live in such rundown facilities that are too small with rates continuously increasing.

Where every other option is non-affordable and that my entire existence is predicated upon my ability to work and create wages, surrender those wages and start over. The precarious nature of our everyday existence is no matter to the ruling class. This is structured in such a way that there is homelessness, near-homelessness or incredibly wealthy and there are no alternatives and in between. If I try to be free I find that it is illegal in many places to have more than a set number of adults in one household, I can deny to pay and find that it is illegal to sleep in my car or to sleep outside because white people ‘own’ the land. Finding liberation on the land I was born on is criminalized because I was born on a plantation.

I cannot feed myself because fruit and vegetable plants do not naturally grow in the wild in my region because of constant degradation and raping of our environment and natural areas. It’s technically illegal to take items (food) from garbage cans or dumpsters.  Food is reserved for those who earn it. Water is reserved for those who earn it. To ensure this standard stays set they place fences and guards around crops, trees, bushes and reservoirs.

They even go as far as packaging and bottling food and water to create a system that makes food largely unattainable on equal and equivalent dimensions. The standard is set at who is most deserving of the best food and deserves clean water for regardless of the human capital you generate through employment or consumption it is not guaranteed. Take Cleveland, OH or Flint, MI or Charleston, SC.

Those caught without chains and the security of bondage face public humiliation, social stigma and bias and are targeted and destroyed by the carceral state. Those who attempt to seek freedom are punished through malnutrition, loss of security and must surrender what some would argue as basic rights in the 21^st century. Overwhelming statistics reveal that low economic and impoverished individuals are subject to be involved in higher rates of violence and crime. Most likely to be victims of police brutality and likely to be apprehended and imprisoned.

Pursuing freedom from slavery only ensures that the structures will send the hounds and the henchmen after you. To capture you, make legal claim over your flesh, and submit your body to further abuse in private institutions in which they continue to profit on your caged residence.

The visibility of Black bodies across the class systems can be distracting and confusing for those of us who still suffer the worst. Black capitalists and their influencers are often the first to offer critique of underground economies, denying the need of these economies for survival. These capitalists will then make films, movies, music and art about the struggle of underground economies to then and moving upward and profit in the system that demands our exploitation or annihilation.

I sit here watching the performance of ‘Freedom’ by Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar on the BET Awards 2016 and wonder if they are worth critiquing. I should be proud and excited at our beautiful blackness on stage demonstrating Black magic and Black power. These are examples of the modern role models of the Black community and of Black culture.

I notice how hip hop artists, athletes, famous business owners each contribute to creating an allure that to gain success is to embrace the meritocracy. To grind, grind, and fight to provide evidence that you have an inherent ability that is worth greater social positioning and status. That our dances, our poetry, our art is evidence that we deserve our rights and they illustrate a myth that this capitalistic machine can be weaponized as a methodology for social change. They provide us with the fantasies that embracing the systems that perpetuate our destruction is not in fact some form of enslavement.

We need to support one another and invest into each other’s dreams and aspirations. We need to build a new positive structure for ourselves where we uplift and protect one another’s businesses and inspire to build our own empires. Instead, we are suggested to endure, struggle and claw our ways to the top by feeding our white slave massas and working their plantations all while singing with grace and with hope Freedom.