The Profit in Black Pain
Black is opulence.
Black is wealth.
Black is the amalgamation of all colors.
On the day after Thanksgiving every year, companies celebrate “Black Friday” to celebrate profits that they’ve made all throughout the year.
Profit.
I just finished watching Mindhunter on Netflix last night, and as much as I enjoyed watching the show, I know that I don’t ever want to watch it again. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that the show was brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the birth of the term “serial killer.”
It was that second season that truly got to me.
If you’re unaware like I was, the second season of Mindhunter focuses on the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979 -1981. These are cases where 29 black children were abducted and murdered while the entire world watched with shallow breaths. I was horrified that I’d never heard that this’d happened, as much as I pride myself on knowing black history and taking my time to study and research it.
I’m the type of person that does not like watching movies or tv shows that depict the brutalization of black bodies for the benefit of other races with no resolution at the end. Spoiler Alert but that’s how Mindhunter ends. The FBI and the city of Atlanta find a suspect that was only responsible for two out of the 29 murdered black children and threw a victory party for themselves. Watching this happen and knowing that it’s real made me so incredibly sad. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and when I was on the phone with my girlfriend earlier, I explained to her how companies profit off of black pain really bothers me. While I can definitely see the merit in Mindhunter reenacting these murders because, at the end of the day, I learned about something I hadn’t, it still really bothers me to see it.
I believe that bringing awareness to black people’s pain is important, but if nothing will be done about it, I don’t want to see it.
Here we are, a year and some change after the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Oluwatoyin Salau and I’ve had so much time to reflect after writing the Drew Brees Principle around this time last year. So much has happened within this time that I honestly don’t think I have the time to list it all, but there are a few things I want to talk about.
I lost my job last year and got a new one not far from it in downtown DC. My daily commute has me walking past the newly established “Black Lives Matter Plaza” which leads towards the White House. I can’t help but laugh every time I pass it, because it reminds me of an incident that happened last year.
In the DC area, from the time that George Floyd was murdered, there was a dedicated group of activists that marched every day during a global pandemic until Election Day in November. These brave activists had the goal of bringing awareness and demanding change in the hostile policing of black bodies. These people marched every day and saw their numbers dwindle day in and day out and yet, they persevered. When Joe Biden’s win was announced (the first time lol), that first night there were celebrations in the streets everywhere. That night, I saw an interview on Twitter where a reporter got a hold of one of the aforementioned protestors and asked them how they were feeling. The protestor was angry. He was angry because the first place these people went to celebrate was, you guessed it, Black Lives Matter Plaza. People that hadn’t shown up for a single protest, people that were too afraid to tell their own families that black lives do indeed matter, decided that place was where they should celebrate a centrist Democrat and a previous District Attorney that blocked innocent black people from being released from prison.
They were angry, and rightfully so.
It was the type of performative show that black people are all too familiar with. Never mind the reason that the street was painted and renamed, it was time for a photo op. It reminds me of all of those companies that were silent that first week that people were out in the streets getting shot in and losing their eyes. Getting tear gassed. Getting beaten into the pavement. Then, in the second week, after seeing how well received the few companies that spoke up immediately were, they “jumped on the bandwagon” and issued their flimsy statements. They did no research, and donated their funds to the Black Lives Matter organization black people had been begging them not to. It was too much work for them to research where their money would actually go, or just ask a black person, so now those people are using that money to buy land and Gucci handbags.
Why would they do such a thing? Easy, profit.
Black pain is profitable. People that hate black people love to see it and find it interesting. Black people want to support it because who knows when the next time we’ll be able to tell our stories will come around.
Jordan Peele made Get Out four years ago and created a new genre of black pain. I doubt he had any idea how many copycats would come out of the woodworks. Like that one show on Amazon Prime I don’t feel like looking up at the moment.
Recently, Netflix put out Two Distant Strangers, a movie with Joey Badass where a black man is living a nightmare. He’s stuck in a loop of living the same day which ends with him being killed by a policeman. After the launch of the movie, Cynthia Kao, an Asian filmmaker made a TikTok suggesting that the movie idea was stolen from her. While I completely believe her and know that Netflix was in the wrong, something else bothers me about it.
Why was she writing the story in the first place?
It isn’t her story to tell. She was doing her best to capitalize off of black pain.
For profit.
I am tired of black pain.
I am tired of seeing our suffering being used for nothing but profit.
Black is opulence.
Black is wealth.
Black is the amalgamation of all colors.
Black is so much more than pain.
-E.