Y’all, I really just wanted to just enjoy Ghost of Tsushima yesterday (absolutely amazing game by Sucker Punch fyi), but instead I found myself on IG commenting on Talib Kweli’s page because he is still harassing a Black woman going on…3 weeks and about 2 days, who knows, by the time I’m done writing I may have to edit to add today too. Anyway, I wrote a comment trying to explain his power vs hers, his response was not acknowledging anything I said (which I felt was respectful in tone), then there was just noise mostly because of how the social media works. I feel the need to say this and I think I’ve already stated this before, but who I am online and offline is no difference. If you see me talking Black Lives Matter on social media, you bet I’m having that same conversation around me. I do not troll or support trolling because that defeats any sort of dialogue the same way Stewie kept saying “MOM!” to Lois in Family Guy. I DO NOT like pile-ons, which is basically when one person says something and another person decides to piggyback on that comment for the sole purpose of being rude or confrontational. Again, all it does is detract from a necessary debate and causes others to immediately become defensive.
Why am I wasting my time talking about social media rapper drama? Well it’s mostly because of a lack of reading comprehension on Kweli’s part. He considers himself a conscious rapper, or at least as he put it a “well known progressive pro black artist” so I expected a little compassion? ….maturity maybe? I don’t really know, but there’s this idea that somehow if you feel disrespected you are entitled to have little to no control of your actions, even if that means misreading a retweet and harassing a Black woman. It wasn’t so much his tweets that had me thinking, they were asinine, but it was the response I was getting from other Black men. Either a “she has it coming” due to Kweli’s spreading of out of context tweets or his misinformation of not following a timeline of his overreaction to her reaction. Then I thought about the Civil Rights movement currently and how even now there is this hostile discourse among Black people about what can/can’t be said, should/shouldn’t be done and there is a wider discussion that needs to be had concerning the difficulty of finding a space for Black intellectual thought or discussion. In some form in the 60s and 70s, you had Black intellectual debate on TV or radio and you were able to point to figures whose motives were to have discourse concerning being Black in America, but also pointing to community issues, schooling, etc.
We are in a time where information is excessive and everywhere, so because of this there is a natural aversion to too much info. A sensory overload essentially, so you only stick with the things you believe you know to be true. Just as there is excessive info, there is also a lack of attainable info, meaning that some people don’t have access to the information that would be most beneficial to them. So when you have someone like Talib Kweli constantly posting about a 24 year old Black woman every day for the past 3 weeks, while on this woman’s Twitter page she is saying she is not and has not been doing well for over 20 days. Or even the criticism of Dave Chappelle’s 8:46 in which he mentioned many Black men’s names that have been killed by police, but not one of the Black women that have also lost their lives to police violence (valid criticism, doesn’t detract from the message he gave), you can see this exasperated attitude from Black men as if they can’t do anything right. Criticism can help to show that maybe we have overlooked something, and just because that info comes from social media doesn’t mean it is invalid. Rudeness makes it invalid, not taking your humanity into account makes it invalid. Noname was talked to on Twitter by fans who told her she didn’t know what she was talking about, so you know what she did? SHE STARTED READING! Then she started a book club to read along with other fans of hers, and with that information came knowledge (because of the reading) and wisdom (sharing that knowledge to help others).
I am not going to lie to y’all, being Black is fucking hard. We are not a monolith, yet we constantly have to make sure we are on point. Not just to look fresh but for our own safety as well. So when a Black celebrity steps out of line, and you try to remind them that maybe they should take it easy, the immediate response is “Who are you and why should I listen?” Well…because at some point you were me, no one, and you were given an ear at some point. Do I need status to be heard? Do I need celebrity friends to validate my existence? If I have no power or wealth am I inherently inferior to you even if you are wrong? Again, as usual, I have no answers to any of this. I’ve always been plagued by this question of how can we have regular access to Black discussion and debate because the news isn’t helping, so would a network host a panel of thinkers, writers, artists to discuss wider topics other than gossip? Or if there are and anyone has an idea of something like that I’d love to hear it.
Below are the exchanges between me and Talib Kweli:
1/5 
2/5 
3/5 
4/5 
5/5
Something With Nothing 