Us, Black Celebrity, & the Class Divide

If you haven’t seen Us or are on a media blackout until after the election (which I totally get) - there are spoilers ahead.

Background: Wealthy black celebrity entertainers have recently come out in support of the current president. It’s something all kinds of celebrities have done, so why the moral outrage over these very few black celebrities endorsing the current administration and encouraging black Americans to vote for another term?

Opinion: It is irresponsible and morally indefensible for wealthy black celebrities to endorse racists to black people, especially for financial gain.

I don’t mean to just drop my opinion and leave, so I’ll show the lens that I’m seeing this through as a black millennial southern Progressive woman. This can’t be thoroughly explained without delving into US history - this scenario hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. There’s background, and I’ll get into that. But yesterday my husband put on a scary movie for Halloween: Us.

Us was released in March of 2019 (feels like a decade ago) and yesterday I realized that it is the perfect, META vehicle to explain exactly what is so wrong and unsettling about Kanye’s , Lil Wayne’s, Ice Cube’s, and 50-Cent’s endorsement of the current administration. Its extended metaphor lines up with the issue as perfectly as 11:11.

Us.

To start, Us isn’t a story about blackness or race. These are just black actors, and not representative of race.

The story goes that while on vacation, a family of four (I’ll just call them Mother, Father, Daughter, Son) is faced with their doppelgangers. These doppelgangers, called the Tethered (as they are a kind of twin psychically tethered to their counterpart) are from a place below the surface. The Tethered have emerged to rise up against the surface-dwellers who have enjoyed freedom and all of its perks while they, although identical, were forced to remain below where they eventually grew mad. They are led by Mother’s Tethered who has a particular hatred for Mother. The revolution she leads incites chaos, murder, destruction, and ultimately a violent suppression by the surface-dwellers - including Mother, who kills her Tethered and protects her family by every means she has. We learn though, as she smiles at the son she was able to save, that she was the one originally from below the surface. She is one of the Tethered. She’d forced her privileged twin down into her place and ascended into the land of the free. Her twin, conscious of the disparity between the surface and the place below, plotted her revenge for years.

So no, Us isn’t about race.

It’s about class.

Education in America:

Us explains that the Tethered were created intentionally by the government as a means to control the people on the surface. The government’s presence is evident in the place below, in the rows of chairs in classrooms, the prison-like rooms of bunk beds, the walls of cages where rabbits were once forcibly kept and bred for food. The government has long since left, but their framework is still intact. The Tethered are now self-perpetuating. The government doesn’t need to be there to enforce their ideas - it’s been institutionalized.

Our current system of education, the insistence on a national standard, of orderly classrooms, of weeks of testing - these are popularly identified as being the remnants of a theory of education that revolved around industrialization . (Although historically, it’s more nuanced than just that.) Children were ordered to sit, absorb, memorize and repeat. Critical thinking, engagement, all of that is replaced by the banking system of education that we are wielding against the children in this country. In this system, there is an authority on a subject who deposits their knowledge into the presumed empty heads of their students, who are then to accept the information without question. In Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he encourages dialogue, conversation, an environment of learning that is involving, evolving, and inclusive of the students’ input. Without critical thinking, and the ability to question information, American children are growing into American adults who don’t understand the history of the country they live in, doubt the validity of science, and believe the word of whoever they consider an authority, without proof of merit.

The US.

To start, racism was not about blackness. It was and is about class. However, the two issues are permanently tethered.

Slavery in the United states of America began as a venture for capitalists who wanted to undercut the cost of labor, plain and simple. In order to do so, they obtained human beings from different countries and enslaved them. Americans had tried to enslave Native peoples, but it’s hard to enslave someone who knows the land better than you do. So they imported people from abroad and enslaved them - for profit.

This is a bit of a PR issue for people who:

A) understand that slavery is evil and

B) call themselves Christians when there’s a whole story in their book about a guy names Moses who freed some slaves - maybe you’ve heard of it.

These capitalists knew how to sell a product though, so they created a plan:

In order to reduce the natural empathy any normal person would have towards another person being enslaved, imprisoned, captured, brutalized (and so on and so forth until death) there had to be a campaign to otherize the people they were enslaving. White plantation owners and slave traders dehumanized these captured people, emphasized their differences, degraded their appearance, and stripped them of their language so that they were forced to speak in the little English they were able to pick up from their oppressors (therefore making them seem less intelligent). The color of these people was an easy target to otherize them. If you can convince one person that another person is not as human as they are, you can easily reduce that first person’s empathy to the other’s plight. More than that, if you can convince people that those who are enslaved are of such little intellect that they don’t even understand what freedom is or what they would do with it, then you can convince people that these slaves (note: not people but slaves) are being taken care of by their masters.

So if you can be convinced that a less-human-than-you slave is so helpless that really all they can do is work for a living and receive shelter in return, and if it makes things easier and more profitable for you, you might find yourself not minding slavery so much.

All the while, the institution of slavery enriched itself off the labor of the people that they had captured. These rich, white, slave owners created the southern economy and ran it ruthlessly. There was even a war about it - you know, the one that we’re taught in school was about state’s rights? You have to get specific when you mention that it was about a state’s right for white humans to claim ownership over black humans that they’d forcibly kept, bred, sold (and so on and so forth until death) for profit.

The other piece to this is that these capitalists also disenfranchised white people. Poor white people couldn’t compete against the institution of slavery. They also ended up working for these capitalists, and were grateful for it, too. So grateful that when the capitalists said that without slavery they’d all be out of jobs, these poor white people took up arms to defend their master’s right to own people. These poor white people were told that it was about their liberty as Americans.

Poor white people still believe the lies of those capitalists to this day.

When black people were emancipated and had to be paid for their work, their wages were still undercutting the poor white man’s. Capitalists could afford this labor and always could, it just cut into their profit margins a little. Being capitalists, they were always going to go for the lower cost, so this left the poor white man out. And the poor white man, instead of turning his ire against his own master, the capitalists, started to truly despise people of color. Blamed people of color for working for lower wages when it was the capitalists who hired them. Hated the presence of people of color even though it was the capitalists who brought them here. Hated the remnants of capitalism, but still dreamed of being capitalists themselves one day.

This pleased the capitalists very much, who could oppress poor white men and people of color equally, and a short-time investment of institutionalizing racism among poor whites was paying off dividends in the form of white people being too distracted by their hatred for and exclusion of people of color to realize that it was the capitalists who had put them in their place.

The capitalists knew then just as they know now that if poor people in America realize that they are in the same boat as each other despite their race, and that there are far more of us than there are true capitalists - then there might be an uprising. But they sleep well at night knowing that the racial divide has been driven deep into the heart of America. The institutionalization is already in place. They can continue to harm all poverty-stricken Americans and convince poverty-stricken whites to go along with it by claiming it’s about protecting their liberty and their jobs. When William F Buckley speaks about voter suppression (minute 53, but really watch the entire thing) - he states that if it were up to him, he’d raise the standards of the vote to disqualify 65% of whites from voting as well. He’s talking about poor white people being in the same boat as black people because again, it’s not about race, it’s about class. There is a type of vote that capitalists want to suppress - and it doesn’t have a skin color.

That’s how the class divide stays in place.

Transcending the Divide.

When you watch Us, you’re first going to think about it very metaphorically. As if maybe it’s about there being two sides to every person.

It’s not. Jordan Peele’s Us is META metaphorical - abstract enough to not be literal, but on the nose enough to explain exactly what it means. When Mother is describing to her husband that when she was a little girl, she saw a copy of herself in a funhouse mirror - he asks if she meant a reflection. No! She screams. She’s a real person.

When the husband asks Mother’s Tether who she and her doppelganger family are, she answers:

We’re Americans.

How more direct can you be?

We’ve all heard that the middle class is shrinking. It’s about 51% right now. Lower-class households make up about 29% of America. That’s Americans living in poverty. Millions of us. About 20% of families are upper class.

So the scary thing about Us is not that for every one surface-dweller there is one Tethered living below - the scary thing is that for every one upper-class person, there is one and a half people in poverty.

There is a $60k difference between the median middle-class household income and the poverty-stricken lower class. There is a $121K difference between the median middle-class household income and the upper class.

80% of the population actually has a lot more in common with each other, has a much smaller divide between them, than there is a divide between the middle-class and the upper-class.

Which means that for every one surface-dweller, there would truly be four Tethered in a literal scenario. If we were united.

But that divide is not only financial, it’s psychological.

Let’s return for a moment to James Baldwin’s debate with William F Buckely that I linked above. (seriously, watch it.) In order to partially discredit and undermine Baldwin’s experience with racism, oppression, violence and discrimination as a black American at home and abroad, Buckley tells the audience to consider that Baldwin had attained some level of fame. That Baldwin was the toast of the town when he was in it, that he was celebrated and welcomed at every higher-level educational institution and that many had invited him to speak. Buckley asked them to see this as a sign of America’s class mobility, and evidence that any black person could attain such social stature. To see it as evidence that America’s structure is what allowed for Baldwin’s successes, and that in deconstructing the institutionalization of America in order to overthrow it for something different would eliminate this class mobility. In short, he was asking the audience to see that Baldwin had transcended the class divide - and that any other black person could, too.

People of color are often evaluated based on their proximity to the class divide. If a person of color is poor, the question becomes how poor and why. If that person is not poor, then they are discredited as not being able to relate to or represent a poor constituency - and yet they are proof themselves that a “rags to riches” story is completely attainable. Although “bootstrapping” has been pushed by capitalists and adopted as a mantra by many working Americans, this idea was introduced to ridicule the notion that a person could pull themselves up by a pair of bootstraps because it’s nearly impossible to do. No one should feel as though they have to complete a nearly impossible feat to survive. You shouldn’t have to claw and scrape and scratch your way out of poverty.

But let’s talk about how Us addresses this.

Mother’s Tether reminds Mother that they were born special.

Talent works a lot like that, doesn’t it? A wealthier family may have better equipment, may have extra programs to get coached, tutored and practiced in, but raw talent can begin anywhere. Given the right mindset, the right motivation, the right preparation and the right circumstances - and even a person in poverty can transcend the class divide and become wealthy. Maybe even ultra-wealthy.

The class divide can be transcended. A person can emerge from poverty to the surface. A Tethered can enter the land of the free.

But what then?

Untethered.

Us is a story about a woman’s struggle to untether herself from a class of people. However, Mother’s Tethered shows that a true untethering doesn’t happen until the control that the surface-dwellers have over those below is severed. She convinces herself that the suffering has been a cosmic test from god, and that she was meant to lead the Tethered to freedom. In the end, her revolution is largely symbolic and sadly, ultimately futile in terms of commanding immediate change. What the emergence of the Tethered does accomplish, however, is to draw a hell of a lot of attention to their issue: the “haves” controlling the “have nots” from the other side of a class divide.

When Mother, as a little girl, transcended the place below, she did so by suppressing her doppelganger. Mother’s Tethered tells her, you could have taken me with you. Instead, Mother left her and all of the Tethered beneath, below, and tried to forget them and move on with her life. Because it was easier. Mother is shown to be upper-middle class (as opposed to upper class, like their friends with the huge house, new cars and new boat). Her husband shows that he aspires to have the same sort of lifestyle as his upper-class friend and sort-of rival. While they are upwardly mobile, they are already at the very least financially comfortable.

Mother was able to give her son the extra attention he needs (while his Tethered is wild and primitive, and maimed from an accident), to get her athletic daughter good running shoes (while her Tethered runs just as fast in flats), and to choose a husband based solely on her desire for him and not a combination of circumstance and financial convenience (while her Tethered was stuck with Father’s Tethered). Mother’s husband is able to have the glasses he needs while his Tethered squints and frowns. It’s even mentioned that Mother was able to have a successful C-section while her Tethered had to suffer alone. Considering that women in poverty have a higher maternal mortality rate than their wealthier counterparts, it’s worth mentioning. When Mother transcended, she left all of the issues related to poverty behind. But she was not untethered. She could not be untethered so long as the Tethered version of her existed.

OJ Simpson.

Because race and class have been so profoundly connected, black people who transcend the class divide in America are often seen as leaving behind an element of blackness along with that poverty. Their negative experiences as a person of color are devalued while the fact that they are a person of color is heralded as proof that the class divide can be transcended and that racism does not exist. So if a person of color who has financial (and social) status speaks out against institutionalized racism, their own wealth is used as proof against their allegations against America. Worse yet, if a person of color buys into this narrative, buys into the idea that they have transcended the class divide and left both race and class behind - then they do a direct disservice to every other person of color who continues to be oppressed, and have themselves become an oppressor.

In Us, in the upper-class household, when the wife curses at her husband and tells him to check for trespassers because she hears something outside, he begrudgingly looks out into the night. He then says that he does see someone out there… OJ Simpson. As if he was their version of a bogeyman.

So let’s talk about Juice.

I’m sure there are many different takes on the trial (besides the fact that yeah, he totally did it and got away with it because he was rich ) but when I asked my mom (you should ask your own parents) why people were so riled up about the case, and why it was so racially motivated, she told me two things:

One, white people were perfectly fine with OJ “when he was their boy” (full negative connotation there with the word boy). When OJ was making money for them, entertaining them (if you don’t know, he’s got some great slapstick in Naked Gun), while he was putting on a show for them he was one of theirs, one of them.

Two, the quote “I’m not black, I’m OJ”. To be clear, he has never actually said that. However, it’s a concise description of his belief about himself. Meaning that he’d bought into the idea that he was absolved of the issue of being black, seeing as how he had become wealthy and famous.

OJ Simpson is an example of a person who’d believed that he’d transcended the class divide and race with it. He was embraced by the white upper-class - right up until his accusations. He was immediately otherized. Time magazine darkened his skin on their cover-page photo of him. The defense argued that the prosecution’s Detective Fuhrman was acting on racial prejudice - the kind of prejudice OJ thought his money, his class, had protected him from. But stripped of his class identifier (you are no longer a black celebrity who has overcome race, you are a black criminal) he was immediately vulnerable to the institutionalized racism of America.

What made black people angry was that he was treated as a white upper-class person when he was valued, but he was not treated the way a white upper-class criminal is.

Black Celebrity Endorsement.

Which brings us to the current issue.

There are black people who hold conservative views. I’m not here to contest whether they should or shouldn’t, though I obviously disagree with the premise of being fiscally conservative to the point of keeping people in poverty when taxing the 1% of the ultra-wealthy population would resolve the issue. Especially when a disproportionate percentage of the impoverished are people of color.

However.

There is no middle ground for racism. There is no middle ground for human rights. There is no middle ground for systemic and institutionalized oppression.

When ultra-wealthy black celebrities endorse open racists, they are speaking from the other side of the class divide as if they have transcended racism. Believing privately is their right. But when they pull on their tether, when they speak to black people who are in the middle and lower-class (the same black people who gave them the patronage to cross the class divide) - when they pull on that tether of control and try to pull those black people squarely beneath open racists to hold them up - it is disingenuous, manipulative, and degrading to themselves and to the black people in America who continue to suffer the direct repercussions of systemic racism. Poverty has costs that are paid with interest: higher mortality rate, lower opportunity for nutrition, worse education, and extra-judicial killings, to name a few.

Being a tool, a colorful prop, for a racist to use disenfranchises black people in America everywhere. It emboldens capitalists to say that any black person can be ultra-wealthy if they work hard. It bolsters a system that benefits directly from the suffering of the poor. The reach of that message is an unfair, bought-and-paid-for direct line to black people who otherwise would not give an open racist the time of day. They are speaking for the benefit of the upper-class, ultra-wealthy capitalists who do not and have never had anyone’s interest in mind but their own.

I do not speak for all black people. I don’t have to.

I’m speaking for myself as a black woman in the American reality that I live every day.

There’s absolutely nothing new about one person selling out his own people for the right amount of money - which is exactly what these endorsements are. Whether they were paid directly or they’re hoping to save tax money on every dollar over 400,000 that they bring in - tax money that educates, houses, and feeds the people of America including many black people who count themselves among the ones who need help the most - it’s blood money. How much American blood are they willing to spill to keep their money?

How much American blood will be shed if there does have to be a class uprising in the streets? At least 25 people were killed or maimed in the summer Black Lives Matter protests alone. Thousands of people who protested against police violence - largely black people - have been jailed and are about to face serious charges, up to Life in Prison.

So again, I believe that black upper-class celebrities who have built their career on the support of the middle and lower-class black community must act in the best interest of those communities, and not for themselves. I feel that every elite owes their riches to the exploited classes beneath them. But given our history, these black men must take particular care that they do not continue the exploitation of other black people by trying to control them in a way that supports the racist capitalism that continues to perpetuate poverty. They should instead work to empower black people by addressing the roots of all American poverty by: paying more taxes; fighting for an increased living wage; championing health care for all; and pushing for educational equity, availability, and reform.

In Us, the site of Mother’s final battle against her Tethered counterpart is at the site of the institutionalization. That is where the battle really needs to be; like in Us, every other violent clash will be just on the surface. If we don’t change the educational system, the power that capitalists have and the institutions that perpetuate poverty, we’re never going to see an end to the racial or the class divide.

They. Are. One.

That oppression that black people face, the oppression these celebrities try to address in the Platinum Plan is a direct result of the systemic racism that is meant to keep the curtain drawn between races who are ultimately in the same boat.

So long as the poor white man is convinced that poor immigrants and people of color are the enemy, the system wins. So long as we continue to believe that we’re supposed to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the system wins. So long as we continue to believe that the lower class deserve their lot in life and exist only to support our clamoring for the upper class, the system wins. So long as we continue to vie for position, one on top of the other rather than side by side, the system wins.

But once that curtain is drawn back between the races, between the lower and middle class, and more people see that we have far more in common with each other than with the few who are dominating our lives and oppressing us, we will begin to see the true outrage and potential of us Americans.