Does Boycotting make sense?
by BlaqKharma · August 29, 2017
Does Boycotting make sense? Do we know how to boycott? Is this method of fight outdated? These are questions that I ask myself as I observe the patterns of my people.
We have seen how the issue of racism has transitioned and changed. We have watched the evolution of both white supremacy and technology… Yet we decide to combat evolutionized ways of hating with things that we have done decades ago. We are geniuses at screaming “boycott” or “protest” at the first site of injustice. We advertise the revolution on our t.shirts. We reduce it to clever quotes and fashion statements: “Stay woke”. We are backstroking forward…
I can’t help but wonder, is the psyche of Black America left in the pre-1960’s struggle? Have we forgotten what century or decade we are in? We now live in an age where drones and mechanical insects are reality and not science fiction. We have crossed over from analog to a digital. For the life of me, I cannot understand why our people are stuck in the past and moving forward in the current times.
If you want to be honest, today black people don’t even know how to boycott effectively. A real boycott takes too much work. It takes too much energy, something most of us are not trying to give up outside of keeping up with the Jones’s. If it’s not something as simple and easy to do, black people are not interested. If you cannot use it to look good on social media, we half-ass it. We have become comfortable with being lazy. We have become okay with being complacent. This is a problem. This is the damage of us growing up with “No Ceilings”. We allowed ourselves to forget our power. We allowed ourselves to raise our offspring without a care in the world in regards to our history and our fight. We have allowed ourselves to believe that we actually have a place in politics in this country. We do not think of creating our own Timbuktu. What is wrong with us? We have literally been thrown into a war and we don’t realize it. Our elders have either died off or they are rotting away in prison. Yet we don’t think, “let’s go back to their plight. let’s go back and see what they did.” We don’t listen to the commentary we don’t read the literature that a lot of them left behind. Yet when something happens, we are so quick to yell out “I’m boycotting.”
Boycotts today aren’t a success with us because we don’t want to do the work that it takes to make a boycott impactful. A boycott is an inconvenience. We cannot stand to be inconvenienced. We have been so spoiled by technology. We want things when we want them which is always instantly. We can’t even unify to boycott. For instance, with the whole situation where everyone decided that they were upset with Pepsi over the Kendal Jenner commercial. That “boycott” didn’t even make a week. Everyone screamed boycott in the beginning but no one actually did the work. Nobody actually boycotted Pepsi Co. Hell, nobody even googled all the companies under the Pepsi Co umbrella. We were too lazy to even research the Pepsi company. We couldn’t even find out that Pepsi was a conglomerate that owns several different companies that a lot of us use regularly.
I am so sick of hearing my people talk about boycott without sacrifice. The Montgomery Bus boycotts was a phenomenal example of solidarity and sacrifice collectively. People do not realize whenever you think about it these people were so about “that life” that they said, “fuck it we’ll walk wherever we need to go.” They said, “fuck it we’ll carpool wherever we need to go”… Boycotting strengthened the unity of the community.
We have all of these tools and we do not use them strategically to our advantage. .. When I think “boycott”, I think “ultimatum”. Why do we continue to offer ultimatums when we are more than capable of creating?
