The peculiar institution of modern day slavery.

In this video, Damon Wayans illustrates -in comedic fashion- just how easily bought and sold Black people are in today’s America. But we weren’t supposed to just sit at white people’s counters and on the front of their buses and prove we were as good as they are, we were supposed to OWN ours, and serve ourselves and each other.

Wayans provides here a light-hearted but hardeningly sober look at several things: (a) How white people pick and choose a new slave token in modern terms; (b) How $13 million can be a lot of money to a Black man who serves himself to us on a Butler’s platter that we forged, regardless of the fact that we will pay them three to 10x more to make him serve himself to us for laughs; and (c) How fearful Black people still are of economic loss and reprisal, just as much as or more than the chained slaves were during the antebellum times.

Funny-not-haha how a little “jokey-joke” can become deadly serious, particularly with Black people who are laughing about it as if Wayans is not talking ABOUT the people in his audience.

Nah. You would never be that afraid of a white person and bow and scrape and say “Yassa Massa” in such a manner as this, not “lil’ old conscious you.” Surely he is comparing the past with the present. Or is he?

He sounds quite a bit nervous in this video, shaky and nearly afraid to tell the joke … as if he is crying out to be rescued from them nutcase crazy white folks. He tells us that he is still a slave on a top-level plantation because of the paycheck that gives him free, but not freedom, and moreso than that, there is really nothing he can do about it. Why would he want to?

But because we already know that money can’t buy us freedom, OR love: It’s a joke that sounds like a cry for help, especially coming from a man whose family members not long ago attempted to claim a legal franchise -a copyright- to the word “nigger.” As many of us should know by now, the U.S. Copyright Office turned them down. No one can copyright a word or a nomer, the law won’t allow that for anyone of any race.

To add fuel to the fire, Wayans’ joke reflects a moment for pause in so many other ways.

It doesn’t take $13 million to buy an average Negro/Black/Colored/Pan/African/American these days. For far too many of us, a $9/hr job does the trick, and we’re steppin’ and fetchin’ for that slave wage job because that’s all there is and there ain’t no more. A six-figure token Negro is an even bigger bargain, if they can find one that is actually worth two to 3.5 times less what they would pay a white man who won’t work as hard to take his place.

The Game of Black and How to Play It

1 – Go in to corporate (white) America at a lower salary rate that can be negotiated downward. They don’t need you, Black person, they need the fact that either you don’t know what your worth is on the comparative job market; or even if you do know it, they need YOU to know that they can find a white person at the ‘market’ rate, if you dare to charge it. If you’re going to charge what they charge, they’d rather have the white person.

2 – ‘Innerstand’ your precarious position in this world: You are here to serve them or die. Period.

They make it their business, in all of our so-called “racial paranoias” to tell us that we are only here to (a) Make them rich with our labor and resources; (b) Serve them out of our poverty regardless; or (c) Die or starve to death if we can’t do either of those two things. And every now and then, they will kill one of us cold dead for any reason they desire and walk away in a court of law because we’d better learn, in all of this, to stay in our “place” or chance getting caught up in a system that is designed to (a) Make them rich with our labor and resources; (b) Serve them out of our poverty regardless; or (c) Die or starve to death if we are of no use for either of those two things.

Revolving cycle: Caught in the whirlwind or the yarn ball of a hellish pack of lies about who we are, where we came from, and how this all ends.

That is not far removed, not even a slaver’s whip removed, from the lives our ancestors lived on those plantations. How’s that for a change we can all believe in?

3 – As Wayans insinuated [paraphrased], “Nawsa Massa, I ain’t seen no racism ’rounds heah, suh-if’n it ars ‘roun’ heah, I ain’t seed it….”

Because they are not counting ALL of his money (and the myriad ways they are going to get all $13 million back) AND because he can answer any way he wants to (re: their permission is required for him to answer any way he wants as long as he answers exactly as they expect, like a “Good White Man’s Nigger” should), the stage’s Opening Act I is all set: [Open Curtain] ***Pant, pant…*** Good boy!. *Pats head.* [Close Curtain] On with the show, or be the one monkey that couldn’t stop it.

4 – When it comes to Black businesses, “jew us down” as much as we possibly can. Keep us broke and broken — Willie Lynch style. You know how Chris Rock did it on the Wayans movie, “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.” How much for one rib and pour the soda in my hand, fuck the cup!

Certainly, if we are not worth very much to a white business that gets 10x richer off our labor and resources, we most assuredly must be worth less to one another. Even free as we are, we must be cheap as well — all except for hair, clothes, shoes, babysitting, guns and bullets, fatty foods, and funerals.

To us Black folk, what was once “so very beautiful” when freely given quickly becomes “ugly” and something like “That’s too much money!” and “I could have done THAT myself!” in the hands of our Black business constituents. Yet, we run faster than “Gone in the Wind” to give white competitors EXACTLY what they want and no less, take it or leave it.

5 – We are often told “If you don’t like it here in Americ-uh, you can leave,” but when the regular conscious Marcus Garveyites come along with a plan to tell us how to leave NOW, they go into auto-lynch mob mode to keep us from leaving. Whether they steal from us, kill us, or destroy us, they are still in control of our lives, our bodies, and our resources. That will never change, and we won’t LET them change it, in Jesus’ name.

“For without our resources and labor, and even the parts from our bodies and the eggs of our women and the seed of our men, they are as good as dead.”

Slavers or Drivers?

We no longer need tethers, chains, whips, or overseers, because we have Drivers, i.e., “Black overseers” now. We enslave freely, and anything else we do or have or try to be is “just our runaway slave imagination.”

Folk like Wayans himself -a Driver not a Slaver- who confesses in public that he answers to a paycheck and not to us, keeps us laughing and entertained so we never begin to fathom it’s really not a joke. He’s jokingly dead serious.

Yet in this video, his shifting focus and almost tear-filled gut-wrenching inner cry is to be rescued out of it by his own people. Yet make it FUNNY so we don’t have to take him seriously and we throw the white folkses off a little bit, too.

After all, if we can all “go along to get along” and play shuffling dancing the jig-a-boo about it and like it, they LOVE it for us. But even Jada The Actor is asking us to be free from the Plantations, and she’s not a comedian.

Besides, if we did talk him (or ‘her’ or ‘them’) into leaving that Hollywood Plantation behind to do US right, to unravel and UNTWIST from it, we would “jew ’em down” to a mere pittance and then laugh as they roll homeless and dead broke in the streets. Quote: “Nobody tol’ your stupid arss to leave Ol’ Massa’s Big House in the fust place.” Oh well, you is a Hollywood BIG SHOT no more!

President Obama wasn’t even that stupid, thank God.

We watched “That One” rise up on his HNIC lion haunches from time to time over the past seven years. Yes, the HNIC who left All-Mighty Whitey John Boehner drunk and in buckets of drug-induced tears. President Obama sent us a clear message about our REAL Black Power without saying hardly a word; and Wayans still capitalizes on it through white-paid (with our money, of course) Black comedy. But Mr. President Obama doesn’t trust us either, which is why he stays away from the topic of racism as much as possible unless forced to comment.

All we can say now is “Free at Least, Free at Least, thank Godamighty, we’s Free at Least.” And the beat(down) goes on, even without white people’s help any more.

“Lawd, we pray, let us be free of all negativity, even if that negativity comes bodaciously forth in the name of the truth.

But … Just how peculiar an institution is it that we should continue and carry on the inbred legacy of our former and current owners?

Serving it up and servitude, that’s what we do best — skipping, dancing and smiling; and chuckling it up as we go.

Happy Martin Luther King “We Integrated Into a Burning House” Day!.