No joking, I recommend people read Jivan's book to understand what happens when the shock of double consciousness in young adulthood is severe enough to lead even self-indentified Black people down a path of punishing other Black people to fill the gap in their own broken souls. https://twitter.com/CBCToronto/status/1282841756967546880

I once reviewed Jivani's book generously, under the assumption he was like many other Black folk from around the Rexdale/Malton/Brampton corridor who turned to respectability as an avenue out of the systemic failures plaguing those areas.

I was really, really wrong about him.

(I was wrong about a few other things in that review, but it took me until around late 2017/early 2018 to really put together the missing pieces of what I was searching for, and that took getting over the discomforts I had around race, gender, and dialectical materialism)

Back to Jivani though, it's not uncommon for Black people deeply affected by the shock and trauma of double consciousness to not only turn their anger against Black communities, which they see as weak and conquered both by white people and their own cultural vices...

But the most nihilistic among them fall under the Clarence Thomas variety - seeking out institutional power to break what they see as a moral weakness leading to cycles of dependency.

This is the endpoint for Black people who fully embrace the Protestant work ethic, by the way.

It's a mode of fascism that assumes some elements of power inherent to capitalism and Reformist ethic can be used to benefit the most morally upright, while either converting the sinner or banishing them to their own deaths.

Hence his obsessive fixation with hip hop culture

For example, Jivani is in his late 30s, like me, and believes that hip hop not only led him down a path to "gang culture" as he calls it, but to conspiracy theory.

He's not an actor in any of what he sees as a process of indoctrination, but a victim carried along the currents:

He not only sees this "gang culture" of Hollywood and...uh...Jadakiss as a mode of violent indoctrination, he literally draws connections between hip-hop culture and ISIS.

US imperialism, the War on Drugs, infiltration, imprisonment, outright murder against Black radical movements...None of these factors into his analysis

And this is why I had to embrace dialectical materialism myself, bc the rejection of it ultimately leads to this self-hatred

Ultimately, this is what it's about.

All the pages between are noise and apologetics.

Jamil and I didn't grow up that far from each other. If we were closer in age and postal codes, we likely would have known each other way back when

The last time I saw my father in person, I was nine.

There's a reason someone like me is me, and someone like Jamil is him.

And I'm not special, this is a common story for many Black men and women in our end of town, in the 80s and 90s, who raised by mothers, aunts, and grandparents.

It's the difference between seeing your people as broken, corrupted, conquered, needing purification, and seeing your upbringing and breathing free air as triumph in the face of oppression.

A lot of us were never meant to be here. But we are anyway. That means something.

Anyway, I didn't even mean to tweet this many tweets. I didn't sleep last night, and I've had a migraine all day.

But at some point someone needs to tell this dude to get the fuck over his anger at his dad, at his people, and at himself.

Because even if we flagellate and flay ourselves into his perfect image, Jamil has to live with himself and what he obviously sees as stains, flaws, and broken parts.

We are a whole, perfect, and complete people.

And that coon can kiss my Black ass.

Oh, and this is the book.