El Chisme

I remember a number of years ago my family was commemorating the Fourth of July. I wasn't exactly a committed, principled, or well-read anti-imperialist at the time, but I was still already by that point questioning the propriety of commemorating the Fourth of July at all, or otherwise how to commemorate the day in a "respectful manner". And so we agreed to fly the Stars & Stripes with a black ribbon of mourning to represent the victims of Septic imperialism, and I made a music playlist of songs by Yankee artists or about the country's history, including such hits as Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier".

...And my mom reacted to that latter song, saying, "Ah yes, the famous American musician Bob Marley." And so I explained to her that the song was about the real-life Buffalo Soldiers, and I told her the basics of who the Buffalo Soldiers were. My mom had apparently in none of the years of her long life ever heard of the Buffalo Soldiers, and never realized that the Bob Marley song was based on actual events — which kinda surprised me, because the 25th infantry regiment garrisoned Fort Snelling less than a century before my mom was born, so the history of the Buffalo Soldiers was neither temporally nor spatially distant from where my mom grew up, and in general Buffalo Soldiers seemed like the type of history that she'd like learning about.

...But hey, you can't know everything, can you? Especially not when you were born in a racist settler-colony that wants to bury its own atrocious history after already documenting it so thoroughly, and certainly not when one of the biggest "counterweights" to that whitewashing is Hashtag Girlboss Black Capitalism like Beyoncé's. Even Bob Marley's song is notably apologetic of the Buffalo Soldiers, although I wasn't really paying attention to the deeper meaning of the lyrics when I played it for my mom.

Insert that quote about class formation amongst New Afrikans in Settlers here, alternatively the quote in Red Shadow's "Understanding Marx" about the New Afrikan workers at a Black-owned business going on strike.

Sigh.

If Beyoncé's comment here is any indication, it'll certainly be A Day when the Australian Native Police are presented as an example of Indigenous Excellence in Australia or whatever, rather than as an example of divide and conquer being the through-line strategy of every settler-colonial project from the beginning of the phenomenon and into the present day.