The Black elite have forgotten their own bodies. They parade wealth, status, and proximity to power as if these could shield them from the systems that created inequality in the first place. They perform liberation, flaunt luxury, and chase proximity to whiteness, but they do so in a trance—they have fallen asleep in their enemies’ dream. They do not realise that the structures they navigate will ultimately discard them.
The Black Elite: Bodies in Illusion
Their power is an illusion. They are never a true threat to the system; they are allowed only limited access, carefully curated roles within a world built to exploit and exclude. In embracing the aesthetics of freedom, they forget their own material vulnerability and the bodies that sustain them—the working-class Black majority whose labour and dispossession make their luxury possible. They confuse proximity to whiteness with emancipation, failing to see that their status is conditional, granted only insofar as it reinforces the prevailing order.
The Black elite have abandoned solidarity. They consume, display, and perform, but in doing so, they alienate themselves from collective liberation. Their bodies are instruments of spectacle, not resistance; their freedom is borrowed, temporary, and ultimately illusory. Meanwhile, the majority of Black people continue to struggle against systemic oppression, predation, and the racial wealth gap.
Liberation cannot come from those who have fallen asleep in the dream of their oppressors; It can only be seized by those of us who are fully awake, who reject the seductive lullaby of empire.