no need to write an essay or anything

some libs and baby leftists are kinda baffled by the trump banter here and don’t know what’s serious and what’s irony

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    4Chan found out about the NOI a few years back. I think their meme was something like (CW: 4chan racist bs)

    spoiler

    “we were kings” mispelled in various ways and accompanied by racist caricatures.


    Afaik the Chapos referring to assorted white people as Yakubian devils was a response to 4chan and the wider American reactionary world using racist memes based on NOI and Hotep beliefs.

    The NOI are bigts, anti-Semites, reactionaries, queerphobic, and any other right-wing epithets you want to throw at them will stick. Idk if they can be strictly considered fascist but they’re in that general region of politics. If you’re Muslim then they’re the worst kind of innovators and believe in a false prophet who they conflate with god. Farrakhan also supported Trump, which isn’t really important but fits in to the lore. They share beliefs with Hoteps and there’s some cross pollenization of ideas and language.

    Essentially the joke behind the Yakub bit is taking the white supremacist meme and throwing the NOI’s mythology back at at the white supremacists, ironically adopting the NOI position that the white supremacists, and white people generally, are a product of ancient eugenics experiments by the NOI’s version of the mythical Hebrew patriarch Jacob. In the NOI mythology the brutal eugenic process by which Yakub created white people by forcing the “lightest” black people to have children for hundreds of years resulted in white people being incapable of empathy, compassion, or anything but evil. Which, fair.

    I don’t even know what to call the NOI. Racism doesn’t apply because they have limited if any institutional power, although the group does have a small by persistent amount of cultural influence. It’s the right-wing reactionary fringe of African American politics and existed alongside black power, black nationalist, and black separatist movements. That puts it in a complicated historical position - No one likes them, but criticism of the movement by white people is often in bad faith bc the only white people who know it exists are white supremacists and white people who actually study African American political and religious history. Of the two it’s heavily weighted towards white supremacists. That the Chapos knew enough about the origins of the 4chan meme to formulate the Yakub bit is a pretty good statement about just how bizarre and fringe the Dirtbag Left is in terms of historical awareness of American politics.

    There’s probably some irony poisoning going on on Hexbear, and people who don’t know the origins or significance of the Yakub bit, why it was developed and deployed, and where it came from.

    If I’m completely off base please call me out. I’m just some white guy who read the Autobiography of Malcom X at a formative age and did a little follow up reading. I wasn’t even aware that the the (cw: 4chan bullshit)

    spoiler

    “we were kings”

    meme was directly related to NOI mythology. I didn’t think 4chan was that literate. I just assumed the Yakub bit was a way to mock the beliefs of white supremacists, derived from the NOI mythology.