Anti-Blackness Was Always for Sale - by Jermaine Fowler

Anti-Blackness Was Always for Sale

Jermaine Fowler
Jun 16, 2026

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Every platform you touch is making money off the degradation of a Black person. You scrolled past one this week, or hovered on the comment under a post. The app sold an ad against it before you reached the end.

They have stopped hiding it. On the President’s eightieth birthday, a cage fighter took the microphone on the White House lawn and told the crowd that a former First Lady had been born a man. The crowd laughed. The President, ringside, smiled.

In the comments, thousands leaned in to help, because the slur was an open door and they had been waiting on the porch. It is the oldest cut this country keeps for its Black women, the one that says they were never women at all. Worked like men in the fields. Denied the word in the law. Denied it again now, for a laugh, on the people’s lawn.

A man in a good suit reads the day’s news from behind a desk, except the news is always that one kind of person is ruining the country, and the kind never changes. He is twenty-seven and has eaten near the President’s circle. He says the word on the stream and laughs, calls it a joke, and the donations climb the side of the screen while he talks, close to a million dollars from his viewers in a year.

Further down the bill, the louder kind. A streamer walks up to a Black man minding his own afternoon, camera already running, says the word to his face, and when the man reacts calls it “chimping out” for the people paying to watch. He had done it a hundred times before the afternoon outside a Tennessee courthouse, when the man he was baiting swung back, and he drew a gun and fired and left him on the pavement, a disabled veteran and a father of three. The arrest went out on every feed by nightfall, and it did not cost him his audience. It handed him a bigger one.

Below them, the act runs without a stage at all: AI slop generating grotesque and racist stereotypes by the thousand, a fired officer appealing to get her badge back after a video of her saying she would jail the next Black person she met, the usual suspects posted under a mugshot, a man in a parked car filming himself on the victim mentality of Black people and how they should go back to Africa. A whole rank of them runs the same act now, and the n-word that for a blip in time cost a white man something to say out loud is becoming, clip by clip, a thing he says for money.

Some call them provocateurs. Others say it is manufactured outrage for virality. But these are modern minstrels. They have names, and you may know them, but the names are beside the point. Shame one and the role stays open, because it was here before him and the pay is too good to leave the stage empty.

The Minstrel’s Wage

New York, 1830. A carpenter’s apprentice named Thomas Rice, with no particular gift, smears burnt cork across his face until only the eyes show, paints the mouth wide and red, and pulls on rags he wants the crowd to believe he took off a real enslaved man’s back.

He shuffles onto the stage of the Bowery Theatre and calls himself Jim Crow. He sings about knocking another Black man down and leaving a grease spot, about skinning him like an eel, while the house howls and stamps and calls him back for more.

What he makes that night is the first thing this country can call its own, the cork sweating, the grin shining out over the room bursting in laughter. Rice carries the act across the country and across the ocean, and he grows rich. Abraham Lincoln loved this entertainment. So did Mark Twain, who called it “the genuine n----- show” and meant it as praise.

The old minstrel got paid to put Blackness on, the cork, the dialect, the shuffle, a grinning theft a white audience could adore. The new minstrel noticed the market had moved, that imitating the Black man no longer paid best. Pointing at him and saying the unsayable, out loud, to a camera, paid better.

He keeps his own face now. Where Rice wore the cork, he wears the contempt, and the contempt is the song. The more naked it gets, the higher the rate, because a feed that cannot tell rage from joy pays most for whatever holds the thumb in place. Nothing holds a thumb like a man saying what he is not supposed to say.

The streamer mimics a people he has no interest in knowing. No craft of his own — so he performs the contempt, and the contempt is what sells. The man in the suit works the same market. Point at the Black man, say the unsayable, and it pays better than making anything ever did.

It works because it always worked. The crowd that paid Rice to grin in cork lived mostly in the Northern cities, in the towns with the fewest Black people in them. The act sold best where the man himself was missing, where no one in the room would ever have to know him, only watch him be played. That is a comment section, a hundred and eighty years early.

The Tax

The audience that never bought a ticket still pays.

You are Black in America, and you hold a phone. You wake already braced. There is a muscle that tightens before the thumb moves. The rest of your life is in there too: the voicemail from your mother you have not answered, the ninety-one dollars that have to last until Friday, the shift you cannot call out of. A child shot over four bottles of water sits in the scroll above a man frying a block of cheese, given the same three seconds by a feed that cannot tell a killing from a snack.

This predates the phone. Toni Morrison said it at Portland State in 1975, to a mostly Black audience, in a talk that went unpublished for decades: “The very serious function of racism is distraction, the way it keeps you from doing your work.”

Count what that costs. A father opens his phone at the kitchen table and goes quiet, and the child across from him learns early that the screen is where the hurt lives, that the thing in every pocket is a place where your own people are killed for sport and you are expected to keep scrolling past it to reach the parts of your life that are also in there. The afternoon that should have gone to the work goes to a stranger in the comments instead. This is the tax, and it is paid in the one currency you cannot earn back, which is attention, and the people charged it are charged it from the morning they are old enough to hold the phone.

Strip the names the country gives it, free speech, dark humor, just asking questions, and the thing underneath is plain and old. There is money in it, and there always was.

The Cost

When the act steps off the screen, it lands on someone.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen. A convenience store owner in Columbia decided the boy was stealing, chased him more than a hundred and thirty yards down the road, and shot him once in the back as he ran. He had stolen nothing. We have no evidence that he stole anything whatsoever, the sheriff said.

At trial the prosecutor set a single bottle of water in front of the jury and said the man had decided a human being was worth less than that. They acquitted him. At the vigil, someone spelled the boy’s name on the ground in empty water bottles. Cyrus.

The man who killed him is not white, a shopkeeper, an immigrant, from a people this country has its own long history of treating as foreign and suspect. In the second that mattered, he reached for the one rank America gives away free, the right to see a Black person as less than a person. It is the bottom rank, and the whole house is built so that everyone has someone to stand on. He found his.

The clips only drilled what the country wrote down two centuries back: that when a Black child is dead in the road, the work is to find what he did to earn it.

The Question

They sold us a country of gold and open road, a promise the work would pay and tomorrow would run wider than today. What they built is a theater, and the oldest act on the bill is still anti-Blackness, performed now by men who hate, women who envy, and those who are simply getting paid, all of them working the stage Rice built, all of them cut a check by the same house.

Racism is the old news. The internet its new stage. It pays, it always paid, and the surest living in America is still a man doing in public what Rice did in cork. The price of the ticket comes out of the same pockets it always has, two hundred years running, paid by the people made to watch their own degradation perform to a house that has never once failed to sell out.

We are building historical literacy here, the ability to see the pattern as it is being written in real time and the thing that makes you harder to lie to at a moment when the lies are coming faster than most people can track. If you are reading this and recognizing the pattern, you are not the only one, and the community of people doing that work with you is part of what this is.

Writing and researching these pieces takes 8 to 12 hours each, all of it done by me down to the footnotes, and I cannot continue this work without your paid support. So much information is locked behind paywalls now and I want to keep this work open to the public. Those who pay keep it free and open so it can reach everyone who needs it.

  1. The UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House and Josh Hokit’s “Michelle Obama is a man” outburst.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/15/after-white-house-bout-ufc-fighter-disparages-michelle-obama-man/
  2. Nick Fuentes and the nearly $900,000 from superchat donors.
    https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/20/nation/nick-fuentes-online-donors/
  3. “Chud the Builder” and the courthouse shooting of Joshua Fox.
    https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/15/us/chud-the-builder-shooting-court-appearance
  4. The monetized racist AI-slop industry, including the Waffle House clip.
    https://asuselj.org/moving-beyond-terms-of-service-the-case-for-criminalizing-racist-ai-slop/
  5. The fired Houston officer appealing her termination.
    https://abc13.com/post/former-hpd-officer-ashley-gonzalez-appeals-termination-following-investigation-racist-videos-union-says/19088566/
  6. Thomas Rice, burnt cork, and the 1830 birth of minstrelsy at the Bowery.
    https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype
  7. Rice as the highest-paid minstrel of his era.
    https://black-face.com/jim-crow.htm
  8. Toni Morrison on racism as distraction, Portland State, 1975.
    https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf
  9. The Cyrus Carmack-Belton shooting and Rick Chow’s acquittal.
    https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/01/us/south-carolina-murder-trial-cyrus-carmack-belton
  10. Sheriff Lott’s “no evidence that he stole anything whatsoever.”
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/14-year-old-fatally-shot-back-sc-store-owner-sheriff-says-rcna86855
  11. The prosecutor’s bottle of water before the jury.
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chikei-rick-chow-south-carolina-store-owner-murder-cyrus-belton/

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