Divide and Conquer: You’re Expendable

I’ve always known that rhetoric, speech, and writing serve as weapons to sever communities or as tools to bring them together. Because of this, I know that individuals in power will use that weapon to keep individuals beneath them separate through demonizing one group and promising hopes to the other. This has occurred throughout history, and in regard to race in America, it has occurred with white politicians and those in power telling whites who are beneath them, “You can be like me one day. You’re not like Blacks. Latinxs. Muslims. You should fear and hate them. You’re white.” This weapon serves, then, to construct a dispensable army that’s been promised riches but will never see them. It works to buttress those in power, making everyone beneath them expendable.

Numerous thinkers, artists, and scholars have discussed this from W.E.B. Du Bois to Keri Leigh Merritt and more. Here, I want to delve into this topic a little more, specifically by looking at two songs: Brother Ali’s “Before They Called You White” and Run the Jewels’ “walking in the snow.” Each of these songs points out the ways that the powerful flatten whiteness and present it as a unifying mechanism which separates whites outside of power from others in the same situation. This severing causes those whites to stand against their own self interest in favor of upholding those who reside above them, ultimately…