The More Things Change…

….the more they stay the same.

We have talked ad nauseum about how black families, most often the bereaved mama, have a knack for immediately monetizing their tragedy when a black kid is killed/dies or commits a crime. Recent examples include Nolan Wells, the black kid that got drunk and drowned in Mississippi (The Ghetto Lottery!) and Karmelo Anthony (Murder Monkey Is Movin’ On Up). What I didn’t realize, but should have, is that this isn’t anything new. I discovered this while watching a recent video from American Renaissance featuring Jared Taylor talking about one of the early “martyrs” of the “Civil Rights” movement, Emmett Till…

Till was a 14 year old black kid that, depending on who you ask, either was murdered for no reason at all by Whites or was murdered by the husband of a White woman after he was sexually harassed/assaulted her. His story has become one of those legends of the “Civil Rights” race hustlers and you aren’t supposed to question it.

Jared eviscerates the ridiculous and over the top endless monuments and memorializing of Emmett Till but one part really stuck out for me. After his death, his corpse was displayed for 4 days in the Mississippi heat despite his face being grotesquely disfigured from his killing and time spent in a river.

Yikes. I can’t even imagine the smell.

Afterward his mama, Mamie Till Bradley went on a 33 city speaking tour where she was paid $100 per day plus expenses on a race grifting tour sponsored by the NAACP. That was a lot of money back in the 1950s. It wasn’t good enough for Mama Till and she kept making demands for more money until even the NAACP got tired of her grifting and accused her of “capitalizing on the death of her son”. She was replaced by her uncle Moses who was happy with his hunnerd dollah per day pay.

That is precisely what so many black women do even today. The over-the-top weeping and gnashing of teeth, the almost immediate presence of t-shirts with a (usually much younger) picture of their dead kid with angel wings. Ben Crump who flies in like a mildly retarded vulture to nod sadly and then start looking for a paycheck. Invariably there is a GoFundMe started to help the family with “expenses” even when, as is the case with Nolan Wells, all of the actual expenses are covered by celebrities leaving the bereaved family with ready cash for cars and luxury goods.

Since Emmett Till is the Proto-Good Boy Who Dindu Nuffin, it makes sense that his mama cashing in on his death would be the model for future mothers of Good Boys to follow.

Far be it from me to judge a grieving parent but on the other hand I do consider myself to be a somewhat accomplished Noticer of Naughty Patterns and I can’t help but notice here that for all of their performative grief, black mothers never miss a chance to get dat bag as the kids say before their child’s body is even cold.

As an amusing aside, the paper Jared Taylor references in his video, Grief Capital, Grief Activism: The Brief Life of Mamie Till Bradley’s NAACP Tour, by one Rhaisa Kameela Williams, is a comedic adventure to read, chock full of 2G pseudo-intellectual word salads and absolute babble that they no doubt think sounds incredibly profound. Here is a sample:

Performance, then, served as the vehicle not only to surface an interiority that evidenced authentic love and mourning but also to dispute that authenticity because it could be outwardly produced on demand. The tension from this intersection becomes more pronounced when we turn to the broader history of spectacle and gendered forms of Black [sic] suffering. The porousness of spectacle, bordering between benign amusement and serious provocation, makes it useful in varied contexts, from circus and freak shows to political agendas. Racial melodrama, for instance, is one genre that highlights all potential uses of spectacle.

The “porousness of spectacle”? The black “academic”, an oxymoron if ever there was one, loves to use Big White People Words but invariably they don’t use them correctly or in away that makes any sense at all and of course no one points this out to them because that would be White supremacy or something.

She was “responding” to what Thomas Jefferson had to say just a few lines earlier….

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson observed that grief for Black [sic] people was transient, signaling their emotional immaturity. Reflection was needed to adequately express grief, a mental capability he believed Black [sic] people lacked.

I will leave it to the reader to decide who is more accurately reflecting reality. You can probably guess I come down on the side of the guy on the $2 bill.