Hey y’all and welcome back to another episode of Messy Mondays, where I expose myself for the sake of relatability. And yes… I’m doing the dishes again. 🧼
Here’s the thing about dishes: no matter how many times I wash, rinse, repeat, the sink always fills back up. Somebody always comes and eats, makes a mess, and then leaves it for me to clean.
And honestly? That’s how I’ve been feeling about us as a people lately. We keep setting the table, cooking up the culture, letting folks come in and eat off our plate and when they’re done, they leave us with the dirty work. We keep washing and scrubbing, but the cycle never ends.
So, since I’m already elbow-deep in suds, let’s wash through this mess together.
🍳 Culture in the Frying Pan
I don’t know if y’all feel it too, but something about this current cultural moment feels… overdone. Between our c list talent celebrity culture, our obsession with “getting the bag,” and our blind acceptance of whatever “representation” is thrown our way, it feels like we’re fan dancing straight into extinction.
Look at who and what we’re uplifting. Summer Walker and her aging “arm candy” , GloRilla’s and Meg Thee Stallion’s constant barrage of fast food flings and bottom shelf booze, Simone Biles and Serena Williams fronting for GLP-1 weight-loss meds. These are not just random endorsements or personal choices they are signals. They carry a message. They are shaping what we normalize. And our default reaction has become: “Well, sis get that check.” Period. No critical thought, no pause, no bigger questions asked.
And then, of course, there’s Beyoncé sitting at a table with Ivanka Trump like it’s nothing. A perfect example of class solidarity trumping race solidarity. It’s no longer about “one of us making it,” it’s about the rich preserving their own elite table, while the rest of us are left begging for crumbs. And we, the people, applaud it instead of questioning it.
And then you turn on Zeus Network, where the hottest shows are Chrisean Rock and Blueface fistfighting their way through “love.” We consume it, laugh at it, meme it, and hand over our streaming dollars. Meanwhile, black family shows, black network television, and even commercials that used to spotlight strong black households have all but disappeared.
The only time you really see a black couple or black family unit these days, it’s toxic, dramatic, or dysfunctional. Positive representation has been watered down until it’s barely visible and somehow, we’ve just… accepted it.
🏚️ Where Did the Black Family Go?
Let me be clear: interracial families deserve space and representation. They’re real. They’re beautiful. But let’s not confuse them with being the only face of progress. An interracial family is not the same thing as a black family, just like it isn’t the same thing as a chinese or latino family. Every group deserves to see itself reflected whole.
Yet over and over, we’re shown that the black family, the healthy, thriving, intact Black unit is either nonexistent, toxic, or expendable. And slowly, quietly, we’re being written out of the script.
🎭 Assimilation as Entertainment
This isn’t just about celebrity antics or TV programming, it’s about how we’re trained to pander and perform. We’ve normalized assimilation so deeply that we don’t even notice when we’re laughing at our own erasure. From “inviting everyone to the cookout” for the bare minimum, to celebrating white creators who mimic our dances better than we can market them ourselves, we’re trading exclusivity for acceptance.
And yes, Christianity plays a role here too. Let’s be honest, Christianity was one of the primary tools used to enslave us, and today it still feels like it’s enslaving our mindset. Too often it becomes a crutch: an excuse to forgive racism, to excuse assimilation, to accept scraps with the logic that “God will provide.” But is He providing, or are we just pacifying ourselves while whiteness keeps its foot on our neck?
We can’t keep using faith as a reason to excuse foolishness. Christianity has long been the anchor holding us down when we needed sails to move forward.
🌆 The Macro Meets the Local
And it’s not just celebrity culture or Christianity, it’s spilling over into how we see ourselves in real life.
Take Detroit, for example. Folks are quick to praise our white mayor as though he single-handedly brought the city back to life. Sure, development is happening. But underneath it, 34% of Detroit residents live in poverty the highest since 2017 and nearly 50% of adults are functionally illiterate.
How do we reconcile that? Why are we so quick to believe that whiteness equals improvement, that only white leadership can “save us”? Have we forgotten our own capacity to build, organize, and innovate for ourselves? Detroit was built on black labor, black artistry, black survival. Yet too often the narrative is shaped to forget that.
And it’s not just the politicians. Even some of our own Detroit influencers are embarrassing us. I saw a recent thread where one of them argued Detroit doesn’t need a public transit system, that the 40% of riders who depend on it are just “broke”. Imagine saying that in a majority-black city where systemic racism has shaped every layer of infrastructure and access. People like this should not have platforms. They should not be getting brand deals. And let’s be real a lot of these “Detroit” influencers don’t even live in the city. Black people scared of being around folks who look just like them.
🪞 Fan Dancing Into Forgetfulness
Here’s the truth that’s hard to swallow: we are assimilating into extinction. We are intermingling into invisibility. We’ve been so focused on “getting the bag,” chasing the spotlight, or aligning ourselves with whiteness that we’ve forgotten how to stand together with exclusivity and intention.
And I’m not saying this to stir up division. I’m saying it because we deserve to exist. For ourselves. Not as commodities. Not as clout for corporations. Not as sidekicks or spectacles. We deserve to exist in our fullness, in our families, our culture, our media, THE future.
Right now, too much of what we’re celebrating is embarrassing. It’s crumbs. It’s distraction. It’s erosion. And if we don’t wake up, we’ll look up one day and realize we’ve erased ourselves.
❓Black People, Is We Good?
So I’m asking again, black people: are we good? Because it feels like no matter how much we wash, rinse, repeat the sink just keeps filling back up. But here’s the thing: I’m not scrubbing away at the same dirty dishes forever. At some point, we gotta stop cleaning up their mess and start flipping the whole table.
