Practical Morality vs Performative Morality
Well, I said that the West and that America, in these places, in these cultures, in that so called civilization, the truth of the matter is that you have no serious coherent practical morality. Not at all. No no applied moral framework that gets implemented, that's consistent, and that has any sort of real world weight to it in terms of behavior, in terms of regulating behavior. Yes. You have things that you say you believe in.
You have things that you say matter to you. You know? You have values that you'll espouse all day long and whatnot. But, where are they? Where where are those values?
You really have to learn this. You're not gonna get anywhere until you learn this. This is the difference between what you can call functional moral systems versus what passes for morality in the West. You see? The disconnect between what people say they believe in versus what they actually do, what their actions actually are.
Because the fact of the matter is that what you do, what you do consistently, what you do systematically, what you do at scale, in fact, that is what you believe in. Not what you tell yourself you believe in. You know, not the abstract ideals that you proclaim, but what you actually do, what your actions are. Please understand me. You relegate morality to abstraction, and you relegate morality to unpracticable platitudes, you know, homilies, quotable sayings that signal virtue, yes, but which are, in fact, if you look at it, completely open to individual interpretation, which renders them completely meaningless.
Completely meaningless, at least in terms of being behavioral regulators or behavioral modifiers because there's no standard of implementation. It's completely disconnected from practical application. Well, this is useless. This is lip service. And when it's just lip service, then you can claim to believe any sort of standard of morality that you like, any standard of virtue that you like because you have no intention whatsoever of ever living up to it.
You can even make a standard that no one can possibly live up to. Do you see what I mean? It's like little kids talking about I have a 100 toys. No. I have a million toys.
Well, I have gazillion toys. I have infinity toys. Because you can say whatever you want about what you believe. You can say it. It's very cheap to say it because you never have to act on it.
And because everyone understands that the that the morals are just lip service, that it's just something that you proclaim that you never perform and never really expected to perform, then you also can never be called out for it. Like just take Christianity, for example. Right? Turn the other cheek. Beautiful sentiment.
Right? Except nobody does it. No Christian nation ever practiced, pacifism ever. No Christian individual actually turns the other cheek. Certainly not if their family is threatened or even if they're threatened.
And I'm not even saying that they should. Of course not. Everyone understands why they don't practice that particular platitude. They know why they don't do it because it would be incredibly self destructive. It would be impractical.
It would lead to your own annihilation if you turn the other cheek as a as a practical principle. Everyone knows this. It's suicidal. So why maintain it as a moral ideal? Why even still talk about it like you believe it when no one believes it?
No one believes it and no one practices it. Or look at child protection in the West. They tell you, and I mean they will tell you with absolute conviction that they don't tolerate the sexualization of children. Zero tolerance. It's unspeakable.
Right? Except, child marriage is still legal in most US states. You've got your, little child beauty pageants with little girls in swimsuits. That's normal entertainment for you. Your your fashion industry uses prepubescent models in adult contexts.
Like I said before, the average age of first exposure to pornography is just 11 years old. Jeffrey Epstein operated for decades with apparent institutional protection in your society. You adultify children and you infantilize adults. That's what you do. You don't practice what you preach and you don't preach what you practice, like I've said many times.
And I'm telling you, what you practice on a societal level is actually what you believe in, whether you like to admit it or not. No matter what you tell yourselves and no matter what you tell us, we see what you do, and that's how we know you. That's how we know you. What do people do consistently? They become known for.
So in fact, we're looking at a society that proclaims absolute moral standards while systematically violating them. You understand me? This isn't an occasional failure we're talking about. This is normalized practice with institutional backing and with popular participation, social approval, everything. We're not talking about a stumble here and there.
We're talking about, like I say, systematic society wide persistently acting in contradiction to what you say you believe in. And we could literally go point by point, declared moral value by declared moral value, and you'll see nothing but the opposite ever being practiced, ever being implemented across the whole society. Oh, what you proclaim is lofty. It's so lofty in fact that you already immunize yourself from blame, for not being able to reach it. Because if it's unreachable in the first place, why bother trying?
Right? Like I said, you can go point by point. All men are created equal. Have you ever believed that in practice? Liberty and justice for all?
Meanwhile, you've got mass incarceration in your country with obviously very drastically unequal legal outcomes by race and by class. You say you have an absolute belief in freedom of speech. Meanwhile, public speech is exclusively contained now on privately owned platforms. And those privately owned platforms do not guarantee free speech. You believe in the right to privacy, meanwhile, you've got mass surveillance, you've got data harvesting, you've got government monitoring and so on.
Your lofty values like government by the people, for the people, of the people, and so forth. Meanwhile, in real life, you have total oligarchic control in your country, unlimited campaign funding, lobbying, total corporate capture of policy, total corporate capture of the state. You say that civilian casualties are never acceptable, but you'll sure keep sending the arms. You'll sure keep sending the funding anyway, and you have no problem whatsoever with carpet bombing whole cities. You're proud of it.
You brag about it. You say you stand for human rights everywhere. Meanwhile, you starve, you sanction, you bomb, you mass murder, you kidnap people off the street, even your own streets to send them back to black sites for torture, send them to Guantanamo, which is still operating by the way. And you say torture is absolutely prohibited. Since when?
Since when? Meanwhile, you literally pioneered torture techniques. You trained others in torture techniques, other security forces, and you've done it for decades. You say, give us your tired, your poor, your starving masses who yearn to breathe free. Well, you made them tired.
You made them poor. You starve them, and they yearn to be free from the suffering that you imposed upon them in their countries, and then you sick ice on them when they come to you. I mean, like I said, we could literally go on and on point by point. Equal opportunity for all, sure. Rule of law, sure.
Innocent until proven guilty? Family values? Family values is a good one. Meanwhile, your whole economic model requires both parents to work. You have a minimal parental leave.
You have unaffordable childcare, unaffordable health care. You know? People are divorcing in your country more than they marry. You've got children divorcing their parents in your family values country. Old people thrown into nursing homes or thrown out into the street.
Like I said, this is this is where you came from. This is your theological roots. Turn the other cheek. Right? Never applied by a Christian nation in history.
Not even applied individually. Love your enemies. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Meanwhile, what you practice in the real world, it looks like you believe that the the blessed are the predators who get hold of the poor and they get hold of the meek.
You know, you've got your prosperity gospel, you worship money, you have utter contempt for the poor, utter contempt for poverty. In your religion, you say judge not, lest ye be judged. Meanwhile, the only time in real life that you ever even bring up morality is to judge others, to criticize others, to operate your whole cancel culture. It seems like when you heard in your bible, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. You just decided to abandon the idea of ever getting into heaven altogether.
You just decided to focus all of your efforts on getting rich in this world and have your heaven right here, right now. Like, if I can't be rich and get into heaven, then let me just be rich then. This is how you do. This is your real morality. You see, there's the difference between what you proclaim and what you do.
Like, you talk about environmentalism, saving the planet and whatnot. Meanwhile, you've got the highest per capita emissions in the world. The highest consumption in the world. And the most corporate exemptions from any sort of environmental regulations or responsibility. You know?
What you say and what you practice. You talk about sustainability, where you have the worst throwaway disposable culture on earth, simultaneously destroying whole ecosystems across the planet just for your disposable whims, just so you can have something for a few minutes and throw it away. Like I said, it doesn't matter which so called values we're talking about, which values that you talk about. If we talk about any of the values that you talk about, every single one of them is systematically violated at scale as official policy, as lived culture with popular participation. Across all of these proclaimed absolute moral values, moral principles, you literally contradict them systematically for your own benefit, but you'll uphold them rhetorically so that you can claim moral authority.
Please reflect on this. Understand this. You must understand this. You have to recognize how damaging this is, truly damaging, how destructive it is when you actually allow such a constant and such a massive disconnection between what you claim to believe in and what you actually do and what you actually act upon. Wallahi, it is catastrophically destructive to operate as if moral values are just words that you say and not behaviors that you comply with.
It's catastrophic. And the loftier and the more high sounding those values are, the more unrealistic and the more the more absolute they are, the more beautifully abstract they are. I'm telling you, the worse your behavior is actually going to be. Because like I said, when when you establish completely unrealistic, unrealistically high moral standards, standards that literally nobody could ever actually meet in real life, where you create a system where everyone is perpetually guilty. Everyone has already failed before they even try.
And when everyone has failed, then failure itself becomes meaningless. You can just say I'm not a saint, and that becomes an excuse for any violation because you've set the bar, for what constitutes moral behavior at sainthood. Unreachable. So then you normalize falling short. You normalize the stumbling until all you can do is stumble, and you don't even know how to walk upright anymore.
See, the performative proclamation of high values ends up providing a cover for, in real life, escalating violations of even realistic moral boundaries because you can always claim. Right? You can always claim to have impossibly high moral values while at the same time transgressing even reasonable moral limits. And you can minimize the seriousness of your violations by saying, I'm not a saint after all. Because you have you've set the bar, like I say, for what constitutes a moral person as patently unreachable and unrealistic and inhuman.
So you're gonna be excused for any violation below saintly morality. So then by consensus, you will you will automatically be excused for any violation that falls below saintly morality no matter how minor or major it is. See, in Islam, we're realistic. This is a realistic religion. This is a practical religion.
We have practical realistic moral values. You're not gonna hear us talking about turn the other cheek. Doesn't make any sense. You're not gonna hear us talking about love thy enemy or bless them that curse you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. No.
Absolutely not. We don't believe that, and we're not gonna pretend that we do believe that. It's unnatural. It's unintelligent. That's not moral.
That's not actually moral. That's not functional morality. Yes. If the moral values are not functional, meaning they cannot realistically regulate your behavior, then they're not functional. But you constantly uphold these as ideals.
What sort of psychological dissonance do you think that that must create in any individual in your society if the moral value is inapplicable in real life? If it's inapplicable in real life, then violating it is not morally wrong. No violation has occurred if you break that rule. But the individual feels that they have failed. Do you see my point?
In other words, you are placing unnatural behavioral obligations on individuals rather than determining moral values that are actually consistent with natural human behavior. It's not regulation of behavior in a realistic way. It's imposing unnatural expectations upon behavior that are completely inconsistent with nature. We don't teach our people to do that. That's not what we teach.
And our people, we don't teach that, and our people actually behave better than the people who do teach that. Reflect on that reality. Because I know a lot of you are gonna say, love your enemies. Right? Love your enemies.
Bless those that curse you. Turn the other cheek and whatnot. You'll say that that it's still good to believe in that because it's godly, it's righteous, it's saintly. You're not listening. It's inhuman.
It's unnatural. It's unrealistic. It's unintelligent. And nobody practices that in real life. What's the use of this?
No one practices that in real life because no one is that foolish. So you're holding up as the definition of a of a high moral standard that which is completely contrary to human nature, which means fundamentally that you have actually a very low regard for human nature. And fundamentally, you believe that human beings can never truly be righteous, so we may as well set the bar so high that no one even has to bother trying to reach it, which means that morality has no practical role in determining your behavior in the real world. Do you understand? This is how you do.
Unnatural moral expectations do not elevate people. They break people. They create a psychological pathology by demanding people to deny their own nature, then condemning them when they can't deny their own nature. When they act as any sane normal person would, you can condemn them for not being able to reach that so called saintly level. Now Islam teaches very practical moral values.
In Islam, there are no unrealistic behavioral expectations. We don't aspire to an unreachable moral state. So what I'm saying is that people have to they must identify what they actually believe by what they actually practice and stop with all the performative moral values declarations that bear no resemblance whatsoever to what you actually believe and what you actually do. You need to do this. If you genuinely want to want to be a moral individual, a moral human being.
Now I'm not saying whatever you do, it doesn't matter as long as it's natural and shouldn't be regulated. No. Obviously not. Look, what I'm saying is that you need to look at what you actually do and don't let there be a disconnection between what you espouse and what you practice. And if you see that there's a disparity between what you espouse and what you practice, then you need to examine the realism of what you espouse.
I hope you understand me. Because you do have moral values in the West. You do have moral values, but they are not even remotely like the moral values that you talk about in the West. Your actual moral values are demonstrated by your behavior. This is what I'm telling you.
So you need to look honestly. You need to look with ruthless honesty at your own behavior and then figure out by that behavior what it means you truly believe in. Yes. I'm not saying that the West has no moral values. I'm not saying that.
What I'm saying is that there is systematic dishonesty about what the actual operating values are. This creates hypocrisy in your people where you claim values that you don't practice. It creates psychological harm in your people, where you have people feeling guilty for absolutely normal behavior. And it creates moral confusion in in your people when you have an inability to identify any truly immoral behavior. In Islam we have a system where here is what is permitted, here is what is prohibited, and here are the reasons that it's permitted or prohibited, and here is how you can live within those reasonable boundaries.
We'll teach you that. Clear, practical, applicable. When someone violates it, they know they have violated it. Not because they failed to reach an impossible standard, but because they crossed a very realistic clear boundary that they could have kept. A boundary that is entirely possible to not violate.
Like I said, when you have when you proclaim impossible standards, that does not in any way whatsoever constrain behavior in real life. It just provides cover for bad behavior. So you can say, for example, we take child protection so seriously in America and that somehow coexists with Epstein operating for decades with institutional backing until now, backing until now. Because for you, the performance or the declaration of high moral standards that actually substitutes for you for actual enforcement of realistic moral standards. So you say that you take child protection, for example, you take child protection seriously.
Right? You say that. Where's the child protection? You see what happens when you have unrealistic deliberately abstract, basically symbolic and meaningless moral values? You see what happens?
You essentially prevent any practical morality from ever manifesting in your society. See, that's why I said in Islam morality basically comes down to something very simple which is obedience and disobedience, Not subjective interpretations of good and bad. We deal with observable actions. We have clear boundaries. It's very simple.
It's very clear. We deal with adherence to commands, realistic demands that are absolutely doable and that are not ambiguous. And we judge exclusively on the basis of behavior. You either prayed five times a day or you did not. You either fasted in Ramadan or you did not.
You either committed zina or you did not. These are concrete, verifiable, and action based. Everybody knows what the wrong things are. And so we have a system. We have a a a a societal system, a cultural system, a family system, a legal system to ensure individual and collective compliance with proper behavior.
And this is reinforced in our societies by innumerable safeguards. This is practical morality. This is functional morality. And this is what is completely absent and missing in the West. You can't say one thing and do another in Islam because the only thing that we look at is your conscious deeds and your conscious behavior.
You might feel all kinds of ways. We don't care about that. You might feel anger. You might feel rage. You might feel lust.
You might feel hatred or whatever the case may be. Your heart is your problem. I'm sorry. This is your personal private struggle. Your heart is your problem.
We just care about what you act upon. Obedience and disobedience. We don't get distracted by abstract moral declarations. If your deeds don't back that up, if your actions don't back that up. And we're also not concerned about what kind of a person you are.
No. We might like you or dislike you. It doesn't matter. Makes no difference. You might be our friend or you might be our enemy.
Good, bad, decent, indecent, what have you. You might have a pure heart or an impure heart. That's not our business. Like I said, this is not our business. Your actions are what we look at.
Your actions are your actions. Your obedience is obedience. Your disobedience is disobedience. No matter who the person is who's doing it. And if you keep on acting in a certain kind of way, then we start to expect you to act in that certain kind of way.
Do you understand? Because the way you act reveals what your character is like. Understand that's not a judgment about you. We're not I'm saying that we we learn to anticipate the way you're gonna act. That's not the same thing as saying that we're making a moral determination about the goodness of your soul or otherwise.
Like I say, your soul is entirely your business. That's entirely your concern. And it's not our job to cleanse your soul if it needs cleansing except in so far as the enforcement of right actions in the society can be a way to change the orientation of your soul. But you in the West, like I said, you come out of a tradition that completely separates the nature of your deeds from the nature of your soul. Separates character from actions.
And that's why you have no kind of system in the West that can actually apply morality in any sort of coherent, consistent, practical way. It doesn't exist. I mean, look at racism in America. Just look at racism in America, in the West. For the longest time in America, all of my life and certainly before my life, you keep talking about the need that we need to end racism.
Well, that's like saying that you need to end greed. You need to end stupidity. You need to end evil and obnoxiousness. Try to end arrogance. No.
These are all ways of just misdirecting the the the the victims of racism from their own practical liberation. You understand me? Telling you that your only hope is for your oppressors to become enlightened, for your oppressors to become fair minded and benevolent people. That just keeps you neutralized. It keeps you neutralized from ever taking any real world steps to try to protect yourself, to try to fortify yourself, and to try to liberate yourself.
You see what I mean? In Islam, we understand, like I said, we understand morality in a very practical way. Real world actions, real world measures. We don't believe in the idea of sitting around and waiting for racism to end. That's not moral.
That's not moral. Racism exists here and now. It affects people. And the only truly moral thing is to take action to neutralize it rather than allow yourself to be neutralized by it while you're waiting around for a racist to reform. Now I'm not talking about taking action against racists.
I'm talking about taking action for yourselves to address the actual destructive dynamics and the actual conditions that racism creates in your own life. In other words, I'm talking about saving yourself instead of trying to save a racist from their own racism. It's no one's job to try to rehabilitate their own oppressor. So just like in the case of child protection, genuine protection of children is supposed to manifest in concrete actions, concrete measures, concrete measures that provide real world safeguards, real world protections for children, not just speeches and declarations about how much children should be protected. The answer isn't we need to rehabilitate child predators so that finally our children can be safe.
You don't say what what is it? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone? No. I'm talking about trying to face the reality of what the conditions really are in the real world and then trying to implement measures, trying to implement steps to try to correct those conditions for the people who are the victims of those conditions. Because look, the reality is this.
If you are African American or any member of the global majority living in The United States, in my opinion, you need to completely abandon the idea that you're gonna end racism in America. Not because racism is acceptable, it's contemptible, it's evil, it's a civilizational disease. But you need to abandon the idea because it is baked into the operating system of America. And you are wasting precious time, energy, and resources fighting in a battle that was designed to be unwinnable. I mean, think about it this way.
If you lived in a region where tornadoes were a regular occurrence, would you spend your life trying to campaign to end tornadoes? Would you organize protests demanding that the atmosphere stop producing severe weather conditions? Right? Would you dedicate your existence to trying to convince the sky that tornadoes are morally wrong? No.
You would accept that tornadoes are just a part of the climate of that region, and you'd build storm shelters. You'd develop early warning systems. You would construct your homes with reinforced foundations. You would create evacuation plans. You would prepare.
That's practical. I know you'll be mad about that comparison because you'll say that racism is the isn't a natural disaster. Right? Brother Shaheed, racism is not a force of nature. I agree with you.
But when a tornado comes and rips apart your house and your property and your family and your life, you're not worried about what caused it. You're worried about the fact of its impact. And you should do the same thing with regards to racism when it rips apart your life the same way Because white supremacy in America is a permanent feature. It's a permanent feature of America. It's a permanent feature of western society, of so called western civilization.
It's a it's as much a feature of that as just as much as tornadoes in Illinois or blizzards in North Dakota or earthquakes in California. You know? You can tread as lightly as you want in San Francisco, but that's not gonna stop the the the tremors. They'll still come no matter how lightly you walk. You understand me?
You're not going to eliminate racism in the West any more than you're gonna eliminate rain in Seattle. It's not gonna happen. It's a part of the weather system. It's a part of the weather system in America. It's a part of the environment.
It is the climate of the West. So don't take my example of a tornado as me saying that racism is natural. No. It's unnatural. It's absolutely unnatural, but it's also structural.
It's engineered and it's maintained by foundational civilizational incentives. But just supposed to believe in these all men are created equal platitudes, they're just meant to substitute any actual practical equality in that society. That's why ending racism becomes the perfect moral treadmill. You run, you sweat, you suffer, you post, you march, you beg, you vote, you educate, you plead, on and on and on. And the machine of a work western society, that machine just updates itself.
They patch all the holes, they rebrand the language, they, you know, hire a diversity officer and keep doing what they were built to do, what that system was built to do. And you don't understand how you've been on that treadmill, how you've got tens of thousands of steps in. Right? How you've been on there for hours and hours and gotten nowhere for years and years, for decades and decades, for centuries. And again, I know what the indoctrinated response is gonna be.
The programmed response is. If we just accept that racism is permanent, well, doesn't that constitute just giving up? Isn't that a hopeless position? No. No.
What you are doing by trying to chase the end of racism is actually surrendering. You're surrendering your agency. You're surrendering your agency to people who have no intention whatsoever of ever treating you as equals. You're making your survival completely dependent upon your oppressors having a moral awakening. That's surrender.
You're betting your children's future on the goodness of people who have given you no practical evidence whatsoever for centuries that they have any good in their hearts towards you except what you yourself project into their hearts in your in your head. That's the hard truth. And waiting upon unfair, biased, bigoted people, a bigoted society to have a moral awakening, well, they're not even asleep when they do what they do. No. They're wide awake.
Their eyes are wide open when they do what they do. You're And waiting for them to have a moral awakening? They're not asleep. They know what they're doing. Waiting for them to have a collective change of heart.
Well, that's not a strategy for liberation. That's a permanent psychological captivity that you are choosing to trap yourself in. Like I've been saying, you need to understand how how how morality actually works, practical morality versus how America pretends that it works. In a real civilization, moral principles aren't just decorations. Moral principles are supposed to be, like I said before, it's the actual structure, the actual architecture of your society.
It's the foundation, the the the walls, the roof. That's what protects you from the elements. That's what makes civilization possible in the first place. Your moral values, that's what makes it possible. They're not ornaments.
Moral values aren't ornaments. You understand? It's supposed to be in your bones, not on your clothes, not just on your t shirt. I've told you before, what America actually operates on is nothing but raw power dynamics, law of the jungle, the law of capability. If you can do it, you have the right to do it.
That's how it works in America. If you have the power to take it, then it's yours. If you have the capability to inflict something, then you are entitled to inflict it. And if you're too weak to stop it, well, that's your problem. This is the system in the West.
Your safety is your own responsibility, and the strong have no obligation whatsoever to restrain themselves from exploiting you. If they can exploit you, it's their right to do it. That's the actual operating system in America, in the West. And you need to know the way that your society actually functions and not the lies that they tell you about how that society functions. Well, you're not gonna get anywhere.
You're never gonna get ahead that way. Just trudging away on that treadmill, like I said. And while you're doing that, while you're trudging on that treadmill, you're not building power, which is what you need. You're not creating alternatives, which is what you need. You're not developing functional independence, which is what you need.
You're trapped in this cycle of appealing to power, then disappointment when you don't get it, then outrage, then more appeals, more disappointment, more outrage. It's an endless loop. That endless loop just keeps you psychologically dependent upon your oppressors while they continue doing exactly what they have always done. Do you understand me? With you sitting at some diversity workshop trying to convince people to give up their entitlement, to give up their privilege because it's the right thing to do?
You think that has any currency? I'm telling you, as long as you keep giving uncle Sam the benefit of the doubt, you're giving uncle Sam no doubt that he never has to change. That's the truth. When you make your survival strategy dependent upon ending racism, then you are assuming, first of all, you're assuming that racism in that society is some kind of a flaw in the system that can be fixed rather than something that is absolutely foundational to how that whole society operates. You're treating it like a problem to be solved rather than a permanent condition that needs to be navigated, that needs to be mitigated, that needs to be neutralized in terms of your own life.
Now obviously, African Americans, Muslims, so called Latinos and so forth, all members of the global majority in The United States who in The United States are called minorities, obviously, they've been navigating. They've been navigating those conditions all this time, but they have been navigating under the false hope, in my opinion. I mean, to one extent or another, they've been navigating under the false hope that American society will eventually give up its bigotry, which is unrealistic. And that has, in my opinion, gotten in the way of taking the kinds of actions that you actually need to take. As long as you hold that as some kind of an objective to so called end racism, obviously, you are giving your oppressors veto power over your own progress.
You're saying, literally, I can only be safe, can only be successful, I can only be free if you choose to stop oppressing me. That's not power. That's begging. And they are never going to grant you what you beg for. They're never gonna grant you what you're begging for.
Otherwise, you wouldn't even have to beg in the first place. They know what you need. You wouldn't need to ask if they cared about you having it. And you've been asking for so long, you can't possibly believe that they don't know what you want. If you don't know by now, Wallahi, if you don't know by now that they are not gonna give you what you want, then you're like some sort of a a prisoner on death row who's waiting for a reprieve from the governor, and the governor is the one himself who's gonna pull the electric chair switch.
So you're sitting there waiting for a reprieve and he shows up and you think maybe there's some good news. You think he's gonna let you off the hook. And all he says to you is do you have any last words? No. Asking racists to stop being racist so that you can be free is like asking a a a parasite to stop extracting blood from your body because it's bad for your health.
Well, the parasite doesn't care about your health. He's feeding himself. You understand? And he knows that he's gonna be able to keep right on feeding himself off of you, off of your blood as long as all you do is wait for him to change his diet. You get my point?
I'm just telling you like it is. It's not pretty. It's not pretty. It's ugly. And it doesn't get any better looking with age.
And understand that the racist element in that society is a sub element of the overall system. I think it's crucial for you to understand this because you're talking about a society which 10% of the population owns and controls 70 to 80% of all the wealth. That's bigotry. Yes. It is.
It's bigotry. It's bigotry. It's dehumanization and subjugation. And the truth is that it is systemic and it is fundamental to that society, to the way that that society runs and operates. That's a fact.
That's 10% of the population that despises 90% of the population no matter what so called race they are. Because the fundamental issue is not that individual Americans are racist or have racist attitudes or what have you. No. The fundamental issue that everyone in that society is living under is that you are economically captive to systems that are designed exclusively to extract wealth from you to politically marginalize you in a structure that does not represent your interests. Listen.
The whole world is turning away from America. That's a fact. The whole world is turning away from America. It's turning away from the West, and they're turning towards each other. They're turning away from the colonizers, and they're turning towards each other.
And if you are a so called minority in the West, a so called minority in America, then like I say, you are actually part of the global majority. That means that your parents or your grandparents or your ancestors come from the global South. The truth is that you are diaspora communities over there. And in my opinion, you need to do over there, what your people are doing in their part of the world. In other words, turning away from them and turning towards each other.
And I mean, don't just turn towards each other over there. No. Turn towards your brothers and sisters in the lands that your people came from, where your ancestors came from. You need to understand that when when the society tries to make you identify yourself as an American citizen and not as part of the diaspora of the global South. They're trying to make you reduce yourself.
They're trying to make you isolate yourself and accept the lie that you are a minority. You're a minority. Not that 10% that's controlling all the money and not that so called the so called white population that represents maybe 15% of the people on earth. Do you understand? You're the minority.
When you accept that you're an American, the whole point is to get you to internalize the falsehood that you're small and they're big. Citizenship is an optical illusion if you understand it properly. If your people came from Africa or Asia or so called Latin America and ICE comes after you and you cry out, I'm an American citizen. This shouldn't happen to me. You think that that's a reason why this shouldn't be happening.
No. It's exactly why it's happening to you. That's exactly why it's happening to you. Because when you call yourself that, when you call yourself an American citizen, you're calling yourself a minority. You're calling yourself weak.
You're calling yourself vulnerable. You're calling yourself someone who hasn't got any backup. When you call yourself that, you're calling yourself the prey that has wandered away from the herd. Meaning, you are calling yourself eligible for oppression, eligible for subjugation and brutality in that society where the law of the jungle is actually how they operate. I really hope you understand me.
I truly hope you understand me. Saying that you're an American citizen when you come from the global majority, that's not a defense against ICE. That's an invitation to ICE. I've talked about this before. You need to think about or or it would be worthwhile for you to think about as a goal or as an objective to pursue, to join BRICS.
I'm not joking. I'm not and I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm completely serious. Minority so called minority communities should try to join I know why you think that sounds like a joke because African Americans, right, so called Latino Americans and whatnot, they're not a country. They don't constitute a country.
Only countries can join Briggs, and you're not a country. Okay. Try to think beyond the obvious constraints, please. Don't think in terms of formal BRICS membership. Try to think in terms of how you can create a new category for BRICS recognition and BRICS cooperation.
Say a BRICS affiliated community, for example, something like this, a category like this. You can think of all of the plausible criteria, like, say, a given diaspora community, their their ancestral heritage should be from a country that either is a current member of BRICS, a current BRICS member state, or else it they come from a state that would otherwise qualify to apply for BRICS membership, and there should be a demonstrable pattern of marginalization for that community. Because let's be honest, BRICS is unofficially an anti colonial, anti imperialist economic organization. So I'm saying you can argue that this or that diaspora community in the West exists actually as a quasi colonized, de facto global South population that's located in the West, located in America, and it's there due to historical coercion. And that this community has continues to suffer coercion within that country itself.
So you're looking for economic exclusion relative to the host country's dominant population, America's dominant population. You know? Political underrepresentation, historical, colonial, neo colonial relationships within the state, meaning exploitation, meaning discrimination that you suffer, meaning state violence that you suffer, mass incarceration that you suffer. Don't I think that's a hard case to make, frankly, especially when you're talking about African Americans in America. Then you'll need for that diaspora community, whichever community you're talking about, they'll need to have some degree of organizational coherence.
Meaning you have to have some sort of recognized representation, representative organizations that are capable of formal engagement with BRICS. BRICS members, member states, other countries. You know? Some sort of institutional bodies that can carry out something that's more or less analogous to state state diplomacy. You understand?
And, of course, you need the the the diaspora community, but have to be big enough. You'd have to have sufficient population density to make it even worthwhile to deal with you. And then you wanna put in some sort of a clause about how the the diaspora community that's applying for the BRICS recognition is the separatist movement. You know? You can't be advocating the violent overthrow of the host country's government or something like that, you know, wanting to secede or have your own, you know, state.
Brix obviously doesn't wanna be involved in anything that's overtly subversive or insurrectionist or anything like that. But think about it. Applying for Brix membership or trying to navigate something like this, this is a practical, non rhetorical recognition of the fact that the colonial legacy doesn't only exist inside the formerly colonized countries, but it exists in the communities that were displaced from those countries, most likely due to war, due to economic sabotage, due to deindustrialization, and of course, obviously, because of the literal slave trade. You know, some people left their lands because the the the West extracted all their resources and left them in poverty. And then of course, some other people, plenty of people left because they themselves were the resources that were being extracted.
That deserves to be acknowledged not just in speeches and not just in statements, but recognized and acknowledged in actual practical real world ways. Imagine, this sort of a program, if you had something like this, this would be a a kind of formal acknowledgment of shared global South identity to diaspora communities in America or in the West. You could maybe get access to BRICS cultural educational programs. You could get some sort of an observer status at the BRICS summits. I mean, inshallah, maybe even diaspora communities could even potentially get conditional access to loans for community development from the new development bank.
You understand? If you have this kind of status, if you have this kind of status with BRICS, this kind of connection with BRICS, that would facilitate trade for community owned businesses in your in your area with BRICS economies. There could be educational exchange programs with BRICS universities. You understand? Potentially, you could establish expedited pathways to citizenship or anyway permanent residency in BRICS nations, in BRICS member states.
Your community could have direct engagement with BRICS foreign ministries. There's no reason why you can't do this. I mean, the potential benefits are absolutely massive. And obviously, this this could work not only for just the African American community or not even just only with regards to America. I mean, if you think about North Africans, for example, in France or the Pakistani Bangladeshi community in The UK.
You can think of plenty of other examples. I mean, the Palestinian diaspora, on and on. There's plenty of people who could benefit from something like this. That's practical morality. You're not just asking people to be good.
You're trying to build systems that actually create safeguards for yourself against the bad behavior that exists by others. You're not waiting for bigots to stop being bigots. Like I said many many times, you need parallel systems that will bypass the systems that oppress you. That's what real solutions look like. That's what real morality looks like applied in the real world.
Your own sources of financing, your own supply chains, your own trade relationships. Right? Your own, community governance structures that you create yourself among each other, your own economic networks. See, this is what I mean by practical morality versus performative morality. Performative morality, that's protest signs and diversity statements and politicians making speeches about equality and justice and what have you.
That's all theater. No. Practical morality is actual institutions that actually work and that actually protect you and that actually create the conditions for you to flourish regardless of what racists think. We're not concerned about reforming them because that's what you would be building if you were aiming at trying to get some sort of a bricks recognition. Do you see what I mean?
The objective itself, bricks recognition, bricks acceptance, that's less important than what you would build in the process of pursuing that goal. Every step towards that goal is a step towards economic sovereignty, is a step towards political autonomy and civilizational dignity. Brexit recognition would just be a coup de grace. But everything that you build on the path to that, everything that you build on the way to that would constitute practical liberation already. Again, I've talked about this many times I know.
But look at the numbers. African Americans, if you're if if African Americans were considered as a separate economy, then that is an economy that generates somewhere between 1.6 to $2,000,000,000,000 in economic activity every year. You understand? That's massive. That's larger than most countries' entire GDP.
That's equivalent to Brazil which is a founding member of BRICS. You have a massive economy already right now. But right now you're functioning like a colonized nation. You understand? You have economic activity but you don't have economic sovereignty.
You don't have economic control. You generate wealth but you don't control the wealth that you generate. You participate in every single sector of the economy mostly as labor and mostly as consumers, not as owners and not as decision makers. Your spending power is absolutely enormous, but it flows out of your communities into the hands of people who have no interest whatsoever in your well-being or the well-being of your community. Just like a colonized country.
You understand? You thought that your struggle was trying to gain acceptance in America, trying to end racism in America. No. Your struggle is trying to liberate yourself from America. You are yourselves in an anti colonial struggle whether you know it or not.
And no colonized country ever tried to gain the acceptance of their colonizers. They tried to get themselves out from under their colonizers. And that's what you should be doing. This is the only thing in my opinion that makes sense for African Americans or any other diaspora community from the global majority that's living in that country. That's the only thing that makes sense.
If colonization was the ultimate version of offshoring, well, your communities represent the onshoring of colonization. And I don't think that it can even get any clearer than what we're seeing right now in America with ice and so forth. You're literally having slave rage taking place across that country. So I'm saying, see yourself and your community as literally a colonized nation, as an occupied people. And every colonized country had preexisting structures.
They had preexisting authority structures, governance structures, so forth. And those continued in one form or another even while the occupation existed. They operated beneath the imposed colonial governments. And these formed the foundation for their independence later on. And it helped them to struggle against the colonizers during the colonization.
And that's what needs to be built in my opinion, some semblance of that. You need some sort of unified economic governance. Right now your economic activity, like I said, is fragmented across millions of individuals, across thousands and thousands of, small businesses with no coordination, with no unified strategy, no collective leverage. That's counterproductive. That's counter liberation.
You need to create some sort of a diaspora economic council. I've talked about it before. You can call it whatever you like. The name isn't important. The function is what's important.
Have regional chapters across the country, advisory boards, and so forth, people with actual expertise, expertise in economics, in law, international relations, and so forth. Every community has people like that. The point is to have some sort of a body, some sort of an institution that can speak with one voice about the economic interest of the community. This isn't a a far off dream. This is something that you can literally start organizing next month.
Have community meetings, online coordination and so forth. It's it's it's very easy to facilitate something like this. Build catalogs of businesses. Create databases of economic activity. Start the work of actually understanding your collective economic position.
Get a full map of what your situation is. I'm sure that a great deal of this is already being done to one degree or another by different organizations in civil society. But these civil society organizations are not treated as and maybe they don't see themselves as or even maybe they don't behave as anticolonial institutions. This is a mindset recalibration that needs to take place. Look, I'm not advocating aggression.
I'm not advocating hostility. But there's a big unspoken element in these community organizations that's getting lost, in my opinion, because it is unspoken. You know? In your mission statement, if you have a a an NGO of some form, your mission statement is to help the community, help the African American community, help this or that community, the so called any any member of the so called minority communities. You want everyone to know that you're there to help.
Right? That's what you have to say in your mission statement. But help against who? Help them against what? No.
The fact of the matter is that you are living under aggression. You are living under hostility. You are living under persecution and bigotry. Conditions are being imposed and you say that you wanna help the people who are enduring those conditions, but you don't wanna talk about who's imposing those conditions and that those that those conditions are being imposed. Do you understand me?
There is an adversarial reality going on here. There's no two ways about it. You have to acknowledge this. You have to recognize this and act accordingly. Every organization that says that they're out there to help the community is or should understand that it is or should be treated as if it is and they should behave as if it is an anti colonial revolutionary organization.
In my opinion, there needs to be some urgency and some importance given to what they're doing. You know, if people are compiling a catalog of so called minority owned businesses, well, that's a chart of an anti colonization network of economic sovereignty. You understand? This is important. It needs to be framed like this.
It needs to be understood like this. In my opinion, this is very important because if you don't understand it like this, then there's a danger that people will just fall into acting just like the the the same way that the oppressors do, the colonizers do. And they'll just use their community owned status of their company as a technique for more extraction themselves and self enrichment instead of being part and parcel of a larger, broader, deeper community struggle for autonomy. So in my opinion, you need to start by registering and coordinating these community owned businesses. Right now, there's no comprehensive, registry that I know of.
There may be. So nobody knows where they are, who they are, what they are, what sectors they're in, what they need, what they can provide to each other, and so forth. Create that registry. Make it possible for African American owned businesses or so called minority owned businesses to find each other, to trade with each other, to support each other, to invest in each other. Build an actual ecosystem rather than isolated entities that are all just trying to survive.
You know, survive separately in a hostile environment because that's what you're in. You're in a hostile environment. I don't actually know if if if a if a registry like this exists, it may. I haven't been in The US for over twenty years, but back in the day, they were only sort of localized versions of this and only in in specific sectors like restaurants and and maybe mechanics and so forth. And then you should try to create investment funds.
I've talked about it again before. Pool your resources. Now African American wealth is scattered and isolated. Like I say, individual families trying to build something with no support. You can combine, pull your resources and combine that into some sort of a diaspora investment fund.
Like I say, pool your resources. Make strategic investments in businesses in your community that serve the community interest. Finance the creation of institutions that you need yourself. Build that parallel infrastructure. And obviously, like I said, this is not only for the African American community, it's for any community.
Any community can do this. Every community needs to do this because yes, like I say, 90% of you are colonized by 10%. That's something I've talked about many many times, community sovereignty, building sufficiency zones, establishing sufficiency zones, parallel structures, and so forth. And you can make sure that these funds, this this community fund or what have you, it doesn't operate according to the same predatory financial system that you're currently trapped in. No interest based exploitation.
You can have equity partnerships where the risk is shared. You understand? Investment decisions being made based on community benefit, not just profit maximization. That can be determined by a committee, by a council. This is about trying to build something that actually works for you, not replicating the same extractive systems that have been bleeding you dry.
And in the process of all this, you are building community institutional structures that you that you'll be able to, utilize in the future. And yes, you can establish direct partner, trade partnerships, trade relationships with the BRICS nations. You don't need BRICS recognition in order to do that. Like I said, your consume your consumption power is enormous already. You're keeping entire industries solvent, but you have zero control over your own supply chains.
Everything is mediated through American corporations that mark up the prices, that control the availability in the market, and they extract maximum profit while giving you the minimum value. It doesn't have to be like that. You can have direct relationships with Chinese manufacturers. There's no reason why you can't do that. Asian suppliers, African producers, Chinese manufacturers, like I say.
Everything doesn't have to go through middlemen. There's no reason for that. I mean, I don't mean to repeat myself. I've said all of this before, but it does bear repeating. I think sometimes we need to hear ideas reiterated several times before they finally click.
Pursuing Brix membership, in my opinion, sort of forces you to think of yourselves as a nation. A nation that is connected to the rest of the world, not as a minority begging for inclusion, not as a demographic within someone else's country, but as a people with your own economic interests, with your own political aspirations, with your own civilizational heritage and with your own collective destiny. That psychological shift is is absolutely vital and like I say you're not gonna get anywhere without it. Now I know that you might be stuck on the idea of being an American. You might be stuck on that idea especially because if you're African American then your ancestors bled and they sweated and they built that country.
Look, I'm not telling you to disavow what is your right. I'm telling you the practical way to get your right. And that's not gonna be, by buying into the bait and switch con job of citizenship because that's what it is. You can't put your faith, in the idea of trying to get your rights, your heritage rights, the legacy of what your ancestors earned, you can't put your faith in trying to get that from the same people who denied your ancestors those rights in the first place, the same government. You know?
Talking about your rights as a citizen and thinking there's gonna be anything that you can cash in the bank. You can't cash that anywhere. Your citizenship so called. No. They didn't sweat and bleed for that country.
They sweated and they bled for you. And that goes for every diaspora community, for every immigrant community and so forth. Everyone who went over there did not go over there to make America great again. They went over there for their own children. They went over there for their families to try to secure a better life for themselves and their families than the misery that America and that the West had inflicted on them in their home countries.
So you don't owe anything to that country. You owe it to yourself to make a better life for yourself in spite of that country's determination to deny you a better life. And the way to make a better life for yourself and for your children and for your community is to recognize that you do have to do it on your own with clear eyed understanding that that society is gonna try to hinder you in every way possible at every turn. So you need to understand your community as a nation within a nation, as a colonized nation within a colonizing nation. You understand me?
And you need to understand that your struggle is adversarial in nature. You're not in a struggle to join the system, you're in a struggle to separate from the system. And that's the key difference between this and the end racism approach. Because when you work to end racism and fail, which you will, you'll have nothing. You will have spent decades protesting, decades petitioning, decades voting and pleading and you're still essentially in the same structural position that you were at the beginning because none of that built you any actual power.
None of those actions built you any actual power. But when you work to build economic sovereignty and build an international relationships even if you don't achieve the ultimate objective, you've built real things. You have institutions now. You have networks now. You have alternatives now.
You have leverage now. You have reduced your dependency on systems and on people that hate you. That's a win. That's a practical strategy. That's practical morality.
Like I said, you don't need pie in the sky, you need a bakery. Understand everything that I'm telling you here, rests on one fundamental premise. You have to see reality clearly. You have to see it clearly. You have to stop believing in fairy tales about American democracy and equal opportunity and, believing in the eventual triumph of justice in America.
You have to stop making your strategy dependent on racists having a moral awakening. America is what it is and it always has been what it is and it will continue to be what it is. The violence, the exploitation, the dehumanization, none of that, represents a deviation. That's the normal operation of the system. I've said it many times.
You need to build as if your survival depends on your own capabilities rather than upon their goodwill because it does and it always has. Capability is the only currency in that country. I'm telling you, you are not going to end racism in America, but what you can do by building, by connecting with the global South, by identifying as and operating as a diaspora community, by building cohesion, by building capability within your community, you can make the racists incapable of holding you down and holding you back, and that's the moral thing to do.
تمّ بحمد الله