Like are we seeing “the black problem” here as still the population of Mass Production Era city centers with a population prepared for an industrial workplace that no longer exists? ‘Cause you seem to be talking in those terms, as a source of physical combatants. Where I’m seeing the training of a surplus elite for a post-industrial symbolic manipulation economy that never arrived as its own thing. (And far be it from me to suggest Quentin fucking Tarantino as an authority on Black experience, but Jackie Brown is really a lot more on point about the 80s-90s LA arc than Daryl Gates or gangsta rap.) And they could be Discourse combatants, but the extent to which they’ve succeeded as such at all has to do with frames and their connections to the real world being deliberately tilted towards them starting the later '00s that it would be well within historical experience to tilt back

I think there IS something to the emerging tendency to capitalize Black – as an ethnicity of the USA, like Walloons, amalgated into a distinct collective there.

For one, think it’s iffy when they try to apply it across borders. It’s not as noticeable as when they call an Ethiopian “African American”, but while dude’s black he’s not Black, he’s Ethiopian

Pan-African dream of the Americas as a diaspora of a transcendent Black People crashed amidst decolonization, when the guys taking charge weren’t T'Challa.

Bears thought though that’s what the other US nationality? White? Really, American, a field the earlier coinage of “African American” wasn’t ceding. Setting “Black” as a distinct thing it kinda makes sense that there’s Black Entertainment Television and everything else. So that’s one possibility, some flowers will bloom for a while.