I was reading this article by Michael E. Ross in which Ishmael Reed was quoted as saying that Black Americans live in a banana republic inside the United States; and I was barely paying attention in my classes at LSE to some theory my professor has about how rational individuals will cooperate if they believe that they will receive individual benefits from said cooperation; I was trying to convince people that weren’t born in America that I wasn’t really American, getting all these blank looks when I talked about unproductive Anti-Americanism and listening to people rattle off the benefits that I supposedly receive from living there (me, the rural black girl); and I was really really mad about all the beatings my friends and I have to take in our African Economic Development classes about how Africa is not a culture ready for capitalism (thank God, but you know, they say it in a really smug way and are really just taking jabs at corruption that’s only wrong if you’re Black) and how they’ve decided to participate in the world economy and it’s expected that they play by the rules (but strange how nobody wants to give up the diamonds).

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