Information Overload: How Black People Get Neutralized
Ponder for a minute, if you will, just how much visual and audible information your brain takes in and how much it has to process every single day. Just think about the amount of information your brain has to sift through and about how your mind is taxed with the monumental task of deciphering which information is useful, beneficial, and practical and which is not.
Often, we take the mind’s loyal service to us for granted, until–heaven forbid–we get some type of severe head injury, suffer from a mental disorder, or have a stroke. It is only when there’s some drastic circumstance where our brain is prevented from properly being able to perceive and manage our navigation through this world we then begin to appreciate all it does for us.
The mind is a powerful and obedient tool, and, as is the case with any tool, such as a gun, it can be misused and abused. Many of us don’t ever stop to think, throughout the day, about the information we mindlessly consume, and many don’t stop to determine whether that information is making their life better in some way nor if they should avoid engaging with it altogether.
When it comes to all the information you need to know from ensuring your kiddos’ well-being is maintained, to the knowledge you must possess to perform the various tasks at your job properly, to what you need to know about how not to catch a certain, potentially deadly virus that’s been floating around, to you becoming acclimated with the daily practices that are aligned with a healthy and vigorous lifestyle, one has to ask, are our minds really equipped to both extract and utilize the plethora of data they receive every 24 hours?
Despite popular belief, our brains weren’t created to multitask, in the sense where one intently focuses on multiple tasks simultaneously. Science has proven it’s simply not possible for our brains to do so. And yet, in the age of smartphones, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, streaming services, and 24/7 cable news, our attention is being yanked in different directions more than it ever has ever in human history. Studies have even found that multitasking can even cause IQ points to drop in people.
The bottom line is that it, indeed, does matter how much and what kind of information you allow to take up your daily allotted mental real estate. The more you permit into your psyche’s scope, the more cluttered and obstructed your mental view of the world around you becomes.
That said, if you were a regime whose goal was to take the attention of the very people you’re oppressing off of you–because you’re the one causing the oppression they’re experiencing in the first place, wouldn’t keeping your victims’ focus preoccupied with as much random information as possible be an effective way to accomplish that? Not only could you keep that oppressed group’s attention on any and everything except them actually working to end that oppression, but you could keep the rest of the society distracted enough to where they don’t notice the systemic slaughter of their fellow citizens.
Or, you could implement that distraction as a method in which the rest of society has a readymade avenue in which they can drown out their own conscience in regards to what’s happening to the other citizens and in which don’t have to focus on the massive guilt they feel because they’re not doing anything to stop it.
America is a society where mass distraction is used as a tool to reinforce and maintain systemic white supremacy, and the strategy the dominant society uses to implement it is information overload. Because if we, as black people, are busy focusing on which celebrity is sleeping with who, which rapper has beef with another rapper, what some ballplayer’s stats are, and whatever new series is coming out on HBO Max, we’re not focused on the issues that threaten our very existence as a people.
When we’re subjecting our brain to a steady diet of mental junk food on a regular basis, that translates to time away from equipping and arming ourselves with the knowledge needed to overthrow the oppression residing over us–the crucial wisdom CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and NPR are going to extend to you (because they’re agents in the implementation that mass distraction).
That translates to you not having the time to read vital information like Scripture, The Isis Papers, Malcolm X’s autobiography, The United-Independent Compensatory Code, or the Code of Conduct Suggestion Guide for Surviving, Comprehending, and Fully Dismantling Systematic Racism/White Supremacy.
That translates to you not having time to watching things that benefit you and your people, like the Hidden Colors series, Race War, or the Third Reich: The Rise & Fall.
There’s nothing wrong with allowing yourself a predetermined time of leisure and recreation on a daily basis, but 95% of the time you spend during a day, as a black person, needs to be deliberately devoted toward taking in information that will empower you and black people as a group and toward using the information you obtained to actually do the necessary work needed to exterminate white supremacy from society.
The mind is an exceptionally powerful tool when it’s utilized correctly, and a major part of using it to its full potential is by being cognizant of the visual and audible information you’re consuming on a daily basis, even if you see it as “just entertainment.” The question you should ask yourself when ingesting any kind of information should be, “How is what I’m clicking, watching, or listening to empowering me and making better?”
One Love & One Justice,
Hello Family,
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