Artificial intelligence has so many people worried, in health care, in government and in the entertainment industry. Experts are afraid of who is writing the algorithm as much as the result the code produces. Which can be the same worry actually. Deep fakes, false news, just plain bullshit and the eventual supplanting of humankind are among the concerns. There is one area however—black liberation—where A.I. is kicking ass and taking names, by freeing the colored peoples of the earth from the tyranny of false narratives, specifically the lies that white people love to tell about themselves. Instead A.I. makes the Negro the hero of his/her own narrative. And what a welcome change it is.
With artificial intelligence we’re seeing the end of the white savior, in other words, which is long overdue because it’s high time that bitch was laid to rest. We say bitch with no disrespect and/or misogyny intended—bitch is a nonbinary concept although the white savior is often a female, like Sandra Bullock for example in movies. Examples of the new algorithms at work are now available on YouTube and the plots are familiar but nonetheless refreshing and cool to watch. It’s hard to get enough, actually, if you’re flesh-and-blood Negro. White people may be less entertained.
A frequent and favorite storyline is a young black woman who is in a traffic stop with a racist cop who spits on her, or strikes her, and it turns out the sister is really an undercover FBI agent and she kicks the holy shit out of the white puerco or arrests him. Have you seen that one? A lot of these vids are produced by BlackStruggles, out of France: “Our purpose is to convey a moral message about the dangers of prejudice, the importance of treating everyone with respect, and how justice eventually catches up with those who act with bias.” Doesn't catch up soon enough, bro, but we’ll take it when it gets here. The white narrator with a British male voice needs work but overall the effect is still pretty cool and, you know, liberating.
Or in the plot the black woman is really the new police chief or head of internal affairs, or a district judge who still lives in the old ‘hood and who a racist cop thinks is just another nigga. Or there's a white judge dissing a black female attorney who, unknown to the white judge, was just that morning appointed Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court? And will soon have the white jurist's balls in her hands. Have you seen that one? Totally cool, bro. Or the black attorney is actually the new president of the American Bar Association. You go, girl!
Mostly the heroes are black women but there are also some black guys who get pulled over and berated, or profiled, or busted, and it turns out he is really the U.S. Army Chief of Staff in civvies or a retired Medal of Honor recipient who was a Navy Seal. Have you seen those two? A drawback of portraying black men in A.I. liberation videos is that in real life the black guy often gets capped by the cops so he can’t be liberated later, you know, dead black men tell no tales and they don't write algorithms either. Guys are okay but the women kick ass, literally.
My all-time favorites are the stories when it’s a middle-aged black woman who is really a billionaire investor and buys a huge company and who comes to work at the company’s headquarters as a housekeeper in order to see what her administrative employees are really like. She goes to the boardroom to empty the trash and ends up firing everybody in management. As does the black lady, in another vid, who just bought a swanky New York hotel or restaurant and tries to make a reservation, for a room or a table, and is treated badly and denied accommodation. Usually—spoiler alert—the black billionaire doesn’t reveal herself when she’s getting dissed and instead she texts her administrative assistant, who is a white guy, to call together a meeting of management and the owner walks in, to oohs and aahs from the people who discriminated against her the day before, and she fires everybody in the room! Except the black people. How cool is that?
It’s kind of like, well, how good are you on the Greek classics?
You remember the scene in the Iliad or the Odyssey or whatever, not to get all pretentious, when Ulysses the king returns from the siege of Troy and he arrives in Athens or wherever in disguise and finds all manner of mofos trying to get close to his old lady, who has been chastely awaiting his return? Ulysses arrives in a beggar's rags and is derided but suddenly reveals himself by stringing his bow, that none of the pretenders to his throne is strong enough to string, and he slays every motherfucker in the room? That’s kind of like Denzel Washington's preferred role in film today but back in the day the role was written by, like, Socrates, or whoever, not A.I. and not Hollywood either. In the old movie, Anthony Quinn plays the chief pretender and Kirk Douglas plays Ulysses, even though both guys are white, not that that’s important here, but that is kind of like what these present-day BlackStruggles videos are all about. A lot of instant karma that in actual history has taken African Americans more like 100 years to achieve but in the videos only takes like 15 or twenty minutes. You can be smoking a blunt and just as the THC peaks you're seeing merciless justice. Oh wow. You don't have to wait for the U.S. Office of Civil Rights to take the case.
Speaking as someone who attended segregated schooling in the South, you can’t get enough. My own plot suggestion is something along the lines of, actually, segregated schooling back in the day when the black high school was shitty, because segregated was not equal and the white school had a whole lot better facilities, and suddenly desegregation is ordered by the Supreme Court and a black high school football player, who we’ll call Denzel, is so awesome that he becomes quarterback of the integrated formerly all-white team and wins the state championship and also ends up banging all the white cheerleaders too. Would it be possible for A.I. to put together an algorithm that runs, let's say, 30 minutes? That may sound like a lot of action to cram into such a short time but without the white savior story thread the plot becomes a sleek narrative and is totally doable. It would probably get a million views, if only from black guys.
Let's see. My only complaint would be, once again, that the A.I. voices still sound white, but that’s a small price to pay. So, like, there is a theory that there are only seven basic plots in literature, including the A.I. variety, and 36 basic plot situations. My theory is however that in American storytelling there are only four basic heroes. You got your cavalry that arrives just in time, that’s number one. It’s usually more than one guy but the principle is the same, 1 or 100 riding to the rescue. Number two is the lone cowboy, like Shane or High Plains Drifter or any of Denzel Washington's roles when he is kind of a thug but still does good? Number three is the Magic Negro, like Jim in Huckleberry Finn and Whoopi Goldberg in any number of TV shows and films, including Star Trek, or Sam in Casablanca or Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. Fourth is the white savior. But these four types of hero get reduced to three pretty damn quick if you watch A.I.-generated liberation videos. Because the storylines have totally done away with the staple of American storytelling, the white savior.
OnYouTube, in BlackStruggles, we go from white racism to black liberation without any of the detours that have plagued American movies, publishing and journalism. You know, like Emma Stone as the white writer in The Help? Not having seen the movie personally but it's on my list for viewing as soon as a big enough barf bag can be found. Instead, guided by A.I. on YouTube, black people get to free ourselves. Which is actually what has happened, bro. Caucasians are relegated to where they entered the picture, as racists. How cool is that?
So, like, of course the premier white savior of American arts and letters is Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, both movie and book versions: a small town southern white lawyer who liberates a falsely-accused black man. Stop me if you’ve heard/seen that plot before or since. Like, eight million times, you say? But it’s actually my claim that TKaM has been supplanted in the annals of White Saviordom by the more recent A Time to Kill. Not because of a brilliant performance by Matthew McConaughey as the white lawyer, or even Samuel L. Jackson as the accused black defendant—who actually caps a couple of white guys in the movie and is “guilty” as a mofo, as seen thru a traditional law and order lens? Not having read the book or seen the film, personally, for reasons of racial protest purity and because my real world has been filled with enough white saviors already, these last 70 years, thank you very much, without going out of my way to meet more. But instead because of the presence in the cast of Sandra Bullock, as a law student helping the defense. To set the scene. Sandra Bullock has made being a white savior into kind of her life’s work.
First and very important, Sandra Bullock in the film and in life is smoking hot. Not having seen the movie but having seen photos of her in it? That just needs to be said. Not being a fan of white hotties particularly, preferring fine black women instead, or Latinas actually, or the Korean major league baseball cheerleaders you also see on YouTube? But if white women were to my taste, which they are not except in exceptional cases, not to repeat myself? Sandra Bullock would be up there on the black man’s GOAT to-do list with, oh, let’s see, Jacqueline Bisset and Tyra Banks, to say nothing of my #1 on-screen hottie of all time Raquel Welch. What follows is therefore said with utmost respect and affection for Ms. Bullock. She's totally smoking hot and that means something to The Black Man, politics notwithstanding.
So, like, she has made kind of a career out of helping black people on film, not necessarily in film—in the industry—but on celluloid. First with ATTK, as the starry-eyed hot law student, and then in The Blind Side for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress portraying a white woman with frosted blond hair (which does not suit her, actually) who adopts a “homeless” black teenager and provides him the support needed to fulfill his dreams as a football player. Have you seen that movie? And apparently it was great acting because according to press reports, after the black guy wrote a book about his experience, The Blind Side movie based upon a book by white journalist Michael Lewis turned out to have very little resemblance to what really happened. The other reason to mention Sandra Bullock is because in her personal life, mostly but not entirely away from the camera, she adopted a black kid. Which makes her a real-life white savior! Life resembles art, you feel me?
It’s not just her, bro, Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron have also adopted black kids. In Hollywood alone, so has Mariska Hargitay, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jane Fonda, Kristen Davis, Mary Louise Parker, Jillian Michaels, Madonna, Connie Britton and Joely Fisher. To say nothing of white guys Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and Hugh Jackman. If you are black you may be forgiven for feeling that some white people, especially white women, view black children as fashion accessories. You don't see that on BlackStruggles, bro. That’s the good thing about A.I. black liberation, you just wish it could be applied to real life. For instance black children who get raised by black parents, not Tom Cruise or a total nutjob like Ms. Jolie? If Brad Pitt were more involved in the Jolie-Pitt family, btw, that might be a different matter, because Brad is kind of cool for a white guy and might be a good dad. Anyway these videos skip right past white saviors as unnecessary to the storyline. Especially, one supposes, if the algorithm was written in Beijing or in Mumbai, because it's hard to imagine white saviors in the Chinese or Indian Subcontinent context. Because white people did a lot of things in Asia but "saving" anybody was not among them. Although white programmers will doubtless try to insert a savior or two, there's still been big progress in computer coding, bro, in the form of black liberation artificial intelligence. Check it out.
For instance you could have a Casablanca-type plot without Humphrey Bogart, where Sam the piano player gets Ingrid Bergman (if she's his type) and kills a couple of Nazis and ends up selling the bar, with the money going to the employees, and joins the Foreign Legion. Or A Time to Kill with Matthew McConaughey replaced by the black woman lawyer who just this morning in Black Struggles was elected president of the American Bar Association. For The Blind Side, to know what it would be like without Sandra Bullock’s heroic white savior efforts, just read the black guy’s book.
A.I. Black Liberation is pretty cool. Especially if it was written in Beijing or Mumbai because artificial intelligence programmers, especially non-whites, know unnecessary or faulty code when they see it. The Black Struggle, as in BlackStruggles, is getting white people out of the savior part of the narrative. And when that happens it's not "bad A.I.," bro. It’s good programming.
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