- DPD
- 16 hours ago
- 16 min read
From the living room to the global charts—how society loves Black culture but stays terrified of Black people.
A Note Before You Read:
This piece examines systemic patterns in how Black culture gets commodified and extracted while Black people remain marginalized and surveilled. I'm critiquing structures, industries, and historical mechanisms, not making blanket statements about individuals or assigning collective guilt.
If you genuinely engage with and respect Black culture and its origins, this isn't an attack on you personally. But this piece does challenge the normalized dynamics that allow culture to be consumed while its creators are excluded, criminalized, or erased. If something in here makes you uncomfortable, I'd encourage you to sit with that discomfort and interrogate where it's coming from.
The patterns described here are real, documented, and ongoing. Naming them isn't divisive, ignoring them is.
The Disconnect in the Living Room
I was recently hanging out at the home of an acquaintance, a white guy, about 25 years old. Being in someone's home is important because that's where the mask comes off; there's no audience, just the person's default setting. In this relaxed environment, he was slipping in and out of Jamaican Patois with a practiced ease. It wasn't a joke; he was wearing the linguistic aesthetic of "road" culture like a comfortable hoodie. He wasn't doing a bit; he was using the slang to add texture to his personality.
The irony, of course, is that I am Jamaican.
Throughout the evening, he barely engaged with me. He was hosting the culture, the slang, the rhythm, the "cool", but there wasn't much direct conversation with the person standing in his living room who actually embodies it. But the moment that really stood out to me wasn't the silence; it was something more specific.
Early in the night, he looked me dead in the eye and told me, "Don't smoke in that chair. It's worth 50,000." Fair enough. It's his house, his rules. I respected it. But as the night went on, I watched as every other person in the room, none of them Black, proceeded to smoke in that exact same chair. He said nothing to them. He barely even seemed to notice.
I don't know what was going through his head, but from where I was sitting, the pattern was hard to ignore. The same rule applied to me didn't seem to apply to anyone else. Whether that was intentional or not, I can't say. But it felt like my presence carried a different weight than theirs did, even in a space where he was actively borrowing from the culture I come from.
Later in the evening, after hours of slipping in and out of Jamaican slang, he went on this passionate rant about protecting his own culture. He was genuinely upset that someone from a neighboring town was using slang specific to his estate. The contrast was striking, this fierce protectiveness over his own cultural markers while freely adopting mine. Again, I don't know if he saw the irony. But I did.
The Walk to Breakfast: The Public Audit
The next morning, hungover, I walked to get breakfast in Chelsea. I had my Trapstar jacket on, just a black puffer, nothing crazy, hood up, sunglasses on, all black. Standard "please don't let the daylight kill me" uniform.
The stares were immediate.
Not the quick glance you get anywhere. I'm talking sustained looks. Eyes tracking me down the pavement, following me into the shop, watching me with what felt like suspicion. In Chelsea, my outfit wasn't read as "hungover guy getting breakfast." It felt like it was being read as something else entirely.
Look, I'm used to this. Ever since I hit puberty, I've watched people cross the road when they see me coming at night. It's been the background noise of my life for years, that split-second calculation people make when they clock my presence, the subtle shift in their trajectory to put distance between us. It's so routine I barely register it anymore. But in Chelsea, it felt amplified. More frequent. More sustained. More comfortable in its obviousness.
These weren't nervous glances from people trying to be discreet. These were open evaluations, like they had every right to assess me, to decide whether I fit in their post code.
And here's what got me: Trapstar is a British streetwear brand. It's been worn by everyone from Rihanna to Stormzy to half the kids in London. It's been co-signed by the culture they claim to love. But on my body, in their neighborhood, it didn't feel like it was being read as fashion. It felt like it was being read as something to be wary of.
The same aesthetic that gets praised as "urban cool" in certain contexts becomes a red flag in others, depending on who's wearing it. They want the style, but they're uncomfortable with the people who created it actually being present in their spaces.
The night before, my host had been adopting the language and mannerisms of my culture, speaking in Patois, using the slang, embodying the aesthetic in private. But out here, in public, that same reality I represent was being treated with visible discomfort. He wanted to sound like something I am while society was making it clear they'd rather I wasn't there.
I'm not saying this was coordinated or intentional. But the pattern was unmistakable.
The Mindset: The "Open Source" Fallacy
It all comes down to a simple, arrogant belief: Black culture is Open Source; White culture is Copyrighted.
The guy in the living room feels entitled to "download" Jamaican Patois to fill the gaps in his own personality because he views our culture as a natural resource, like air or water, rather than a heritage created through specific struggle. Yet, as he proved with his rant about his local estate, he treats his own culture as private property. He protects his physical assets (the chair) and his local assets (his slang) with the ferocity of a border guard, while walking through centuries of Black history as if it were an unlocked door.This suggests he doesn't believe Black people own anything worth stealing. In fact, i'd argue he sees our very presence as the danger he needs to protect against.
The Evolution of the Filter
Society is addicted to the "cool" of Blackness but remains deeply uncomfortable with Black people. To solve this, the culture industry has engineered The Filter, a series of mechanisms designed to extract the aesthetic while discarding the human element. This engineering has evolved from simple dilution to high-tech replacement. Each phase built on the last, refining the extraction process until we arrived at a system that no longer needs Black people at all, just the blueprint.
Phase 1: The Dilution (The Bob Marley Edit)
In the 1970s, the industry used the "Palatability Filter." The goal was simple: keep enough Blackness to maintain authenticity, but remove enough to make white audiences comfortable. The Wailers were the testing ground.
When Chris Blackwell of Island Records signed Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer, he immediately recognized a problem. A democratic group of three conscious Black men, all equally talented, all equally militant, was too threatening for mainstream consumption. The image was too powerful, too unified, too reminiscent of movements that actually challenged white supremacy. So Blackwell engineered a split.
He sent them on what the band members would later describe as "Freak Show" tours, performing in white rock clubs where they were treated as exotic curiosities rather than artists. Audiences would show up to gawk, not to listen. The racism was blatant, the disrespect constant. Blackwell knew exactly what he was doing. He understood that Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the more politically radical members, would eventually refuse to be paraded around like zoo animals. And he was right. They left.
With the group fractured, Blackwell isolated Marley as the "safe" face of reggae. He was still Black, still Jamaican, still authentic enough to sell the image. But now he was alone, and that made him controllable. Blackwell then brought in white session musicians to overdub rock guitars onto the tracks, softening the African percussion, smoothing out the edges. He literally diluted the sound to make it digestible for suburban record stores.
The formula worked. Marley became a global icon, but the music that reached the masses wasn't the raw, militant sound that came out of Trench Town. It was a processed version, filtered through white hands, stripped of its most threatening elements. The culture was preserved just enough to be marketable, but the people, Tosh, Wailer, the community they represented, were left behind.
This was the blueprint: fracture the collective, isolate the marketable individual, dilute the sound, and sell it back to the world as "authentic." But dilution has limits. You still needed Black bodies in the frame, and Black bodies come with history, with demands, with the possibility of saying something the system doesn't want heard. So the industry evolved.
Phase 2: The Mask (The EsDeeKid Phenomenon)
As culture shifted to Drill, the system invented the "Anonymity Filter." Look at the viral theory that the masked UK rapper EsDeeKid is actually the wealthy actor Timothée Chalamet. On the surface, it sounds like harmless internet speculation, just fans connecting dots, having fun with a conspiracy theory. But dig deeper and you'll see what's really being revealed.
The theory itself is built on a simple premise: that a white, privileged Hollywood actor could convincingly perform the lived experience of UK Drill, a genre born directly from the violence, poverty, and systemic neglect of Black British communities, and nobody would be able to tell the difference. Think about what that assumption requires you to believe. It requires you to accept that the trauma, the street politics, the generational pain embedded in Drill music is so shallow, so performative, that it can be replicated by someone whose biggest hardship was choosing between film roles.
It treats the entire genre like a Halloween costume. Put on the mask, drop your voice an octave, reference a few post codes, and boom, you're indistinguishable from someone who actually lived it. The fact that people entertain this theory as a fun mystery rather than an insult reveals something terrifying: a widespread belief that Black pain is just theater, that our culture has no depth, no authenticity that can't be faked by someone with enough acting chops and a good producer.
But here's where it gets even more insidious. While the internet giggles about a white celebrity potentially playing "roadman," actual Black Drill artists are hit with Criminal Behavior Orders (CBOs). They are banned from performing, banned from their own post codes, and their lyrics are used as evidence to put them in prison. A white cosplayer, real or imagined, gets called "edgy" or "talented" for performing the same content that gets the Black originator criminalized.
The system simultaneously treats Drill as so trivial that anyone can fake it, and so dangerous that the people who create it need to be caged. The message is clear, the art form is up for grabs, but the artist is a threat. You can wear the mask, but if you're actually from the ends, you're going to jail.
This phase improved on the Marley model. Instead of diluting the sound, they masked the person. You could have the full intensity of the culture, the aggression, the rawness, the street credibility, without the "risk" of an actual Black artist who might use their platform to say something uncomfortable. The mask creates plausible deniability. It allows the culture to be performed without the accountability that comes with lived experience.
But even this had limitations. Masks can slip. People ask questions. Authenticity becomes a liability when you're faking it. So the system took the next logical step: remove the Black person entirely.
Phase 3: The Replacement (The K-Pop Factory)
Today, we have reached "The Replacement." We no longer need to dilute the sound or hide behind a mask. We simply upload the Black "software" into non-Black "hardware." The K-Pop model is the final evolution of cultural extraction, a system so efficient it doesn't even pretend to need the source anymore.
Here's how it works: K-Pop agencies studied Black American music, trap beats, hip-hop flows, R&B vocal runs, the swagger, the cadence, the aesthetic, and reverse-engineered it into a training program. They take young Korean artists, some as young as 12 or 13, and put them through years of rigorous instruction. These kids learn to rap in English with Atlanta accents, to dance with the precision of a Harlem step team, to embody the "cool" of Black culture down to the smallest gesture. It's not collaboration. It's replication.
The result is a product that satisfies the global appetite for Black rhythm and style without any of the "complications" that come with actual Black artists. No political messaging about police brutality. No references to systemic racism. No demands for reparations or acknowledgment of the culture's origins. Just the aesthetics, polished to perfection, sold to a world that wants the beat without the burden of the history that created it.
And the genius of it, if you can call it that, is that it's presented as "innovation." K-Pop agencies don't credit Black culture as the foundation; they brand it as a unique Korean creation, a global phenomenon that just happens to use trap beats, just happens to employ choreography rooted in Black dance, just happens to appropriate AAVE in their lyrics. The extraction is so normalized that pointing it out gets you labeled as divisive or jealous.
This is the perfected form of the filter. In Phase 1, they needed Bob Marley but removed Tosh and Wailer. In Phase 2, they needed the mask to maintain plausible deniability. In Phase 3, they don't need us at all. They've got the blueprint. They've studied the culture, mapped the aesthetics, and created a pipeline that can manufacture "Blackness" on demand, without Black people, without Black pain, and without Black power. It's the ultimate theft: taking the culture, erasing the people, and calling it progress.
The Unintended Consequence: The Evolutionary Arms Race
Here's the part they didn't plan for: you can steal the blueprint, but you can't steal the ability to create new ones.
Every time the system perfects its extraction method, whether it's diluting the sound, masking the artist, or replacing us entirely, Black culture responds by evolving past what was taken. Not because appropriation inspires us, but because staying still in a system designed to erase you is death. Innovation becomes survival. Movement becomes resistance.
Look at hip-hop. Started in the Bronx as block party music, breaks, loops, MCs chatting over beats. By the time the industry figured out how to package and sell it in the late '80s and early '90s, the culture had already moved. Gangsta rap emerged. Then conscious rap split off. Then the South flipped the sound entirely with bass-heavy production that the East Coast wasn't ready for. Then trap. Then drill. Then Brooklyn drill, UK drill, Bronx drill, each iteration moving faster than the last.
The system keeps trying to catch up, but by the time they've figured out how to monetize one wave, we're already three waves ahead. They're still trying to sell the "90s boom-bap revival" while the kids are making rage beats and plug in bedrooms with cracked FL Studio. They package and market "drill" as a coherent product while the sound is already fragmenting into regional sub-genres that don't even sound like each other anymore.
This isn't some beautiful symbiotic relationship. This is Black artists being forced to out-create the vultures just to maintain ownership of something. The theft doesn't fuel the innovation, it necessitates it. Because if you stop moving, if you let your sound sit still long enough for the industry to fully commodify it, you lose it. It gets sanded down, repackaged, and sold back to you as a sanitized, whitewashed version of what you made.
So we keep moving. Not because we want to, but because we have to.
And here's what the vultures don't understand, they can copy the form, but they can't replicate the source. K-Pop agencies can train kids to rap with Atlanta accents, but they can't manufacture the lived experience that makes Atlanta trap sound like that. White producers can recreate the sonic texture of drill, but they can't inject the weight of systemic neglect and survival into the 808s. You can steal the aesthetics, but you can't download the context.
That's why the bastardized versions always feel hollow. They've got the shape but not the substance. The rhythm but not the reason. They perform Blackness, but they can't be it, and on some level, audiences can tell. That's why they keep coming back to the source, keep needing the "next big thing" from us, keep refreshing their playlists with whatever new sound is bubbling up from the communities they're terrified to actually enter.
The system created a trap for itself. By constantly extracting and commercializing Black culture, it's forced us into a state of perpetual innovation. And because that innovation is rooted in real life, in actual struggle, actual joy, actual community, it will always outpace the imitations. You can study the formula, reverse-engineer the sound, train a thousand artists to mimic the aesthetic. But you can't manufacture authenticity. You can't fake lived experience. And you can't keep up with people who create because it's how they process the world, not because a label told them it's marketable.
So yeah, the theft is real. The harm is real. But so is our refusal to be caught. The vultures can keep chasing, keep extracting, keep trying to freeze us in place long enough to sell us back to ourselves. But by the time they've set up the factory, we've already moved. By the time they've perfected the formula, the formula's already obsolete. They're not driving the culture forward. They're chasing it. And they always will be.
The Final Evolution: When the Machine Learns to Steal
But here's where the arms race hits a wall we need to talk about: AI.
Except, let's be real, this isn't new. This is just the automation of what's already been happening.
Spotify's been doing this for years with their in-house "artists." You know those playlists you throw on for background vibes? "Chill Beats," "Lo-fi Study," "Ambient Focus"? A huge chunk of those tracks aren't made by real artists, they're made by anonymous producers working under fake names, hired by Spotify to create cheap content that fills playlists without paying real royalties. The whole point is to keep you on the platform, keep you streaming, without Spotify having to pay actual artists actual money.
Netflix does the same thing. They don't just make content anymore, they engineer it specifically to be watched in the background. Half their catalogue isn't designed to be good, it's designed to be just engaging enough that you don't turn it off while you're folding laundry or scrolling your phone. Binge-watch metrics, not cultural impact. It's content as wallpaper.
The system's already decided that art doesn't need to mean anything. It just needs to exist, fill space, generate clicks, and cost as little as possible to produce. AI is just the next step in that evolution.
For the first time in history, the system has a tool that doesn't just copy what we've made, it learns from it, analyzes it, and generates infinite variations without ever needing to go back to the source. You don't need a K-Pop trainee anymore. You don't need a white producer trying to reverse-engineer the 808 pattern. You don't even need Spotify's anonymous in-house producers. You just need a machine that's been fed a hundred thousand drill songs, and it'll spit out a new one in thirty seconds. No lived experience required. No human artist needed. Just data and algorithms.
This is the system's dream, extraction without the mess of actual people. No paying royalties. No crediting influences. No risk that the artist might say something politically inconvenient. Just pure, automated content generation that sounds "Black enough" to satisfy the market but costs nothing to produce and generates maximum profit.
And yeah, AI has limitations. It's trained on the past, not the present, so it can mimic what's already been made but it can't predict the next evolution. It can generate bars that are technically correct, but it can't write a song that actually means something because it has no life, no context, no stake in the culture it's imitating. It's pattern recognition, not creation.
But here's the thing, the industry doesn't need AI to be perfect. It just needs it to be good enough. Spotify's fake artists aren't making groundbreaking music, but they're filling playlists and keeping people subscribed. Netflix's algorithm-driven content isn't winning Emmys, but it's keeping you on the platform long enough to justify your monthly fee. If streaming services can flood playlists with AI-generated tracks that cost nothing to make, and if listeners are passive enough, just looking for background noise while they work or scroll, then it doesn't matter if the music has soul. It doesn't matter if it's hollow. It just matters that it's there, filling the silence, generating clicks.
And if that happens, we're not just talking about cultural theft anymore. We're talking about cultural obsolescence. A world where the people who create the blueprint get replaced entirely by machines trained on their work. Where Black artists don't even get the chance to be diluted, masked, or replaced by human imitators, they just get automated out of existence.
So yeah, we've been outrunning the vultures for decades. We've stayed ahead by refusing to be static, by evolving faster than they can extract. But AI changes the game. It's not introducing a new problem, it's perfecting the solution to an old one. The industry's been trying to cut out the artist for years. Now they finally have the technology to do it.
Whether it works depends on whether we let it. Whether audiences demand humanity in their music or settle for algorithms. Whether we protect the source or let it get fed into the machine.
The arms race isn't over. But the terms just changed.
The Root Cause: The Fear We Don't Name
So why does all of this happen? Why did my host enforce a "No Smoking" rule only for me? Why does the industry work so hard to separate the art from the people? Why do they love the culture but cross the street to avoid the person?
Because deep down, they know.
They know their comfort was bought with centuries of violence and theft. They know the wealth, the property, the "50,000 chair" was built on a system that extracted everything from us, labor, land, life, culture, and gave back nothing but trauma. They look at us and see a threat, not because we are dangerous, but because they know what they would want if the roles were reversed. They know there's a bill that's never been paid, and they're terrified we're going to come to collect.
This is why the culture is safe but the person is not. The slang is a dead object, it has no memory, no receipts, no ability to ask for reparations. It's just a tool they can pick up and put down whenever it's convenient. But the person? The person is alive. The person carries the history. The person is a walking reminder of what was taken and what's still owed.
So they've built an entire system to get around us. They've learned how to extract the rhythm without the reckoning, the style without the struggle, the cool without the confrontation. They can enjoy the fruit while pretending the tree doesn't exist. And as long as we let them rename the theft as "appreciation" or "influence," they'll keep doing it.
The Verdict: What We're Left With
We've built a world that worships the Prosthetic Personality, borrowed slang, stolen aesthetics, filtered sound, manufactured "Blackness" that comes with none of the history and none of the people. It's a world where my host can wear my culture like a costume while treating my presence like a contaminant. Where people cross the road to avoid me at night but stream my people's music on their morning commute. Where a brand like Trapstar is "cool" until it's on my back in their neighborhood.
This isn't appreciation. It's extraction. It's an economy built on the idea that Black culture is a resource to be mined, refined, and sold back to the world, while Black people remain the threat to be managed, surveilled, and excluded.
And the cost of this system isn't just personal. It's not just about me getting stared at in Chelsea or being told not to smoke in a chair. The cost is that we've normalized a world where entire communities can create the blueprint for global culture and receive nothing in return, no credit, no compensation, no protection. We've accepted a reality where the people who build the culture don't get to own it, don't get to benefit from it, and in many cases, get criminalized for performing it.
The Wailers got broken apart so Bob Marley could be sold as a solo act. Drill artists get CBOs while people speculate that a white actor could do it better. K-Pop factories extract the entire sonic and aesthetic DNA of Black America and rebrand it as innovation. Spotify floods playlists with fake artists to avoid paying real ones. AI trains on our work to replace us entirely. And my host sits in his living room, code-switching into Patois, protecting his chair from my smoke while everyone else gets a pass.
This is the loop. And it will keep running until we stop calling it "influence" and start calling it what it is: theft.
The question isn't whether we recognize it. The question is whether we're going to keep pretending we don't.
Stay Dangerous,
DPD.
