One of the biggest mistakes I see in some corners of the Black community is the tendency to give white people far too much credit.
White people are not omniscient.
They are not omnipotent.
They do not spend centuries carrying out flawless master plans that unfold exactly as intended. History simply doesn’t support that view.
Most governments, corporations, and powerful institutions don’t operate like the cartoonish villains in a Hollywood movie. Their conspiracies (when they exist) are usually messy, short-sighted, reactive, and often exposed much sooner than people imagine. They make mistakes. They fight among themselves. They pursue immediate political or economic gains without fully understanding the long-term consequences of their decisions.
History is full of examples where powerful people achieved one objective only to create entirely new problems they never anticipated.
That doesn’t make oppression any less real. I am certainly not arguing that. Rather, it simply makes the oppressors more human.
Unfortunately, some people have embraced a worldview where every historical event is interpreted as evidence of an elaborate, centuries-long conspiracy that only a handful of self-proclaimed “enlightened” YouTubers can supposedly decode.
I don’t buy it.
Ironically, this kind of thinking can become a form of white supremacy itself.
Why?
Because it assumes that Europeans and their descendants possess almost supernatural intelligence and foresight, and that every outcome in history happened exactly as they intended. It turns them into all-knowing masterminds while reducing everyone else to passive spectators with no agency of their own.
History is far more complicated than that. Empires rise, and empires fall. Wars produce unintended consequences. Economic systems evolve. And, technology changes societies in unexpected ways.
Entire civilizations have been transformed by accidents, disease, environmental changes, and decisions that looked reasonable at the time but produced completely unforeseen results.
The world we live in today wasn’t built from one perfect blueprint. Instead, it emerged from countless successes, failures, conflicts, compromises, and historical accidents.
The same applies to European dominance.
Europeans didn’t become globally dominant because they were biologically smarter than everyone else. Wealth, geography, trade networks, military competition, access to resources, political institutions, and centuries of technological development all contributed to that outcome. And let’s not forget the unfortunate accidental “luck” of wiping out most of the people on two continents with new diseases. The Innovation tends to flourish where societies have the resources, security, and incentives to pursue it.
More importantly, what we choose to believe affects what we choose to do.
If we convince ourselves that every aspect of our current reality was perfectly engineered hundreds of years ago, we risk believing that nothing can be changed. This fatalism has never liberated anyone and saps people of any real empowerment.
This is one reason I have little patience for theories claiming that the countless slave ledgers documenting the forced transportation of Africans across the Atlantic are all fabricated because “they” supposedly want us to believe we’re Africans instead of Native Americans or ancient Israelites.
The historical evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact that Black Americans are primarily descendants of West and West-Central Africans. Accepting that reality doesn’t diminish us. It does the opposite. It connects us to one of the richest, oldest, and most diverse regions in human history.
Instead of spending our energy chasing increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, we should be asking far more practical questions:
How do we build stronger Black-owned businesses?
How do we create institutions that outlive us?
How do we increase homeownership?
How do we educate our children about African and African American history?
How do we develop economic relationships with countries throughout Africa and the wider African diaspora?
How do we build wealth instead of merely talking about it?
These questions are much more important than hanging on to weird conspiracy theories.
Nation-building is harder than conspiracy-building. It requires discipline instead of speculation, investment instead of internet debates, and cooperation instead of division.
If we truly want liberation, then our greatest challenge isn’t uncovering another secret plot.
Our greatest challenge is building communities that are economically independent, culturally confident, politically organized, and connected to the broader African world.
That’s work worth doing. Everything else is just a distraction.
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