House Negro vs Field Negro: Choosing your community over commodifying your culture?
Rewind to 2016 when the ‘Doggfather’ Snoop admonished any Black person prepared to perform at Donald Trump’s first inauguration, calling them, “Uncle Tom Ass N*gga”. Nine years later, you’d be forgiven for double taking at the bow-tied Bojangles performing at the overseer of the White House technological policy, David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, celebrating Trump’s second term. Is that you Uncle Tom, sorry, I mean Snoop?
As his sell-out status was achieved, the overwhelming feeling from Black people on X was one of disappointment, and 500,000 Instagram users made their feelings of disgust known by unfollowing his account on the picture sharing site in the 30 days that followed. Whilst he wasn’t the only minstrel at the show, with Rick Ross and Nelly performing at other inauguration events, I’d imagine it was his previous vocal and vehement criticisms of the orange devil that made this about-face so difficult to digest.
Signs that Snoop Dogg had crip-walked up out the field and into the big house were there from January 2024, when he declared, “(he) has only done great things for me… I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump”; we just weren’t looking closely enough. Though best known for a musical repertoire including Drop It Like It’s Hot, P.I.M.P’ and Beautiful, Snoop also has 86 film credits, having featured in cultural classics Baby Boy (2001), Training Day (2001) and Soul Plane (2004) as Rodney, Blue and Captain Antoine Mack respectively.
Based on recent behaviour, it seems he’d be better suited to playing a brown-nosing Black, a character who puts the needs and desires of white protagonists ahead of themselves, their family and wider community, whether acquiescently - think Cecil Gaines in The Butler (2013)- or in a more perverse manner, akin to Stephen in Django Unchained (2012). So convincing was Samuel L. Jackson’s performance as Calvin Candie’s henchman in infamous Blaxploiter Tarantino’s film, that his face is now synonymous with the house slave/Uncle Tom figure, his likeness used in viral memes calling out those who sell their fellow Blacks down the river. It is this inside joke why his performance as Uncle Sam, the embodiment of America, at Kendrick Lamar’s halftime Superbowl show, was so powerful, we see all of you working against your own race just so you can don the stars and stripes - you are really, “not like us”.
Now, this article is not trying to do away with Black people’s right to live with nuance, to support politicians, or even be politicians (coughs ‘Kemi Badenoch’), whose ideals fall outside of ‘expected’ or existing voting patterns, to change their minds, to evolve, or in this case regress, in their thoughts. It is not trying to denounce Black endeavours to ‘get the bag’ (even when the bag isn’t needed by multi-millionaire celebrities), but it is asking at what cost, and if it ever pays (for them or us) to be in the inner sanctum of whiteness?
Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith
Snoop’s acceptance of Trump can be directly attributed to the latter’s decision to pardon and release his friend, Michael ‘Harry O’ Harris, who co-founded Death Row Records and then spent 33 years in prison on drug trafficking charges. This pardon is one in a long line of apparent exoneration for endorsement schemes, brokered by right-wing lawyer Bradford Cohen, targeting Black rappers, including Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, and by extension, the votes of their fans and followers.
In true house negro form, these celebrities use their relative privilege for personal gain, not community elevation, and put the interests and preservation of themselves and their immediate circle over the greater good. But does proximity to power, and by default whiteness, ever help any of us get ahead?
The promise of ‘40 acres and a mule’ in exchange for African American support in the civil war, an initiative of reparative justice broken less than two years after victory was won on the backs of the enslaved, is one of the earliest examples that participation in existing power structures and employment as political pawns doesn’t pay.
This precedent was further entrenched during the 1970s when Richard Nixon got his run for a second term endorsed by Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Enamoured by the president’s plans to assist and promote Black entrepreneurship, the progenitor of funk whose artistry also crossed over into films such as The Blues Brothers (1980) and Rocky IV (1985) believed, “the future of the country lies with Mr Nixon”.
The decision to co-sign Nixon to curry favour with the administration, not only backfired on Brown, who saw record sales plummet and pickets plot up outside his apartment, but on the Black people whose agenda he was allegedly trying to advance. Nixon failed to advance Black Capitalism and was instead responsible for introducing the War on Drugs policies that still have a disproportionate impact on Black people and enforced a new system of racial control.
As expounded by Nat Turner, played by Nate Parker in Birth of a Nation (2016), it is only when we stop ingratiating ourselves as house negroes for relative ease, get out in the fields and stop being complicit cogs in a system designed for our ruin, that true freedom will be found.
Black people have been building the White House, literally and figuratively, since 1792 without a return on our investment, so maybe it’s time we decided to stay outside of structures that uphold white supremacy and construct our own.