Black America in a Jar
On scrutiny, silence-as-unity, and the politics of being watched.
I found myself reading IAMCHADDESHAWN’s essay, “When Black Unity Can’t Survive Scrutiny,” and I was struck by how cleanly he names a problem many of us feel but struggle to articulate: accountability becomes “dangerous” when Black institutions are forced to operate under backlash, austerity, and an unblinking public gaze that treats our flaws as proof of our unworthiness.
There have long been issues within the Black community that thinkers, cultural icons, and professional groups have tried to address (sometimes quietly and sometimes publicly), but often without the kind of sustained traction the moment demands. Not because we lack insight, but because we live under the threat that any internal critique will be stripped of context and repackaged for audiences already trained to suspect the worst of Black people and our contributions. Some of that suspicion is inherited through bad history, recycled stereotypes, and a national habit of confusing Black pain for Black pathology. Some of it is structural: segregation still shapes who resonates with whom, who gets treated as “credible,” and who gets dismissed as “messy” the moment they tell the truth too plainly.
Black America exists inside a jar, observed, measured, and interpreted, while the country pretends the cost of repair is too high. It’s an old American trick: manufacture a crisis, deny its cause, then complain about the price of the cure.
Deshawn describes how this pressure distorts the internal life of Black institutions. Leadership organizations are wedged between survival and self-correction. They risk funding, reputational capital, and sometimes literal safety when they name contradictions that slow Black progress, or when they admit that institutions can reproduce hierarchy inside the community. That hierarchy is woven into the American story: who was relatively free and who was in chains, who could accumulate and who could only endure. Those divisions do not disappear after emancipation; they evolve. Like many postcolonial societies across the world, we can find ourselves living with power lines influenced by the same tools colonizers used to divide and conquer, only now the instruments are grant cycles, media narratives, social capital, and gatekeeping.
And now we’re at a moment when Black contradictions have become a liability. Not because Black people are uniquely conflicted, but because the stakes are rising. The fight to protect voting rights, secure public funding, and reclaim basic dignity is happening amid widening inequality and political cynicism. Many Black Americans who never felt held by the classic elite institutions of Black life no longer feel deferential to them. In that vacuum, the mafioso appeal of American demagoguery becomes seductive with protection, swagger, and “I alone can fix it,” even when the fine print is written in our community’s blood. When accountability conversations get shut down, that silence becomes a political weakness: it leaves leaders sounding managerial while people are living in emergency, surrounded by the drug trade, weapons markets, failing schools, and the carceral state.
An example of how accountability gets swallowed by narrative war is the long-running controversy around the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF). It involved questions about governance and transparency that detonated into a national spectacle after reporting revealed that the organization had purchased a roughly $6 million property in the Los Angeles area with donated funds. The purchase became less important than what it could be made to symbolize, which a right-wing media machine treated as proof that the movement itself, its grief, its organizing, its insistence that state violence matters, was a scam.
The truth is messier, and mess is exactly what hostile storytellers know how to monetize. Cullors defended the purchase in an Associated Press interview and acknowledged the property had been used twice for personal purposes, obviously an admission that understandably deepened suspicion, especially among people living at the sharp end of inequality. At the same time, viral claims that donations directly funded Cullors’ personal home purchases have not been substantiated, as partisan outlets implied. In other words, there are credible governance questions here, but the most combustible conclusions have not been cleanly proven in court.
And that is precisely the trap Deshawn is warning us about.
In the moment, internal critique can feel like betrayal, not just because critique is wrong, but because the external gaze is hungry. Federal authorities have reportedly pursued investigative steps in recent years, while the organization has said it is not the target of a federal criminal investigation, and some state-level inquiries have ended without public enforcement action. Financial filings and conflict-of-interest disclosures can invite scrutiny without resolving it, and separate cases involving other BLM-branded entities blur in the public mind into one undifferentiated scandal. Civil litigation, including disputes over donation handling, adds another layer of smoke.
So the property purchase is a fact.
The sweeping “self-enrichment” story remains a contested narrative.
But contested narratives are still politically useful. When a community cannot hold a public, rigorous conversation about accountability, wealth gaps, incentive structures, grift, institutional efficacy, and the limits of blaming “bad cops” without confronting deeper structural decay. Well then, that conversation will be held for us by people who do not love us, using tools designed for demolition.
That’s what it means to confuse silence with unity inside a hostile test-tube of American apathy.
I’ve been watching Apple TV’s “Manhunt” with two of the most important Black women in my life, and it reminded me of an older American habit of blaming the turmoil on those demanding inclusion rather than on the system that made exclusion profitable. Reconstruction wasn’t only sabotaged by policy. It was also sabotaged by narrative, by the insistence that Black citizenship itself was chaos. That move still echoes: punish Black claims to full personhood, then cite the punishment as proof the claims were illegitimate.
Black people are diamonds in the American cave. We are expected to be refined, polished, perfected, and made legible to meet standards that were never designed to be humane. Those standards demand flawlessness from the targeted while granting endless excuses to the powerful. And the industry that insists on purity has never been pure but built on extraction, violence, and the human itch to dominate dressed up as virtue.
Deshawn’s metaphor of the leak behind the wall is the one I can’t shake. When accountability is deferred, failure doesn’t vanish but accumulates. And because post–civil rights America never truly held itself accountable for what it has done to Black bodies across time, even its patchwork reforms cannot hold back the flood. That flood doesn’t remain “Black.” It spills outward and upward. It becomes America’s pool of democratic drift with corruption normalized, cruelty rationalized, public goods hollowed out, and then everybody acting surprised when the house starts leaning.
This is why Deshawn’s reframe matters. Accountability isn’t disloyalty but maintenance, care, and the ordinary work of self-governance. Unity that can’t survive scrutiny is not a strength. Instead, it’s fragility wearing a crown. And the institutions that will carry us through what’s coming won’t be the ones that demand silence to preserve an image but instead will be the ones sturdy enough to tell the truth, correct course, and keep moving.
We don’t owe anyone perfection.
We owe each other honesty. If the world insists on watching us, let it watch us repair what we build, protect who we serve, and refuse to confuse love with quiet.
References:
Apple TV+ Press. “Manhunt.” March 15, 2024. https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/manhunt/.
Deshawn, Chad. “When Black Unity Can’t Survive Scrutiny.” IAMCHADDESHAWN (Substack), January 16, 2026. Accessed January 16, 2026. https://iamchaddeshawn.substack.com/.
(Note: the specific post URL wasn’t publicly indexable in the sources I could retrieve, so this cites the publication and homepage.)Murphy, Sean. “Oklahoma Black Lives Matter Leader Indicted for Fraud, Money Laundering.” Associated Press, December 2025. https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-oklahoma-city-fraud-dickerson-9457bac0f4587f394fae4756ffca9c3d.
Morrison, Aaron. “$6M Black Lives Matter House Welcomes Families into Space of Freedom and Healing.” Associated Press, November 2023. https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-finances-mansion-dc28cf47e3724c31d5791c90555b5b75.
“The AP Interview: BLM’s Patrisse Cullors Denies Wrongdoing.” Associated Press, May 8, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/business-los-angeles-race-and-ethnicity-philanthropy-only-on-ap-db1db730c77540f0cbc614b0d3522b88.
“Justice Department Investigating Fraud Allegations in Black Lives Matter Movement, AP Sources Say.” Associated Press, October 30, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/371e3277ff3b78bc73d3467c4692c66c.
PBS NewsHour. “Justice Department Investigating Fraud Allegations against Black Lives Matter Leaders, AP Sources Say.” October 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/justice-department-investigating-fraud-allegations-against-black-lives-matter-leaders-ap-sources-say.
ProPublica. “Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc.” Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed January 16, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824862489.
United States Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Oklahoma. “Executive Director of Black Lives Matter OKC Charged with Wire Fraud and Money Laundering.” Press release, December 11, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/executive-director-black-lives-matter-okc-charged-wire-fraud-and-money-laundering.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Why Tides and Black Lives Matter Are Fighting Over $33 Million.” May 23, 2024. https://www.philanthropy.com/news/why-tides-and-black-lives-matter-are-fighting-over-33-million/.
I watched It Was Just an Accident last night, and I can’t recommend it anymore. It opens in Iran with a moment so ordinary it’s almost sinister: a family man driving at night hits a dog, upsets his daughter, and tries to wash it away with the phrase that doubles as an authoritarian lullaby: "It was just an accident." Then his car breaks down, and he needs help. And that’s when we meet the film’s central character, a mechanic named Vahid, who becomes convinced the man in front of him is his former interrogator and torturer.
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