Notes on Mark Zuckerberg and the American ghost that haunt us.

Mark Zuckerberg think he’s fighting for unity and democracy. He, like others before him, are doing everything to ruin it.

We are living under the bitter cloud of American nostalgia.

It was beautiful after the wars, they said. The energy was palpable. 1945 was thick with unreality. America was on top — so many thought. The journalist James Agee, in an essay entitled “The Nation: Democratic Visitas”, paints a picture of the mood: “underneath all the pleasure-bending, lay a more tragic and justified uneasiness,  still more disturbing fatalism.” So was the world of 1945; so goes the world 80 years later. And the picture is both eerily familiar and jarring: while one group celebrated the rise of glory, others all over the country were worried of its demise. 

And this is where I tell you about Mark Zuckerburg, the businessman, founder of Facebook, and want-to-be cool kid who just can’t figure himself out. An almost damn-near perfect villain arc that the best screenwriters could have written in their sleep. He began how they all began: by feeling left out, unloved, undesired. And he goes the way they all go: with laughter, putting down others, making everyone suffer because they can’t have their way. It is no wonder that in the beginning it was Facesmash — a website built on bullying others by ranking their attractiveness — and morphed into Facebook, what writer Adrienne LeFrance calls “the Largest Authoritarian State on Earth.”

“Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse. It is designed for blunt-force emotional reaction, reducing human interaction to the clicking of buttons,” she writes. “The algorithm guides users inexorably toward less nuanced, more extreme material, because that’s what most efficiently elicits a reaction. Users are implicitly trained to seek reactions to what they post, which perpetuates the cycle. Facebook executives have tolerated the promotion on their platform of propaganda, terrorist recruitment, and genocide. They point to democratic virtues like free speech to defend themselves, while dismantling democracy itself.”

The man is powerful, weak, fragile, determined, confused, resolute, and arrogant. But most of all, he is a chameleon, a man who becomes whatever he is closest to desires him to become. What a sad state to be in: powerful and empty, bigoted and unsure of who you really are.

And now, just days after The New Republic reported a secret meeting between him and disgraced President-elect Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg said that the world should embrace “masculine energy”. He said we should celebrate aggression; going so far as to call it “positive”. He, with a gold chain around his neck, disbanded DEI initiatives and the fact-checking department. It is laughable and familiar (sacrificing safety on the altar of whiteness). Be clear: It is not about truth or meritocracy; it is about one thing: white male power.

Racism and white supremacy do not die with passing generations. It is inherited and transferred. And sadly, people like Zuckerberg and Trump are more concerned with protecting a world that benefits them than they are about dismantling a world that harms us. 

I want to tell you a story: One day I was at the coffee shop on a cold, brisk afternoon. A professor stopped me while reading to talk about the copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. “So you’re a writer,” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “I love how you were talking about your books with others,” she said. “Thank you,” I said, moving a bit. She tells me she works in education — in curriculum in high schools. 

We began to talk more about her work and I told her that all children need a better curriculum that tells a more honest story of who we are and what America is. She pauses and then it happens. She tells me about all the “problems” with books focused on diversity and inclusion. “Well, our children need a more balanced history,” she said, her face becoming more stern. 

I knew what that meant: we need less black people, less women, less gay people, less immigrants, less of anyone who would upset the ideas of American innocence and goodness. I will never forget it because when I look at Mark Zuckerberg, I see the same thing: white fear and white audacity.

There is a problem when you are afraid that you are not the center of the world. There is a problem when you feel that another person’s freedom means your oppression. There is a problem when you think that another person’s equality means your erasure. 

They were grieving: The loss of a world. A world that in their imagination was once perfect, as white as snow, a time when they were powerful and didn’t have to answer to no one but themselves. This country taught them that to be white was to be in control. And they know they are losing it. And they are afraid and angry and will do whatever they can to bring the country down with them. 

All grief is not good grief. Some grief is violent and unjust. What Mark Zuckerberg is doing is not just unfair. It is violent. It is a kind of erasure. And as Toni Morrison once said: “if you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.”

Mark Zuckerburg just like Donald Trump, and all of these people who want America to stay white, have a problem. 

I need y’all to understand something — and this is a history lesson. In the 1860s and especially the 1870s, many black Americans who were formerly enslaved began to find some sort of respite and new world after having been in chains. They had won power. Like my ancestors in South Carolina, they had created lives with what little they had. 

They had built schools. They had built businesses. They had built churches. They won power and made art and music and culture and love. They did it alone, and they did it with white people. For a bitter second, they could breathe a bit as the grip of American hatred loosened on their neck. Just for a second.

A cold, long, and bitter second. 

Then the election of 1876 came, and with it all the forces of hatred, resentment, bigotry, and nostalgia. A campaign of terror was waged. A war waged on land ownership and voting rights and schools and leadership. These low-down people, as my grandma would call them, even made war on black families attempting to be unified after having been sold: mothers and fathers and grandparents and children and friends. 

No one was safe — and I repeat, no one — who saw black Americans as human. It was a violent period of American history. The Reconstruction did not “fail”. It was overturned. It was rolled back. And for what? Black Americans, and now anyone who is marginalized, was “too free”. So when you see Zuckerburg and Trump or MAGA, just know you are seeing the children of these people attempting to haunt us. 

It was never about justice or rights or fairness or advancement. Zuckerburg or Trump have no higher commitment to humanity in what they are attempting to build and create. I don’t care how much they say they want to create a unified world as Albert Einstein declared in 1947 — a world where everyone is included, protected, and safe. When they say “unity”, they mean white supremacy. 

When we say that these people are American bullies, this is what we mean: their hatred and desires are old and familiar, they despise the sheer existence of people who are not white or Christian or straight or male, their grief has turned them to monsters, and when given the choice to be better, they have chosen to be terrible.

Do not believe the lie: we are not the problem, they are. We are not the ones polarizing and dividing America, they are. We are not the ones deepening hate speech, acts of violence, and social disillusionment, they are. These people do not love America or us. They are not our friends. They want one thing and one thing only: power. 

We didn’t make it about race, they did. Every time we try to move the country forward, they are hellbent on taking us back. 

I am tired. I am tired of us all having to fight these terrible white men. I am tired of this country just letting them have their way. I am tired that we have to not just deal with them but we deal with the demons they carry. I am tired of having to constantly prove why things hurt and why we exist and why what they do is wrong and why we deserve it. 

And as Fannie Lou Hamer says: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” And yet, we got to say something because we come from the most radical place in America: the South. And in the South we fought against them and won. And they keep coming back, and we will keep fighting. Why? 

Because we have children. Because we got a stake in this god-forsaken nation. Because our ancestors taught us to never let white people do whatever they want.

Because we know whiteness is weak, afraid, fragile. Because they taught us that we — all of us, black, white, gay, straight, born-here, arrived-here — are somebody and can’t nobody can take that from us.