Willie Lynch Rides Again: Social Media and the Fracturing of the Global Black Collective

Willie Lynch, that 18th-century British West Indian plantation overlord of dubious historicity but indubitable infamy, arrived in Virginia in 1712 with a PowerPoint presentation before PowerPoint existed. His stated objective was simple and chillingly corporate: to solve the slaveholder's eternal HR problem - how do you keep a people who outnumber you from realizing they outnumber you?

His methodology, as preserved in the infamous letter that every Black barbershop has laminated next to the faded photo of Malcolm, was pure divide-and-conquer. Lynch proposed a taxonomy of tribalism. Take the differences that already exist - old Black vs. young Black, light-skinned vs. dark-skinned, house vs. field, male vs. female - and inflate them into principles of faith.

Distrust the old for being too docile, distrust the young for being too reckless. Pit the light against the dark until they do the master's work for him. He promised that if you did this correctly, the slaves would remain "self-refuelling" and "self-perpetuating" in their enmity for at least 300 years. It was, if you will, the original subscription model.

Well, the subscription has auto-renewed. And it now comes with push notifications. Willie Lynch apparently has returned, but he no longer wields a whip. He has an algorithm. Social media is the ultimate overseer, and it has perfected his methodology with a precision that would make the old man weep into his rum.

The plantation has been replaced by the platform. And the platform's genius is the information feedback loop - or as I like to call it, the echo chamber. You are fed, with algorithmic solicitude, only what you already believe, until belief becomes bigotry. The other Black person, who happens to be outside your loop, is no longer merely wrong, he is the enemy, a heretic, an agent of white supremacy, an Uncle Tom.

Observe how efficiently we are being curated into mutual contempt. Exhibit A: The Great Diaspora Civil War. On one side of your For You Page, you have ADOS and FBA fundamentalists, armed with ancestry.com printouts, explaining why Black immigrants are stealing jobs. On the other side, you have first and second-generation Africans explaining why ADOS have no culture.

Both groups are typing this furiously on an iPhone made of Congolese cobalt while wearing durags made in China. It is a Pan-Africanism that has become pan-icked and is pan-handling for likes. Lynch said pit the house against the field; we have settled for pitting Accra against Atlanta.

Exhibit B: The Gender Cold War. Black Twitter and Black TikTok have managed to monetize the Willie Lynch instruction to "distrust the male and distrust the female." We now have an entire industrial complex of podcasts where high-value men with low-value microphones lecture women about submission, and a counter-industry of high priestesses of healing who lecture men about their toxic unavailability. We are so busy arguing about who pays for the first date that we have forgotten we cannot afford the house where the date takes place. Lynch wanted us to breed distrust. We have bred content and contempt.

Exhibit C: The Complexion of the Conversation. The light-skinned vs. dark-skinned divide, once a tragic artifact of the paper bag test, is now an hourly referendum. Is it colourism if a rapper casts a light-skinned video vixen? Is it reverse colourism to complain about it? We have managed to turn melanin, a polymer designed by nature to protect us from the sun, into a reason to get burnt.

The wisest of our ancestors would have said that the most depressing thing is not that we disagree - disagreement is the engine of emancipation - but that we disagree so boringly, so predictably, according to scripts written for us by engagement metrics. We are, in a phrase, being algorithmically lynched. Pardon the pun, but the pun is intentional: we have mistaken our lynching for our linking.

So, what is the alternative to this new black tribalism? To this e-tribalism? First, practice informational miscegenation. Deliberately follow Black people you disagree with. If you are a Hotep who thinks the pyramids had Wi-Fi, follow a Black astrophysicist. If you are a bougie integrationist, follow a Black anarchist who thinks voting is a psy-op. Let the algorithm choke.

Second, embrace what the younger metric call "touching grass." The Black collective was not built in a comments section. It was built in churches, lodges, markets, and streets. No revolution ever started because someone went viral. Go to an actual fish fry. Argue in person, where you have to look the other person in the eye and see that they are not an avatar but your half-retarded cousin, twice removed, but who came back anyway.

Finally, remember Lynch's core lie: that our differences are irreconcilable. They never were. The old versus young, light versus dark, male versus female, continental versus diasporic - these are not contradictions, they are the very definition of a collective. A collective that is all the same is not a collective, it is a cult, and we have enough of those selling snake oil already.

Willie Lynch wanted us to be self-refuelling. Let us instead be self-refusing. Log off.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of Deliver Us from Distractions: How to Love Our Families More Than Our Phones.