Da’Vinchi and the history problem at the center of his comments about Black Americans
TheGrio...
Open the schools!
Black Americans have heard it all before. We’ve been called “lazy,” “not as qualified,” “uneducated,” “uncultured,” and all manner of other reasons the world can come up with for why our disenfranchisement is somehow of our own design and perpetuation. But there’s a long history behind why.
During an appearance on Cam Newton’s “Funky Friday” podcast, actor Da’Vinchi certainly kept it funky when he revealed why, from his experience, non-American actors are offered American parts and kicked off a diaspora war in the process.
Roughly 11 minutes into the conversation, Newton star asks the 30-year-old “All-American” star what he thinks about non-American actors getting American parts in television and film. The actor says there is a perception that Americans are lazy, later lumping Black Americans into the conversation when discussing why non-American Black actors may be cast in Black American roles.
“What I had to learn early is that this is the entertainment business, not the entertainment arts,” the “Why Did I Get Married Again?” actor said. “When there’s a business, there’s certain things involved.”
The rapper noted that those things include financing a project and, sometimes, foreign actors being cheaper. And when it’s not about the cost of the talent, he suggested it could come down to work ethic.
“I’m not gonna lie, I do think the work ethic of Americans is one that people in a higher position, it’s hard for them to trust it,” he explained.
“Humans are becoming more incompetent and America is producing—we baby our kids in a way that is unheard of,” he continued. “I’m fortunate. I was born here, but my parents aren’t from here. My grandma raised me. She didn’t speak English. So at home was Haiti, and in the real world, you know what I’m saying? Then it was like America, but I had work ethic. I was determined. I could take care of myself fully at like 8 years old.”
Oh, but he did not stop there. Newton pushed back, saying he doesn’t think it’s fair to simply characterize Americans as lazy. Instead, he sees a culture obsessed with efficiency that, when abused, can become unhealthy. Eventually, the two came to an agreement of sorts that America has a serious efficiency and greed problem.
Later, when Newton asked whether Black British and Caribbean people think they’re better than Black Americans, the “Black Mafia Family” alum said that while he doesn’t agree with the attitude, he knows that energy is out there. He even offered historical context for why he thinks it exists, pointing to Caribbean nations, including Haiti, where enslaved people overthrew slavery long before Black Americans were emancipated.
By the end of the conversation, Da’Vinchi also argued that Black people are too stuck on the history of slavery and Black progress, suggesting that LGBTQ relationships have become more acceptable in society than interracial ones as a result.
“We’re looking at history from a point of view that is cutting our legs off from under our feet to really be able to move forward and be like smarter and more, just, more awareness,” he said.
Since the comments began circulating online and stoking yet another diaspora war, they have also revealed just how little many modern adults actually know about the history that shaped the world they live in. Some real “open the schools” vibes. From the centuries-old stereotype of the “lazy” Black American to why enslaved people in Haiti were able to overthrow slavery while Black Americans remained trapped in it until the Civil War, nearly every point in the conversation has real historical context.
Take the idea that Americans are lazy. Newton was actually circling something with his point about efficiency and, and eventually, when Da’Vinchi entered greed into the chat. The word they were both looking for was capitalism. American life has been shaped for generations by capitalism’s relentless pursuit of productivity. Industrialization reorganized work around factories, clocks, shifts, assembly lines, and producing more in less time. Even everyday conveniences, including mass-produced breakfast foods like cereal, emerged and exploded in popularity alongside an increasingly industrialized food system and changing American schedules.
Now, applying “lazy” to Black Americans comes with an even uglier history. For centuries, Black people forced to perform some of the hardest labor in this country but were simultaneously stereotyped as naturally lazy, ignorant, and incapable, per the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Those ideas helped turn exploitation into supposed evidence of Black deficiency, allowing a society profiting from Black labor to blame Black people for the conditions that society created.
It’s also why so many still misunderstand the Black American plight so severely. While Da’Vinchi did say he doesn’t agree with the idea that Caribbean people are better than Black Americans, he did bring up why “some” among the diaspora may feel the way that they do. But the context he offered for why some might look down on Black Americans — that Haiti and other Caribbean nations successfully fought their way out of slavery while Black Americans did not — demonstrates exactly why understanding history matters.
Haiti’s revolution was extraordinary. However, Black Americans did revolt during slavery. Like a lot.
Gabriel Prosser planned a massive rebellion in Virginia in 1800. Hundreds of enslaved people marched toward New Orleans during the German Coast uprising of 1811. Denmark Vesey was accused of organizing an uprising in Charleston in 1822. Nat Turner led a bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831. Beyond the names history managed to record, there were untold escapes, sabotage, organized plots, work slowdowns, and other forms of resistance.
Also, geographically speaking, comparing uprisings on Caribbean islands to the prospect of overthrowing slavery across an enormous continental nation ignores dramatically different logistical, demographic, military and political realities. It also ignores what happened when enslaved Black Americans did organize. After Nat Turner’s rebellion, white militias and mobs killed scores of Black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the revolt, while Southern legislatures responded by further restricting Black movement, assembly, education and communication.
Also, it probably can’t be overstated enough: slavery was not some marginal institution America simply needed convincing and a change of heart to abandon. Enslaved labor produced half of all U.S. exports and supplied capital and raw materials that helped fuel American industrialization, according to the National Museum of American History. By 1860, enslaved people themselves were valued at an estimated $2.7 billion. You think they were going to let us go easily? One could argue, in fact, that they never got over it either.
Ending slavery nationally ultimately required generations of Black resistance and abolitionist organizing, mass self-emancipation, nearly 180,000 Black men serving in the Union Army, and, finally, a Civil War. The fact that Black Americans did not reproduce the Haitian Revolution is not evidence that they were less courageous, less determined or somehow content with bondage. The United States built an enormous political, economic, and military apparatus around keeping Black people enslaved, and violently suppressed their attempts to dismantle it. This makes the suggestion that Black Americans are too stuck on history, especially strange.
Da’Vinchi tied that idea directly to relationships, arguing that society has reached a place where LGBTQ couples are more accepted than interracial couples because Black people remain too attached to the racial history surrounding the latter. That comparison is difficult to square with modern American culture. Interracial relationships are commonplace across television, film, advertising, and public life, while LGBTQ relationships remain the subject of ongoing political and cultural battles.
But overall, though, the initial premise still raises a bigger question. What exactly are Black Americans supposed to be stuck on when so much of that history continues to shape the present? If anything, we may not be stuck on history enough.
The country overturned Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years. Voting rights have been attacked. Debates continue over how slavery, critical race theory, and Black history can be taught in classrooms and presented in museums. Not to mention that there was also renewed concern for suspicious Black deaths, which makes it difficult to argue that history is something Black Americans are simply refusing to leave behind. The history won’t die.
But hey, just like Black Americans aren’t to blame for their disenfranchisement, not many others can be blamed for their anti-Blackness. After slavery ended, many stereotypes were kept up because they could explain and justify racial inequality as something Black people created rather than something produced through segregation, disenfranchisement, racial terror, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and generations of exclusion.
Honestly, that’s the danger when history goes untaught, gets whitewashed, or becomes something people are encouraged to “move forward” from without actually understanding it. People inherit the stereotypes without knowing where they came from. They see the outcome without the machinery that produced it. Eventually, even other Black people can repeat explanations for Black American struggle that were designed centuries ago to make that struggle look self-inflicted. Knowing our history isn’t being stuck in it. Sometimes it is the only way to recognize what is happening today.