Deconstructing False Narratives of African Americans in a Modern Technological World

Through the lens of Mbembe’s concept of “new exclusion” and Collin’s “new racism,” I have theorized the continuation and impact of false narratives and their persistence globally. Racial and ethnic false narratives flow freely between people, media, organizations and institutions. False narratives about African Americans originate from the early years of colonization, dating back to the fifteenth century. The historical underpinnings of these false narratives have shaped and transformed and thus persist today (post-slavery). African Americans and Africans continue to endure psychological and physical abuse by White oppressors both in the United States and globally.

This theoretical research builds on the work of Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017) on his forms of "new exclusion" and the role that these false and (negative) narratives have on African Americans and Africans. Exclusion for African Americans is created and perpetuated from years of cultural development reinforced by layers of influence flowing in and out of our institutions. This research investigates how these narratives are a means of scapegoating African Americans that can be hypothesized to 1. A lack of accurate information about African Americans while at the same time, isolating oneself from any sustained and/or frequent interactions with African Americans. And 2., as Collins points out, the abandonment of acknowledging and educating historical racism in the United States by grouping African Americans in a universal paradigm which distorts the uniqueness of the African American struggle in the United States; through structural and systemic forms of new racism (Collins 2004:12). This theoretical research not only brings light to an important topic, but it also allows room to create real utopias (Wright 2012) that in turn shift these narratives from negative and false to real and accurate.