Black Friday is a colloquial term for the Friday after the Thanksgiving day in the United States. Stores usually open early and the discounts are huge. Shoppers usually line up in large numbers to wait for the opening. As an old man and a Marxist,I had negative thoughts towards the day.
I want to believe that those of us in the Black Consciousness and Africanist block have outgrown politics of vilifying and demonising people for making purchases on Black Friday. These politics are regressive not only because of their lack of appreciation of the material conditions that define Black existence, but because the argument around Black Friday having been a day in which slaves were sold is premised on false information and historical revisionism.
People in this country, in their majority, can barely make ends meet. The poorest among us have no clue where the next meal is going to come from, while the so-called Black middle class is suffocating in debt. Contrary to popular belief, this debt is not largely the result of living a life of luxury, but debt arising from lack of Purchasing Power. So Black Friday is one day in the year where people can actually buy things they need (or want) on discount. It is one day where people can save on their hard-earned money to buy things that will benefit themselves and their children, things that are otherwise unaffordable and beyond reach.
I have come to realize that the reason I reduced everything to dialectical materialism was perhaps I didn’t have the kamoney then thus being academic and regressive in thought, I have since changed opinion. There’s nothing wrong with Black Friday and the people ought to spend as they wish.
So can we, who have in the past demonised people who buy goods on Black Friday, take our revisionist and purist politics far away, and allow people to spend their hard-earned money on that which brings them and their families joy; that which they need and even that which they want, because our lives are already so difficult, our responsibilities so enormous, that from time to time we must spoil ourselves with plasma TVs and whatever we want.
Mwene 