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When you give your enemies the inertia, you empower and strengthen them to come for you. Since the July 2 arrest of Rakim "A$AP Rocky" Mayers, while he was in Stockholm, Sweden, to perform for a festival, there have been two opposing stances that can be captured in two hashtags: #FreeASAPRocky vs. #ItsAboveMeNow. Rapper A$AP Rocky upset some members of the Black Delegation when he was asked about his position on the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in a 2015 interview. He stated that he "couldn't relate" and that he lived in "Soho and Beverly Hills," asking if he was Al Sharpton, and expressing what he truly wanted to rap about: his friend dying, his fashion, and the women that come in and out of his life. The words he chose to express it may have been just as problematic as his outlook, distancing himself from the working class issues of Black America.

I randomly met A$AP Rocky in early February 2019, while taking my children to a painting studio in Beverly Hills. His security guard asked me to dismiss myself from his table, a couple of tables away from where I helped my kids paint, but he overrode it with a casual, "It's cool." We chopped it up about his recent trip to South Africa, as I'd visited in 2016, and shared how beautiful it was. I told him about my work in progress, an album bringing South Africa and Black America together, with it's single "Unite" and scrawled my artist information on a piece of paper, in full mommy mode. "You have beautiful kids," he emphasized, humble and cool as an ocean, before I returned to my seat.

When I saw his Instagram video, a few months later, of the harassment and assault by Swedish locals, I saw the same humility in the video that he exuded in real time, while trying to diffuse the escalating situation. An unusual calm and a humbleness that flew in the face of ideas about celebrity Black men, Black male rappers with braids and rap bravado. While processing the news of his arrest, I couldn't help but notice the contrast in the way he treated me, an unambiguous Black woman, against the way folks online were asserting that he felt about Black women. I recognized the contrast in the way he spoke of Africa against the online assertions about his outlook on Blackness. I could only deduce that he'd grown since the four-year-old interview, as folks in their early 20s should.

I began organizing a demonstration at the Consulate of Sweden in San Diego, knowing I could have easily been arrested for defending myself abroad. This message from Sweden wasn't to A$AP Rocky or his staff they arrested. It was to Black America and any person of African descent that had the audacity to be successful, traveling their country on tour — or traveling, period. It was a message of global white supremacy. One the said Black people could be harassed anywhere and arrested upon self-defense, while their attackers walked free, as A$AP Rocky's attackers have. It was an issue of sovereignty. The U.S. oppressed Black Nation had no embassy in Sweden nor full citizenship in the land their ancestors' blood made a thriving first world utopia. Instead, the Unite States of America was a place where a second generation German President could tell folks, whose ancestral line in the country goes back centuries, to "go back where they came from." A place where when you claim that you oppose racism, but cherry-pick which incidents of white supremacy are tolerable, and serves the victim right, you only permit white supremacy.

It is not that A$AP Rocky's comments were not callous and cruel to the family of Mike Brown and so many other families whose loved ones were brutally murdered. It is worth having the discussion about class outlook and the antagonisms of petty bourgeois Black America with poor working class Black America. However, for all of the self-proclaimed "decolonized" posturing of those who proudly announce they will not oppose this, they do or do not realize they have consented to their own injustice. It is an epic failure of anyone claiming to oppose bigotry to respond to a nation who allows their locals to assault, and officials to kidnap, a member of your own nation, with "we didn't like him anyway." That is a full surrender.

Keyanna Celina

Writing since July 2019 · 1 story contributed