An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

solidarity looks like, and also illustrate the possibilities of our shared
futures, and what a holistic humanity can look like. We also need Black and
Indigenous artists to collaborate on projects, and create the Afro-Indigenous
future we need. We tend to think of our issues as so different that we can’t
collaborate. If Black comedians, for instance, can stop erasing Indigenous
peoples and using jokes that are based on stereotypes of Native people, and
if Native people can avoid the pitfalls of appropriating blackness without
acknowledgment, then we can get somewhere free. Above all, our
conception and use of popular culture should be for expressing ourselves
and humanizing ourselves to each other.
Popular culture matters. How we produce it and how we consume it is
also important. As we move from cultural appropriation to cultural
appreciation to the forms of culture that will emerge in the aftermath of
settler colonialism and white supremacy, it is urgent that we learn each
other’s histories. We must carefully produce popular culture together.
Cultural collaboration will be a key part of our evolving society. We need to
continue to walk side by side and produce culture that is, in Frantz Fanon’s
words, “based on the values that inspired the struggle for freedom.” 35 In
this aftermath moment, our cultures will represent not just struggle, critique,
and pain, but the joys of freedom.