Daniel To Revelation

Watching iShowSpeed in Africa didn’t feel like watching a travel vlog. It felt like a flashback to a muscle memory we never got to make. As Black folks in America, we are the living, breathing collateral of the capitalistic experiment. We weren’t just brought here to build it; we were listed as the capital  on its original balance sheets. Our bodies, our breath, our lineage—the initial investment. The entire grotesque project of America was capitalized on the futures it stole from us. So when we talk about "American capitalism," we’re not just critics from the outside. We are its original raw material, now processed into complex, contradictory products: citizens with a receipt, survivors with phantom limb pain for a culture we can sense but not fully grasp. We live inside the beast. We wear its clothes, speak its language, fight its wars, and feed its algorithms. But we are not "of" the beast. And that distinction is a daily, silent civil war. We are perpetually tra...