Afro punk noise rap crew DOOKOOM join forces with Dirty South hip hop legend, David Banner, for their video single, ‘The Worst Thing’. The unsettling song dwells on the state violence where structural racism, the direct result of white supremacy, is rendering black lives worthless across the world
DOOKOOM and David Banner, from South Africa and Mississippi respectively, two places that are separated by many thousands of miles, but united by a shared history of black oppression at the hands of white supremacists, came together to vent their anger and remind their black brothers and sisters to embrace the principles of unity, historical and political education, and resistance. The song also demands that white brothers and sisters hear black anger, confront their own history and contemplate the effects of colonialism and white supremacy across the globe, in order to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
The controversial video shows DOOKOOM kidnapping two white men and ‘torturing’ them (in the style of the famous aversion therapy scene in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’) by forcing then to watch historical footage of atrocities committed by white supremacists on black bodies. The video also draws on a theme that runs throughout DOOKOOM’s work; that the passive acceptance of victimhood is not an option. It echoes Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964, “We want justice by any means necessary… we want it now or we don’t think anybody should have it.”. DOOKOOM don’t beg for justice, they demand it.
As a multi-ethnic group (with two white members) DOOKOOM are quick to reject the simplistic knee-jerk response, that they are racist against white people, “We are artists, we want white people to hear and see black anger and really think about their part in causing historical oppression, or maintaining the power structures that enforce white supremacy to this day. At the end of the day, we want peace and unity… by any means necessary.”
The crew was infamously taken to the Human Rights Commission by a white Afrikaans ‘civil rights’ group for raising issues of inequality, land ownership and structural violence in South Africa with their historic track ‘Larney Jou Poes’
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