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Tastes and the accumulation and distribution of money, wealth and power are closely related. For example, the taste of Europeans for sugar transformed the economic destinies of both Europeans and Afrikans, helping to transform the former peoples into wealthy imperialists, landholders, industrialists and slave holders, the latter into poverty-stricken colonials, laborers, slaves and producers of cheap raw materials.
As owners of the means of production and as the chief manipulators and producers of Afrikan tastes, appetites and needs which can only be satisfied by the consumption of European/White producers, White imperialists have induced Blacks to seek to satisfy their (created and natural) tastes in ways which only enrich Whites themselves. Hence the social role of Blacks almost exclusively as consumers.
Under the dominant influence of the White owners of the means of production Black are discouraged from seeking to create and produce for their own tastes and desires, that is, are not encouraged to own the means of producing to satisfy their self-created desires or those created in them by others. Thus, their very patterns of consumption lead to the enriching of their exploiters and oppressors and to the financing of their own oppression.
Through their consumption they forge the chains which bind them in powerless dependency on dominant Whites whose power they helped to enhance through their non-discriminating (except against their own enterprises) political and consumer behavior to begin with. Thus, a vicious cycle is established and maintained.
Dr. Amos N. Wilson
