You Can Watch. You Just Can't Play.
The difference between consuming global culture and being allowed to participate in it.
A few days ago, I was scrolling on TikTok, and I watched a video by a lady from the UAE. In summary, she made a point that there is a global exported culture, and it flows primarily from one direction. You open Spotify lists of popular songs from any country, and you’ll almost surely find American or European music near the top of the charts regardless of where you are. The content, the references, the aesthetic standards, all of it travels. Everybody consumes it. But not everyone can participate in it.
She went further to give examples, as a lady who grew up in the UAE consuming American culture like it was hers. Barbie.com announces a sweepstakes, and she wants in. She goes on to read the fine print and sees US and Canada only. Or an invitation for a competition with kids from other regions. American & European kids say yes immediately. Everyone else needs three months and a visa application that might not even be approved. It is not one moment, it is a hundred small ones, each delivering the same quiet message: this is for them, not you. You can consume it, but you cannot participate in it. Not without significant logistical effort, money, and paperwork that they never have to think about.
I opened the post’s comments, and more examples filled it. Kickstarter allows anyone from any country to back a project. But only creators from approved Western and a handful of asian countries can launch one. A film depicts the end of the world, but somehow, it only destroys New York, London, Berlin, and maybe Tokyo. The pattern is consistent enough that it stops feeling like oversight and starts feeling like architecture.
The Larger Version Of The Same Problem
Scale this up, and the same logic appears everywhere. Recently, Marvel has come under a lot of deserved fire. They have had documented commercial success with Black-led projects. Yet, the studio has gone quiet on several projects with Black leads: the Black reboot has been in development limbo for years, Wonder Man was cancelled despite receiving an Emmy nomination, the current Black Captain America has seemingly been sidelined in the next movie, and IronHeart, a black woman-led series, received promotional treatment that barely registered. This is just a few examples, but there’s a longer list. With the Wonder Man cancellation, which happened fairly recently, we didn’t even receive any sort of clarity as to why; all we know is the decision came from above.
Recently, at the streamers games, a Nigerian streamer named Enzo won a race against a very much favored white competitor. Overtime, a prominent digital sports media company that covered parts of the game made a post announcing the results of the race, and rather than name and tag the winner, it centered it around the losing white streamer. Or a post I saw on Twitter about an achievement by Professor Mashudu Tshifularo, who became the first surgeon to restore hearing using 3D-printed ear bones. The post by the media company (can’t remember which) read “An African doctor is the first to…” as if he is a category rather than a person with a name. Or the post by “ESPN Africa” on X showcasing the attendance at WAFCON, without giving any context as to why that’s the case; one will think they’re trolling the competition. The competition is currently receiving a fraction of the coverage the equivalent competition elsewhere commands, despite the quality of the football being played.
None of these are the same story, but they rhyme in a way that’s hard to ignore.
The Counterargument Worth Hearing
It’s fair to clarify that not every act of exclusion is deliberate gatekeeping. Some of it is infrastructure and legal complexity: sweepstakes restrictions exist because of tax and prize laws that vary by territory. Kickstarter’s country restrictions reflect financial regulation and fraud prevention systems. The global dominance of American & European music does reflect genuine audience preference at scale, not just imposition. Billions of people choose it.
There is also the question of what counts as participation. African music is undoubtedly now a dominant global force. African designers are setting trends at some of the highest levels of the fashion industry. African filmmakers are winning at Cannes and the BAFTAs. The infrastructure that enables global cultural participation is being built. The picture is not purely exclusion.
Yet, the counterargument has a ceiling. Legal complexity explains some territorial restrictions. It does not explain why a winning streamer goes unnamed. Infrastructure gaps explain some of Nollywood’s limited global reach. It does not explain why Marvel cancels black-led projects without public justification while similar decisions about white-led projects, if made, receive full statements and context. The structural explanations are real, but they do not account for a lot.
What Mahershala Ali Understood
Mahershala Ali spent over a year training in sword fighting for a role. When Marvel went silent on Blade, rather than wait for a system that had already demonstrated its indifference, he moved. His next project is Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, directed by Bassam Tariq, a Pakistani-American filmmaker. Two people who exist on the margins of the dominant cultural system, making something together without waiting for permission.
This is the same argument the essay published on Unruly last week makes about African storytelling infrastructure: the answer is not to wait for the dominant system to become more generous. It is to build the alternative with enough seriousness that the dominant system becomes irrelevant to your survival. But building takes time, and time requires resources, and resources require numbers.
The Part That Requires Something From Us
The cycle that keeps Africans and the diaspora’s creative work underfunded and underplatformed is partly sustained by our consumption patterns. We watch the Western content, we stream the Western music, we go to the cinema to see the Hollywood film. We do all of this while the African equivalent struggles to find its audience.
This is not to push guilt in any way. Taste is real and legitimate, and nobody should be asked to consume something they consider to be inferior solely out of solidarity. But when the work is genuinely good, when the film is worth watching, when the music deserves the streams, when the platform deserves the subscription, the choice of where to put your attention and your money is not neutral. It compounds over time. The people building African and diaspora creative infrastructure are doing it without the studio system, without the legacy distribution networks, without the marketing budgets that make discovery effortless. They are doing it with the numbers that they can earn from an audience that chooses them. Until those numbers grow large enough to fund the infrastructure that makes them competitive at scale, the consumption without participation dynamic will not change. We will continue to watch from the outside.
The difference between consuming global culture and participating in it is largely structural. But structures are built by people, funded by attention, and sustained by choice. The choice of where to direct ours is one of the very few things in this equation we actually control.