The Day Proximity Ran Out

A Brown Wake-Up Moment — and Everyone Else’s (Hopefully)

Prologue: The Script

Go to private school.

Join a sports team to learn leadership.

Pick up a creative pursuit to look well-rounded.

Get a part-time job, join an academic club, and volunteer.

With a 4.0 GPA and near-perfect test scores, attend an Ivy League and major in Finance, Law, Medicine, or Engineering.

While you’re there, intern. Earn an MBA.

When you’ve done all that, forget your passion.

Head to Wall Street in your Zegna suit and Ferragamo loafers.

Ask your mom or one of your aunties to find a nice woman from the same tribe, clan, or caste to be your wife.

Move to the suburbs.

Find a house with a white picket fence and good schools.

Start a family — then repeat the cycle all over again.

That’s what we were told success looked like.

Safety. Status. A seat at the table.

Assimilation as blueprint. Proximity as protection.

It was sold to us as freedom. Branded as the American dream.

And for a while, it worked.

We were told excellence could outsmart exclusion. But the truth, as Paul Mooney warned, is that every script like this has an ending — and it’s never written by us.

As Fanon might say, proximity was always the colonial hangover of wanting to be seen as human through someone else’s gaze. And that hangover still lingers — dressed now in diplomas, passports, and paychecks.

The Mooney Doctrine — When the Joke Stops Being Funny

Comedian Paul Mooney had a phrase for that split second when illusion collapses —when even success can’t protect you from what the world still sees. He called it a “N**** Wake-Up Moment.”

It wasn’t profanity for shock’s sake.

It was prophecy through comedy — Mooney’s way of saying that even when you’ve done everything right, the structure still knows where to find you. A way of naming that jolt when the laughter stops and you realize you were never the audience — you were the joke.

Just ask Ryan Coogler.

In 2018 he directed Black Panther, a film that grossed over $1.3 billion and made him one of the most celebrated Black filmmakers in history.

Four years later, he walked into a Bank of America branch in Atlanta to withdraw $12,000 from his own account.

He slipped the teller a note —

“I would like to withdraw $12,000 cash from my checking account. Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet.”

The teller called the police.

Coogler was handcuffed until they realized the mistake.

Even after building a global symbol of Black excellence — Wakanda Forever echoing across cultures — he couldn’t escape the suspicion embedded in the structure.

That’s a Mooney moment in real time — when power, fame, and wealth can’t buy you out of suspicion.

For this essay, let’s call it the Mooney moment — the instant when proximity, achievement, and mimicry all run out of road. Saidiya Hartman might call it the afterlife of freedom — where liberation’s descendants keep waking up in the same dream.

And what Mooney once captured in punchlines, we now see in headlines — from Coogler’s detainment to Vivek’s Turning Point cameo, to every professional, immigrant, or influencer who thought excellence was escape.

Assimilation is not liberation.

The lights come up. The joke stops being funny.

The Brown Wake-Up Moment

I remember when Vivek Ramaswamy first appeared on the scene —

a sharp, fast-talking Indian-American with the cadence of a venture capitalist and the confidence of a disruptor.

Rapping Eminem one week, on every screen the next, he branded himself the outsider who could fix America by becoming its favorite insider.

His intellect was undeniable; his ambition, almost mythic.

But from the start, I wondered who he believed his reflection belonged to.

I read the comment sections — TikTok, Instagram, X —watching the same people who celebrate every Indian CEO announcement cheer on Vivek’s proximity to power.

Their excitement wasn’t about politics; it was about recognition.

As if his apparent white acceptance could serve as a portal into their own.

It’s the same seduction that’s haunted generations of immigrants: the belief that visibility equals victory,that proximity to whiteness can be proof of arrival.

But as Mooney taught us, there’s always a moment when the lights come up,and the illusion starts to flicker.

First, it happened in his own studio.

Ann Coulter smiled across the table and told him,

“You’re so bright and articulate because you’re not an American Black… I couldn’t have voted for you — because you’re an Indian.”

On The Vivek Show, the Mooney moment found him under his own lights — the compliment turned confession, the hierarchy re-established on cue.

Then came Turning Point USA — a hall of young white conservatives cheering diversity so long as it looked disciplined. In Montana, a student said what the structure had been whispering all along:

“Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God… How can you represent the constituents of Ohio if you’re not part of that faith?”

Another accused him of “masquerading as a Christian.

”None of the credentials mattered —

not the biotech millions,

not the presidential run,

not the fluent recitation of American exceptionalism.

The moment his Hinduism entered the frame, the applause thinned.

The crowd that once treated him as proof of inclusion suddenly remembered its own boundaries.

That’s the Mooney moment played out in public:

when your brilliance can’t out-shine your skin,

and your belief system becomes your border.

The same audience that crowned you model minority now hands you back the reminder —proximity isn’t partnership. It’s permission, and permission always expires.

What felt like a breakthrough was just a rehearsal.

Proximity goes global — fingerprints turn into flight paths.

The Global Wake-Up Moment

The Mooney moment doesn’t stop at American borders.It travels through passports and promises — wherever people mistake acceptance for arrival.

Some Latinos for Trump learned that nationalism doesn’t translate into belonging.When asylum tightened and TPS was lifted for Venezuelans, the slogan that once promised inclusion read like a disclaimer: “This isn’t for you.”

Even abroad, the ceiling travels with you — Blackness crossing borders faster than passports.

Different accents, same audition:perform worthiness, receive permission, lose it without notice.

The wake-up call always comes.

The only question is who we choose to stand beside when it rings.

Reconstruction / What Now?

If the Mooney moment is inevitable, then maybe awakening isn’t the punishment — it’s the portal.

The collapse of illusion makes room for something real to stand.

Because what proximity can’t promise, solidarity can.

It doesn’t ask you to perform worthiness; it asks you to practice witness.

It’s the difference between wanting a seat at the table and building a new one from memory and care.

I’ve lived long enough at the intersection of Black and Brown to know that liberation doesn’t come from mimicry.

It comes from what happens after the lights come up — when we look around and choose not to leave the room.

Maybe the work now is less about arrival and more about alignment.

Less about being exceptional, and more about being accountable.

To see proximity for what it was — a mirage — and community for what it is — the real inheritance.

The wake-up call always comes.

The question, as ever, is who we stand beside when it rings.

Because assimilation is not liberation —and some wake-up calls don’t come with a snooze button.

Jonah Batambuze is a, Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and founder of the BlindianProject, a global platform remixing Black x Brown identity through art, history, and storytelling. His work moves across installation, film, writing, and education—challenging systems of erasure while building new cultural blueprints.

Batambuze speaks and facilitates internationally on topics including Black South Asian solidarity, caste and colonial legacies, diasporic memory, and cultural resistance.

For speaking engagements, workshops, or media inquiries, contact: jonah@blindian-project.com or visit jonahbatambuze.com/speaking