In video footage that went viral this fall, the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z said that growing up in a Black single-parent household contributed directly to anti-Black police brutality. As I pondered his remarks, I was reminded of the lengthy history of stupefying male-centric social analyses that Jay-Z’s take was in league with. And the net effect of these misinterpretations called to mind the Men in Black (MIB) movie franchise’s iconic neuralyzer gimmick.

Let me explain. In the films, all manner of extraterrestrial mayhem may have broken out in plain view of countless witnesses. But the debonair agents in the title roles wielded their memory-wiping gadget to dispatch all traces of the damning episode into the ether. They then thoughtfully supplied the poor saps in their charge with a flimsy, slapdash account of what happened to supplant their now-vanished memories.

Patriarchy functions in much the same way, particularly with respect to how the many life-destroying dynamics of anti-Black racism are erased and redubbed into a baby-simple saga of negligent Black mothers and absent Black fathers. Whether the inequality at issue is the police killing of Black people, the mass incarceration of Black communities, anti-Black violence, disparities in health and wealth, crumbling schools, abandoned cities, or diminishing political power, the patriarchal neuralyzer manages to make it all vanish in a blinding flash.

Neuralization isn’t new. In fact, a telltale sign of its impact is just how enthusiastically stunned and disoriented witnesses lapse into incoherent analysis. In Jay-Z’s case, his viewers became mired in a vastly oversimplified bit of pop psychology when the hip-hop legend conjured up an explanation for Black death at the hands of police that had been recycled from generations of earlier commentators who rest the blame on Black gender disrepair: “You’re like, ‘I hate my dad. Don’t nobody tell me what to do. I’m the man of the house.’ And then you hit the streets and run into a police officer and first thing he says, ‘Put your hands up, freeze, shut up,’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck you!’”

Meanwhile, during September’s Democratic presidential debate in Houston, the party’s front-runner, Joe Biden, was asked to address earlier views in which he angrily rejected any responsibility for addressing slavery. Given the opportunity to talk concretely about the contemporary legacies of slavery, Biden produced his own neuralyzed script. Regurgitating a tangled fur ball of tropes from policy debates past, Biden delivered an impressionistic, stereotyped word-picture of Black family life that only made notional sense because of the exhausting familiarity of the narrative.