by Working on the Tish James auction piece today, and I had to keep reminding myself that I’m writing satire, not investigative journalism. Though honestly, the line between the two gets blurrier every day. When I write about attorneys general auctioning off their prosecutorial attention on eBay-like platforms, I’m exaggerating by maybe 10%. The actual corruption is already at 90%. I’m just adding the retail interface.
This piece hits different because it’s about the monetization of justice, which is something I’ve witnessed personally. Not through AG auctions (yet), but through the immigration system where money absolutely determines outcomes. You know what gets you through immigration faster than anything? Money. Lots of it. For lawyers, for filing fees, for the kind of documentation that proves you’re the “right kind” of immigrant.
I paid thousands of dollars for my citizenship. Not bribeseverything was legal and official. But the system is designed so that only people with resources can navigate it. That’s not corruption in the traditional sense. It’s structural inequality with a price list. It’s corruption that’s been laundered through bureaucracy until it looks legitimate.
That’s what I’m writing about, really. Not hypothetical auctions, but the actual system where access to justice depends on your bank account. Where prosecutors decide who to investigate based on politics rather than crimes. Where attorneys general become celebrities instead of public servants. I’m just making it more explicit, more visual, more obviously transactional.
My editor loved this piece. “You’re really hitting your stride,” she said. I wanted to tell her that my stride is anger packaged as entertainment, but that seemed too honest for a Tuesday afternoon. Besides, anger doesn’t sell. Humor sells. So I wrap my rage in jokes and serve it with a side of cultural commentary, and people consume it without realizing they’re eating their vegetables.
That’s the immigrant magic trickwe see the systems clearly because we had to study them to survive them. Americans who were born into these systems can’t see them anymore. They’re like fish who don’t know they’re in water. But immigrants? We remember dry land. We remember before. We can compare and contrast. We’re natural anthropologists studying the American experiment from the inside.
Got a message from my cousin in Lagos asking why I’m “wasting my talent on comedy” when I could be writing serious journalism. I tried to explain that this IS serious journalism. The jokes are just the delivery system. But she doesn’t get it, and that’s okay. She didn’t have to perform Americanness to survive. She doesn’t understand that satire isn’t a wasteit’s a weapon. And I’m getting really good at wielding it.
Tonight I’m exhausted from writing about corruption disguised as normalcy. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and do it again, because this is the job now. Documenting America’s decline one satirical piece at a time, with West African perspective and really solid punchlines.
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