The Death of American Decency: What Olu Jacobs Taught Us

Olu Jacobs died this week. If you're an American scrolling past that name with a shrug, that reaction is exactly the problem I want to talk about. Jacobs was a Nigerian actor, a giant of African cinema, the kind of performer whose face carried entire generations of stories. He died at 82 after a long illness, and across an ocean, millions of people stopped what they were doing. In Lagos, in London, in Accra, in Houston, in Atlanta, in the Bronx, Nigerian families gathered around phones and televisions the way we once gathered around a single screen in the living room. For one afternoon, strangers who share nothing but a heritage and a memory wept together. We don't do that anymore. And that's the real story here. Think about what passes for a shared cultural moment in America in 2025. A celebrity feud. A courtroom verdict. A video of someone screaming in a parking lot. We don't mourn together. We don't grieve together. We don't even watch the same things. We have fractured into ten thousand algorithmic silos, each one feeding us a personalized version of reality, each one designed to make us angry enough to keep scrolling. When a great artist dies, we get a trending hashtag and a hundred hot takes, and by Thursday we've forgotten their name. Olu Jacobs represented something we've lost: the idea that a single performer could belong to an entire culture. He wasn't a brand. He wasn't a content creator. He wasn't optimizing for engagement metrics. He was an actor who spent decades on stage and screen, playing kings and fathers and flawed, complicated men, and in doing so he became part of the furniture of millions of childhoods. People in Lagos don't say "I liked his work." They say "he raised me." That's a different kind of relationship between artist and audience, and it's one that American entertainment has largely abandoned in favor of frictionless, forgettable, disposable content. Here's the uncomfortable part. The reason many Americans have never heard of Olu Jacobs isn't just geography. It's that we've decided, culturally, that stories from outside our borders don't count. We import British accents and Korean pop and call it globalism, but we still treat African art as a niche curiosity, something to be sampled and moved past. Meanwhile, a man who was arguably one of the finest actors of his generation dies, and the largest country on earth barely notices. That's not a failure of information. We have more information than any civilization in history. It's a failure of attention. It's a failure of curiosity. It's a failure of the basic human decency to care about things that didn't happen to us. Jacobs once said that acting was about truth, about finding the honest center of a character and refusing to lie to the audience. That ethic feels almost quaint now, in an age of deepfakes and engagement farms and influencers performing sincerity for a paycheck. He came from a tradition that believed stories were sacred, that they were how a people passed down who they were. We've traded that for a feed that refreshes every eight seconds. The grief in Nigeria this week is real and enormous. The silence here is real too. And if you think that silence is just about one actor from another country, you're missing the point. It's about what we've decided is worth our attention, and what we've decided we can afford to ignore. We can't. Not forever. **Our take:** A society that can't mourn a stranger's greatness is a society that's slowly forgetting how to feel anything at all. Olu Jacobs deserved our attention while he lived. The least we can do is give it now.