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thatonebirdwrites · 11 months ago

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I wrote a post on Paulo Friere, who is referenced in the thread above, and I feel like it's pertinent to the topic here.

Here is that post in full (though you can hit the link to my blog to read it there too):

Curiosity, Creativity, Compassion, and Cooperation are the 4 C’s of human nature. A fifth C is the darker side of our nature: Control. In past (and non-western or Indigenous) societies, they educated their youth through self-directed learning that required a high level of respect, cooperation, creativity, and mutual exploration. Adults guided the children rather than enforcing a strict curriculum. However, this style is rarely if ever present in our current school system. Why?

Social Control and Education

In Western world, societal control was the ‘necessary’ evil for European ambitions and colonization. To achieve this, they needed to rewrite how human nature was known. The concept of humans as empty vessels to be filled has its roots in the European philosophers of 1500s – 1900s. This ideology treats humans as objects to be carefully molded to fit the needs of society and thus, became the primary form of societal control. In Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen shows how brutal enslavement, genocidal colonialism, and exploitive tenancy:

… principles of social control in a stable civil society based on racial oppression: 1. The oppressor group must be in the majority. This might be called the Sir William Petty principle, after the person who first formulated it. This principle may incidentally serve to give racial oppression a “democratic” gloss. 2. From this “majority principle,” and from pyramidal structure of class society, it follows that the majority of the oppressor group is necessarily composed not of members of the exploiting classes, but an intermediate social control stratum of laboring classes, non-capitalist tenants, and wage-labors. 3. These laboring-class members of the oppressor group are to be shielded against the competition of the members of the oppressed group by the establishment of economically artificial, “anomalous” privileges – artificial because they subordinate short-term private individual profits to considerations of social control. 4. Just as system of capitalist production presents cyclical crises and regeneration, so the system of racial privileges of the laboring classes of oppressor group is adapted and preserved, come what may of economic crisis, impoverishment, famine, intramural conflict, natural calamity or war, in order to maintain the function of the intermediate buffer control stratum.

That intermediate stratum, in America especially but this harmful social control has been exported worldwide, is often marked by how close to pasty white a person’s skin is. This stratum assists in preventing workers from building solidarity against the capitalist class and keeps lower classes in competition over artificial forced scarcity of resources, jobs, and housing.

Yet humans are not born with this ideology or its principles. It must be taught, but to teach it, the leaders of the social control must standardize the education so that people of that nation get the same ideology, so to preserve specific privileges for some groups and exploitation for others. It’s often called the “banking method” as it treats us as recepticals to be filled up rather than autonomous beings with ability to think critically. To think critically would damage the pillars of social control and can tip them toward destruction.

Paulo Freire tackles the harms from the ideology of ‘banking method’ and contrasts it with a healthier and more liberatory approach he calls “problem-solving pedagogy.”

To be conscious requires us to critically think, but to critically think, we need to learn how to problem-solve, to be creative, to explore who we are and our relation to others and our environment. We need to return to the roots of our humanity, the 4 C’s, which requires education to be based in problem-solving not ‘banking.’

Problem-solving methodology is rooted in dialogue between teacher and student, where they consent to the material, critically think and discuss material, and learn from each other. Dialogue cannot be forced, else it ceases to be dialogue and becomes lecturing at best and abuse at worst. We cannot speak for another, as that takes away the person’s voice, and thus fails to be dialogue.

Dialogue must meet the other with an open mind, else it ceases to be dialogue and becomes a projection of our assumptions and/or refusal to account for our own biases. Paulo Freire provides some excellent examples of what is not dialogue:

Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others—mere “its” in whom I cannot recognize other “I”s? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of “pure” men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are “these people” or “the great unwashed”? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration, thus to be avoided? How can I dialogue if I am closed to—and even offended by—the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness?

Problem-solving methodology requires dialogue, but only if such dialogue respects with humility and love the consciousness, body, and mind of the other person. Again, the goal is not to treat students as a well to be filled, but as conscious beings capable of critical thinking and speech. Those involved in this education are cooperative learners and teachers eager to explore, honor, and respect one another’s humanity and transformative growth.

However, the Western education paradigm requires a ‘banking method’ to teaching, where students are vessels to be filled with the ‘right’ information and narratives. Students are not allowed to critically think as that would cause a disruption of the continuation of staus quo. Instead, students are expected to memorize the narratives of the oppressors, to think the way they decree, to behave within their constructed parameters, to not question the oppressor’s constructed reality.

Some people like Akilah S. Richards focus on ‘unschooling’ to unlearn the Western pedagogy of ‘banking’ and not trusting children or giving them autonomy. She writes:

Unschooling is child-trusting, anti-oppressive, liberatory, love-centered approach to parenting and caregiving. It is a way of life that is based in freedom, respect, and autonomy. Unschooling is a curiosity-led approach to learning without testing or predefined curricula. Unschoolers see learning as organic by-product of living and being a child, and therefore, reject the premise of passing information from adults and books to children based on what is believed (by adults) to be necessary learning. Children follow their interests, and their parents offer resources, which can include direct instruction from books, for their children to pursue, exploring what they enjoy… Listening and witnessing help parents to facilitate learning by offering resources for their child to pursue their interests and to follow their curiosity, without restrictions of time limitations or judgment by way of testing. Deschooling and unschooling are healing work as much as they are liberation-centered lifestyle practices.

Here Richards explains a way to unlearn Western education’s coercive, top-down, pyramidal power structures and punishment-based learning. Deschooling embraces the Problem-solving approach Freire describes. Love, respect, humility, trust-building are essential to building the relationships necessary to learn with someone rather than lecture to them.

To be truly conscious and to liberate our minds from the Western ideological chains, we must unlearn how to learn.

Problem-posing” education, responding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split”—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors—teacher on the one hand and students on the other.

As conscious human beings, we are not passive wells for a teacher to fill (just as children are not blank slates for parents, teachers, society to write upon). We have the ability to think beyond what we are told, but if we continuously receive the message to blindly obey what society tries to dump into our minds, then we can become trapped in oppressor’s domination webs.

Many authoritarian groups and leaders abhor education and books that present an alternative view because it often induces critical thinking. Education and what we read or discuss with others can give us new language to explore our reality, our environments, and our relations with others. In order to maintain power over us, the oppressor needs to limit our language, knowledge, and ways of being. Thus, the rigid control of education and societal narratives.

The teacher must be the one to teach, to hold power over the student, while the student exists as a receptical and absorbs the narrative given to them. Critical thinking cannot exist in the ‘banking method’ because the moment questions arise to critically examine the given narrative is the moment the fragile veil masking reality shatters, and reality ceases to be the carefully constructed fiction of the oppressor.

How do we define these two ways of learning?

Let’s examine how Freire defines it through the critical examination of how lessons are constructed. Cognizing is a term he uses to uncover the complex, active thinking required to create a lesson.

The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the “preservation of culture and knowledge” we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture. The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student: she is not “cognitive” at one point and “narrative” at another. She is always “cognitive,” whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create; together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed. Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

The object of study can range from an multitude of objects within our universe to an infinite amount of ideas. To think critically, we must be open and willing to engage in dialogue and seek understanding between the thoughts, actions, and perceptions of others. Freire describes this examination of the object or idea as an act if cognition, which is an active act. He contrasts it with the “banking method’s” approach, where students must be passively absorbing what another tells them. The students do not utilize their cognition to memorize another’s words. The need to question the truth of the teacher’s narrative is discouraged.

To become an active agent in one’s education requires acts of cognition. Quoted above regarding problem-solving method, Freire describes how that works between students and each other and the teacher. They contemplate, critically examine, reflect, and work together toward understanding. This is not an passive act but an active one.

Freire mentions the level of doxa versus logos. These are ancient Greek terms that is a nod to Plato’s theory of forms and learning. Plato assigns doxa to the lower level realm, which is a logicless realm that is easily manipulated and housed in the unreasoning and belief portion of the soul. For Plato, physical objects in doxa level are not in their true form – not until logic and reasoning (through logos) give them meaning and depth. (Aristotle would dispute this to call doxa the common sense or practical thought from which all knowledge starts.) Thus, logos represents the higher level of thought based in logic, critical examination, and robust cognitive acts like scientific or philosophical reasoning. Cognitive acts require logic and reasoning to help facilitate learning through dialogue, active actions, reflection, and reforming one’s understanding through new knowledge or perspectives. To build knowledge and understanding, logos creates a horizontal format of learning, where the teacher is simultaneously student and teacher and student is both teacher and student.

Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction [Note by Aidan: this contradiction is the teacher-student relation]. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other…

I quoted the above detailing the two styles of educating in depth as Freire paints the contrast beautifully.

Liberation requires us to be conscious and in relation with each other and the world. Freire shows us how to work toward that aim. We must foster dialogue, critical thought, building relations, unlearning individualism, and creating in collaboration with each other and our environment. We are not separate from the natural systems of our planet, and our actions and ideologies have tremendous impact on each other and our environment. To achieve sustainable harmony and equity with each other and our planet, we must break down our individualistic walls of alienation our current societal systems grafted onto us. The destruction of the old is always accompanied by the creation anew. Dialogue and action mediate these relations.

Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.

Liberation cannot happen if we deny others their right to speak. When we deny people that right, we become an oppressor. This denial of speech is central to the banking method of education, where the student is denied authentic dialogue with the teacher and other students — in fact, students are often denied their right to speak, especially if their words exit the constructed reality of the oppressor. As always, what we say impacts each other and our world, and harmful speech that tears down isn’t authentic, true, nor healthy. Accountability must exist to provide guides in our relating, destroying, creating, and becoming. To be accountable means owning what we say or do and accepting consequences and learning from those to do and be more true, compassionate, equitable, and just.

Problem-solving pedagogy is also rooted in collective approaches to building and maintaining community. Because to have authentic dialogue and liberatory critical thinking and action, we must work together in solidarity and compassion. It is only when we come together that we hold the power to break the harmful social control systems and exploiting class systems. Alienated by the “banking method,” we often fail to bridge the chasms between classes and racial and gender groups. But the more of us challenge the status quo, the more able we are to build community and power to fight for liberation, to unlearn individualistic white supremacist imperialist capitalism ideology, and dismantle it for good.

In its stead, we can build a more equal, equitable, just, and sustainable future, where everyone’s needs, bodily autonomy, and talents are respected and honored. We are powerful together.

A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.

We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.

Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.

Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.

What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.

Some definitions:

Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.

Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.

Things we (scholars) DO know:

-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.

-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.

Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.

Maintaining the status quo? Nope.

Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.

If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.

They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.

And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.

For what?

It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.

WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.

We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.

The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?

Education is all about capitalism.

"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.

THAT is why modern education is a failure.

Its basic premise is monstrous.

"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"

Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.

#paulo freire #pedagogy of the oppressed #liberation #social justice #justice #education #learning #students #teaching #critical thinking #problem-solving method #banking method #problem solving #literacy

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christian-perspectives · 4 months ago

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Free From Sin In Christ Jesus

Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. Romans 6:17-18 One of the biggest black marks in American history came at the legalization of slavery. Slave owners forced those they owned to do all types of labor using abuse and other methods. A slave remained a slave even if they escaped from their master. The reason, because they had to continue running, always looking over their shoulder. Fortunately, America abolished slavery. Americans, however, paid a price to set the slaves free. It took the Civil War and the loss of many lives to free people from their bondage. A different type of slavery exists that has had people in bondage for centuries. Paul called it slavery to sin and told us how we can live a life free from it. We know slavery existed before the birth of Moses. The Egyptians forced the Israelites to make bricks and build cities for them. Taskmasters made sure they completed their jobs. The slave master of sin operates in just a little different manner. It offers things that aren't good for us and hard for us to resist. And we get to choose who or what we will serve. Don't you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? Romans 6:16 I'm sure you've heard someone say something like this before, "I know I shouldn't do this, but..." Or maybe you've even said it yourself.

The Influence of Sin

Sin leads us to do things that make us feel good, regardless of how we make others feel. We often feel free to sin because we only think of the moment. We don't consider its eternal effect. You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Romans 6:16 Sin's influence can cause a monster to arise within us that takes over in our lives. In other words, it makes a slave out of us from the inside out. Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Romans 6:19 Sin will also try to override our consciences. It will guilt us into doing what we know is wrong. Sin works to convince us that "I need to take care of me" no matter what it costs. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Romans 6:19 The worst part about the bondage of sin is we can't free ourselves from it. So, we must give ourselves to a master who can free us. The third part of verse 19 addresses that. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy. Romans 6:19

A Life Free from Sin

So, how do we change masters? We have a free choice to choose between sin and righteousness. God gave us the ability to make the following choices with the help of the Holy Spirit. - Do not let sin control the way you live; do not give in to sinful desires. - Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. - Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. - So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. - Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. - Instead, you live under the freedom of God's grace. Romans 6:12-14 Take another look at our verse for today about how sin used to enslave us. It says, once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. What teaching? The Word of God! All the things Paul taught them became a part of the bigger picture, the Bible. Freedom from sin comes from obedience to God and His Word. Just like sin enslaves us from the inside, when obeying God, we begin to change first on the inside. We become less selfish and more righteous. We continually become free from sin. In fact, we become a slave to righteousness, which means we want to live a life pleasing to God. Being free from sin also changes our view on how we deal with the people in our lives. It's wanting to treat others with respect and dignity and with love and compassion. Look at what Jesus taught in Matthew 7, which we call the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule

Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets. Matthew 7:12 So, let's say that you feel free from sin and living in righteousness. Plus, you treat everyone in your life the way you want them to treat you. And now you can just coast along. I don't think so! As humans, we will always serve as a slave in one way or another. If we don't consistently and consciously serve the Lord daily, our coasting will lead in the direction of sin. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. Romans 6:18 Anyone who remains or reverts back to living as a slave of sin will forfeit the gift of God. Sin only produces wages, which results in a payday no one should desire. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:23 Lord, because you have made a way for us, we can be free from our slavery to sin. It is only through your son Jesus we can become slaves to righteousness. Check out these related posts about freedom - God Helps the Helpless and Sets Us Free - How To Be Free In Life - Freedom From God For Everyone Read the full article

#BibleStudy #Devotions #Evangelism #Romans #SetFree #sin

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zen-garden-gnome · 3 years ago

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Long post about whiteness

I’m seeing a lot of false-start questions based on a narrow understanding of whiteness. Whiteness (and recovery from whiteness) can be tricky to unpack because it has a lot of layers that have been added over the years. So you’ll run into a layer and may be tempted to stop there, but it goes deeper.

1) Racial identity was a vague belief before it was officially named, but it’s not as old as many think it is. Prior to European Expansionism, travelers and merchants and militaries alike have generally referred to people based on their place of origin or their language. The idea of vaguely lumping hundreds of ethnicities together based on a handful of physical attributes started to kick up when Portugal began capturing and enslaving huge numbers of sub-Saharan Africans in the mid-1400s. As slave traders and “explorers” brought shiploads of captured, multi-ethnic Africans to Portuguese auction blocks to be traded all over Europe, what set these enslaved people apart from anyone else there (including other enslaved people) was a) the fact that they were to some degree darker than the Portuguese despite displaying a wide range of skin tones, b) were from Africa at the time, and c) were enslaved. When Christian militant and royal biographer Gomes de Zurara was hired in 1453 to write about the life and “accomplishments” of Portugal’s most famous slave trader, Infante Henrique aka Prince Henry the Navigator, he officiated, in writing, the idea that all these newly enslaved people were their own class of people with no differentiation between them. Here, race is a burgeoning social narrative invented to praise European slave traders, and this racial concept is defined in relation to slavery, African origins, and skin tone. Racial concepts appeared in tandem with racist concepts, because races began to be envisioned in order to excuse the abuse of others. The ideas of whiteness and blackness were birthed simultaneously, specifically around slavery, and they became deeply entrenched beliefs before they were ever officially named.

2. “Negro” became the first major racial term before “white” was widely used, binding the development of racial concepts even more securely with the practice of European slavery. In fact, race and racism became encoded in colonial-American law in 1640, when African servant John Punch ran away from his European buyers along with two European servants. He was eventually recaptured, as were his Dutch and Scottish companions. However, the colonial judicial system sentenced Punch to a lifetime of slavery, while the two Europeans had an extra year added to their initial servitude. This marks the first record of a Euro/American legal precedence for lifetime sentencing of enslavement based openly on race. John Punch’s African lineage and the other servants’ European lineage were the differences between their sentencing. Here, European origin was what freed a person from being of the “negro race” and therefore severely reduced one’s likelihood to enslavement. It was also the requirement for incoming settlers who wanted to be able to buy land. Only white people were allowed to develop inter-generational wealth, at a time when this continent was being carved up by land speculators for massive profits.

3. The concept of whiteness was officially named by Carl Linnaeus in order to rank Europeans as superior among other conceptual categories of people. It involved grouping hundreds of ethnic groups together to form white, yellow, red, and black races in he text “System Naturale" (1735). While primarily an introduction to our current taxonomy system, it included these racial categories. It was highly regarded by Europeans eager to cast themselves as superior because it a) created a popular “scientific” framework for excusing the most obscene (and profitable) crimes against humanity, b) officially outlined/invented the white race and identified it with everything good and the black race as everything bad, and then c) clearly defined Europeans as the basis of whiteness, “Homo sapiens europaeus.” Here, whiteness is coined to describe European ancestry, particularly in relation to “grotesque” non-whites.

4. An individual’s personal ideas of whiteness fluctuates with time and circumstances. As governments, social institutions, literature, etc all work to redefine history and clean up their image, people have different/less information to work with, but the effects are the same. The popular spoken definition of whiteness is often simply a reference to a relatively pale skin tone caused by European ancestry. Obviously there are pale people in other places around the world who aren’t European and weren’t related to the slavery of European Expansionism, so pale skin isn’t enough. The relation to Europe’s capitalistic global expansion is key. But what about European countries who didn’t go expanding this way, or whose involvement is harder to pinpoint? After all, most of the trading of enslaved indigenous peoples from Africa and North & South America were carried out by the Portuguese, Genoese, Dutch, French, British, Spanish, and Americans. Well, the rapid enrichment and development of the rest of Europe for centuries to come was specifically made possible by all the labor, resources, and capital brought in by this period of the European slave trade. European ancestry links every white person to privileges and developments born on the backs of black and indigenous enslaved peoples. Furthermore, simply being white makes one safer from these kinds of exploits, and today it also makes one safer from the effects of generations of racial prejudices and resource extraction on the global scene. Which brings me to...

5. Whiteness tends to involve one’s relative freedom. Freedom of movement, both physical and social, without immediate threat of policing. Freedom to explore one’s ancestral history without being blocked by 500 years of forced removal, renaming, forced childbirth, etc. Freedom to exist without having to actually know or respond to one’s racial identity. This one’s really important. Whiteness involves not having to think about being white, usually in relation to living in a country/region whose laws and norms are defined and enforced almost exclusively by other white people. Since whiteness and blackness arose mutually around the European slave trade, blackness is inherently tied to a lack of rights/freedoms and whiteness is inherently tied to an abundance of them. That doesn’t mean that every white person experiences these equally, and there will always be exceptions to the rule. But the exceptions don’t make the rule, and after centuries of globalized white supremacy, whiteness has become a subconscious signifier of power for people all over the place.

The big take-away is this: whiteness is inherently toxic. There is nothing positive to defend in whiteness. It was born out of ugliness and it is ugly to its core. That’s why it feels so bad. It’s why “white pride” is always ugly. However, the solution is not to disconnect from our ancestry. All that does is leave us trapped here, in an ugly set of circumstances, with no concept of who we are except what we’re living in, now. The real work to be done is to connect with our ancestry before whiteness, with the ancestors who related to the land as a living entity, before the land was limited in social memory to a source of private capital, servitude, and empire-building. This land, this Earth, is the backdrop against which all our relativity is measured. From this place of relative security, understanding, and development of the spirit, we can withstand the reality of our more recent ancestors, and finally heal from the last 1000 to 2000 years of trauma.

I know I’ve said this before, but now that I have this huge post, I’ll repeat it: Dr. Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine is a really helpful book and/or course for this whole process. It’s not the end-all be-all resource, but it’s a great start! I’m also always down to talk about this stuff. Hit me up. I need to be able to talk about it, too.

(I should add, while blackness was created by white people and therefore was born out of the racism of whiteness, blackness was forced on people, while whiteness was claimed by the takers. It’s no white person’s place to have an opinion about "black identity.” White people started race, so white people are responsible for deconstructing our own race--no one else’s. We cannot be “post-racial” while everyone else is still living the violent reality of racism.)

#whiteness #race #ancestry

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nevermindirah · 4 years ago

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So, Captain America’s shield.

Here’s a symbol made of metal stolen from Wakanda and painted red white and blue for the purpose of mythologizing and defending ~America~. It gained its symbolic meaning through the blood, sweat, and tears of marginalized white Americans: disabled dirt-poor son of Irish immigrants Steve and implied-Jewish-in-Agent-Carter Howard. Is a Black man, descended from people who were stolen from Africa and forced to build the United States under horrific conditions, taking up this symbol only a “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” situation, or is it worthwhile to manage the messy politics for the sake of the entire country celebrating Sam’s heroism as the obvious successor to Steve’s legacy?

I want Falcon and Winter Soldier to explore ALL the complex reasons Sam declined to take up the Cap mantle. Like the fear Sam has, and lots of other regular human people with high integrity and a strong moral code have, that the risk of making one mistake that hurts people makes him somehow unworthy (when this perspective is what makes Sam worthy, just like Steve “it’s not about me” Rogers before him). Like does he even want to bother representing a country that stole his ancestors and wants his labor and his aesthetics but not his perspective and will hate him even more for trying this. (Head writer Malcolm Spellman has told press that the majority-Black writers room is definitely planning on going here and I cannot wait to see more.) Like Sam got out for a good reason and once upon a time Captain America needed his help and that was a good as hell reason to get back in but is it still a good reason after all the fresh trauma he’s been through. Like his sister and nephews could use his help and maybe helping his family and hometown economically and psychologically recover from the blip is a better use of his energy and expertise than US imperialism or whatever the fuck SWORD is doing.

I want the show to explore why Sam gave the shield to the Smithsonian, specifically. Why this institution? It’s a unique part of the federal government that in some ways functions as an independent nonprofit educational institution and in some ways is a joint project of the 3 branches of the federal government (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Vice President, and a few selected Senators and House members are always on its senior decision-making body). The Smithsonian is an obvious choice if Sam was deciding “which museum do I give the shield” — but was that the decision he was making? If Sam chose to give this historically meaningful but also still very powerful tool of war to the Smithsonian instead of the Department of Defense, that’s a very interesting character and plot choice and I want to see more about that. Especially given the Smithsonian seems to have immediately handed it over to the DOD without Sam’s input.

There’s a very obvious choice that I have zero faith Disney will explore but that would be infinitely more meaningful than Sam carrying the shield into battle, some right-wing jackass doing the same, or the shield sitting in an exhibit at the Smithsonian. Repatriate the shield to Wakanda. There’s no way in hell that pile of vibranium made its way to Howard Stark without colonialist theft involved. Sam could just give it back.

Imagine a museum exhibit in Birnin Zana that displays Captain America’s shield and shows the timeline from Wakanda protecting itself from European colonialism and its people from enslavement but some white people still managing to steal a little vibranium, to an American son of Jewish immigrants using some of that stolen vibranium to build a tool for an American supersoldier to use in fighting Nazis, to Steve Rogers using it first against and then alongside King T’Challa of blessed memory, the Black Panther who opened Wakanda to the world, and finally Sam Wilson, an African American who may or may not have Wakandan ancestry and may never know where on the continent his ancestors were stolen from, taking up Steve’s mantle and using that power to return this complicated piece of American symbolism to its ancestral home. Imagine African American kids seeing that exhibit on field trips to Wakanda.

Sam is going to pay a price no matter what he does with the shield, because that’s how antiblackness works. He’s paying a price right here on this hellsite because some fans can’t see past their Bucky obsession long enough to think about the white supremacist context of their shitposts. He would pay a hell of a price for going so far as to repatriate to Wakanda an object that many in-universe white Americans would no doubt see as a sacred object of ~their~ country. We saw at the end of this first episode the heartbreaking, insulting price Sam paid for giving the shield to the Smithsonian. Fuck how I wish there were an easier path for this character who is just so, so good and deserves a little goddamn peace already.

All that said, one thing I do have confidence Disney will give us is Sam punching that live-action Hydra Cap in the face on his way to taking back the shield. The politics of this show are messy as hell, but at very fucking least they can let Sam get in a really good punch.

#fatws #fatws spoilers #sam wilson #cap's shield #us imperialism #slavery cw #nazi cw #antiblackness #ffs america #marvel #mine #long post

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parentsnevertoldus · 3 years ago

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An Afro-Futurist Future is a Harm-Reductionist Future

by Mallory Culbert

The end of the prison-industrial complex and the release of all prisoners are in humanity's best interest. Disabled people are more likely to be arrested & abused by authority figures/cops. Black people are arrested & jailed for drug-related charges at 2x the rate of whites, despite using drugs at the same rate. People who use drugs are punished for needing healthcare and/or minding our own damn business. We can do better.

The afro future cannot exist with harm reduction. We must address harm to the "afro" (Black) community in the form of reparations. For Black Americans reparations are due for slavery and for the racist drug war that incarcerates Black people disproportionately. After the civil war, 40 acres of land and a mule were promised to us. Without reparations, Black americans today have 1/10th of the wealth of white americans.

We are looking towards the future. We must be able to envision the future in order to build the future! In the Afrofuture, where we fully own our own bodies, drug use is a fact of life. Why? Because we can determine what best works for us!

We imagine an inclusive future that intentionally makes space for the perspectives & needs of historically excluded groups of people.

“The first Afrofuturists envisioned a society free from the bondages of oppression—both physical and social. Afrofuturism imagines a future [without] white supremacist thought and the structures that violently oppressed Black communities. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, often presented through art, music, and literature” [1].

Afrofuturism is a direct contrast to Black Pessimism, a belief that considers Black people not as Humans, but as things to be watched and used by white and non-Black people. Black Pessimism examines the unique horrors of anti-Black violence, the endurance of anti-Blackness in the US after emancipation of enslaved folks and racial desegregation, and those aspects of Black suffering that cannot be fully explained by political economy or class conflict.

Black (capitalized, like every ethnic group) doesn't just include people descended from enslaved peoples in the americas, but is a term that describes the systematic devaluation of Black labor and bodies in a racial capitalist hierarchy. Whew, that was a mouthful!

This can look like Black laborers making a portion of what non-Black laborers make for the same work (devalued). It can look like Black neighborhoods being used as waste dumping sites by the local government (devalued bodies). It looks like racial segregation and whites moving away en mass to keep away from Black people. It is based in slavery with the idea that Black people are replaceable animals and not human. “Black” encompasses many culturally distinct groups of Indigenous peoples across the world, like the people of the Mer Islands of what is now called Australia or the Siddi people of Southeast Asia. Black folks span the spectrum and the globe; yet there is one universal experience between us--experiencing anti-Blackness, racial prejudice against Black people. This experience varies across cultures and depends on how race is socially understood and constructed in each one.

Afrofuturism escapes us to a different world, a world of our own creation. Black joy is not found in the absence of pain and suffering. It exists through it, even if injustice is inescapable. "So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul" [2].

Sources

Perry, Imani. “Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/racism-terrible-blackness-not/613039/

Capers, I. Bennett, Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 (February 8, 2019). New York University Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 101, 2019, Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 586, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3331295

#afrofuturism #afrofuturistic #drugs #harm reduction #drug mention #Blackness #futurism #parentsnevertoldus #parentsnevertoldme #comprehensive sex education #afropunk

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96thdayofrage · 3 years ago

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Gregg “Marcel” Dixon, the third of his parents, high school sweethearts, four children, is Georgia-born, the port city of Savannah, and South Carolina raised, just minutes away in the small, rural town of Ridgeland. Both areas are home to the Sea Island Creoles, or as they are better known, the Gullah-Geechee, a Black American ethnic group native to the sea islands, and the Lowcountry of the Gullah-Geechee Corridor where his family has resided since at least the mid-1700s. Even though he was a student of the Jasper County School District, South Carolina’s lowest performing district, a very troubled school system part of the state’s so-called “Corridor of Shame”, his childhood days, especially the earliest parts, were marked by love, happiness, and his rich, unique culture. He grew up with a large immediate and extended family that included his mother, his grandmother; his great grandmother; his grandfather, his two granduncles, his two uncles, his two aunts, his two cousins, and his three siblings. His great-grandaunts and cousins provided him and his siblings with a constant source of companionship, affection, camaraderie, and protection in their longtime community along a busy stretch of coastal highway that connected his town to the more popular Lowcountry destinations of Hilton Head Island, Beaufort, and Savannah. From all, he witnessed overwhelming compassion and empathy as they clothed, fed, protected, and housed many in need even though they were all people of modest means themselves. It was truly a wonderful time in his life.

At the end of slavery in 1865, Black Americans owned 0.5% of America’s wealth. Today, 165 years later, Black Americans at almost 15% of the population, fare little better owning just 3% of the nation’s wealth. The average wealth for a white American family is approaching $200,000.00 while the average wealth for a Black American family is almost 10 times less at $24,000.00. Twenty-five percent of black families have a net worth of either zero or negative and in just two decades, it will soon be zero for all Black Americans! This has NOTHING to do with the work ethic of Black Americans but has EVERYTHING to do with the systemic, government-sanctioned, violent enslavement, and the subsequent anti-black racial terror faced by Black Americans first centuries. This first manifested during chattel slavery, where they did not receive as much as a penny for their labor and then it continued through goverment sanctioned, violent discrimination and exclusion from government policies and initiatives that resulted in Black Americans being excluded from opportunities to build wealth, a number estimated to be high in the trillions. At the same time, they were simultaneously being forced into deep poverty, by means of redlining, Jim Crow, and land theft; extreme violence by means of lynch mobs, police brutality, terrorism from the FBI, and race riots; robbed denied equal access to an education by means of underfunded schools and educational discrimination, and more. This has not just hurt Black Americans, but all Americans.

According to one study, anti-black racism has caused the United States SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS! It goes without saying then, a thriving Black America is a thriving America, hence, the motto of my campaign, “Repair Black America To Fix America”. The word “reparation” means “the act of repairing and keeping in repair.” To solve these issues, the American government has a responsibility to repair the damage it has caused, and that is why I will do all within my human power to bring a multifaceted reparations package for Black Americans That Are Descendants of Those Who Were Enslaved By The American Government aka Freedmen to fruition that will be funded by government spending, as have past initiatives.

This package will include:

The closure of the racial wealth gap that will include measures such as direct monetary payments, tax exemption status, debt cancelation, land grants, business grants, and more;

Class protection status for those descending from those who were enslaved by the American government;

Allotments of federally granted and protected land in all 50 states where only Freedmen can settle and receive services from the institutions located on these aforementioned lands;

Provisions of federally subsidized housing and business grants;

The investigation of cold cases of anti-black racial terrorism to bring all living criminals to justice;

The reform of heirs property to provide full equity and ownership to all heirs and compensation for any property that may have been lost or stolen through unethical avenues such as “partition sales”;

The reestablishment of the Freedmen Bureaus to close all disparities between Freedmen and White Americans such as the high mortality rate for black women during childbirth versus what it is for white women, job discrimination, heirs property, etc.

Establish a commission to specifically review and immediately address the unique challenges facing black men and boys.

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46ten · 4 years ago

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curious as to your take on the current debate going on in hamiltonia re: hamilton a slaver vs hamilton not a slaver?

Whew, this is going to be a long answer. Since Jessie Serfilippi’s “As Odious and Immoral A Thing” was first published (I posted a few brief quotes here), likely as part of an ongoing interest in the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site with the subject of the Schuyler and Hamilton families and slavery (see here for blogposts labeled ‘slavery’ including a couple about AH specifically), there have been three versions of a rebuttal by Michael E. Newton and some people calling themselves Philo (”Love”) Hamilton, one of whom is Doug Hamilton*. The ongoing engagement on this topic also brings up issues of historiography and hagiography.

In this whole discussion there is only one new piece of evidence that Serfilippi has referenced on Twitter but is not part of her article - I’ll get into that below. Everything else is a re-analysis of known and fairly popular sources, so I don’t think going through it point by point would be helpful.

But let’s be clear about something. This discussion around AH is in large part because of this Chernow falsehood: “[f]ew, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” Chernow also calls AH a “fierce abolitionist” and a “staunch abolitionist” because Chernow doesn’t know what abolitionism is. This lie got tons of mileage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical character AH may have personal moral defects, but not blind spots as huge and disastrous to a modern audience as a lackadaisical approach to the owning of other human beings. (That Miranda’s approach totally riled some Black artists and scholars is well-known, and I wrote briefly about it here.) Serfilippi’s article doesn’t get the media play it does without the popularity of the abolitionist Founding Father myth that Miranda put on stage. So this conflict and news-cycle interest arose from Chernow’s need to give AH the moral high ground by claiming that he was the best best best abolitionist because Chernow is interested in hagiography, not biography. Unfortunately, Newton-Hamilton seem interested in the same thing.

A brief note on word usage: an enslaver, in most current usage, is defined as someone who participated in any aspect of the slavery enterprise. Considering AH’s undisputed role as money-handler (or the more laughable ‘he was a banker’ assertion in the Newton-Hamilton essay) for members of the Schuyler family acquiring enslaved persons, AH was an enslaver.

In my opinion, on the issue of slavery, AH is damned by his extensive ties from 1780 onwards to the Schuyler family. There’s nothing that can explain away the fact that AH at times lived with, visited, and sent his wife and children for extended stays and to be educated by his slave-owning in-laws. AH did not somehow become innocently involved in slave trading and ownership. Rather, he knew what he was doing when he married into the heavy slave-trading and owning Schuyler family and when he engaged in business acts for that family, including helping them to acquire/sell enslaved persons. These were morally weighty - and abominable acts, argued even in his day - and he did them anyway. There is not any record that remains that he had a problem having his children reared within an abhorrent system/household where people were enslaved and served them; in fact, given the number of times he sent his children to his father- and mother-in-law’s home for extended periods, it could be suggested he found nothing morally objectionable going on there. Philip Hamilton even thanked his enslaver grandfather for his advice on how to “be a good man.” P. Schuyler’s wealth and trading was through the slavery economy. Moreover, AH’s economic concerns were also inextricably tied to slavery - keep in mind that every mention of tariffs on sugar is connected to the slave trade. Almost everything led back to that evil institution.

During AH’s lifetime, a number of white AND Black persons articulated that all enslaved Black and Indigenous persons should be freed, that the practice of enslavement was a grave moral failing. AH was well-informed enough to know that Black Americans were articulating how freedom should be applied to them - indeed, many of the manumission policies of the original states arose from these efforts. So AH was fully aware of the arguments. (His son was involved!) Maybe this helped inspire him and his slave-owning friends and political colleagues to form the NY Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, although none of this group agreed to give up their own enslaved persons as part of the organization of this group.

Or, as Newton-Hamilton audaciously state, “[AH] was more involved in building a nation” sotto voce based on enslavement and racial distinction than he could be bothered to care about the lives of enslaved people. This shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to AH’s major moral failings/blind spots - he didn’t care about the lives of the people affected by his whiskey tax either. If one wants to nevertheless call this a “good man,” we’re probably looking at each other from across a void.

But this is well-trod territory. Several articles post-Chernow have evaluated and summarized positions on AH and slavery that I share:

“Hamilton's position on slavery is more complex than his biographers' suggest. Hamilton was not an advocate of slavery, but when the issue of slavery came into conflict with his personal ambitions, his belief in property rights, or his belief of what would promote America's interests, Hamilton chose those goals over opposing slavery. In the instances where Hamilton supported granting freedom to blacks, his primary motive was based more on practical concerns rather than an ideological view of slavery as immoral. Hamilton's decisions show that his desire for the abolition of slavery was not his priority.” Michelle DuRoss, “Somewhere in Between: Alexander Hamilton and Slavery,” Early American Review, 2011 [part 1, part 2]

“But it does illustrate something that his primary modern biographers have been reluctant to concede: Hamilton routinely subordinated his antislavery inclinations to other family and political concerns, and he did not ever approach even a modest level of engagement on the issue in his otherwise voluminous published works.” Phil Magness, “Alexander Hamilton’s Exaggerated Abolitionism,” 2015

“He was not an abolitionist...[h]e bought and sold slaves for his in-laws, and opposing slavery was never at the forefront of his agenda.” Annette Gordon-Reed, “Correcting ‘Hamilton’,” Harvard Gazette, 2016.

Serfilippi extends this:

When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

I have no objection to her statement. We simply have no record of AH strongly challenging the institution of slavery, while several of his colleagues and friends most certainly did. Instead, we have the financial transactions, the possible use of enslaved labor, and the possible ownership of enslaved persons, alongside his strong personal, professional, and political ties to owners of enslaved persons. And the new evidence: the inclusion of the following in a list of persons dead of Yellow Fever in NYC 1798, “Hamilton Alexander, major-general, the black man of, 26 Broadway” An Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in the City of New-York, 1799. We cannot know if this was an enslaved man or a free Black man who lived and labored for the Hamiltons, but it should eliminate anyone confidently stating that the Hamiltons did not own enslaved persons.

Thus, Serfilippi has successfully accomplished at least one important goal: bringing to the forefront the names (as we have them) of persons, servant or enslaved, connected to the Hamiltons.

I wrote above that part of the problem here is hagiography. If his concern is with the truth, I certainly look forward to Newton’s chapter-by-chapter repudiations of books written by Chernow, Brookhiser, and Knott on AH and the AH/GW relationship.This leads to the second issue that has arisen: the unprofessional, and frankly gross, glee in trying to punch down on a young female scholar. In my own field (an ex-partner is a military historian so I’ll speak for their field too), the approach when one believes a colleague is publishing in error and one has additional information that could illuminate the issues is to contact them and seek to work together to analyze and draw conclusions. Newton and the anonymous Love Hamilton clan didn’t treat Serfilippi as if she were deserving of this respect. Moreover, Newton has never, to my knowledge - and I purchased his books! - gone this hard after Chernow, who certainly deserves it even more.

But Newton-Hamilton betray their own concerns here: “Considering the era in which Hamilton lived, the challenges he faced, and his accomplishments, it is not difficult to understand why Hamilton did not make opposition to slavery his primary focus. His attention was on building a nation.” And what kind of nation was that? At the Constitutional Convention, AH’s lengthy speeches on the formation of the government have been recorded. There is no record of him offering any statements about the slavery issue, unlike his friend Gouverneur Morris.

Newton-Hamilton continue: “Unfortunately, that meant neglecting other important matters, not just slavery but also his own financial well-being.” Wow, a comparison is made between AH’s personal finances and the ownership of human beings. Could these authors be any clearer that the slavery issue is an inconvenience that they are ultimately unconcerned about? I’m unsure if Newton-Hamilton realize just how gross their attempt at addressing this issue has been, and that it’s hard to take their interpretation and analysis of the evidence seriously when these are the kinds of statements making their way into the rebuttal essays.

Now there is an interesting discussion about how even later abolitionists did not see a conflict in the employment of enslaved labor, but that too isn’t something that Newton-Hamilton show interest in. Instead, their approach seems to be that AH needs to be celebrated at all costs, and thankfully, those days are passing into history.

*It’s ridiculous that a group of people have given themselves a stupid pseudonym to avoid attaching their actual names to a so-called scholarly article. And I’m aware that I’m writing this anonymously, but on tumblr where maybe 5 people have made it to the end of this (I’m not publishing it on my real blog).

**I will not link it, but it can be found on Newton’s blog discoveringhamilton.

#Alexander Hamilton #Chernow #slavery #Philip Schuyler #Michael E. Newton #Serfilippi #historiography

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amr-goat · 3 years ago

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Black Lives Matter: Race and Racism Across Time in the U.S.

by Amir Agurs

“The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. Racist ideas have been woven into the fabric of this country, and the first step to building an anti-racist America is acknowledging America’s racist past and present”. - Ibram X. Kendi

Racism is the cancer of America. It is pervasive and has influenced and infiltrated every system of this country. America was not founded from a human rights standpoint and the constitution extended the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness primarily to white men. This final presentation will focus on the theme of race and racism across three key time periods 1) the onset of slavery and the science of race, 2) Jim Crow to Black power and 3) the age of social media to racial reckoning.

RACE + OWNERSHIP = RACISM

In 1619 the first Africans arrived at the shores of Jamestown. They did not come by choice, but through brute force; captured from their homeland, transported across the Atlantic, to exist in a permanent state of chattel enslavement in a foreign land. Forced labor and indentured servitude were not uncommon practices throughout history. According to Elliot and Hughes (2019), “Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries ---but enslavement had not been based on race” (Elliott et al.). The trans-Atlantic slave trade sparked a 244-year reign of terror and suffering on Black people supported by science and law. Despite this reality, Black people resisted, survived, and begin to create a new cultural identity in America.

Racism as defined by sociologist Neely Fuller, is system of thought, speech, and action, operated by people who classify themselves as white, and who use deceit, violence, or the threat of violence to subjugate and abuse people classified as non-white, under conditions that promote the practice of falsehood, injustice, incorrectness, in one or more areas of activity, for the ultimate purpose of maintaining, expanding, and refining the practice of white supremacy” (Fuller 36).

Race became what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to as a single story. The single-story, she says, “creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete---making one story become the only story (Adichie 03:15–05:21). Race, as a US social construction and human invention, was developed to justify the enslavement of Black people and grant or deny benefits and privileges based on a hierarchy of racial superiority (National Museum of African American History and Culture).

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In Early American history, Racial stereotypes played an essential role in shaping the attitudes towards Black people (Green). During the mid-1800′s the scientific community tried to legitimize their racist ideas that Black people were inferior and only suitable for service (National Museum of African American History), lacked the intelligence to learn because they had smaller skulls, the initiative to work and the qualities for morality and domesticity to live in a society (“Racial Stereotypes of the Civil War Era”). The work of early European scholars helped to fuel anti-blackness that the Civil War and Emancipation did not undo.

RACISM + JIM CROW = 100 YEARS OF TERROR

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, abolished chattel slavery, was signed into law by President Lincoln. Even though Black people were technically free, it was not until the ratification of the 13th-15th amendments adopted between 1865-1870, five years following the Civil War that slavery full ended (Reynolds and Kendi). These laws restructured the US from a country that was “half slave and half free” to a nation where freedom existed for all people, not just those that were white.

Reconstruction provided hope to Black people, allowing them to obtain the privileges and rights of being an American. For the first time in 200 years, Black people were able to function and be recognized in society as fully human. Black people were able to run for political office, own land, serve on juries, vote, and marry. By the end of reconstruction in 1877, over 2000 Black men had served in offices from senators to ambassadors (Locke and Wright). The promise of Reconstruction was short-lived because primarily southern white Americans became increasingly opposed to the idea of Black social and political power (Reynolds and Kendi). The response from white people was to use law and state constitutional provision to empower the south and kick off a 100-year reign of terror on Black people.

The Jim Crow era (1876-1965) disenfranchised Black people through a set of laws referred to as the Black Codes and returned Black people to a subordinate position in society in order to maintained white supremacy and control over Black people lives (Reynolds and Kendi). Black people did could not serve on juries, run for political office, own firearms, had no voting rights or civil rights. Many of the Jim Crow laws were focused on creating segregation and keeping Black Americans from white schools, public transportation, entertainment, parks, restaurants, bathrooms, and even water fountains (Reynolds and Kendi 54). It would be almost 100 years before Black Americans would not enter the political field again and reclaim their human rights (Stefoff and Takaki 58-59).

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The Jim Crow era led the way for the rise of white terrorism. From the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to state-sanctioned violence, racism allowed Black lives to the threatened because of their race. Lynching became a regular part of life in the South after the Reconstruction period. From 1882 to 1968, 4743 people were lynched (“Lynching in America”), this included 3446 blacks and 1297 whites. The highest number of lynchings was in Mississippi, with 581 recorded lynchings (“Lynching in America”). Lynchings were used as a form of terror, to enforce Jim Crow and racial segregation and to keep Black people under control similar to how it was during slavery. The assault on Black people would continue until the 1960s with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights and Black Power movement built on the historical acts of, resistance and insurrection that would lead to human and civil rights. The Civil Rights era saw many different laws that ended segregation, provided voting rights, and began to diminished the power of the KKK. Black people were finally getting the freedom to thrive, and with the death of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, a new type of self-determination was created. “Black Power” was the rallying call for the pride, joy, and cultural identity people found in their Blackness.

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TOWARDS RACIAL RECKONING

The chants for Black Power was replaced with Black Lives Matter. 400 years later, Black people are still demanding justice, freedom, and rights. With the rise of social media, people have been able to record racial acts of violence that are predominantly aimed at Black people in America. Instances such as police officers abusing their power, and the assault of Black people have steadily increased over the years. However, Black people, have not been passive and have been very active politically and socially to bring focus and awareness to the problem and push for solutions. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Aubrey, and so many others, sparked a new movement to hold police and society accountable for their historical assault against Black people. Calls to defund the police were spoken across the country. Protests and insurrections began in many major cities and across the world. For the first time, there was an acknowledgment of the value of Black life. George Floyd’s death showcased Black people’s suffering similar to how Emmit Till’s death shocked America in 1955.

Racism in the present day is less tolerated than in previous times. Black people are still fighting for justice, but this time it seems different. Reparations were talked about in the presidential election, racism was deemed a public health issue and many people, places, and institutions require anti-racism training. Racism is a part of the public conversation in a way that it hasn’t been before. Racism, not race is seen as the problem, and the commitment to create a more just world keeps me hopeful that I can grow up as a young Black male in a different world that sees me as human and I can live my life to my fullest potential.

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fatehbaz · 3 years ago

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As early as 1700, Samuel Sewall, the renowned Boston judge and diarist, connected “the two most dominant moral questions of that moment: the rapid rise of the slave trade and the support of global piracy” in many American colonies [...]. In the course of the eighteenth century, three textual moments prepared the grounds for a major semantic shift in the trope of piracy in the Atlantic context, turning its primary connotations from exploration and adventure to slavery and exploitation. [...]

[A] large share of Atlantic seafaring took place in the service of the circum-Atlantic slave trade, serving European empire-building in the Americas.[...] [S]hips also became a popular literary topos for writers critiquing slavery. Ships have been cast as important sites of struggle and as symbols of escape in the context of a fledgling Black Atlantic consciousness, from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) and Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: or Memoir of Archy Moore (1836 [...]) to nineteenth century Atlantic abolitionist literature such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) or Martin Delany’s Blake (1859-1862). [...] Black and white abolitionists across the Atlantic world were imagining a different social order revolving around issues of resistance, liberty, (human) property, and (il)legality [...]. In the Black Atlantic context, the ocean, like the ship, similarly functions as an ambivalent, heterotopic site, “a trope marking the unruly space between the past memory [...] and the present reality of slavery in terms of active resistance” [...]. Furthermore, the moving ship, as a symbol, represents “the moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders” [...].

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During the slavery crisis of the mid-nineteenth century, piracy signified the criticality of legitimacy in the context of Black Atlantic literature.

Black Atlantic narratives responded to the crisis and voiced a critique of the triangular trade by turning the trope of the pirate as a figure of excessive consumption on its head. Using black pirates as figures of resistance to an exploitative system of enslavement and to the spectacle of colonial commodities, Maxwell Philip’s novel Emmanuel Appadocca (1854) emphasizes the nexus of insatiable material desire and its conditions of production: slavery. In addition, Black Atlantic narratives of piracy also turn upside down the traditional definition of the pirate as renouncing all ties and laws of nature [...]. [B]y appropriating claims to natural law as incompatible with a slave-based system, the pirate, paradoxically, becomes the outlaw defendant of laws of nature as opposed to legal law. [...] [T]he consumption of commodities produced by slave labor itself was delegitimized [...],.

In Emmanuel Appadocca, piracy is presented as a result of disenfranchisement on the one hand and as a source of empowerment and strength in the struggle against inequality and injustice - particularly against slavery and its consequences - on the other. In the novel, the pirate ship enacts a different sort of “imagined community” (Anderson {1983] 2006) than that of the nation-state, which excluded various groups of people due to its racist and classist colonial structures. [...]

One of the central discourses in Emmanuel Appadocca is that of legitimacy, of rights and lawfulness, of both slavery and piracy, focusing on the natural right to resistance [...]. About midway into the book, Appadocca gives a powerful speech in which he argues that colonialism itself is a piratical system:

If I am guilty of piracy, you, too [...]. [T]he whole of the civilized world turns, exists, and grows enormous on the licensed system of robbing and thieving [...]. The people which a convenient position ... first consolidated, developed, and enriched, ... sends forth its numerous and powerful ships to scour the seas, the penetrate into unknown regions, where discovering new and rich countries, they, in the name of civilization, first open an intercourse with the peaceful and contented inhabitants, next contrive to provoke a quarrel, which always terminates in a war that leaves them the conquerors and possessors of the land. ... [T]he straggling [...] portions of a certain race [...] are chosen. The coasts of the country on which nature has placed them, are immediately lined with ships of acquisitive voyagers, who kidnap and tear them away [...].

In this [...] analysis, slavery appears as a direct consequence of the colonial venture encompassing the entire “civilized world,” and “powerful ships” - the narrator refers to the slavers here - are this world’s empire builders. [...]

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The alleged violence of the Caribbean pirates [...] is of special significance in the context of the text’s discursive appropriation of piracy as a means of heterotopic resistance. [...] Moving from the Caribbean background toward the ocean in its setting, Philip’s novel inverts the significance of this Atlantic motif through the association of piracy with a rough [...] Robin Hood principle [...] by redistributing the wealth of the colonies. Piracy, for Philip, signifies a just rebellion, a private, legitimate war against colonial exploiters and economic inequality - he repeatedly invokes their solidarity as misfortunate outcasts [...]. That the pirate’s mobile, temporary home has to remain beyond the Caribbean shores is both evidence of an emergent counter-modernity informed by the Black Atlantic and the tragedy of Philip’s text. In the nineteenth century, the heterotope of the pirate ship thus helped Black Atlantic literature like Philip’s to give voice to subaltern subject positions and allowed for a discursive questioning of the dominant order, even though the design of a ‘more perfect’ place from the perspective of the oppressed remains unstable.

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All text above by: Alexandra Ganser. “Cultural Constructions of Piracy During the Crisis Over Slavery.” A chapter from Crisis and Legitimacy in the Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865. Published 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial #caribbean

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years ago

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COMPARE & CONTRAST: Birth Of A Nation vs Gone With The Wind vs The General

TRIGGER WARNING: Talking about race in American culture and movies, so some readers may want to brace themselves (looking at you, wypipo).

. . .

Confining “classic films” to movies that: Demonstrate technical expertise, and Influenced other films and creators

-- we have three (and only three) movies about the American Civil War we can safely put in the classic bin.

Before we go further, let’s restate the obvious: A film’s impact in the medium of motion pictures is separate from its impact on the culture as a whole.

Case in point: Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph Of The Will is a perfect textbook example of how to stage massive crowd scenes for maximum visual impact, and how to promote individuals and ideas in purely cinematic terms.

It also contributed mightily to the Nazis’ rise to power, their subsequent wars of conquest, and the deaths directly and indirectly of tens of millions of human beings.

It’s important to know The Triumph Of The Will exists and why it’s important in film and cultural and political history, but you need never subject yourself to its vile hate mongering.

With that in mind, let us proceed.

. . .

Here are the three bona fide classic movies about the American Civil War:

The Birth Of A Nation (1915)

Gone With The Wind (1939)

The General (1926)

They are all problematic for the same reason: They embrace the “lost cause” myth of Southern white supremacists.

The Birth Of A Nation is by far the worst offender of the trio, helping to restart the Ku Klux Klan and promulgate jim crow for decades to come.

Director D.W. Griffith was a Southern boy, Kentucky born with a father who served as a colonel in the Confederate army (Kentucky, a border slave state, tried to stay neutral at the beginning of the Civil War, then leaned heavily towards secession, but by 1862 threw its lot in with the Union).

Griffith bought into the lost cause myth heavily, and The Birth Of A Nation explicitly states African-Americans are fit only for slavery, becoming a murderous / rapacious mob once freed, and the Ku Klux Klan were gallant heroes attempting to turn this tide.

Griffith tries to have it both ways, depicting Abraham Lincoln as a thoughtful and compassionate leader who would have treated the South better had he survived (ignoring the fact Andrew Johnson did everything in his power to prevent the Union from holding the South accountable, and that Lincoln’s assassin was a Southerner who killed him in revenge after the war ended).

There can be no denying Griffith’s enormous talents as a film maker (again, separating thematic content from the technical expertise). While the Hollywood publicity machine was quick to claim The Birth Of A Nation was the first feature length film (i.e., 65 minutes or more), the truth is the Australians, the Chinese, the English, the French, the Italians, the Japanese, and the Russians all made feature films long before Griffith, and Griffith wasn’t even the first American to make a feature but was preceded by at least a half a dozen other film makers.

What Griffith was, however, was a master synthesis of all the techniques that preceded him. Griffith made movies better than anyone else of his era, and his best films are still eminently watchable to this day.

That’s what makes The Birth Of A Nation so harmful and destructive: Like the Riefenstahl film, it seduced common audiences into complacency while stirring the worst people to action.

It’s a film whose final cost is not measured in dollars but in innocent blood and tears.

Griffith wasn’t stupid, and while he might have felt personally immune to the criticism of his racist attitudes, he was savvy enough to recognize publicly embracing them would not serve his career well. He followed The Birth Of A Nation with Intolerance, an epic that jumps around in its story lines like a Tarantino film, and in later movies displayed a far gentler albeit still patronizing attitude towards African-Americans.

But the damage was done, the lost cause myth cemented into not just the Southern psyche but white America in general.

Like The Triumph Of The Will, I would never recommend The Birth Of A Nation as a “must see” film to anyone. If you’re a film historian and you want to subject yourself to this cancer, that’s your choice, but if you’re a student of film there’s nothing Griffith did technically or artistically in this movie that he didn’t do better in his later efforts, and other film makers have since emulated his innovations and built upon them.

. . .

For many decades Gone With The Wind was celebrated as the pinnacle of American film making, but once the romantic blinders were removed we see it for what it is: An over long, over blown epic that promulgates what we now recognize as white supremacy, classism, and rape culture.

And while it uses every technical trick in the book, it doesn’t use them as well as Orson Welles did a year later with Citizen Kane.

Gone With The Wind is really two movies: A well made Civil War epic and its lackluster Reconstruction sequel.

They should have ended the movie with “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” (Seriously. The only two memorable scenes in the second half other than “I don’t give a damn” both center around Scarlett O’Hara’s dresses.)

Again, let’s emphasize that a technically well made movie does not excuse bad intentions in thematic content.

Gone With The Wind is a rip-roaring bodice-ripping historical novel, admittedly well research and well written by Margaret Mitchell.

She isn’t necessarily writing from a conscious desire to spread the message of white supremacy, but as a Southern gal who grew up in the midst of the lost cause myth, she ends up breathing that message into every line of the book.

The movie version can’t escape that, nor does it try to. There’s a brief scene early on where both Mitchell and the later film makers prefigure the lost cause myth where Rhett Butler explains to the good ol’ boys at the Tara cotillion that they’re about to be brutally decimated by the Union in a war of attrition, but both author and film makers side with the good ol’ boys and support their God given right to throw away their lives and destroy their homes in an attempt to keep enslaving millions of innocent people.

That last part in bold never gets mentioned, does it? As others have observed, Gone With The Wind isn’t antagonistic towards African-Americans, rather it treats them as if they don’t exist other that walking / talking props among the scenery.

In that regard, Gone With The Wind is on par with The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (only with a far superior writing style). The protagonists of all three books are narcissistic sociopaths who will lie / cheat / steal / blow up buildings because the common folk -- the people who actually put in the grunt labor to make things work -- are nothing but slaves there for the elites’ entitlements, and God (or market forces, take your pick) help them if they ever raise their heads or voices -- much less their hands -- in protest.

Oh, but doesn’t it look gorgeous? As those beautiful rich Technicolor gowns and sets and matte paintings. All those balls and dances. All those smoldering looks. All those flames as Atlanta burns…

There’s the true hero of the story: William Tecumseh Sherman. The mofo cut the Confederacy in half, destroying lines of supply and communication, obliterating any rebels who dared to stand up to him, shortening the war by several months, and freeing tens of thousands of enslaved people in the process.

None of which would have been necessary if a few greedy bastards such as the O’Haras had lived Christian enough lives to say, “Y’know, maybe the way we’re treating these people is wrong…”

Gone With The Wind proved insanely popular, on a scale with The Birth Of A Nation a generation earlier, and once again it made it easier for mainstream middle American whites to turn a blind eye to injustices still being perpetuated on African-Americans of that day.

And it kept playing again and again, one of the very few non-Disney movies to enjoy a substantial re-release schedule, popping up about once every seven years in theaters until the arrival of first cable then VHS.

And it’s still popular, still a steady seller in DVD and BluRay.

That’s in no small part to the skill of both Mitchell and the film makers in hiding the most egregiously problematic elements of the story under a think patina of romanticism. It became a cultural touchstone that everyone knew and everyone could reference, from political cartoons to Carol Burnett skits.

But it’s still racist and white supremacist, saying African-Americans exist only to serve whites.

It’s still classist, saying not all whites are worthy of what the upper class hogs for itself.

It’s still about rape culture, saying all Scarlett needed was one good rape by Rhett Butler to set her straight.

Is it a product of its era?

Absolutely. The same way over the counter heroin at your friendly neighborhood drug store was a product of its era. The same way cocaine laced Coca-Cola was a product of its era.

Just because it wasn’t recognized as a bad idea then means we should still circulate it now.

Compared to The Birth Of A Nation, Gone With The Wind is a far less hate filled work, and one that inspires less immediate harm.

It has inspired harm over several generations by making it easy to overlook the real harm it represents in favor of a romantic antebellum fantasy.

If someone wants to see a film that represents the Hollywood studio system at the height of its creative power, I’d recommend Casablanca or The Wizard Of Oz.

I’d put Gone With The Wind way down on that list, and I’d caution it with caveats, but I would say it represents a good example of the old Hollywood system firing on all eight cylinders.

At least for the first half of the film.

. . .

In most ways, Buster Keaton’s The General is the least problematic of these three films.

In another, it’s as bad as Gone With The Wind.

The good thing about The General is that modern audiences can easily enjoy it.

Buster Keaton chasing after a stolen steam locomotive? What’s not to love?

It’s one of his best comedies and if it’s not the very best, I’d hate to live on the difference.

It certainly lacks the overt racism of The Birth Of A Nation.

In fact, it almost lacks any race at all.

And ironically, that’s what makes it a problem.

In researching this post, I re-watched The General, something I wasn’t willing to do for The Birth Of A Nation or Gone With The Wind.

I re-watched it looking for African-American faces anywhere in the film.

I think I found four.

Two porters lugging a trunk in an early scene at a train station, possibly two small children with their backs turned to the camera at the edge of a crowd about ten minutes later.

That’s it.

In a movie about one of the most crucial events in American history, an event entirely predicated on the issue of the enslavement of millions of African-Americans…that’s it.

Four faces.

Total screen time: Less than a minute.

If critics can justifiably lambast Gone With The Wind for sailing over the bloodied backs of millions of enslaved African-Americans to focus on the luxury liner S.S. Scarlett O’Hara, what can they say about a Civil War movie that almost succeeds in eradicating those enslaved humans from the story?

Paradoxically, this makes The General the safest of these movies to show an unsuspecting audience.

The Civil War is boiled down to the dark uniform army fighting the light uniform army; why they were fighting is never explored in detail.

But the lost cause myth was so prevalent at that point that Keaton and company didn’t need to discuss the causes of the war.

Audiences – even those completely ignorant of U.S. history -- automatically assume the light uniform army are the good guys simply because Buster is on their side.

Buster would never do anything bad, would he?

Of course not!

And so -- =poof!= -- millions of people erased from history.

Top that, Thanos.

To be honest, I don’t know how a modern audience should react to that, in particular an African-American audience.

Disappointment at being culturally short changed again?

Relief at being spared the most egregious stereotyping and white supremacy apologies?

Or just plain enjoy Buster chasing after a stolen locomotive?

The General’s cultural weightlessness helps it become a great film.

It’s a purely cinematic endeavor, with the intertitles used primarily to explain the spies’ and military leaders’ plans and motives, not tell us what Buster is thinking and doing.

For a guy called “the great stone face” Buster could be awfully expressive with his body language, and he needs title cards the least of all the performers in this movie

. . .

So where does that leave us, as a 21st century audience in a 21st century culture?

We can neither deny nor ignore the impact of these three films. Even The Birth Of A Nation, as vile and as hateful as it is, influenced the country and the countries attitudes for a century.

Gone With The Wind feels like something we’ve outgrown, something some audience members can look back on with fondness, but not anything we can fully embrace again.

The General can still make us laugh, and in this case the sin of omission seems far less than the others’ sins of commission.

Learn from the past.

Do better in the future.

#race relations #movies #art #cinema #morals #ethics #politics #Birth Of A Nation #Gone With The Wind #The General #DW Griffith #Buster Keaton

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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Describing Dashiell Hammett’s noir detective character The Continental Op, literary critic Steven Marcus inadvertently captures the reactionary. Both detective and reactionary emerge from profoundly disordered societies. Their gut tells them something is amiss, that their circumstances are fundamentally unsatisfying. Each finds himself waking up to a world of falsehoods, where natural inclinations are everywhere subverted, where human flourishing is derailed or destroyed, and where truth is buried under mounds of error. With little to nothing left to ‘conserve’, the reactionary becomes a deconstructionist, a detective, stripping away contemporary liberalism’s false legitimations.

There are several branches of reactionary thought, but most if not all share at the core an antipathy for the money-power, a sacral understanding of culture, affinity for hierarchy, and some degree of hero-worship. These threads persist regardless of any particular riffs or permutations. The reactionary, through churchism, nationalism, vitalism, traditionalism, or some combination thereof, struggles against liberal nihilism, the deracination of romantic visions and immaterial goods. In short, reaction rejects the myth of Progress.

…

Modern decadence rarely takes the form of lavish balls or orgiastic retreats. Instead, it is characterized by exhaustion, the desocialization of pleasure and thrill, anhedonia. Late cartographer of capitalism Mark Fisher describes the latter vividly as “the soft narcosis, the simstim eternity, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.” All forms of fulfillment eternally forestalled by gluttony, onanism, and the general inability to disconnect from our ever-present digital dopamine drip. Contemporary reaction, then, often originates as a backlash against passivity, consumerism, sterility, physical weakness, and all the other rotten fruits of disenchantment.

…

While it is no doubt true that many past eras surpassed our own in virtue, beauty, and spirituality, it is impossible to return to the same set of social, economic, and technological conditions that shaped the past. A Bushism summarizes the issue well: “I think we can agree, the past is over.” The challenge, then, is to fashion a society out of postmodern clay, in which natural virtues again flourish. The reactionary mind must attune itself to the particular ailments, conditions, and advantages of postmodernity.

…

Until very recently, this was an apt description of the Western world. But as liberalism works itself pure and intersectionality marches through the institutions, it also reintroduces the West to metanarrative. From the Enlightenment’s murder of myth, through to the Enlightenment’s death, we have arrived again at an era of myth. As the United States continues its transformation into an ideological state premised on gender gnosticism, anti-whiteness, and anti-nationalism, liberalism’s hyper-moralism becomes clearer.

Today, the West is returning to the political as such, to a state of polemos, the social warfare that punishes, purges, and partitions. Yet the regime’s tendency toward anarcho-tyranny, as well as postmodernity’s general liquidity and chaos, lends extra potency to reaction’s promises of order, beauty, and the sacrosanct. These developments are a great boon to reaction. Politicization is a preferable outcome for the reactionary, and one step closer to the outright conflict necessary to effect social rejuvenation.

…

With normalcy demonized at every turn, the West finds itself in another Prohibition era. The person who honors his ancestors, obeys God, and admires traditional mores participates in “collaborative illegality.” Societies of illegality, where day-to-day life becomes a radical state of affairs, are fertile ground for reaction. Confrontation is everywhere preferable to obfuscation. If, as detectives, reactionaries are emergent byproducts of decline, then we should expect them to proliferate as decline accelerates and the spirit of polemos enlarges.

…

The scuttled America First Caucus recently proclaimed America as “a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and decried mass migrations disruption and disintegration. The media backlash to the term ‘Ango-Saxon’ was both predictable and educational. America, as it was perceived by the Founders and most subsequent generations, no longer exists.

The Confederates are clarifying here. If we considered the United States as an Anglo-Saxon civilization, which incorporated other ethnic groups into this civilizational fabric, the Civil War was a tragic conflict between kin. If being American means identifying with a vacuous, chimeric liberalism, then the Civil War was an existential battle between the supposedly chthonic horror of racism and the ever-perfected march of reason. This is exactly how the ruling elite perceives the United States: a polity on an ideological mission to liberate the world, whatever form that liberation may take in each succeeding generation. America’s refusal or inability to recover a moderate and reasonable ethnos is nothing less than suicidal. If immigration continues and there is no American identity aside from vapid cosmopolitanism, the money-power will continue its disintegration and rulership over the United States.

A bleak portrait, perhaps. But so is a crime only halfway solved. As a detective continues his investigation, to be called on amid a crumbling society of illegality, so does the reactionary continue forward. He is often the fortunate benefactor of Providence, that sublime knife which eternally slips loose Gordian knots. The Gracchi brothers’ assassinations by the optimates and their mob paved the way for Caesar; Jacobin excess unwittingly opened Fontainebleau’s doors to Napoleon, and Europe’s midcentury dirge kept Iberia under reactionary rule until the third Christian millennium. If Buchanan began transforming American conservatives into reactionaries, and Trump made reaction politically viable — if even for a moment — we can reasonably hope reaction will maintain its historical relationship with decline, and be nourished by decay.

…

With that and all the above in mind, we may sketch a vision for an Occident shaped by reaction. As with reaction generally, it will be a romantic vision. After liberalism’s society of illegality inevitably buckles under its own weight, the regime’s simultaneous reaction emerges triumphant. The inevitable degeneration of republics into oligarchies reaches its climax: the ‘one and the many’, king and peasantry, president and people, triumph over ‘the few’, optimates, oligarchs, regime Brahmans, and the like. Porous borders are shut, capital is disciplined and reordered to serve national rather than global, financial interests. Liberalism’s atomization buffet is shut down for good, the policies and laws that annihilated the family are overturned, gender is reembodied, and voluntary infertility is a dwindling artifact, a bygone object of derision. The past, which Fisher calls “forever lost and forever insistent,” is insisted upon, and revitalized through new modes of government, old sacraments, and the erection of monuments that honor the past and promise the future.

If this sounds fanciful, it’s because it is. No clarion call to ‘build’ can make the path any straighter or the course any clearer. What reactionaries may take solace in, however, is the organic nature of human societies, the predictable decline and rejuvenation of civilization as superorganism, history’s countless overthrows and about-faces. When it happens, it will seem as if it couldn’t have happened any other way. Georges Sorel speaks to this through Vincent Garton’s translation, prophesying: “We would very much need a Mongol conquest to effect the rebirth of great art, today enslaved to the barbarian tastes of the plutocracy.” Accordingly, only terminal decline produces successful reaction.

A reactionary West will emerge from the same organic historical process that has carried reaction to power again and again: the Hamiltonian battle between, on one side, ‘the one and the many’, and on the other, ‘the few’, from revitalized conceptions of ethnos, thymos, and telos. In the vain hope of identifying and reestablishing a timeless and just social order, the Western Man today must dig through refuse and rubble and investigate the gleaming scraps and trinkets he finds underneath. He must do as the noir detective does — live within and struggle against the society of illegality, case by case, until there are no more crimes to be solved, no deconstruction and reconstruction to be undertaken. He must exist as something ‘natural’, beyond reason and beneath society, so that when the time comes, when Providence cuts the Gordian knot, he will be ready to lend his labor to monuments that honor the West’s past and promise its future.

#benjamin roberts #im1776 #read the whole thing

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kemetic-dreams · 5 years ago

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African not Black

Blackness Started in Slavery

We have to start this discussion in its most basic terms. Where do Black people originate from? Then if the answer is Africa, then what is the purpose of identifying with a color over our beautiful Motherland? We could end all discussions with just that simple sentence.

Black is a construction, which articulates a recent social-political reality of people of color (pigmented people). Black is not a racial family, an ethnic group or a super-ethnic group. Political blackness is thus not an identity but moreover a social-political consequence of a world which after colonialism and slavery existed in those color terms.

“white” depends for its stability on its negation, “black.” Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest– Fanon

The Invention of the White Race is a groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America. When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people, nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In his seminal two-volume work, Theodore W. Allen details the creation of the “white race” by the ruling class as a method of social control in response to labor unrest precipitated by Bacon’s Rebellion. By distinguishing European Americans from African Americans within the laboring class, white privileges enforced the myth of the white race through the years and has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over the entire working class.

In our modern era old identities split apart and reform along more self-determined line to recover what was lost after the impact of conquest and domination. We see The Gypsies are now to be called “Roma,” and the reindeer-herding Lapps of Northern Scandinavia are the “Saami.” Similarly, some now claim the Iroquois Indians should be called the “Haudenosaunee” and the Cherokee the “Tsalagi”

Africans have gone from Negro (Spanish for Black) to Black (English for Negro) what has changed? Only the language. An identity is generally geographical and ties the people to their native environment or their core doctrine (Jews of Judaism, Muslims of Islam, Chinese of China).

Very few Africans are actually Black in color, so where is the foundation of a Black people or black people coming from? It is how Africans were seen relative to the European people. So relative to the pales skin of Europeans and White Arabs the most dominant thing about African was relative skin color. Hence the exonym Black in the eyes of the “other.” It was not the land, not the African hair, but the relative color of a diverse skin pigment – that is rarely black in color. For Indians it is their land, for Chinese it is their land, for Jews it is their faith and a notion of Israel. Yet Condolezza Rice feels the best thing that describes her in American is blackness. And to some extent she is right, because there is nothing in her cultural, ethical, aesthetic, outlook that resembles the continent her ancestors came from. She has replaced Africa with America, and finally Africaness with dreams of the White ideal.

African and black are not interchangeable just as Dark continent and Africa are not. Self-determination allows a people to re-examine definitions and sculpt them to their reality. Black, like Negro is facing linguistic extinction, especially in academic circles, due to its poor foundation in speaking about the oldest and most diverse people on the planet. Notice today only two races go by color labels; The race with the most oppression and the ones inflicting that oppression. “I am black and proud” is a song, nothing else. It is the rhetoric necessary at the time to lift an oppressed people who only knew of themselves through the eyes of their oppressor. It has run its course and has expired.

Some have argued that African people chose “black” as an acceptable identity. The evidence is in all the books African-Americans write where the word “black” (lowercase) is used without care. But self-determination has a condition – full knowledge of self. And this is why we see the new Nig*er identity which by the same mass consensus process seems to be a valid new identity. And just like “black” it is again almost exclusively the world view of a minority African population living in America.

In Mauritania, the Haratin account for as much as 40% of the Mauritanian population. They are sometimes referred to as “Black Moors“, in contrast to Beidane. The Haratin are Arabic-speakers, and generally claim a Berber or Arab origin, which is contrasted against other African peoples in southern Mauritania (such as the Wolof and Fula people who have populations in Mauritania). The Haratine, consider themselves part of the Moorish community. But where it becomes problematic is because they are “darker” in color, they are assumed to be slaves brought from “black Africa.” So powerful is the theory of “two” Africa’s that reality is twisted to accommodate its validity. Every study is looking at Africa through the lens of “Black and White”, “slave and master.” It is therefore never considered that these “black” populations, like the Kanuri, who migrated South from North Africa, are native to the region. In a struggle to sustain colonial linguistics all forms of pseudo -anthropology is imposed on the African reality posing itself as mainstream studies.

Ethiopia never had a history of “Black” identity

Brief History : During the displacement of the African Holocaust people were disconnected from culture, language and identity, they went from Fulani, Hausa, Igbo to a relative color, aptly describing their status in European society– Black. Now stuck with this name, and with no agency, no conscious of self outside of the chains of the Holocaust, being black became a source of reactionary pride. (especially in the 60’s). This happened also because the involuntary Diaspora had a deep self-hatred for their African connection, and would prefer to be a empty color than connected to their Motherland–that was the dept of the self hatred. And this produced reactionary love because they had to be something, and they could not be European, so in the psyche reaffirming a negative name was in some sense a statement of ownership–a statement of being. In reality it was a statement of displacement and self-hatred.

The word “Black” has no historical or cultural association, it was a name born when Africans were broken down in to transferable labor units and transported as chattel to the Americas. The re-labeling of the Mandika, Fulani, Igbo, Asante, into one bland color label- black, was part of the greater process of absolute removal of African identity; a color epithet that Europe believed to be the lowest color on Earth, thus reflecting the social designation of African people in European psyche. When Africans, out of their own agency refer to themselves they do so with internal paradigms and self-affirmation. No where in Africa did Africans see the obvious, the natural skin color they had, as the most distinctive characteristic in defining them:

Zulu – People of the sky Khoi Khoi – King of men Numunuu (Native Americans) – The people Mediterranean — ” Our Sea” Senegal – “Our land” Navajo -“Diné” meaning “The People” Han-in (Korean: 한인; Hanja: 韓人; literally “great people”) Bantu – “human” {note}

In this history of Swahili the people called themselves “people” no color attached. Attaching color is only done to refer to “the other.” In Zulu Kingdom again we see no record of a self-reference to a “Black people” they called themselves “People of the Sky” until White people showed up and called them blacks. It is true the term Ethiopia in ancient times meant “burnt face” but the modern name Ethiopia is a name not a Greek word. And the critical thing is name verses descriptive terms. The same is true for Sudan.

ODD ETHNIC GROUP Sesame Street use to play a game called Which one is the odd one out. Can you spot which of all of these so-called Ethnic names is the odd one out:

East Asian (a place) Southeast Asian (a place) South Asian (a place) Black (a color) Hispanic/Latino (a language group tied to a place) Caucasian (a place) Middle Eastern (a place) Native American/First Nations (a place) Pacific Islander (a place) Arab (a place)

Linguistic evolution? COLORED – NEGRO – BLACK – AFRICAN-AMERICAN – NIG*ER

BLACK HISTORY

Black history is the history of enslavement; African history is the history of humanity. If there are no White people, could there be Black people? For over 100,000 years there were only native people of Africa on the planet, and since there were no “White” people there could not have been Black people, since everyone would have been “Black.” This is even more profound when you realize African people are the only truly native people of the place they inhabit—everyone else is at some point a settler.

Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity… To be called African-American has cultural integrity– Jesse Jackson

And if all the “White people” vanished from the Earth, would the remaining “Black” people still be Black? So the older group must define itself relative to the European newcomers? Would it not make far more logical, historically, linguistically, and social to describe people by their land of origin. Negro = Negroid = Colored = Nigger = Black (all associated with color none are connected to a continent). Now compare this to Asiatic, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid (all are tied to land, all can be located on a map— but not so Negroid/Black). Black and White are therefore debunked as regressive incomplete terms for describing people.

For all of recorded history we see in every conflict a central theme — that of “land.” So critical as humans need land to grow crops on, to source water from (see Golan Heights), they need a place to build cities and a place to harvest mineral wealth from. So attaching your identity to land makes sense: Attaching your identity to an abstract color, does not. Black and African are not interchangeable in any logical sense. African people claim an African origin and Africa as their Motherland. There is nothing in “blackness” that logically implies any claim to anything of value, except into bondage. All it tells the world is relative to the dominant race class these group of people are “black.” And in Africa it is even worse, because language wise no majority defines themselves against a minority. i.e. Sudan (Northern Sudan) is still Sudan, but Southern Sudan has to insert “South” for clarity. Holocaust, on its own, is assigned to the Jews, who do not insert “Jews” before Holocaust, since they are the first to use the term in its modern context. How can the majority in South Africa need to identify themselves as “black” relative to a “white” when they are a overwhelming majority and hence “the norm”?

And what is even more revealing is that Dutch settlers in South Africa branded themselves as Afrikaners laying claim to the land they conquered. Signifying in that naming process they were the native European tribe of of Africa (per Zuma). And yet Natives in South Africa still refer to themselves, with glee, as blacks.

It is amazing in our modern era that an entire nation of people, who are free to think and free to reflect– the oldest nation on the planet, the parents to every other people are confined by a name that reflects only their supposed skin color — and nothing else. Being “black people” is still today indelible fixed in Western lexicon (both African American and White), despite all the evidence contradictory such color-based terminologies and the profound work of Malcolm X and especially Richard B. Moore to favor African over Black, which would give a humanist representation of marginalized people. And the perplexing thing is general contentment and seeming inability to see the obvious menace in the term. Only two groups remain on Earth adhering to color labels; the most exploited people in the history of humanity (Black people), and their apex oppressors (White people).

True freedom is not only the right to vote, but the right to self-define and the right to interrogate definitions imposed and formulate new ones, which favor the African in any given political climate

If linguistically we reject the term.Sub-Saharan Africa then therefore there is no Sub-Saharan history or people; as distinct from North Africa. We then only have Africanpeople and a history of Africa

We must realize these are still colonial classifications like Middle East which have nothing to do with historical Africa. We cannot discuss a history of Africa in these colonial boxes which only served to humiliate and take away from the continent. The terms create paradigms which limit, rather than expand, reality. If there are a black or Black people then where do “black” people come form? Since Asians come from Asia, Indians from India (all makes perfect logically sense).

So where do Black people come from? Blackia, Negroland or Blackistan, following the obvious naming convention. What is the capital city of the Black home world? Black City or Blackatropolis? So if Africans do not come from these fictitious places and we find that so-called Black people come from Africa (at some time in our recent history) then why not just call them Africans? At best the term is redundant. So what is the purpose of Blackness? Especially in a world where identity and land are exclusively interlinked for every other people: Jews of Israeli, Palestinians of Palestine, Indians of India, Zulu of Zululand, Masai of the Masai Mara

Twenty-two million African-Americans – that’s what we are – Africans who are in America– Malcolm X

Blackness, is largely a Western or American exonym, in which all so-called Black cultures around the world are forced to fit into. As Americanism expanded so to did this notion of blackness, which is attached to the civil rights struggle and today to the urban cultures of the inner cities. However, It cannot be transplanted into ancient history to describe a people such as Ancient Ethiopia who had no cultural similarities to the modern African-Americans communities. Neither can “Blackness” be put in history to say the Ancient Egyptians were not Black because they did not share characteristics with a group of Africans Europeans chose to label as the archetypal Black population (black skin, thick lips and kinky hair). To do so creates connections and disconnections where there are none. So “Black culture” or “Blackness” cannot be imposed anywhere beyond the modern era. But we can say Cultures of Africa, in which Egypt and Ethiopia were part of that African world. Being African doesn’t mean we all dance to the same music and worship the same tree. So outside of the suggestiveness of “black” and “negro” words are necessary in creating new paradigms or we will always get stuck hearing “Well the Egyptians were not Black” because of a language issue or some other technicality. Far less objections could be raised if we just stuck to “The Egyptians were Africans“. Especially if we claim African as oppose to let it float.

The political question of contributions of modern day African people must be addressed and in this respect Ancient Egypt, Ancient Ethiopia were African civilizations, the same way Greece was an Ancient European civilization (it was located in modern Europe). But this argument is a political because we live in a racialized world which discredits a people’s worth by notions of racial origin and assumes black skin is too inferior to construct civilization.

There is an academic debate that the Ancient Egyptians called themselves Black based upon KMT (Kemet) which in some circles is translated as “Black people.” Now at the end of the word KMT is an ideogram which can only mean physical place

The ideogram indicates the context in which the word applies. An ideogram for humans would always be used to represent a word that applied to people. However Kemet can only mean Black Land since the ideogram indicates it is describing a built or non-human environment. They called themselves “remetch en Kemet”, which means the “People of the Black Land.” Where rmt means simple without any adjectives “the people,” the same way the Numunuu means “the people.”(the authentic people) And likewise Zulu means people of heaven.

Ancient Egypt is commonly referred to as ‘km.t’ , with the theorized reference to the black Nile Delta earth. The determinative O49 is used to designate the term for ‘country, inhabited/cultivated land’, called the niw.t (a political designate). It is a circle with a cross which represents a street, ‘town intersection”(Gardiner 2005 (1957): 498)

But none of this discredits the founders of Kemet as being African people, just like the Fulani or the Amhara. “Black” in the North American context. The “social “construction of race in America does not rely on skin color. “African Americans,” as even Asante notes, ” constitute the most heterogeneous group in the United States biologically, but perhaps one of the most homogeneous socially.”

BLACK AND THE 60’s

Indians are from India , Chinese from China . There is no country called Blackia or Blackistan and a people must respectful be tied to geography as skin color is not the primary definitive identifier.. Hence, the ancestry-nationality model is more respectful and accurate: African-American, African-British, African-Arabian, African-Brazilian, and African-Caribbean. And if Black people has some validity as a political term it can not be limited in its application to people of African decent. Nostalgia is not an accurate place for African linguistic self-determination, and blackness is blatantly a cultural inheritance of oppressed people. The pattern of acceptance of a black identity globally walks hand in hand with European cultural oppression.

Black pride is reactionary pride, necessary then, Irrelevant now. As we blossom into a greater historical and cultural awareness of a Motherland a detachment with fictional attachments to slave names must be challenged, and we must end the romance with things that are a disservice to our identity today.

It is worth noting parts of African that are culturally intact such as in Ethiopia, Mali, Somalia, Nigeria and Niger have absolutely no fondness or linguistic presence of a “black identity.”

New York Times | The term African-American has crept steadily into the nation’s vocabulary since 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks. ”It puts us in our proper historical context,” Mr. Jackson said then, adding in a recent interview that he still favored the term. ”Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.” Since 1989, the number of blacks using the term has steadily increased, polls show. In a survey that year conducted by ABC and The Washington Post, 66 percent said they preferred the term black, 22 preferred African-American, 10 percent liked both terms and 2 percent had no opinion. In 2000, the Census Bureau for the first time allowed respondents to check a box that carried the heading African-American next to the term black. In 2003, a poll by the same news organizations found that 48 percent of blacks preferred the term African-American, 35 percent favored black and 17 percent liked both terms.

BLACK-AFRICA IS A RACIST TERM

Nobody on this planet puts a adjective on their identity, especially when they are a majority, except African people. Black Africa, Dark Continent, Heart of Darkness all articulate the colonial contempt for a continent and its people. But how does one arrive at the term “black Africans,” are there green Africans? Would you speak of “yellow Chinese,” or “brown Indians”? Even terms like “White Russian” are unused, despite Russia being a multi-ethnic nation. Because 80% white means the majority have no need for adding White to their Russian to qualify against a minority of “other” Russians. [3] Globally the term ” Red Indian” is rejected as deeply pejorative yet “black African” is still used even in South Africa which is used to define the majority of the population against the minority so-called white-Africans. Black African is as ridiculous as “rock stone”, rocks are stones so why double up two realities which are often the same?

There is an infinite an inexhaustible list of examples which show that no one with power wears and adjective on their identity, especially when equal or a majority. The peninsula of Korea is called Chosŏn Pando (조선반도; 朝鮮半島) in North Korea and Han Bando (한반도; 韓半島) in South Korea based on the respective names of the two countries. (wikipedia)They both use “Korea” as part of their official English names. In other words North Korea does not say they are North Korean, as far as they are concerned they are the KOREA. The South does not waste time defining itself as South Korea, again, as far as their national pride is concerned they are just Korea. Both countries have equal political and cultural agency. So how is it possible for a continent whose overwhelming demographic, political, cultural majority is African, need to refer to themselves as black + African? And with the split of N. Sudan and S. Sudan it would be shocking to see if N. Sudan adds the term “North” to its national rhetoric, to clarify itself from its new southern neighbor.

There is only one reason the term Black African exists and that is to deny nobility from African people. To explain away how Egypt could be nested in Africa but at the same time divorced from the majority of the African people. Therefore the argument “yes it is in Africa, but it is not Black African.” It is almost like saying Greece was a European civilization, but not a White European civilization.

If 95% of Africans are “Black” (capital B, if it must be used) then the minority should bear the adjective–not the majority. It is disrespectful to describe Africans with a label based solely on a color, especially when it does not accurately reflect the physical appearance of most Africans. This is made even more offensive when the etymological root of that label (black) is derived from the word Negro, and is used in place of the word African as a racial or cultural identity. In reality we must ask ourselves what is the difference between “Negro” and “Black” save historical association, the words mean the same thing, so we have moved from being Black in Spanish (negro) to Black in English (black). It is strange that despite all the genetic research and advance human anthropology we are still clinging to primitive 18th century post-Darwin model of race, which sole aim was/is to segregate and de-culturalize and enslave.

The concept of a “black Africa ” is a Eurocentric term based upon their ignorant primitive regressive deductions. It is true Arabs and Greeks referred to Africans as “black” but this was not a racial label, and moreover Africans themselves did not self-apply these external labels. Like the Phoenician who were called the “red people,” but no Phoenician would have referred to themselves in this way.

CHILDREN DIS-IDENTIFY WITH BLACK

In a recent survey conducted by the African Holocaust society it was noted that young African children (approx 4-5 years old, the age of race consciousness) when told they were members of the “black race” reacted with great confusion because they were also being taught the names of colors. Most of them objected to being called black and said they were not black but rather brown. A repeated survey found that when they were told they were African they did not object to the logic (they were African because their ancestors were from the continent called Africa). Blackness is illogical and only exist by force conditioning of children. This case study is profound because it shows how logic and identify form before social concepts are enforced.

WHITE AFRICANS

It would be very strange if a European, after 200 years in China or India, could be so powerful to alter the definition of Chinese just to be accommodated. Linguistic accommodation is only possible in Africa because of the prevailing injustice of a post-colonial dominance of European settlers. It is clear some European funded African politicians backed it, but where did it originate from? It is interesting to note Europeans (including white Arabs) constitute around 10 million people verses the 800 million plus Africans. Now this negligible minority by way of social influence has caused the majority to need to refer to themselves with the adjective of “black” to separate themselves from a serious minority group who want to be “white Africans.”Minorities of Europeans live in China, in India and in Arabia yet only in Africa has linguistic accommodation been given. Africans now must make room for those settlers who want to identify with the continent for capitalist reasons. Because once you identify with a continent then you have a legitimate claim to its resources. Thus the saying and the philosophy of Garvey “Africa for the Africans” becomes usurped. In South Africa the new trend of “Black Economic Empowerment” has seen the broadening, opening up of the borders of blackness so to speak. Indians are economically classified as ‘black’, and recently Chinese have been included in this definition. So again we see the relationship between linguistics and economic profit.In the scramble for linguistic real estate, why would these descendants of European colonialist who devastated and exploited the continent want to be called African? And in terms of self-determination who introduced these concepts?Despite claiming “African” in name they are very conscious of Whiteness when propagating the White dominant image on the broadcast mediums they control. Being White is clearly obvious when it comes to the dilemma of ownership which is still tipped in their favor. When all of these White South Africans rush home to Europe (when Africa gets a little sticky) do they encounter job discrimination experienced by fellow African South Africans or even 3rd and 4th generation African-British? They integrate seamlessly into the social environment created by White privilege. Seems like with the Indian “Africans”, African is a jacket worn to suit an economic or political opportunity.Race was not only defined in the 18th century, in Aksum and Kemet African peoples have always identified with degrees of racial inclusion and exclusion. The arrogance of Whiteness is to assume they are responsible for every single point of view that has ever existed on this planet. All the while South Africa remains White dominant and unchallenged by people who are the most vocal White Africans. Interestingly if you examine their lifestyle, you will find them to be the most racial conservative personalities. They date and marry women of their specific race, they socialize in White circles, they engage a distinctive non-African culture. And if they do have a few token “Black” friends they are often culturally compromised aberrations the continent can produce. The injustices of White dominance and the legacy of that dominance are smooth over by fictional fantasies of non-returning colonial tourist who still impose their reality as the norm for everyone else. Moreover, in dealing with these issues they always select broad base arguments and never deal with the core issue of African self-determination and agency.

Africa, unlike “black,” is a name, not a adjective. You can get on a plane and visit it, you can find it on a Sat Nav, it has boundaries, governments, you can grow crops on it, and build a house on it. But some say, Africa was a foreign name given to us, if this is true, it was given to us by our contemporaries not our conquerors. However, the word has Berber Tunisian origins meaning ” A sunny place” – Ifriqiya .Romans appropriated this word from which it is believed the modern word Africa came about the describe the entire continent. In addition, Africa is a unique name of a place and Africans are simply people who are native to that place. And over the course of history different names such as Habesha and Takruri were used to refer to African people of various regions, Ethiopia and West Africa respectively. Also the word Moor has been used across the centuries but as critics have established, the term “Moor” was used interchangeably with such other ambiguous terms such as “Ethiopian,” “Negro,” and even “Indian” to designate a figure from different parts or the whole of Africa (or beyond) who was either black or Muslim, neither, or both.

Massey, in 1881, stated that Africa is derived from the Egyptian af-rui-ka, meaning "to turn toward the opening of the Ka." The Ka is the energetic double of every person and the "opening of the Ka" refers to a womb or birthplace. Africa would be, for the Egyptians, "the birthplace.

Human skin color ranges in variety from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. An individual's skin pigmentation is the result of genetics, being the product of both of the individual's biological parents' genetic makeup, and exposure to sun. In evolution, skin pigmentation in human beings evolved by a process of natural selection primarily to regulate the amount of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the skin, controlling its biochemical effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color

“You can’t hate the roots of the tree without ending up hating the tree. You can’t hate your origin without ending up hating yourself. You can’t hate the land, your motherland, the place that you come from, and we can’t hate Africa without ending up hating ourselves - Malcolm X

While in Ghana, Dr. King Jr. told then U.S. Vice President, Richard Nixon, who was also in attendance at the event’s festivities: “I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast is celebrating”.Dr. King Jr. also returned from his trip deeply inspired about the Pan-African movement and penned a sermon called “Birth of a New Nation”. In it, he educated others, especially African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, about Africa, then largely known as the “Dark Continent”. He highlighted various countries across the continent, including Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya, and Ghana and their plight. He used Ghana’s story to remind his brethren of the cost of freedom:“Ghana reminds us that freedom never comes on a silver platter. It’s never easy…Ghana reminds us of that. You better get ready to go to prison. When I looked out and saw the prime minister there with his prison cap on that night, that reminded me of that fact, that freedom never comes easy. It comes through hard labor and it comes through toil. It comes through hours of despair and disappointment.”2. In previously unreleased documents, it was discovered that Dr. King Jr. traveled to West Africa in 1960, this time, to attend the Inauguration of Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe in Lagos. He said the following about his trip to Nigeria:“I just returned from Africa a little more than a month ago and I had the opportunity to talk to most of the major leaders of the new independent countries of Africa and also leaders of countries that are moving toward independence. They are familiar with it and they are saying in no uncertain terms that racism and colonialism must go for they see the two are as based on the same principle, a sort of contempt for life, and a contempt for human personality.”

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