The Rift between Africans and the diaspora

not too long ago this post came across my dash on tumblr. you can read my response at the very bottom, so i won't repeat it. i mainly wanted to talk about the rift that exists and hopefully some solutions to building bridges and make amends.

i've spoken about this before in another post, and every time it gets brought up, i can feel hostility and pain on both sides. it is such a touchy subject that i have to remove myself from it at times because too many emotions arise from just speaking about my reality and my personal identity.

but it's become more and more evident to me that if we are to survive in this world, there has to be unity between us. ultimately, amongst all people of color, but we have to start in our own communities. i don't think it was a coincidence that the American revolutionaries that reached out to Africa or other diasporic communities have been swiftly assassinated, jailed, or considered the most dangerous by their respective governments. Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, etc. when detrimental links are shown between American (US) consumers and government, it is almost always silenced in some fashion because unity between us would mean unfathomable change on every level.

once we become unified and our struggles intertwined, there will be no mission that is unachievable.

so here are some ideas i've gathered from reading the views from those born on the continent and those that weren't that i think will aid in the bridge for both sides:

For Africans from the Diaspora:

Learn: it is a wonder just how little i knew about Africa last year, and the year before that, and before i read this one book or got linked with that blog. our system is sustained by our ignorance, so why would our public education have more than 2 pages on the entire continent of Africa?

go to the travel section and pick up books about Africa to get a basic feel (although, note, most of these books are written by white people who have their own experience in Africa that may or may not be based on their status as tourists/voluntourists).

the internet IS YOUR FRIEND. there is no excuse to not know about Africa, people from the continent, and various cultures within it. i have learned an immense amount of information from friends i've linked with through the internet, African blogs i've followed, and people i've met in person that have been very helpful. here are some blogs and websites about and from people from Africa:

• The AfroFuturist Affair
• Dreams-From-My-Father
• Valrain
• African Style
• Daughter of the Soil - from Nigeria
• Fuck Yeah Black History
• Nok-Ind
• The Ase Fountain
• Kilele
• Monochromatic Black - Nigerian American
• Black Acrylic - from Uganda
• Obia, the Third - from Nigeria
• Dynamic Africa
• blogs recommended from Fuck Yeah Africa
• Eccentric Yoruba - from Nigeria
• Afri-Love
• Africa Style Daily
• Afroklectic
• MsAfropolitan
• Pop Africana
• African Proverbs on Twitter
• Africa is a Country
• That African Girl - from Togo
• B Sama

Mingle: find out about African clubs, restaurants, organizations, and stores in your area. shop there, chit chat there, become facebook friends, etc.

Read: get some books and read your ass off. there are a number of fiction books from authors like Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, and Chinua Achebe that write about experiences in different African cultures. Chinweizu Ibekwe, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John S. Mbiti, Cheik Anta Diop, and Ifi Amadiume are non-fiction writers that should be looked into as well. aside from books, read up on the history of different nations and colonialism. read about apartheid in South Africa, the Blood Diamond trade in West and Central Africa. read about respected leaders like Thomas Sankara, Patrice Emery Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah and leaders that have aided in the destruction of their country like Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor. and don't forget the revolutionaries such as Leymah Gbowee, Steven Biko, and Queen Nzinga. wikipedia does a great job of having a good amount of info about a country, its population, language, etc. all in one place.

Watch: Ousmane Sembene, one of my favorite filmakers from Senegal, has done a number of films about West African culture. search 'Africa' on netlfix (Lumumba is awesome!), youtube, vimeo, and Google Videos. there are a number of Nollywood flicks on youtube in full. watch them and ask some people you've become acquainted with any questions you may have.

Important to note: everything you read about and hear through the news is not always reality and that you must interact with the people in order to get their reality. no one else can tell their story. it is also imperative that you understand that Africa is a gigantic continent with an immense amount of diversity. what is true for someone in West Africa is not necessarily true for those in the Horn of Africa. even within the same country - Igbo is something separate from Ijaw and Yoruba.

classism and political rifts exist within African communities as well and those with money and political standing do not have the same reality as those without.

also, and most importantly for those trying to reconnect, understand that those living on the continent are not waiting for us to come back so that they can embrace us and have a period of mourning for our destructed history. they have their own lives and may not even know, let alone understand, those of us that wish desperately to return and reconnect. it isn't good or bad, it simply is what it is. this is something we have to understand and move on (something i'm still trying to do...).

For Africans from the Continent:

Learn: from what i've heard, most Africans know a lot about the US and even television shows from the US are aired in a number of African countries. those shows tell about the lives of rich/middle class white America. many African immigrants come to the US with stereotypes about Black Americans birthed from these diluted and edited media outlets.

the US is not a land of milk and honey where we all have money, good education, and equal access to prestige and power. racism, classism, and sexism are thriving in the US at this point and have since its conception. these media outlets and television shows will never show you the dozens of Black males the police have murdered, the Black and Brown women that have been forcibly sterilized or the number of Black people who are working 2+ jobs and still can't pay their bills. and it damn sure won't tell you about our history of lynching, genocide, and the systematic dehumanization of people of color. not just of Blacks in the US but of Native Americans and immigrants of color.

here are some blogs and websites of people from the diaspora that speak about our realities:

• Waheed Photo Archive
• AfroDiaspores
• Aikura
• Colorful Diaspora
• Stark Reality
• The Runaway Slave
• Red for Gender - focus on gender in the Caribbean
• Crunk Feminist Collective
• Soul Eyes - Ghana via Canada
• Yearning for Unity
• Tembo Nzuri
• Imsoblackimbright
• Guerillamamamedicine - American in Egypt
• The New Black Woman
• Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind
• Reparations for Enslavement and the Blackside of Things
• Futuristically Ancient
• Shadow and Act: Cinema from the Diaspora
• Abagond
• The Nu Black

Mingle: as much as you can. this may have to be done via the internet, but it's mingling nonetheless.

Read: there are a ton of books written about Black experiences in the US and other diasporic communities. writers in the US like Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and James Baldwin, and Stacey-Ann Chin are just a few. unfortunately, i cannot name any other writers off the top of my head from the Caribbean or South/Central America, so feel free to add to the list or do a simple google search. books that speak about our histories can be found from writers like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Fredrick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. and if these books are not available, google searches with yield just as much information.

Watch: watch films about slavery so you know what they did to us and why we are still recovering. i would suggest staying clear of most news outlets because they tend to focus on and even exaggerate negative aspects of us as a people. there are a number of contemporary films you can watch to see Black life in the US (like Precious), but almost all of these films come along with baggage so it is important to read the criticisms in addition.

Important to note: in turn, as your realities are not the same across the continent, nor is ours. i am from the southern US middle-class background in a small rural military community. this is not the same for someone raised in an urban lower-class (financially) background in Northern US. not everyone is rich in the US, regardless of what they tell you on the news. most of us live in debt up to our eyeballs acquired from college. public education may be better than some places around the globe, but there still exists a hierarchy in which rich white kids have better resources and opportunities than Black and Brown children living in largely colored communities.

i cannot speak of the other diasporic communities, but if you come to the US, understand that you are Black. you will probably get special treatment from whites that like to fetishize you or look at you through a pitying eye ("the poor malnourished, uneducated, savage African that just needs a pair of TOMS shoes and a check from UNICEF..."), but otherwise, you are Black and will be looked at the same way those of us born here are seen. that being, if you're male-a criminal/rapist and is you're female-an emasculating bitch best used as a sex object. all of these can be usurped depending on your level of assimilation, of course. this whole mess about i'm not Black, i'm Somali, i'm Igbo...ain't happening in THIS country. it is true, but once you step in this country, the color of your skin is most important. most people in this country could not tell you whether "Igbo" is a people from West Africa, or a city in Jamaica. and frankly, most don't care. so understand that you may spend ridiculous amounts of energy and time on foolish questions and categories Americans may try to force you into.

also, regarding those that want to reconnect with you, your culture, your country, etc. (note that it is not all of us...not even most...unfortunately) please understand that this is vital to some of us. there is a lot we simply do not know and/or have yet to understand about you or your particular culture. be patient, please. but don't be afraid to set us straight about misunderstandings.

comment. think. criticize. feel free to add to my list if you like.

Negro?

i was watching Channel 12 Brooklyn News today, and they reported that some people were upset about the inclusion in the 2010 census of the word "Negro" (see the story here). the 2010 census uses the term interchangably with "African American" and "Black". it said that some individuals find it offensive and would like it to be removed from the questionaire.

i found this interesting. the name we as blacks wish to call ourselves has gone through many changes in our attempts at self-discovery, and in those changes, we've come to view certain labels as offensive, outdated, and some to be fitting. it seems like we've become aware in more recent times that some terms we used to call ourselves were simply names that were given to us by whites. it wasn't what we wanted to call ourselves or what we identified ourselves as. i think many a times we take offense to words like "negro" and "colored" because of negative associations we have with it. for example, none of the people i knew prior to...the last year used the term "colored", and no one i know uses the term "negro" (not in a positive or neutral light anyway...). so the only times i've heard those terms were in movies showing the racial tensions of early America and in text books highlighting the same time period..and usually they were coming from the mouths of racists. or i've heard them from older whites in my hometown community. so, naturally, i wouldn't use the term myself, but would i get offended at the term? i would say it depends on the context.

in this context, for me, i don't find the term offensive. it has no negative definition such as the term "nigger", so i find it to be an indifferent word that we just associate negatively. however, when an older white person uses the term when they're describing young boys they think want to rob, stab, and kill them just because they have on hooded sweatshirts...then it becomes offensive. but it has to do with the context, and the individual using the word, and not necessarily the word itself.

at one point, we were called negroes and niggers, then we were colored, then afro-americans, then african-americans, and more recently, we're black. but which, if any of these terms (with the exception of the obvious..) is the best to describe us...or is it just one? why exactly is the term "negro" outdated? has it always been offensive? is it meant to be offensive? even if it isn't meant to be offensive, is it?

Dictionary.com defines the term as such:
"1. Anthropology. a member of the peoples traditionally classified as the Negro race, esp. those who originate in sub-Saharan Africa: no longer in technical use.
–adjective
2. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of one of the traditional racial divisions of humankind, generally marked by brown to black skin pigmentation, dark eyes, and woolly or crisp hair and including esp. the indigenous peoples of Africa south of the Sahara.
3. being a member of the black peoples of humankind, esp. those who originate in sub-Saharan Africa."

the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language on the same website defined it as this:
"n. pl. Ne·groes Often Offensive
A Black person. See Usage Note at black.
A member of the Negroid race. Not in scientific use"

the online Etymology Dictionary said this about the origin and history of the word:
"Negro
member of a black-skinned race of Africa," 1555, from Sp. or Port. negro "black," from L. nigrum (nom. niger) "black," of unknown origin. Use with a capital N- became general early 20c. (e.g. 1930 in "New York Times" stylebook) in ref. to U.S. citizens of African descent, but because of its perceived association with white-imposed attitudes and roles the word was ousted late 1960s in this sense by Black (q.v.)."

here's what Malcolm X had to say about the term:
"when you have no knowledge if your history, you're just another animal; in fact, you're a Negro; something thats nothing. the only black man on earth who is called a negro is one who has no knowledge of his history. the only black man in earth who i called a negro is one who doesn't know where he came from. thats the one in america. they don't call Africans negroes.
why, i had a white man tell me the other day, "he's not a negro." here the man was black as night, and the white man told me, "he's not a negro. he's an african." i said "well, listen to him." i knew he wasn't, but i wanted to pull old whitey out, you know. but it shows you thaty they know this. you ate negro because you don't know who you are, you don't knoe what you are, you don't know where you are, and you don't know how you got here. but as soon as you wake up and find out the positive answer to all these things, you cease being a negro. you become somebody."

these were the photos that popped up when i typed the word "negro" into google image search.




comment. think. discuss. comment.

Malcolm X quotes

i read the book By Any Means Necessary by Malcolm X a month or so ago and its one of the most insightful books i've ever read. it is a compilation book of his speeches, interviews, radio broadcasts, NOI meetings and rallies.
i think its necessary for everyone to read reread and take heed at Malcolm's words because he seems to be misunderstood by many people who haven't read his actual words. in a political forum i was on a while, there was a discussion about him, and there were accusations of him being pro-violence, angry, and anti-white. even now, i think many people find it easier to identify with Martin Luther King Jr's path and not Malcolm's mainly because of these accusations.
he wasn't ant-white, he was pro-black. he was not violent, he simply understood the need for self-defense and did not sugarcoat the need for it. and yes, actually, he may have been angry. anyone who knew/knows the reality of the situation for being black in America should have also been angry. i think that anger is quintessential for change. and specifically for the black struggle in America, i think anger was/is fundamental; a prerequisite. bell hooks talks about having a rage that is more than justified against the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal country we live in in Killing Rage...a book i highly recommend. although, i must say that the Buddha raises a good polemic against violence, in favor or pacifism....
anywho...here's excerpts i found most insightful and relevant to the cause:

Spellman: what is your attitude toward Christian Ghandian groups?
malcolm: Christian? Ghandian? i don't go for anything thats nonviolent and turn-the-other-cheekish. i don't see how any revolution-i've never heard of a nonviolent revolution or a revolution that was brought about by turning the other cheek, and so i believe that it is a crime for anyone to teach a person who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. if this is what the christian-ghandian philosophy teached, then it is criminal-a criminal philosophy.
spellman: what is the program for acheiving your goals of separation?
malcolm: a better word to use that separation is independence. this word "separation" is misused. the thirteen colonies separated from England but they called it Declaration of Independence; they don't call it the Declaration of Separation, they call it the Declaration of Independence. when you're independent of someone you can separate from them. if you can't separate from them it means you're not independent of them. so what was your question?
spellman: what is your program for achieving your goals in independence?
malcolm: when the black man in this country awakens, becomes intellectually mature and able to think for himself, you will then see that the only way he will becomes independent and recongnized as a human being, he has to have what they have and he has to be doing for himself what others are doing for themselves. so the first step is to awaken him to this, and that is where the religion of Islam makes him morally more able to rise above the evils and the vices of an immoral society. and the political, economic, and social philosophy of black nationalism instills within him the racial dignity and the incentive and the confidence that he needs to stand on his own feet and take a stand for himself.


"Revolution is like a forest fire, it burns everything in its path. the people who are involved in a revolution don't become a part of the system-they destroy the system, they change the system. the genuine word for revolution is Umwaelzung which means a complete overturning and a complete change, and the negro revolution is no revolution. because it condemns the system and then asks the system that it has condemned to accept them into their system. that is not a revolution- a revolution changes the system, it destroys the system and replaces it with a better one."

"there can be no white-black solidarity until theres first some black solidarity. we have got to get our problems solved first..."



"it is we who have fought your battles for you, and have picked your cotton for you. we built this house that you're living in. it was our labor that built this house. you sat beneath the old cotton tree telling us how long to work or how hard to work, but it was our labor, our sweat and our blood that made this country what it is, and we're the only ones who haven't benefited from it. all we're saying today is, its payday-retroactive."


"no white person would go about fighting for freedom in the same manner that he has helped me and you to fight for our freedom.no, none of them would. when it comes to black freedom, then the white man freedom-rides and sits in, he's nonviolent, he sings "we shall overcome" and all that stuff. but when the property of the white man himself is threatened, he's not nonviolent. he's only nonviolent when he's on your side. but when he's on his side he loses all that patience and nonviolence...Our people aren't going to wait ten years. if this house is a house of freedom and justice and equality for all, if thats what it is, then lets have it. and if we can't all have it, then none of us will have it."

"i'm not bloodthirsty. i'm one of 22 million black people in this country who's tired of being the victim of hypocrisy by a country that supposedly practices democracy."

"prior to one hundred years ago, they didn't need tricks. they had chains. and they needed the chains because you and i hadn't yet been brainwashed thoroughly enough to submit to their brutal acts of violence submissively. prior to a hundred years ago, you has men like Nat Turner, that Brother Benjamin was talking about, and others, Toussaint L'Overture. none of them would submit to slavery. they'd fight back by any means necessary. and it was only after the spirit of the black man was completely broken and his desire to be a man was completely destroyed, then they has to use different tricks. they just took the physical chains from his ankles and put them on his mind."

"we don't organize any black man to be a democrat or a republican because both of them have sold us out."

"...the oppressed never uses the same yardstick as the oppressor."

"question 22: the first guy that was shot at the moment of the Independence War was a negro.
malcolm: he wasn't shot for negroes. he was shot for america. i don't want to take away from Crispus Attucks, but he was shot. he was a slave. his people were slaves.
question 23: he was a slave perhaps, but not on his knees-on his feet.
malcolm: sir, you can take a dog...and sic him on somebody else and he's fearless. i'd like to give you an example. no matter how fearless a dog is, you catch him out on the street, stamp your foot; he'll run because you're only threatening him. his master has never trained him how to defend himself; but that same dog, if you walk through the master's gate, will growl and bite. why will he growl and bite over there and not growl and bite over here? over here he's growling and biting for the defense of his master and the benefit of his master, but when his only interests are threatened, he has no growl. nto only Crispus Attucks, but many of us in America have died defending America. we defend our master. we're the most violent soldiers America has when she sends us to Korea or to the South Pacific or to Saigon, but when our mothers and our own property are being attacked we're nonviolent. Crispus Attucks laid down his life for America, but would he have laid down his life to stop the white man in America from enslaving black people?"