Donna wrote:Right. There's nothing incorrect about that statement if the word racism is being used in the academic sense. Although I will admit young people present it in provocative ways while being esoteric about its nuances, it's still ultimately your responsibility to shape your opinions according to expertise and specialized knowledge and not sensational internet videos of 20-year-old SJWs who are trying to trigger people like you.
No human being or ethnic group in the world is free of human culture. No one lives without culture. But what is African American culture? For me, they are the root of American born culture. Why? Did they come in chains Donna and as such? They had to commit to the USA and its land and the English language from the very beginning. They had no choice in terms of preserving an immigrant tradition. The cultures in the Americas that were stamped out had their language, food, customs, religion, knowledge, and history stripped from them.
And it was replaced with a new culture to model themselves after. African Americans literally had their names beat out of them when they first arrived. Not even their names they were allowed. So? How does a culture who has been turned into property for centuries? Recuperate from that? It is the story of human perseverance and resilience and spirit. It is a great story. The African American story. And well worth investing time and effort in understanding it, Donna.
Most African slaves Donna came from Western Africa. They came from specific tribes. In Cuba, they preserved their original chants in their original languages. For example, in Cuba, they still have songs in the original Yoruban language. Yoruba. Let me see if I can find that for you, Donna? Here is a good example. An 'orisha' is a god. In the West African tradition. Since in the Caribbean that spoke Spanish and French the drum was allowed and not interfered with the West Africans preserved their language in chants. Such as this one...if you examine it closely it is the base for the Cuban sound that is endemic to Cuban music called 'el son'.
African culture is an absolute beauty. The only ones who don't know that are people who never had to live in it or who never lived among African communities in the Americas and somehow think the African is primitive or inferior? By what measure? For me what I wrote long ago in a cultural thread? An African Queen with a club foot defeated the Roman armies of Marc Anthony of Rome...people have no idea about African history because the Eurocentric view is the only one presented as valid and true.
The Schomburg Library in the NY Public library system is large and has a lot of African history. It was ironically founded by a Puerto Rican. Arturo Schomburg. Here is the link? You can study all of the contributions to human history from the African continent and their descendants in the Americas there well. It is vast. Because what they have contributed is a lot. But like most people who are not European it is not studied in by ordinary Americans, etc because the narrative undermines what the stereotype is about. Got to combat ignorance with knowledge. Here:
https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburgIt is logical to see people as survivors of many thousands of years of challenges. To think they learn nothing and never impart knowledge to their children and that they don't love their families and their ways of life or their lands and their traditions? Is foolish.
Colonization destabilized traditional theaters, and demarcations and territories, the need for African resources created tremendous war, tension, and degrading circumstances based on European colonial rules. Many of them forced by a point of a gun.
African tribes have been part of great civilizations for centuries. They are mentioned in the Bible like the Nubians and many others.
In Europe, most of Europe never had educated people formally either til way late in its history. Most of humanity was illiterate. The USA did not have public schools teaching reading and writing until the 1920s consistently. Most people in the world were farmers and shepherds for centuries, in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Constantinople, and everywhere else.
To start thinking Africans in a big generic term? So not specific. Like what Africans truly are. That continent is ENORMOUS. It has every type of language and ethnic group. Zulus, Bantus, Lucumis, Mende, Kikuyu, Yoruba, the cities of Timbuktu, Ile Ife, Nairobi, Cairo, Capetown, Liberia (founded by African Americans as a back to Africa movement founded by Marcus Garvey a Jamaican American immigrant who organized African Americans...the Liberian flag looks like the USA early versions of the USA union flag.
Learn African history. Once you do the 'primitive' stuff goes down the tubes. You are dealing with the very essence of human civilization. The Cradle of all aspects of the homo sapiens species. The people who created geometry in the Nile and its rich delta, the savannahs, the jungles, the many aspects of adapting to a vast land and finding shelter, growing food, living with laws, political structures, finding a way of making a community respond to what is important...to live a meaningful human life. What were their values and why they chose those values? It almost always reflects the land it comes from...
The Orishas....they are out there...hiding behind the Virgin Mary and Saints of the Roman Catholics who also in Pagan Rome had polytheism with archetypes found in human civilization. Found in Greek myths. You see a lot of repeating patterns of need in human life. Human culture. HUMAN.
The ones who don't see their own ways and pasts in the Africans don't see they also have curled hands....curled when they rest...to grab a tree....in case while sleeping they don't fall off and die....white curled hands, black curled hands...Try to sleep Donna without in a resting position letting your hands curl. That past in African trees is not much removed from your modern self.
Your identity is yours. But your humanity is not in question. Neither are the Africans.