I love when African Americans tell ourselves that this is our land or birthright and that no one will run us from it.
That birthright was gained through pointless, thoughtless murder and theft of both Native American bodies as well as our own. This land, this birthright, is stolen, ruined goods.
The Native Americans have aboriginal moral title over this entire continent. The descendants of African slaves are just unwilling, alienated guests.
And we will never be secure in peace.
#Barbados celebrates an entire annual “Season of Emancipation” running from April 14 to August 23:
There was this one tweet saying something to the effect of “you ever wish that you were back in the Nazi era trying to fight the Nazis? Well, this is your time.”
No.
No I don’t.
Why would I be interested in fighting Nazis? Why would African-Americans be interested in fighting Nazis?
We’ve fought plantation owners and White supremacists alike for over 3 centuries. Right now, we’re fatigued, in pain (some of which is self-inflicted) and at the mercy of a White majority which is experiencing an angry contraction of the social contract.
I find it unacceptable that we have to be in this fight at all.
I was looking for Afrocentric education in charter and private schools and found this article:
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but those working within the field say African-centered schools peaked at around 400 in 1999, and have been on the decline ever since. When charter schools first emerged in the 1990s, some private school leaders decided to convert their African-centered institutions into charters, sacrificing their independent status in exchange for the increased financial stability that comes from receiving state and federal dollars.
Today, however, many Afrocentric charter schools are being shut down for poor academic performance and financial mismanagement.“The [charter] rules and regulations get worse and worse every year,” says Thompson, who opened up an Afrocentric charter in 1999—Roots Public Charter School—but didn’t close down her private school, as many others did. “First they lead you on and tell you can just do your thing. But that was a come-on, and every year they’ve got more bureaucratic red tape.”
Source: The Afrocentric Education Crisis
Trump’s rage on Chicago is the latest manifestation of conservative rage against Chicago’s gang violence.
The gang violence is largely concentrated in the predominantly-black Southside.
The Southside of Chicago has always been a destination for the working class.
The Irish working class settled there for low skill jobs, committed violence against each other in gang warfare and killed Black working class emigres in race riots because they competed for jobs. The Black working class of the Deep South migrated to the Southside for low skill jobs and committed violence against each other in gang warfare.
Guess which group had more ability to get out of that hood?
Guess who is still stuck in the Southside after the low skill jobs have left?
This desire for hamfisted martial law against the Southside will score him points among his White conservative supporters.
None of those supporters give a shit about what produces young Black men killing each other in the Southside. They want explosions.
Get out of the Southside while you still can.
My eyes roll into the back of my head….
I’d trade my “athletic ability for survival and also for reward” in for trans-oceanic economic and military power and the lack of a 2nd Amendment.
I’d trade in my “overall and general privilege to put blame elsewhere and be rewarded for playing the victim” in for a time machine to go back in time and find a way to stop European businessmen from buying our ancestors in West Africa.
I’d trade in “regional and national organizations for the advancement of Black People” for reparations.
I’d trade in “Black President” for a new U.S. Constitution which creates a parliamentary republic, a social contract that is much more empathetic to the less-advantaged classes of our society, and features contributions by (and for the equities of) people of color, women, LGBT people and the working class.
Unlike better-minded Euro-Americans, this person wants these things that we “have”. Please, let’s trade.
That hashtag based on a mistake by Yahoo Finance was saved by Black Twitter, but only Black Twitter can touch it with humorous pincers, like it’s a radioactive substance.
I think we’re damaged enough by our past exposure that it doesn’t hurt us as much when we hold it and treat it this way. In the hands of non-Black people, it’s either a nuclear fallout waiting to happen or a weapon of mass destruction to be used with extreme prejudice.
Most of the stuff under that hashtag are cultural references which relate specifically to the Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class experience. I volunteer that they are cultural references which non-Black people with more privilege would find objectionable or distasteful when done by their own people (e.g., “redneck culture” and it’s distaste among more privileged, urbane White people).
There are references to chitlins and collard greens as MREs! Why would non-Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class people celebrate that (IMHO) nasty-ass shit? That’s as real as it gets!
This is why the hashtag is heavily self-policed. For classist reasons, nobody really wants to esteem or positively support any of the contents of this hashtag in another culture.
“During the war years Spain sought, with considerable success, to divide Cubans along racial lines by portraying itself as the defender of white “civilization” and the rebels as black barbarians pursuing the goal of an Africanized, Haitianized Cuba. Once the rebels had been defeated, Spanish policy changed direction, making an open bid for Afro-Cuban support by gradually repealing the caste laws. Spanish officials did not act spontaneously but, rather, under pressure from a well-organized civil rights movement based in the social clubs, mutual aid societies, and civic organizations of the Afro-Cuban middle class. Under the leadership of journalist and political activist Juan Gaulberto Gomez, in 1887 these organizations formed an islandwide Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la Raza de Color to coordinate the civil rights struggle. Between 1878 and 1893 Afro-Cuban activists obtained government edicts outlawing restrictions on interracial marriage; segregation in public education and public services; and the keeping of official birth, death, and marriage records in volumes separated by race.”
—
Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000
By George Reid Andrews
#Cuba #AfroCubans
White Supremacists/Nationalists/Alt-Right folks LOVE to compare themselves and their plight to that of African-Americans in their demand for “ethno-states”. They devalue actual, living, breathing Euro-descended people in the process.
The thing is, if the slave trade hadn’t happened, if our African ancestors’ families were not forcibly broken up, would we even be describing ourselves as “Black” or even “African-American” in the first place?
We would have been Yoruba, or Asante, or Dahomean, or Kongo, or whatever other ethnicities we would have brought with us to the Americas. We would not have been put through such a genealogical ringer in which only the words “nigger”, “Negro” or “colored” matter in their description of one of a similar skin color.
Instead, our post-slavery ancestry is all we really have. Even the angriest Black Nationalist is doing a lot of (slipshod but well-meaning) compensation for what was taken from us in over 246 years of slavery on the North American continent.
What similar trauma troubles those who yearn for “White Pride Worldwide” or “A White Homeland for Ourselves and Our Children”?
What great historical, enduring cataclysm happened to Europeans or to people of European descent that would see a minority clamor for a militarized “safe space” in the 21st century?
Was it 9/11? Was it the refugee crisis ensuing, eventually, from Euro-American adventures in Iraq + the chaotic proxy war in Syria?
Or was it the Ashkenazi minority and their sufferings of Christian European hypocrisy over millennia? Even now, the genocidal resentment against Ashkenazi Jews among White Supremacists is just as rabid as it is senseless and unfounded in logic. “Show us where the big bad Jew hurt you.”
Nothing has been lost from White rule. It’s still a White Man’s world. It’s still a White Man’s country.
These White Supremacists – the National Policy Institute, for one – are acting like they’ve been losing so much ground for so long, and that Trump will gain back what they’ve imagined as losing.
But their imagined traumas simply don’t compare. And the pain they wish to inflict upon not only people of color but also other White people for flouting their ideals is unjustified and unjust.
To date, I’ve been able to find 8 major-party nominees of African descent for governor of a U.S. state, over the spread of 6 states:
Compare this to:
Not bad for two other ethnicities who were once considered non-white by White America.
But it’s emblematic of how adrift Democrats are at the moment in the South, and just how much we have failed in representing and accommodating one of the most and longest-politically-disadvantaged ethnic groups in this country.
