This one is for my African family and friends...yall know who yall are... This week I was quickly reminded (as I am quite often when I get too comfortable) my American blackness is often hated throughout the African diaspora, as an old friend attempted to tell me that we are foreigners, so we have values unlike them! I had to quickly remind him, that I am them and would be denying a big part of who I am if I didnt declare that. Besides, to make such false statements about a group of people without any analysis or understanding of anti-blackness and American racism is irresponsible and shameful...especially off youre an educator (this person is an educator)... We say “they have no African home training” but forget that Amadou Diallo was a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea who had only lived in New York for 3 years, when 19 of the 41 shots fired at him killed him. His African home training did not save him. We say “they are always fighting,” yet we forget that Abner Louima, a trained electrician from Haiti working as a security guard in Brooklyn, was breaking up a fight when he was assaulted, and sodomized by NYPD officers. My African people, blinded by an inexplicable superiority complex, fail to see that we are no different from African-Americans, whose ancestors (and our sisters and brothers) broke down walls of oppression and built roads to liberation, so that we African immigrants may enter this country on our own free will, not forcefully stuffed in the bottom of a boat. And because we did not sail 7,000+ miles in a ships’ hull, we think that we are exempt from racism, prejudice, injustice, harm and in more frequent cases than necessary, death, based solely on our Africanness. We believe that racism is and can be influenced by ones’ accents, affluence and accolades. We delude ourselves in thinking that the racist man only need take one look at the nice camouflage we’ve bought ourselves with our nice money, at the nice department store, in our nice neighborhood, and see that we are not like “those people.”
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 16:53:14 +0000
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