Quote: Duchess of Brooklyn: Idk why Black people love claiming folks. Lupita is not Black. Neither is Chiwetel. Nor Steve McQueen Lupita Nyong’o’s Black is a Shared Experience (A Contentious Relationship with African-Americans) I am Trinidadian. That is my nationality. In the segregational considerations of that country, I am, more specifically, Afro-Trinidadian, but the color of my skin says that I am black, and that is an indomitable fact. I’ve been in New York City now for four years, and although I had been here and in other parts of the United States frequently before that, the things you feel when living somewhere are different than the those you feel while visiting. In those four years, few things rival the friction and contention that I have with the African-American populace and their engagement of the race issue. In an unexpected fallout in the hours following the wins of Lupita Nyong’o and 12 Years a Slave, that friction reached a tipping point. A series of tweets, illustrative of the congregation of stupidity that often occurs on Twitter, voiced the opinions of some African-Americans that actress, Lupita Nyong’o, actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and director, Steve McQueen were not theirs to “claim”. In an effort to be consciously objective, I will say that there is some relevance in her tweet. There are cultural idiosyncrasies that affect the forms that racism takes, and consequently, the effects that racism has on the subjects of a particular culture. Structural racism, for example, is dependent on the country in focus and its history. Subsequently, the psychological effects of structural racism differ across nationalities. Learned helplessness differs across blacks according to where they have undergone their culturally, morally and ethically developmental years. So, the reality is that I understand the desire to separate oneself from others, culturally. I, like many other Caribbean people that migrate to the USA for a variety of purposes, often explicitly and subliminally distinguish myself from the African-American populace. This is an observation that is often made of Africans that migrate here as well. From the end of the migrator, it is often a dual-layered reason - pride in one’s home country and dissatisfaction with components of the local intra-black culture. My dissatisfaction is not meant as an affront to any African-American. Aside from the fact that I’ve met many good people while I’ve been here, I’ve also gained a better first-hand understanding of the structural factors that influence the way that so many think. The truth is, however, that there are just a variety of things that I cannot agree with, condone or endorse - from what I perceive to be too frequently playing the race card, to destructive interactions between black men and black women and the way that black men here approach and speak to women. Still, we cannot fail to differentiate between internal perceptions and external perceptions. We do not always get to successfully project the way in which we want to be perceived. Regardless of how one feels the situation should be, the actuality says that we are all black. That is how the white perceiver will view us. We don’t get to stop the racist in the street, the subway or the office and tell him, “Hey, I’m from Kenya by the way, not America. My descendants didn’t go through the slave experience, so please judge me differently”. It simply does not work that way. The Grandmaster of Calypso, Kitchener, said it himself - “if you not white, you considered black”. Now, Lupita Nyong’o has received a slew of support and love, especially from the black female community in the recent month and a half, and it’s easy to see why. She’s a beautiful woman. She’s a beautiful dark-skinned women. Personally, she is not very attractive to me (making the distinction between a perception of beauty and a state of attractiveness, I believe that attraction is much more subjective), but that has absolutely nothing to do with her skin color. Spurred on, or irked by the support that Lupita has received from the black female community, the members (regrettably) of the black male community have shown their colorism in excessive numbers (indeed, even if it were just one, one is one too many)... ~ Stanza One (Read more: stanzaone.royalty-club/post/78640019330/lupita-nyongos-black-is-a-shared-experience-a)
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 08:43:44 +0000
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