When it comes to discussing, or even thinking about, slavery, the great taboo of White folks is embodied in the question forever on their minds and almost never on their tongues, “Why are Blacks so ungrateful to be in America, when Africa is the worst place on the globe in terms of health, jobs, government, education, crime, climate, resources, blah, blah, blah?”They will go on to say, “sure, slavery was bad for your ancestors, but it ended a long time ago”. They will also say that racism may exist, “but it exist in Africa too, and much worse, with one tribe committing genocide on another”. In the days before political correctness, Whites were fond of telling Blacks that they should go back to Africa, if they don’t like it here. The implication was always that however bad Blacks think America is, it is worse in Africa.
Where White people got off track is in thinking and acting like Blacks are immigrants. “Go home”, has always been the retort for the disgruntled immigrant, and some even made the return trip. But the African ancestry that was forced here is mostly like those people who stayed behind in Europe, China, India, etc. – meaning they are not immigrant-minded. So why did Black people stay here? Out of those that could have returned, they stayed mostly out of spite, and certainly not because anyone offered them a shot at the American Dream. This was the grand screw-up of US leadership before, during, and after the Civil War.
Fast-forward - if Black people could ever find a reason to want to be here, because of the relative opportunity, instead of being here to simply piss-off White people, a lot of the problems of the day would disappear. And ditto, if White people could ever accept responsibility for post-slavery abuse, without pretending to handover the keys to the kingdom, or other counter-productive acts of contrition.
The paradox is that Blacks cannot make Whites miserable about the past and what followed, without assuring their own adjacent misery, and Whites cannot make amends by only pretending to consider Blacks capable and deserving of a fair shot. So we are all miserable together down the crapper.
James C. Collier
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Technorati Tags: The Great Slavery Debate: Ungrateful Negroes, Atlantic Slave Trade, Marcus Garvey, Immigrant, Africa, Acting White
9 comments:
Anonymous said...
Boy, I hate it when people refer to Africa like the worst place to live...
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It surely seems that it's not a great place to live for the majority of its inhabitants. Of course it's possible for some people to happily live there. I had a great time in Africa. But i could see lots and lots of people in the streets and on tv/books for whom life was hell. l
Also, african people apparently kill each other with great enthusiasm. Dont you listen to the news ? don't tell me it's fabricated. Violence is everywhere. Robberies routinely end up in orgies of killing where kids aren't spared. A congolese friend was telling me that In Kinshasa, there's an estimated 25 murders every day. Don't know where he got the number ( it seems very high) but the point is that blood flows freely over there. Don't try to steal fruit at the market. You could easily end up barbecued right there on the spot. There is widespread slavery, particularly of children. And I'm not even getting into the whole human sacrifice thing.
Instead of hating those who tell the bad news about africa, why don't you hate that state of things instead ?
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.... Racism is about treated people differently only because the colour of their skin is different from yours.
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racism has to do with differences not only in appearances between people but most importantly in culture , behaviour and values and quite simply, ethnicity. Your definition of racism is childlike.
anonymous said :
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... in Sub-Saharan Africa, they don't kill each other based on their physical features.
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It's not *BECAUSE* of the physical feature that people fight. They fight for all kinds of reasons, and physical features often help identifying the enemy.
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Yeah, I heard about Rwanda and Burundi, 2 of the smallest countries on the continent, which aren't representative of the rest of the continent. ...
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They're exagerated versions of other countries. More ethnic hatred, more densely overpopulated. More atrocities against civilians. More religious. More fertile.
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2. Instead of resting your lower body on your couch and supposedly try to learn anything about Africa through your TV set, why don't you actually try to speak to the African people you may come across and ask them about their countries?
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You know what ? A lot of africans are grossly, horribly ignorant about their own countries. And even more so about african countries outside of their own country. I just want you to understand that someone who's well educated and who reads and watches high quality books and tv can become quite knowledgeable about, say, africa. In my case, I not only read and watched a lot about it but I actually lived there for years. Having lived there is good but not 100% necessary though. Smart people can figure things out from 2nd hand experience too.
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Seriously, some parts of America are no different from some of Africa and it isn't because of the colour of skin of the population living in the area.
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That's funny. I bet that those parts of the USA that remind you of africa are places like rural missisipi or louisiana or georgia. Gee I wonder who lives there.
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3. As an African woman, I am always taken aback by the jumble of rubbish, some people candidly spit in my face. What is more painful or hilarious, is that those people are convinced that whatever is saying is gospel-truth because a) they're non-African so they know better than me and b) they're white.
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Just because you don't like it doesn't make it garbage.What you don't realize is that it's perfectly possible for some of those white non africans to know better than you. I'm not a kenyan but a few years ago in the office i watched a Kenyan woman explain to coworkers that Swahili was basically an arabic language with a few africn words here and there. I'm not even Kenyan or east-african but I know, through books and Tv , that Swahili (or Kiswahili if you prefer) is a bantu language with a lot of arabic vocabulary. Not the same thing at all.
Another time I , north american black, revealed to a morroccan berber that the neolithic natives of the canary islands were berbers too. He had never heard about that though he thought himself educated about his country's history.
The moral of the story : foreigners, white or black, CAN be very well informed about your country and continent if they care about the subject. And a whole lot of native africans know almost nothing about their place of birth.
Neutral phony
If it's blacks who will become irrelevant when all the others intermarry then why is it that white conservatives are the most strident and vociferous in their opposition to immigration?
@uptownsteve
white conservatives only like to blame illegal aliens to stay in power which is nothing but politics really but that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm trying to say.
no point getting mad at me - Hispanics intermarriage rates are at 35%..which is 2nd only to asian intermarriage rates to white is 45%.
what i'm trying to say is instead of dwelling on the past, you guys need to band together like hornets(give other racial groups the middle finger if need be)and start building your hive to survive because your voice get drowned out by the other groups and politicians will wonder why they have to cater to you guys.
BTW - I'm no phony, I'm a real asian :)
@ogunsiron
My definition of racism is not childlike. You seem to be one of those people who use a word out of their original meaning just like the people who call Hispanics an ethnicity and equates being homophobic to being racist.
I won't waste my time answering the rest of non-sense you state because you have one Congolese friend who gave him statistics about his war-torn country, while other countries on the continent don't face what's going on in DRC (I just assume he was from DRC and not from the other Congo). By the way, what are the stats for murder rates in the US again?
Last but least: the point is instead of focusing your time spreading bad news about Africa, as if it was impossible to have good things happening there and that people living there are just bunch of cursed walking-failures, you should maybe look at what's going on in your own country. You're so stupid, so infatuated with yourself and so arrogant that you can't even see the fact that Africa being always depicted in bad light in news, never for the good things that may happen there, have skewed people's views of that continent. I guess you don't know how prejudices are formed.
So I'm sticking to my point: I hate people, and let me be more precise, I hate presumptuous ignoramus like you, who jumps to conclusions and wants to lecture people about what? The heaven-sent revelation that you were told about what should be done about Africa.
You can't teach me absolutely nothing about my continent: I grew up there, went to public schools there, work now in international criminal law areas so basically I daily deal with shitty reports from NGO about mass-rapes and so and so.
I know you speak French so this last part is just to make sure we understand each other perfectly: au lieu d'être un trou du cul de donneur de leçon qui pense que toute personne qui dit que c'est facile de tirer à boulets rouges sur l'Afrique est un con qui n'a rien compris, regarde-toi dans la glace parce que c'est toi le con acculturé, qui pense que de brosser un tableau absolument noir et faux du continent, arrange la perception et le respect que les gens ont pour les Africains. Bounty à 2 balles, va!
@Ogunsiron
Seem that there was a glitch with my former answer so don't even know if it's gonna be posted. However, in the meantime, had the time to google your pseudo cause I was wondering if you were from Nigeria or Benin and guess what, I came across, from some of your well-informed messages on Grioo.
It seems that you're one of those very young African men (although boys is suitable) who think that they set the world on fire.
Won't waste much time with you but learn, if you don't know, that at the differences of some other cultures where books are not judged by their covers, it's the case in North America. This is to say that if Africa's always depicted like a continent inhabited by a bunch of good-for-nothing people, well, any African man or woman will be seen like that before he or she opens his or her mouth, and that also mean you. Maybe you should read more reports on prejudices and racial discrimination to understand how it works. Oh, you should also take some classes about debates to know that it's fairly common to ward off criticisms from oneself by pointing out someone else's shortcomings. So if some (uninformed) white people tell some African-American that they should be happy to live in America because Africa sucks, it's called diversion. You live in Canada, I won't explain to you why aboriginal people are still considered as sub-human by most of people because of the images which have been conveyed for ages, about them. Dwell on that instead of depicting realities you can't teach nothing about them to me!
A piece of advice for you: Why don't you go back to Benin, spend some times with the elder people of your village or whatever place you're from, and then come back and talk like an insightful man because you still smell breast milk?
So much stupidity in the above 3 anonymous posts... almost everything written is 180 degrees ass-backwards incorrect.
"By the way, what are the stats for murder rates in the US again?"
"people living there are just bunch of cursed walking-failures, you should maybe look at what's going on in your own country"
Do you really want to compare African countries to the USA? That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that blacks who have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into a parallel reality would suggest that others need to get "educated" to appreciate their laughably false worldview. Only a full-time lifelong brainwashing campaign could produce someone so ill-informed.
I've read the deranged ramblings of white nationalist conspiracy theorists who blame Jews for every bad hair day of the past two millenia, so I can sympathize with how JCC must feel when he reads this insane garbage. You have the patience of a saint for allowing such discourse on your blog, Mr. Collier.
were from Nigeria or Benin and guess what, I came across, from some of your well-informed messages on Grioo.
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My nickname is a tribute to the Yoruba god of War and Iron. Iron will and strength. Suits me well.My ethnicity is Haitian.
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... well, any African man or woman will be seen like that before he or she opens his or her mouth, and that also mean you.
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I don't usually have a problem because when i open my mouth it's obvious that one is dealing with a smart man. On the other hand, i find it completely reasonable that a person not knowing me might think that i share many caracteristics of my race and ethnic group. That's not ALWaYS true but that is VERY OFTEN true of people so i don't blame anyone for using stereotypes. Stereotypes exist for a very good reason !
yeah i know that sounds shocking to you but you see, I thankfully wasn't immersed in leftist/marxist/tiersmondiste/Fanon-iste propaganda all my life.
And yeah i know i can be very arrogant. So what ? My leftist adversaries like you are often very arrogant but unlike me they're foolishly arrogant since they're wrong and I'm not.
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Maybe you should read more reports on prejudices and racial discrimination to understand how it works.
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Your work on discrimination and rpejudice is just pseudo science and pseudo scholarship. I have better things to do with my time than to read on critical race theory, critical postolonial mumbo jumbo "theory", satre's insane rantings, fanon's misguided foolishness and all that bullshit.
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Oh, you should also take some classes about debates to know that it's fairly common to ward off criticisms from oneself by pointing out someone else's shortcomings.
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Then what do you call africans like you
who will not engage in any form of criticism at all ? Who instead of trying to look at their own problems an shortcoming point to "racism" and "discrimination" ?
Once again : What about africans like you who never have a word of self criticism but who instead only believe in being absurdly defensive and in blaming whites ?
You know why don't post in places like grioo anymore ? I had enough of africans and blacks like me always focusing on freaking "racism" and "discrimination". After a few years of that neverending charade I had enough and this is pretty much the only black blog where I post.
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So if some (uninformed) white people tell some African-American that they should be happy to live in America because Africa sucks, it's called diversion.
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Lol .
It doesn't stop it from being 100% true.
ANd africans agree too ! That's why you have people dying to stay in so called "racist" countries like France instead of living at home. Reality shows that africans living in the west think they are lucky.
Diversion ? lol ! Laughable, despicable marxo-trotsko-psychoanalytic GARBAGE !
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You live in Canada, I won't explain to you why aboriginal people are still considered as sub-human by most of people because of the images which have been conveyed for ages, about them.
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I don't need the media to tell me how ravaged the natives are in Canada. I can see it, read about it and reason about it. I actually feel bad for them. But ultimately they will need to do the work on their own communities.
You're so predictable with that bullshit about how the media this , the media that ..
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Dwell on that instead of depicting realities you can't teach nothing about them to me!
A piece of advice for you: Why don't you go back to Benin, spend some times with the elder people of your village or whatever place you're from, and then come back and talk like an insightful man because you still smell breast milk?
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You think because they're old they necessarily know what's going on ? You've never heard of old fools ?
The black race's future lies in the hands of the young sould who will have the courage to face the real problems and to adress them.
Ce ne seront certainement pas des gens comme toi. Toi, du moment qu'on fustige le "racisme" et la "discrimination" t'es contente. Moi je reve d'un monde noir ou on se foutra a 100% du racisme parce qu'on sera une race solide et respectee pour les bonnes raisons et non parce que faut respecter les plus faibles et autres conneries marxisto-chretiennes.
Moi je reve de pays noirs riches et puissants et toi tu reves de "diversité" et surement "métissage". C"est tres a la mode parmi les noirs en europe ces temps cis.
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