it is not because i am desperate for blog material that i post this. this topic has been, and will continue to be a point of debate between my sisters and I since moving to Canada when we (or at least I) first realized that people, even the people in my immediate family, are different colours and more importantly that it matters to people.
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And as a halfrican, I'd like to wish you all a Happy Negro-Appreciation Month!"
g.m.and so it began...again
you are not a halfrican friend. which one of your family members can you trace back to africa? shoot, do you even know the lineage of your great grandfolks? your embrace of a continent that neither fathered, mothered nor grandparented you is appalling.
consider yourself disowned.
your almost dougla-ish sister
toac
~melodramatic since 1984
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as i said to your two canadian-born sisters: how do you think black people got to the caribbean? they took a boat ride. from where? AF-REE-KAH. so half of my ancestors comes from where? AF-REE-KAH.
give us us free.
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as a true halfrican, i find your logic weak... though you are darker than me
mamabear
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I'm not sure that darkness proves anything. For approximately ten days every June I'm darker than the mango, and I'm pretty sure I'm not even a sixteenthrican. Or anything like it.
j.a.
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j.a. you will be hearing this argument for the rest of our lives and then on into eternity. and i am not arguing that people came from africa. i'm sure people are still coming from africa. but you're family didn't come from africa, especially half of it. all you know is some dark skinned people met some light skinned people and made babies.
toac
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If it helps you sleep at night,I can call myself a Halfro-Indo-Caribbean. But I don't really know why you are arguing that black people didn't come to the Caribbean via Africa. Because that's where all the original black people came from . And I know that since the year 1619 you didn't have to be from Africa to be black thanks to a little thing called the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
So I'm not fronting that I am from Africa. But half of my traceable peeps came off of some slave ship or another.
And just to be clear,the other half took the same ships across the Atlantic from India as indentured servants. Too bad there is no Indian History Month so I can have an excuse to blog about Imperialism at length.
Post-colonially yours,
gm
g.mango
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How come you are not bragging on the Dutch blood?
mamabear
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The Dutch peeps are Dutch by culture and also came to the other side by slave ship, too.
g.mango
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to rehash the discussion we had yesterday for those interested, and so as not to seem like i am accepting g.m's lame-ass argument:
caribbean blacks are descendant of Africans. not arguing that, that's like denying the holocaust- simple fact.
my argument is purely mathematical. your ancestors are so mixed- even your "black" self professed "ni**a" grandmother is not all black so MATHEMATICALLY speaking if you add it all up you are sadly not half black and definitely not half african. frankly g.m. you're more indian than anything else deary. but labels are pointless and race is as inconsistent and socially constructed as any other so call yourself what you want. i will call myself "s-----".
btw, ever notice that your moniker can also be interpreted as "genetically modified"? yeah. it's true.
- toacmy sisters and i find ourselves in an interesting position wherein we are a race unto ourselves. not that it is impossible to recreate our particular racial combination nor is it impossible that there are other people with our exact melange but as it now stands we are the only ones of our "kind".
finding ourselves in this interesting non-category or within the statistical category of "other" I always find myself asking the same question, "why align yourself with a group of people with whom you share no real connection with other than
something so meaningless that it changes depending on nothing more than exposure to the sun?". seriously. why?
put a black-american or caribbean black in africa and you'll find they have far less in common with their "brothers" than the white/brown/yellow kid in the house next to them.
race and culture are both socially constructed, it's true but, culture is more than skin deep. culture can grow, expand and make room for others and other ideas. culture reflects the vastness and creativity of the human mind. "race", on the other hand is a result of narrow mindedness proliferated by the need to subjugate and remain subjugated.
but these are the musings of a short, brownish, guyanese-canadian double expat living in heterogenous korea, what do i know of race and culture?
holla!
