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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.
--
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.
- toac
my 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!
9 comments:
Oh - I didn't comment, I thought I commented . . . and now I can't remember what I was going to comment . . . DRAT!!! Yes - I understand the race unto ourselves thing very well - I counted it up once - I have over 8 racial/ethnic/national mixes in me. (And no - that wasn't what I originally intended to comment on)
Interesting discussion.
Interesting and tricky. Because I don't think this issue has a clear
cut answer...it's not black or white (pardon my word choice).
What I've taken from this discussion, is that you find some
frustration with ppl who claim ties to a culture/country/continent
that they are pretty far removed from - even if their skin colour
indicates linage hailing from there.
Basically...calling yourself African-Canadian (or sthg similar)...
when perhaps your roots there are dated way too far back to have
records of it.
So does that mean that one should not be considered a child of a
culture, or land, that isn't an immediate presence in their life?
Maybe not.
While I'm sure a black Canadian, American or West Indian would find
they have many differences from a black African, there often will
still be an association that ppl will make of black ppl to Africa.
Many ppl can't tell if you're Guyanese, Trini, Haitian, Grenada...
but they know at one point - black ppl originated from Africa.
In order to avoid offense in perhaps mistaking one's
heritage...blanket terms are used. Can't tell if someone is Koren,
Chinese or Vietnamese? Use East Asian or Oriental.
Serbian, Croatian or Lithuanian? Call them European.
Indian, Sri Lankan, or Bangladeshi? South Asian. And so on.
You may say - but I'm clearly not those other things... ppl need to
learn the difference.
That would be nice, but many ppl haven't - sometimes even being b/c
they just haven't had the opportunity.
So we get PC and use generalizations.
Then you suddenly become an ambassador for a place you might not
accurately represent, b/c ppl expect you to know about the place they
think you, or your family might be from.
And since ppl identify you as that...you start identifying yourself as
that. And then a fondness or sense of attachment and pride develops...
ppl who look like you and share the same ancestors have things
happening in their lives - you might find yourself feeling involved
even though it really has nothing to do with you, you life or your
family...
So i think the issue stems from a few things then. Ppl taking offense
at being improperly identified, people feeling then- the need to be
overly PC in order to avoid offending, and our need for labeling.
Are you Toac the Guyanese? Guyanese-Canadian? African-Guyanese-
Canadian? African-Indo-West Indian-Canadian?
How can someone be sure what to call you?
Why not just S-----?
by not claiming africa, you are in fact, becoming just like white north americans who claim this land as their own. they see themselves as truly canadian (ignoring, of course, that they are immigrants and took this land from the natives who settled this land first). so to ignore africa is to embrace postcolonial settler culture. yes, we are guyanese. but only third generation (on mom's side) and second generation (on dad's). the real guyanese you meet in the jungle.
so are we halfricans? not in a strict sense of the made-up term, but we should not disregard africa or india lest we become like these damn canadians who know not from whence they came and have subsequently claimed this land as theirs, ignoring those who Godself put here first.
africa may not claim us, or welcome us with open arms, but you can hear her voice in our stories of anasie and taste her in the cassava we eat. i'm just saying.
argumentatively yours,
gm
Hm. I don't know how if I feel about the way you do regarding those "dam Canadians". In fact, i think i definitely don't feel the way you do.
For some people, where they came from is not as important, as where they are, or where they identify with. My parents hail from the west indies, my ancestors South Asia... but mentality and life stlye wise - I'm Canadian. Some countries have a ethnicity attached to their identification - generally Chinese ppl, or ppl from China - are Chinese. But is an Indian blooded person from China Chinese? They ARE someone from China... however they likely would be identified as Indian, even if eveything about them was more similar to the lifestyle of the Chinese ppl around them. So then is calling them Indian right? Is calling them Chinese wrong? Do they have to choose between their ancestry and their upbringing?
I def see your point about identifying with where your blood originates... but i think it should really be up to the individual to choose whether or not they want to attach anything to themselves.
excellent discussion.
i do not deny any part of my ancestry but just as it is important to "remember" my unknown african roots it is just as important to remember my traceable, touchable indian roots and to not give more weight to any particular part of my past and heritage because to simply identify myself with one is to not give due recognition to the others. the others which have had a more profound and recent impact on who i am today.
none of which are more important than to the two places which birthed and raised me.
thanks for all the input. ya'll feel free to keep hashing it out.
if nothing else this debate has shown how fallible and pointless a construct race really is if two people with the exact same racial makeup cannot even agree.
Were you a part of that "embrace our race" t-shirt thing?
I think you were...
I still have my T-shirt.
I love your posts. this is the first time I've visited. thought provoking. I'll be back.
Let's revisit this for one minute. The yellow/white/brown people next door, especially those ones in the Caribbean share a culture that is unmistakably Caribbean. And that Caribbean culture is tied to Africa in a way that cannot be denied. So, yes, I recognize that I can't hop on a plane back to Ethiopia or Somalia and blend in with the locals, even though I look like them... But I can see the similarities between their dance, language, movement, etc and ours. Why? Because we are linked. And I don't have any problem celebrating that link.
Very late to respond...
but I think this post actually supports the counter argument as well.
You might hop on a plane and head to africa... but truly, you wouldn't really look like those locals mentioned. You may look more like them than some of your current neighbors in Canada, but I think in heading back to Africa, you'd see just how non-African you are. That doesn't make you NOT connected to Africa... it just might also show that while you are similar... you are also still very different.
But I totally agree with your closing - there should be no issue in celebrating your connection, if you want to.
I just think there should also be no issue not celebrating it, should you not.
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