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njmcgee
Unregistered guest
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 08:21 pm: | 
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I found this story interesting, but I don't quite get the correlation between Live 8 and Phily teaching African History in their schools. One side says help Africa, the other side says US Blacks need to help themselves before we can help others. Personally, I think if we don't find a way to embrace each other, the African race is doomed around the world.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=638&ncid=638&e=4&u=/nm/20050630/en_nm/ group_liveans_dc_2
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Kola
Moderator
Username: Kola
Post Number: 1867
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 08:52 pm: |
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I agree with you njmcgee.
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Roxie
Newbie Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 3
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 10:05 pm: |
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I used to think the same thing a few weeks ago. |
Kola
Moderator
Username: Kola
Post Number: 1869
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 10:34 pm: |
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Well, my point was that we can do ALL (help ourselves AND others) at the same time---and that we have to for the "African race" to survive as Njmgee stated.
Then again, I am starting to agree that of all the groups on earth---African Americans (in a secret place) HATE "Africans" the worst of all. I did not think that until the last few years, being a writer and traveling the country and really paying attention to where these people are "going".
Because I had been raised by a very "afrocentric" AA family----I mistakenly thought that people like Malcolm and Sonia Sanchez were the "majority"----but after a few years dealing with the NATION, I find that it's the opposite. Most AAs are very conservative and (at heart) are not interested in remaining under any conditions that hold them back---which is what "blackness" does in this country. They see themselves as "butterflies"---people who are DESTINED to become mixed and harmonious with this idyllic Pan-world identity. And they tend to see people in Africa as "the past"/Regressive/backwards......or as "Exotics", just as WHITES view blacks.
Not everyone, certainly---but it's not like in Africa where the people have a CORE IDENTITY TO PROTECT that is based (mainly) on having the historical characteristics of ones tribe (all the tribes together being the bloodberry). AAs don't were never ALLOWED to develop that through "language" and "clothing" and "customs", etc.
I truly love Black American people---because they are me and I am them.
I agree with M
Njcgree
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3752
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 11:57 pm: |
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Kola,
I think Africa is as much to blame for what you describe as African Americans.
Were Africa organized/unified to compete with the other continents, it would be much more DIFFICULT for AA, Whites, Asians, etc. to harbor the biases against Africa. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1271
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, July 01, 2005 - 10:37 am: |
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Abm:
Even as the Greeks lay supine under the heel of the Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans in turn, they despised them as barbarians.
All the while China was torn apart and raped by the British, Americans, Japanese and Russians, they despised them all as barbarians.
Have you ever heard this story? Black man goes up to white man and asks him the time. "I don't know, nigger." the white man says. Black man kicks his ass. "You still a nigger!" White man says. Black man kicks his ass again. "You still a nigger!" White man says. Black man kicks his ass again. "You STILL a nigger!" the white man says.
If there is one thing Kola has been right about--and there are many--it is that you develop your own self image and the hell with what anybody thinks long as they don't put their hands on you
(Did I get it right, Queen?) |
Kola
Moderator
Username: Kola
Post Number: 1872
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, July 01, 2005 - 11:27 am: |
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King Chris---yes. LAWD 'a mercy!!! LOL
One thing, though, that I can't say enough is how "PROUD" I am of Black Americans. To me, they are Africans. I think they are the greatest culture we had from 1940-1970. They are truly beautiful and triumphant and they keep hope alive for ALL of us who are black.
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3759
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 02, 2005 - 01:13 am: |
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Chris,
I was responding to Kola's complaining about what AA's think of Africa. I agree that Africans should do what's good for Africa dayam everybody else.
The question is, though, whether/when/can they actually DO that. |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 563
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 02, 2005 - 08:25 am: |
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Lenny's perspective (Also Russel's):
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/sns-ap-live-8-black-artists,0,732834. story?coll=sns-ap-music-headlines |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3767
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 02, 2005 - 09:48 am: |
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'Vette,
Beyonce makes some very revelant point here:
"Beyonce agrees that more education about Africa is needed -- not only for black musicians, but for people in general.
"People don't really have access to see what's going on over there. That's why it's important for someone to bring the awareness and that's why we're happy to do that and to start that," she said of Destiny's Child's involvement in Live 8. "I don't think it's an African-American (problem); I think it's an American thing because of the news. Maybe that's why, I don't know. Or maybe we're just spoiled."
I think it unfair to imply hip-hoppers are any less charitable than other artists. I imagine many of them are MORE generous than their non-Black peers. But since they themselves typically come from blighted, impoverished communities, they're likely more inclined to focus their giving within where they come from.
And I don't think h-h should feel compel to participate in what's essentially a massive PR stunt for faded rock stars. |
Roxie
Newbie Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 4
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 03, 2005 - 08:37 pm: |
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Kola:--AAs don't were never ALLOWED to develop that through "language" and "clothing" and "customs", etc.--
You know, that's what always depressed me as achild. Every non-black kid in my community had a language and dress that defined their cultural identity but AA's had none. Instead the AA's around me pretended by borrowing West African Attire, mixing it up,and passing it off as our own. I remember one of my mother's female friends sported a man's attire and didn't know it while a girl at my school called hers "a Dashiki from Kenya" (like saying you have a Kimono from China). But as I look back on it now it was kinda pathetic.
....and in the earlier post I meant that I used to believe that we had to help ourselves first but I now realize that blacks must understand africa before they understand where their own culture originates. Love for Africa will lead to a more authentic love for African Americans. |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 577
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 05, 2005 - 01:33 pm: |
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More history lesson and context relevant to this discussion: http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6937
...At least the tsunami was an authentic natural disaster, even though the relief effort may have been put to a wide range of political uses. But Ethiopia in 1985 was a very different case. There the famine was the product of three elements, only one of which could be described as a natural event—a two-year long drought across the Sahel sub-region. The other two contributing factors were entirely man-made. The first was the dislocation imposed by the wars being waged by the central government in Addis Ababa against both Eritrean guerrillas and the Tigrean People's Liberation Front. The second, and by far the most serious, was a forced agricultural collectivisation policy pursued with seemingly limitless ruthlessness by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his colleagues in the Dergue (committee) who had overthrown emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 (and officially adopted communism as their creed in 1984). This collectivisation was every bit the equal in its radicalism to the policies Stalin pursued in the Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.
...This is not to say that the Ethiopian famine was not real. It was all too real. The question, rather, is one of balancing the positive accomplishments of running aid programmes and the effects of that work being exploited by government or rebel authorities. Relief agencies routinely operate in places where governments or insurgents kill their own people. What choice do they have? Yet it is one thing to accept that NGOs can never control the environment in which they operate and quite another to participate in a great crime like the Dergue's resettlement, even if the purpose of that participation is to to try to mitigate its effects and save lives. The truth is that the Dergue's resettlement policy—of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the "villagisation" of 3m others—was at least in part a military campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted by western aid money...
This kind of thing makes my head hurt. The more I educate myself about things like this the more hopeless I become. I do feel, however, that deep "education" about Africa is what is called for--not some blind symbolic, if well-meaning, "love" for the continent.
Maybe continued struggle despite hopelessness is exactly what is needed.
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3795
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 05, 2005 - 04:59 pm: |
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'Vette,
And THOSE are the reasons why these Save Africa programs never have chance of working. Because it is in the INTERESTS of American, European and African powers to misuse, manipulate, enslave and, when necessary, KILL the the masses of Africans.
That's why I'll continue to argue that only AFRICA can save AFRICA. |
Anunaki3600
Veteran Poster
Username: Anunaki3600
Post Number: 61
Registered: 04-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, July 06, 2005 - 04:38 am: |
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The African elite with their masters in the developed world have looted most of the AID and credit provided to Africa during the last forty years or more. The moneys borrowed by African countries has produced no tangible results on the ground but just debt now being paid by the working poor through heavy taxes. There is no amount of good or development that will come out of any of these "goodwill" efforts by liberals in the U.S. or Europe as long as these African elite who have rule Africa,in some countries, since their independence. It's these elite who will benefit the most from debt relief by borrowing more and looting it all over again and making their citizen poorer. Look at these African elite who have gathered in Scotland with their begging bowls. Make me sick to my stomach. They should not be given even a DIME until they practice good governance, bring transparency into their rule, cut down mega corruption and tribalism and most of them should retire from politics. If they have not brought any development during the last forty years, there in nothing new in their bags of tricks. There has to be a generation shift in leadership before chaos take over because the youth have no future and also NOTHING to loose. Just look at what angry young people have done in Liberia, sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, etc. |
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