Black People : Identity:The perplexity of defining yourself.(please read)

some thoughts...

panafrica said:
It is both genocidal and suicidal to keep expanding the definition of blackness and dilluting ourselves to include people of "mixed heritage" in order to play a numbers game. Now when I'm talking about mixed heritage I mean "direct" mixed heritage, meaning a person's parent or grandparents. Mixed heritage does not include someone's distant ancestor who was dragged behind the bushes by their white slave master 200+ years ago. It is unrealistic to automatically include people of mixed heritage as black, when they often don't to see themselves as black and their tendencies are towards further mixing with non-blacks.

I agree with your post until you get here. We're not expanding the definition of blackness to include people of mixed heritage, it ALREADY does. Since we both see real threats to our continued existence, I'm not seeing that now is the time for RESTRICTING that definition. I also don't understand how one can arbitrarily decide what percentage of blackness qualifies one to be black. What makes a non-black parent or grand-parent the cut-off? Why not great grand, or great-great grand?


Throwing out mixed heritage people from black identity will most certainly further shrink the pool of who is black; however, it is necessary! It is better to build with a strong and smaller base, than to mix a people so far and so fast that they become lost in that mixture! Black people are only created by black men and black women having babies together! Blacks and whites don't make black babies. Blacks and Asians don't make black babies. Blacks and Indians don't make black babies. Blacks and Hispanics don't make black babies (unless of course the Hispanic partner is black).

They don't? Why not? A black/white IR couple has a possibility of producing offspring that is as much black African in appearance as most black Americans. If that child identifies themselves as black who are we to say they are not? More importantly, what advantage have we gained by doing so?


Our beliefs to the contrary and the adoption of the one drop rule (not just by its white architects but by blacks themselves) is why we've gotten to our current situation.
I agree "one drop" has outlived its usefulness but replacing it with a black version of an aryan rule would be worse.
 
Orisons said:


Black apart from being consistently inaccurate [there are hundreds of millions of brown/black skinned Indians who are not of African ethnicity] is also consistently used within European cultures as a disparaging term, i.e. Black Day, The Black Death, Black Magic, Blackmail, Blackout etc whereas no one says African Day, Africanmail, Africanout, which is why I am promoting and projecting the fact that African is preferable to Black [and should be used consistently instead of Black] on every level.


Anyone who genuinely believes they are not programmed is graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE! [HASTY my alter ego]!​

Orisons,

If the society saw the positive aspects of the color black, acknowledging its role in nature and the fact that it absorbs the energy of other colors, would you feel the same way?
 
Orisons said:
The fact that we still view ourselves as [Coloureds, Negroes] the colour Black as opposed to African; in conjunction with the people of African ethnicity in the USA, the rest of the Diaspora and Africa aspiring to be the only ethnicity on the Planet to collectively advance without our own elite’s guidance and support; highlight just how baffled and confused we are.

Many of us expecting our lower echelons with their limited education and experience to deduce or intuit a reasonable way forward, whereas all the other ethnicities utilise their most brilliant intelligentsia for this strategically vital function?

Even our leaders back in the 50’s and 60’s didn’t realise that language in particular is the operating system for the brain like Windows XP or NT is for computers, thus making it very difficult for peoples of African ethnicity in the USA and the rest of the Diaspora to sidestep European influence because their language is literally our mother tongue.

An easy example of this concept at work is the fact that we collectively and individually insist on using the word Black, which is a colour when what we are actually describing, is our African ethnicity. The Asians don’t describe themselves as Yellow [Chinese, Japanese, Korean] or Brown [Indian, Pakistan, Arab] Americans.

Black apart from being consistently inaccurate [there are hundreds of millions of brown/black skinned Indians who are not of African ethnicity] is also consistently used within European cultures as a disparaging term, i.e. Black Day, The Black Death, Black Magic, Blackmail, Blackout etc whereas no one says African Day, Africanmail, Africanout, which is why I am promoting and projecting the fact that African is preferable to Black [and should be used consistently instead of Black] on every level.


Anyone who genuinely believes they are not programmed is graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE! [HASTY my alter ego]!​

Few questions...

Where did the word "Africa" come from?

Who originated the referring of a certain race of people as "Black."

Where does the power of a word reside, in how others define it, or how you define it?
 
kemetkind said:
Few questions...

Where did the word "Africa" come from?


Who originated the referring of a certain race of people as "Black."
Catechism: "The Egyptians called their country Kemet or Black after the color of the soil."

Western Egyptology contrived this deception from Herodotus, “Egypt is a land of black soil…We know that Libya is a redder earth.” (Herodotus, The History, book 2:12); conveniently ignoring the fact that he also mentioned that the Egyptian people were black as well. So, to anyone not familiar with the Ancient Egyptian language, this "Kemet = black soil" may seem plausible. It is not. Here's what the Ancient Egyptian language has to say (Ref: EHD, page 787b.):

Note: words inside brackets are the determinatives or word classifiers along with their English meanings.

Kem, kame, kmi, kmem, kmom = to be black

Kememu = Black people (Ancient Egyptians) in both Ancient and modern Egyptian (Kmemou).

Kem [khet][wood] = extremely black, jet-black

Kemet = any black thing. Note: "t" is silent - pronounced Kemé

Kemet [nu][community, settlement, nation] = Black nation = Ancient Egypt.

Kemet [Romé][people] = Black people. Ancient Egyptians.

Kemit [Shoit][books] = Black books, Ancient Egyptian literature.

Kem wer [miri][large body of water] = The Great Black sea (The Red sea). This sea is neither black nor red, this is in reference to which nation, Black or Red, at a particular time, controlled this body of water.

Kemi fer = Black double house; seat of government. Note: by reference to Wolof again, we know that to make a plural of per or house, the "p" becomes an "f" or fer. Thus fero=great houses (double), it is not pero as Budge writes.
http://www.geocities.com/wally_mo/index.html


Where does the power of a word reside, in how others define it, or how you define it?
The power of the word resides in those who take their power from words,for others it means nothing until it is actually carried out in action.
 
kemetkind said:
I agree consistency of terms is needed to clarify this discussion. In my case the question should be why use the term "African" at all, since it is the term "black" I view as encompassing Black Africans, Black Brazilians, Black Cubans, Black Americans.....etc. etc. Africa is the origin, but one of the many continents on which black people reside. In addition the word "Afrika" itself has no more legitimate a source than the word "black" does, I'd argue less.

I also think we need to define that when I say "social construct" I'm referring to race defined by anything other than biology. If race were a biological construct it wouldn't matter whether one was raped or not, their biology would define their race. It wouldn't matter if one recognized their enemy or not, their biology would define their race. When you include those factors, you are including psycho-social phenomenon, which supports the social construct theory of race.

If you look closely, you'll see my position is actually MORE aligned to the aims of pan-africanism. For if Race were a biological construct, and pure black African descent is the criteria, a large percentage of "black" americans would not qualify due to their mixed heritage....they would have to be defined as a separate "mixed" race....which is counterproductive to pan-africanism.

Look at all the societies where "mixed" races were encouraged as a separate distinction, solidarity between them and black people rarely flourished.

Even if some black intellectuals have used social construct theory to advance that Race doesn't exist or isn't important, THAT IS NOT my position, in fact it's completely contrary to my view. The concept of Race is tangible and vital to identity and collective action no matter how one chooses to define it. I just happen to think defining it narrowly, by biology alone, works against
our interests.


Kemet....ok..sometimes I can't tell in which direction you're heading...seems like sometimes you're pan-africanist and other times you're not. However, what you've shared here lends some clarity...I think. FYI, I actually interchange those terms 'Black' and 'African', because, in my mind, they are synonamous (?). So, when I use them, unless I've specified which particular group(s) of Blacks or Africans based on location, I am indeed incorporating the spanse of our people---both continental and diasporal. If you define 'race is a social construct' as you did above, then I agree. However, in previous interactions with you, I was left with the impression that you didn't believe in race at all.....i.e. you were only "human", and there was no such thing as black and white. So, in case you didn't catch it already, I've been saying for quite some time that race is biological and psychological....you can't have one without the other---especially in a world that is constantly trying to kill us off.
 

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