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Re: What does it mean to be black in the 21st cent
Posted By: leslie In Response To: Re: What does it mean to be black in the 21st cent (selassielive)
Date: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, at 5:30 a.m.
Selassielive, I understand your complex. You may have some white ancestry in your past, and may even be of a fairer hue than some of your peers or family members. Thus, you seek to separate yourself by your ‘brown hue’. I think that contrary to what you have responded, you are very uncomfortable with the issue of colourism.
Bantu Kelani is quite right in her classification of ‘African’. Your mother could be white, your father half-white and the progeny may be born with 100% Africoid features and thus experience racial discrimination like any other dark skinned African. That person could be quite fit to lead an African movement because society would view that person as they see them and not judge them based on their genotype.
Also, too often Blacks cling to the US definition of ‘Black’ that incorporates a wide range of people who are not. Just because people may have African ancestry in their recent anthropological history does not mean that they are Black/African by race. For example, the Arabs and other Asian groups have very recently descended from Africans but no longer can be called Africans.
Although many mixed-raced individuals may belong to the same ethnic group as dark-skinned Black Africans, they do not receive the same treatment by wider society. Many of them do not even consider themselves to be Black, and they are quite correct. They also seek to remind us that they are mixed raced or brown-skinned and not black. This fact alone should deny them leadership positions in African movements simply because they could never understand the depths of the Black experience.
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