Dash of Reality

Black Americans DO have a culture

I had a provocative discussion with my friends @lovemecca and @chewchronicles about the amazing book “The Book of Night Women.” We discussed our love for the book and the plot and storyline along with issues brought up in the book. The conversation turned to colonization, culture and finally race relations as it pertained to the two aforementioned topics. The book was about slaves in Jamaica and the history of the island’s colonization. My Ghanaian girlfriend, read the book and said the book was probably a biography of her family. It talked about the Ashanti tribe and there was even a town in Jamaica that was similar to her last name. She recently went to Jamaica with the book and was telling a waiter about it and he tuned out and walked away when she spoke about the slave history. In another incident she said a Jamaican lady she knows says “Jamaica is such a backwards country, I am British.”

I told Steven and Mecca some West Indians (not all) would be more apt to claim they are the nationality of their colonizers than admit they are descendants of African slaves, some even go as far as to not even acknowledge they are Black, I said it’s because they resent being grouped in with Black Americans. Steven said, The Black American experience is NOT the (only) Black Experience. I agreed. I have seen this shocking phenomena time and time again. I have never heard a Black American refer to themselves as English or British. The insanity needs to stop. Blacks in their respective colonized countries did not spring from the mountains, they were brought there some way or another. I simply cringe and die inside (sometimes my Haitian girlfriend and I laugh and point) whenever I hear a Haitian refer to themselves as French or a Jamaican say they’re British. Legitimately, there ARE Haitians and Jamaicans born in those respective countries but that fact does not apply to those who do this.

Steven and Mecca said it is similar to the Black American phenomena of claiming Indian (Native-American) in their blood. They went on to both say that the true story is a lot of slaves were raped, thus Black Americans do tend to be mixed with European blood, and it may be less painful to illustrate that a grandparent took up with a Native American (which did happen, although not as much as people may describe) versus saying their great grandmother was raped by a slave-master. Expounding on this, I added that the question “are you fully black” makes absolutely no sense because the Black race is such an inherently mixed race, given colonization, the slave trade and the diaspora, that the concept doesn’t even exist anymore, and hasn’t existed for a very long time. I said really, Black Americans should start taking more ownership of their culture. There is an established Black American culture and it should be celebrated, not diminished.
Continue Reading Black Americans DO have a culture…