Black history is not taught well

I appreciate the issues you mention. All that I can think of to say is to repeat the words of a great man. "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." I too wish that the bend towards justice was stronger. All we can do now is to do our best to bend the arc towards justice as best we can. For example, what is immediately in front of us is an election in less than a month. I think that electing an Asian Black Woman is the task immediately in front of us right now. If Trump wins the election it is going to set the arc of justice the wrong way well more than 4 years compared to what it would be if Harris wins is my guess.

 

It's both. Also, black Americans who are well-educated, well-spoken, and highly motivated receive this deference too, especially if they're light-skinned. I'm speaking from personal, lived experience and also observation over the years.

 

Please don't get ADOS confused with FBA. They're not the same movement. What you've described here is the FBA movement started by the opportunist Tariq Nasheed. I've been using the the acronym ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) as used by the ADOS Advocacy Foundation. I am not a member of either group. I just use the (my preferred) term ADOS to distinguish my community from the foreign black communities in the U.S. The ADOS Advocacy Foundation's goal is to get cash reparations. While I agree that they are owed, I do not believe they will be given and I'm not worrying about it one way or the other.

 

I don't think our issues have anything to do with the alt-right. We've been having the "Diaspora Wars" for years, even before social media. I'm in my 50s and when I was a little girl I heard my mother having conversations with her friends about how the foreign blacks didn't want to be friends or associated with us. We tried to welcome them and embrace them and they gave us their butts to kiss. What's going on today isn't new, we just have social media now and people are using it to speak up.

ETA: Even our ELDERS are speaking up on social media now.

 

My previous posts that were not specifically about the thread's topic were made to give clarity and context to some comments/thoughts that DI members shared. It was not my intention to take the thread off-topic. I hope we can think about it as a little segue.

Now, getting back on topic... It wouldn't bother me if black history and the slave trade wasn't taught in schools. It was all about slavery, struggle, poverty and bad stuff. MLK and Rosa Parks were thrown in for good measure to restore our pride, it feels like. Everyone has been talking about making white children uncomfortable, but it's uncomfortable for black children too. I remember being so embarrassed and uncomfortable in class when we got to that section in social studies class. It was awful.

 

That business about "light skinned"...oh, yeah, even within the Black community itself that business can get ugly.

 

They are two different movements, but the followers have converged, and the starters of the ADOS movement are also aligning with the alt-right just like the FBA cult. I thought the ADOS movement was promising until I saw them consorting with white supremacists and using their xenophobic rhetoric. Now, I have to find other ways to identify myself as an African American that won't confuse me with the children of recent immigrants and also won't connect me to the problematic ADOS/FBA movements. Whenever I call myself ADOS, people get triggered.

This might sound controversial and counterintuitive, but I think that the term African American should be reserved for those whose families were here pre-1865. Contrary to popular belief, Jesse Jackson did not invent that term in the 1980s; it's much older dating back to the 1800s and was picked up by the Black power movement in the 1960s. Immigrants and their descendants usually identify with their country of origin i.e. Nigerian American. Black is a generic race term blind to country of origin. In other countries, they call themselves Afro-Latino, Afro-Mexican, Afro-Jamaican, etc. when they have to distinguish themselves from other races.

When it comes to voting, I couldn't care less about the candidate's race or the national origin of their parents. I will make fun of Canadian Cruz, though. But, it is not lost on me that the U.S. is more comfortable with Black-biracial people regardless of whether their parents were ADOS or not.

 

I sometimes watch her, but this reminds me of another divisive movement, only because Lady Boule sort of touched on this. Louisiana Creoles and other groups of multigenerational mixed race groups of African Americans have been aligning themselves with the goldensphere, mulatto, or "exotical" movement that was started to represent biracial and triracial people. Maybe it was triggered by the growing movement by young Black people to reject the one drop rule, which led to them saying that biracial people are not Black.

 

It's interesting. Prior to the Civil War, immigration to the U.S. was limited to "free white persons of good character." Following the adoption of the 14th amendment, Congress added "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent." Note that even then, non white asians and brown indigenous people were banned.

Colorism is real and all pervasive.

 

As to the "one drop rule", American miscegenation laws made our criticism of the Nazi era Nuremberg Law kind of hard to do with a straight face. The Nazis were quick to point this out.

Legal discrimination based on race was in place and enforced in my childhood. It's not ancient history.

 

Oh, and making fun of "Canadian Cruz" is a civic duty.

 

Apparently, the goal was to keep the racial composition of the U.S. the same. Armenians, Indians, and East Asians went to court to try to be classified as White so they could become citizens. Armenians were successful, but Asians were not.

This is where I have to disagree with the Lady Boule video. The Irish and Italians were not immediately integrated into White American society because they weren't really considered White. Not considering Irish people to be White always tickles me, but they were neither Germanic nor Protestant, so they were othered. It's all stupid because the Welsh and Scottish are also Celtic peoples, and their DNA has mixed with the English in the U.S. Italians, particularly Southern Italians, were not considered White because they were darker and assumed to be mixed with African.

There is division among Latinos along racial and national origin lines. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans don't always get along, and they don't always identify with each other. White and Mestizo Hispanics separate themselves from Black Hispanics, even if they're from the same country. I think that throwing everyone into the Latino/Hispanic box was a mistake.

Then, there is how Latinos, especially Latino men, vote. Many of them want stronger immigration enforcement. Particularly with the Mexican American people who have been in Texas for hundreds of years, they don't automatically identify with recent immigrants.

 

There's an interestingly distinctive history of usage of Black Canadian, African Canadian, etc.

 

I've been arguing against any single "Latino/a" classification for years, here and elsewhere. It's nonsense.

Canadians, on the other hand, are all exactly alike. In case you didn't know!

 

That's exactly what I'm suggesting (except that all Canadians are alike).

 

I don't get it. Are my grandchildren, who are children (married to spouses Americans with ancestors from different countries) of my children who all born in the USA, still Ukrainian Americans?
To me, everyone is American, that's it.
There are many labels, such as by state, or religion, race, etc
After how many generations, the origin of ancestors labels loose meaning, or they never loose meaning?

 

Nooo....no, I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one traffic light while in British Columbia. There HAS to be at least TWO roads for a traffic light, right?

 

(They have to use a traffic light instead of stop signs because otherwise every driver refuses to go until the others go first.)