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Darryl James
While most of us pretend to be African American, many of us are really Black Anglo Saxons.
James Earl Jones, an icon of the Black Anglo Saxons once mused that there is no Black culture, because culture is shaped by language and our language is English, therefore, our culture can not be anything else.
According to James Baldwin, “The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. In the case of the Negro, the past was taken from him whether he would or no.”
For many of us, Black History begins in America with our ancestors being brought over in chains from savage lands, delivered mercifully to civilization and Christianity, without which we surely would have perished.
And, even after a quiet admission that slavery could not be continued, inequities continued boundlessly, even extending to the chaining and abuse of our self-image and according self-worth.
Even when we were supposedly free, from the end of slavery to the end of Jim Crow and to the beginning of integration, we were still being captured many times over and lied to about freedom, while accepting the lie of acceptance.
The goal all along has been to fit in, to melt with mainstream society, but many of us have done that so well that we’ve lost our own sense of history and our own sense of culture in favor of a culture that will never accept us.
And even some of us who claim to be Afrocentric know little of that which is intrinsically African.
For example, ask any so-called African American to name three kings or three nations in Africa. Most of us have nothing that shows an intrinsic African understanding. Yet, even Italians who can’t speak Italian know about Italy and Sicily, whether they have been there or not, and many have not.
Hell, many Black Anglo Saxons know about Italy and Sicily, even though they know nothing of Africa as demonstrated by the wretchedly stupid rappers who take names of Italian gangsters with pride.
The point is that even the Black Anglo Saxon who loves the rhetoric of being Afrocentric, has no intention of making a real connection. That’s why we hear talk of how we were once kings and queens, but those same talkers are doing anything but living like the heirs of royal blood.
And, ask them of Africa today, and they believe that the entire continent is rife with AIDS, civil wars and poverty. They accept this dismal view of Africa from American news reports, but have never been to Africa and have never discussed the continent with native Africans.
