I would just like to stress one facet that is alluded to here, but not much explored. Accomplishment.
Rather than stress where you were born or what you were born with, examine what you have done with it. I don't think I'm weird when I say that I have only a little interest in a person's race, religion, ethnicity, etc. I care about these, but what have they DONE?
Doctor, auto mechanic., plumber, painter, scientist, etc. I want to hear about what a person has done with their life. Race, religion, ethnicity are efforts to find commonality. I want to find out what makes a person unique.
Ehigie makes a useful contribution to the identity discussion. My concern, when we go down this path for those in the United States, is the narrowing of it to 'black' and 'white.' The wider discussion includes Native Americans and Asians. I believe Ehigie would embrace the multi-faceted 'race'/ color approach. He could say I'm simply doing whataboutism. True, in part. But if we're searching for the big picture, the individual nuance in the 'system', then we might do well to say, 'Yes, we're trapped in this dilemma but from different roots, different mindsets, different 'solutions.' Sorry for all those scare quotes, but these words are loaded with different weights.
Here are some titles for FBT to add to their library on the global black experience:
• 'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation by Paul Gilroy
• Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman's Search for Her Roots by Yelena Khanga & Susan Jacoby
• Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union by Robert Robinson
• Germany's Black Holocaust: 1890-1945: Details Never Before Revealed! by Firpo Carr
• Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914 by Mischa Honeck
Martin Klimke & Anne Kuhlmann
• Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French
• Integration: Did Black People as a Collective Benefit by Maurice I. Crawford
• Barracoon: A Must-Read for Black History Month and Beyond by Zora Neale Hurston
• Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom by Tiya Miles
• All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
• If Someday Comes: A Slave's Story of Freedom by David Calloway
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
• At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Daniella L. McGuire
• Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 25th Anniversary Edition by Mary L. Dudziak
• This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
• Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal
• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean by Terence Walz
• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis
• Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America by Jane G. Landers & Barry M. Robinson
• Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII by Mary Cronk Farrell
• Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor by Robert F. Jefferson Jr.
• Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson
👏👏👏 This was a tremendous piece by Eric Ehigie! I hope my comment here will do it justice. Mr. Ehigie makes a great and nuanced argument here! Colorblindness need not necessitate that one can’t be proud of being black or that being black can’t be an important part of their identity. Dr. King saw this complexity first hand. He was the biggest advocate of colorblindness you’ll ever meet. But he also saw that black people needed racial pride as they had faced centuries of discrimination and had been bombarded with negative messaging about being black. For example, blackface mistral shows which mocked, degraded and made fun of black people and shapes white people’s image and perception of black people well into the 1950s. By Mr. Ehigie’s standards of practical utility and democratic buy-in, black racial pride is perfectly fine. On the first part, if it makes black people happy and increases their self-esteem what does it matter? As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, why should we be worried about black pride? On the second part, if black people as a group buy into the notion of black racial identity and pride, who are we to stand in the way of them embracing it? The same is true of racial pride for Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Arabs, and Persians. Non-white people as far as I’m concerned have every right in the world to feel pride in who they are. This is because they survived terrible oppression and discrimination. This is why black, brown, yellow, or red pride is different from white pride. It’s all about historical context. Plus white pride has only ever used for one thing at this to perpetuate hate, white supremacy and white dominance. White Americans are certainly allowed to be proud of their ethnic identities but white pride has nothing but negative connotations. English, Scottish, Irish, German, Italian, Greek, or Russian pride is perfectly fine. White pride is not because the ones who used were some of the evil regimes and ideologies in history and they used it to hurt, oppress and hold down others.
White pride was used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, medical experiments, red lining, the forced dispossession of the Native American, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Holocaust, the Apartheid system, and many other horrible things. For black people, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians white pride NEVER meant anything good! Nor did for various ethnic groups that at one time weren’t considered white by the Anglo-Saxon majority such as the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and others. But black pride on the other hand never harmed or oppressed a single white person. Nor does one having black pride or fighting to help the black community mean they don’t have a universalist concern for all people or won’t fight for all Americans more broadly. There are many historical examples of this. Fred Hampton the Chairman of the Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party fought to build up and uplift the black community while also championing the working-class rainbow coalition of people of all colors white, black, brown, red, and yellow. The poet Benjamin Zephaniah in his works expressed racial solidarity while also operating as an agent of unity for all peoples. Legendary poet Maya Angelou and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy are both advocates of black pride while being married to white spouses.
I would just like to stress one facet that is alluded to here, but not much explored. Accomplishment.
Rather than stress where you were born or what you were born with, examine what you have done with it. I don't think I'm weird when I say that I have only a little interest in a person's race, religion, ethnicity, etc. I care about these, but what have they DONE?
Doctor, auto mechanic., plumber, painter, scientist, etc. I want to hear about what a person has done with their life. Race, religion, ethnicity are efforts to find commonality. I want to find out what makes a person unique.
Ehigie makes a useful contribution to the identity discussion. My concern, when we go down this path for those in the United States, is the narrowing of it to 'black' and 'white.' The wider discussion includes Native Americans and Asians. I believe Ehigie would embrace the multi-faceted 'race'/ color approach. He could say I'm simply doing whataboutism. True, in part. But if we're searching for the big picture, the individual nuance in the 'system', then we might do well to say, 'Yes, we're trapped in this dilemma but from different roots, different mindsets, different 'solutions.' Sorry for all those scare quotes, but these words are loaded with different weights.
Here are some titles for FBT to add to their library on the global black experience:
• 'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation by Paul Gilroy
• Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman's Search for Her Roots by Yelena Khanga & Susan Jacoby
• Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union by Robert Robinson
• Germany's Black Holocaust: 1890-1945: Details Never Before Revealed! by Firpo Carr
• Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914 by Mischa Honeck
Martin Klimke & Anne Kuhlmann
• Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French
• Integration: Did Black People as a Collective Benefit by Maurice I. Crawford
• Barracoon: A Must-Read for Black History Month and Beyond by Zora Neale Hurston
• Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom by Tiya Miles
• All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
• If Someday Comes: A Slave's Story of Freedom by David Calloway
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
• At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Daniella L. McGuire
• Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 25th Anniversary Edition by Mary L. Dudziak
• This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
• Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal
• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean by Terence Walz
• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis
• Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America by Jane G. Landers & Barry M. Robinson
• Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII by Mary Cronk Farrell
• Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor by Robert F. Jefferson Jr.
• Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson
👏👏👏 This was a tremendous piece by Eric Ehigie! I hope my comment here will do it justice. Mr. Ehigie makes a great and nuanced argument here! Colorblindness need not necessitate that one can’t be proud of being black or that being black can’t be an important part of their identity. Dr. King saw this complexity first hand. He was the biggest advocate of colorblindness you’ll ever meet. But he also saw that black people needed racial pride as they had faced centuries of discrimination and had been bombarded with negative messaging about being black. For example, blackface mistral shows which mocked, degraded and made fun of black people and shapes white people’s image and perception of black people well into the 1950s. By Mr. Ehigie’s standards of practical utility and democratic buy-in, black racial pride is perfectly fine. On the first part, if it makes black people happy and increases their self-esteem what does it matter? As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, why should we be worried about black pride? On the second part, if black people as a group buy into the notion of black racial identity and pride, who are we to stand in the way of them embracing it? The same is true of racial pride for Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Arabs, and Persians. Non-white people as far as I’m concerned have every right in the world to feel pride in who they are. This is because they survived terrible oppression and discrimination. This is why black, brown, yellow, or red pride is different from white pride. It’s all about historical context. Plus white pride has only ever used for one thing at this to perpetuate hate, white supremacy and white dominance. White Americans are certainly allowed to be proud of their ethnic identities but white pride has nothing but negative connotations. English, Scottish, Irish, German, Italian, Greek, or Russian pride is perfectly fine. White pride is not because the ones who used were some of the evil regimes and ideologies in history and they used it to hurt, oppress and hold down others.
White pride was used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, medical experiments, red lining, the forced dispossession of the Native American, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Holocaust, the Apartheid system, and many other horrible things. For black people, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians white pride NEVER meant anything good! Nor did for various ethnic groups that at one time weren’t considered white by the Anglo-Saxon majority such as the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and others. But black pride on the other hand never harmed or oppressed a single white person. Nor does one having black pride or fighting to help the black community mean they don’t have a universalist concern for all people or won’t fight for all Americans more broadly. There are many historical examples of this. Fred Hampton the Chairman of the Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party fought to build up and uplift the black community while also championing the working-class rainbow coalition of people of all colors white, black, brown, red, and yellow. The poet Benjamin Zephaniah in his works expressed racial solidarity while also operating as an agent of unity for all peoples. Legendary poet Maya Angelou and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy are both advocates of black pride while being married to white spouses.