Africa, Bible the untold truth

Joeamonroe has my sympathy; African history is vastly ignored by people in general. I myself knows very little about African histories. Egyptian Empire, Nubia, and Bantu are the only ones I am familiar with, and that's only because they can be played as major power in the game "Rise of Nations".

Originally posted by pinguin Go ahead, design those post and let's discuss them. I bet many people will be interested in those matters if expossed correctly.

*sigh* I've done a few times. And I will again I'm sure. The trouble is, I don't know a whole lot about African history either! Not nearly as much as I wish I did at any rate. If I get upset, it's at least in part because I think my education was far too Euro-centric. Sorry.

As regards race: "race" exists in the sense that it's not hard to tell apart someone whose ancestors come from Sweden and someone whose ancestors come from the Congo. Race has been grossly misused by politicians and pseudo-scientists in the last few centuries but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I would say though that there is no such thing as "races." There is no definitive list of how many races there are in the world, no clear dividing lines between even the most isolated groups of peoples, and no gene for race. An American, a medieval Arab, a citizen of the British Empire, and an ancient Egyptian would all give you completely different definitions of "black" and "white" because there is no definition. Only groups of inherited physical traits, and largely superficial ones at that, that sometimes travel together.


Edited by jdalton - 15-Dec-2007 at 04:40

I thus ticked the African box which is technically correct as my mother is from Algeria. The official looked at me and answer it was not funny.

I worked with a woman who was born on an American base in Africa, she said she tried doing that once and received the same treatment as you. Personally I always tick the "Other" box as I refuse to be labeled as "White" since I don't believe in notions of race and only believe in Cultural distinctions.

There definitely are skewed statistics when it comes to American race-relations. For example, there are far more whites living below the poverty line than African Americans; but then again, that's because whites comprise the vastly overwhelming majority population of America. There are definitely discrepancies in the legal system, racial profiling, police harassment, etc. Prt of the problem, however, does not lie with a corrupt system, but with the prejudices of individuals within the system. For example, no police chief gives the order to "harass the darkies" (for the most part, the South excepted), yet individual officers will sometimes go out of their way to run the tags of cars driven by African Americans, pull over African Americans while they're walking, etc. This phenomena, however, is the case in any community where there are high crime rates/ poverty (which seem to be synonymous). Plenty of young white males get ensnared within the legal system as well; the less education and wealth a person possesses, statistically the more likely they are to commit 'blue collar' crime- and the amount of white men in this country with little education and money is astronomical. 67 million Americans are functionally illiterate (i.e. can't read past a fourth grade level), and the vast majority of that population is white, from the Midwest or the South. Interestingly, the overall literacy rate is higher among African-Americans than in any other ethnic group in America besides Middle Easterners and West Asians(including Pakistanis, Iranis, and Indians). However, proportionally, the poverty ratio among African-Americans is the highest per person of any ethnic group; as it is well-known that it is socio-economics, NOT race or ethnicity, that dictates the crime rates of a given area, statistically more crimes happen in African American communities. This statistic however may not be totally accurate, given that the probability of a Black being caught for a crime (committed by them or not), and a white (who often have the system behind them) are far different.
The institutionalized racism of the past is largely over (though the Jena Six trial may shed further light on that subject), but the subjective and individual prejudices will live on as long as humanity occupies the planet.
As per the teacher, and the accusation that one black student that I was guilty by association for slavery, I calmly informed her that my maternal greatgrandfather, and Irishman, came over in the 1920's from County Kildare, long after slavery had been abolished in America, and that my paternal greatgrandfather and his family came over from Calabria, Italy in 1908; again long after slavery had been abolished. This did little to clear my case in the class; every time the injustices of whites against blacks was brought up, people seemed to look right at me. Heaven forbid that the Irish were held to be "worse than n*ggers" [The Irish in America, Michael Coffey], or that the Italians were also routinely persecuted (Sacco & Vanzetti, the New Orleans Lynching of 1909, etc)... tarred with guilt for the color of my skin. It just goes to show that prejudices can go both ways, man.

Brian you have a point. Americans of German descent may feel frustrated with the way German history is taught, but that's it. African American understandably see it as yet another infringement on the republican ideal along with slavery, poverty, &c.

But here is another problem: text books space is a very scarce resource, how should it be allocated? To the one community who suffered the most? That would turn the debate into a native-black-Asian-chicano war race. There would be a vain concurrence over who suffered the most.

In France this issue between mostly Jewish and African people is know as memorial competition. So my point is: yes one ought to understand the African Americans' frustration but one shouldn't act upon it. Or precisely, one should crave to avoid this type of issues to arise again.

I can only repeat what I said earlier: stop considering that humans are some trees with any kind of roots or that they are different spices within mankind. I'd say if one wants to explore the challenges African Americans faced in their history a study of slavery through the ages, of world trade in the Early modern period and of poverty in the 20th century would be more indicated.

African Americans are not an exception. Their lives and the issues they faced resemble those other faced.

No fustration is allowed in this site. If you want to earn respect do the homework!

To be fair we are all allowed to be frustrated, as I mod I can tell you it happens a lot. However pinguin is right if you want to earn respect you must post reliable information to help others learn about the topics that interest you and hopefully you'll either spark an interest in someone else or someone who shares your interest will join in dialogue with you.

As a Black Amercian I have been forced to learn little about my culture and a lot about everyone else's. while this may not be true in your country its true in Amercian.

To be fair the American school system did very little to teach about German (my personal) history prior to the Second Reich. In fact if you really look at it, American history is very Anglo-centric. Which makes sense considering we speak English and began as an English colony. And that for the most part English historical literature of the nineteenth century was the basis for all of America's early history classes.

And thanks to political correctness in many history books every chapter you'll find a page dedicated to the history of a "minority group" of that period. However unlike non-white minorities "white" culture is apparently homogeneous and uniform and is a unified culture. So we never get to see Irish or German or Italian "blurbs" in our textbooks. It's a little pet peeve of mine and stinks of reverse-racism.

I'm not blaming anyone but us Black Americans for not teaching us our history. So I'm taking the time to learn and teach as many people who want to listen. We are so much more then Martin Luther King while he was a great man we have a lot and yes Mr. King learned from Gandhi his nonvoilent approach to solving problems. Its not about you getting it, its about us knowing who we are

I believe that it is the responsibility of every family to teach their children about the families own personal history including their cultural identity. That a way they learn to be proud of their own history.

That class so soured my experience that I was put off of African history for quite some time, until some of my good friends in the Black Student Union encouraged me to give it another shot on my own, if I was having difficulty with some professors.

You think that's bad try taking a college Women's History course, it's almost enough to make you gay

In the US I am shocked by the kind of happy apartheid going on. Blacks stick around with each others and whites marry whites. If Blacks go on learning Black history it won't help. Ultimately it only increases the gap between communities and fuels a racially vision of society.

This actually is a valid point about the "ingrained cultural self-segregation" of the different minority groups of America. joeamonroe (and any other black forum members), if you had a White professor teaching Black and African history would you give him as much credit as a Black professor or would you think he'd be lacking because he wouldn't have the "black experience"?

I agree with Brian. There is nothing worth than professors too involved with their subjects (or students for that matter). "Community" is not a subsidiary for brain.

@ joe
When learning about USSR you'd not want to have a hard core stalinist as a teacher, isn't it? You wouldn't want to have a professor saying: I'm interested in Soviet history because I am communist myself.

Thus having an African American teaching African American because he is African American is wrong. Now I'm not saying African American should not teach African American, I just mean they should be interested in that community's history because, say, they want to understand issues related with housing, culture, work force, what's not.

Now you'll tell me that in many unis an Indian professor teaches Indian history , a French one will teach French history. But that simply reflects a cultural and linguistic advantage. All Americans speak African American.

In the US I am shocked by the kind of happy apartheid going on. Blacks stick around with each others and whites marry whites. If Blacks go on learning Black history it won't help. Ultimately it only increases the gap between communities and fuels a racially vision of society.

Ultimately this African American history for African American is a very little America way of thinking. The same way as gender studies, chicano studies and gay studies are a total loss of time, african american history is (in my view a nonsense). There is history tackling the topics of slavery, social issue from 1860 to 1960 and so on. Taking a community point of view breaks the unity of knowledge and usually leads to nonsensical ideas.

Now there are two other issues. Slaves were brought from highly different places in Africa. As a result which African American can say, "my roots are in Sierra Leone".

The other issue is the fact that such a thing as African history does not exist (before colonisation that is). To have an history you need a unity. In the case of Africa the unity is whether non-human (all people living South of the Sahara) or a posteriori (countries now called Africa).

Just consider Europe before 1400. There was next to now traffic between the different points and thus no common history. The same happened in Africa at an even worst level because of the much greater distances and the lack of coast line. There was no exchange between say Mali and Angola during the 15th century.

So talking about pre-colonial African history is non-scientific. African American interested in African history are making a gross mistake. They should be interested in African histories. Teach those you teach the history of Mali, Congo, Eastern Africa, the islamic expansion. That is not to say that cross-country studies are useless but at the end of the day it does not make more sense to compare the early Zoulou empire with the peul kingdom than with Ming China.

Often one mistakes history and memory. Memory is personal, many things can fuel it (novels, pictures, voyages and but not only historical research) but it should not be used as if it was objective. History is strictly a social science and can only be used to build up political points.

Mixing both leads to the type of situation Brian endured.

If you were born in your own country then its easy for you to misunderstand my point. As a Black Amercian I have been forced to learn little about my culture and a lot about everyone else's. while this may not be true in your country its true in Amercian. I'm not blaming anyone but us Black Americans for not teaching us our history. So I'm taking the time to learn and teach as many people who want to listen. We are so much more then Martin Luther King while he was a great man we have a lot and yes Mr. King learned from Gandhi his nonvoilent approach to solving problems. Its not about you getting it, its about us knowing who we are

True, but to exclusively focus on your own culture while ignoring the history and significance of others is just Euro-centrism in reverse; this seems to me to be counter-productive. Unfortunately, not every one in the world is a history major, or has the free time to become a well-researched amateur historian. So how do people then learn about other cultures in an un-biased way, especially in a widely diverse country like the United States? After all, there are only 12 years in the American Public School system, and only 10 years are mandatory. So how do you find the time to fit in the history of every single ethnic minority in the United States, on top of the history of Western Civilization, beginning with Egypt and going through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, British Empire, American Revolution, etc.? Not only that, but the Hispanic population in America is larger than the African American, according to the 2000 census; African Americans number at around 35 million people, making up 12% of the population, while Hispanics number around 41.9 million, making up 14.5% of the total American population. By these statistics, it seems that the real offense in the Public school systems is not teaching Latin American history, as opposed to African History, seeing as how, from a certain logical standpoint, the highest obligation would seem to be owed to the largest part of the population who finds it's history under-represented!
Now, of course, that "certain logic" does not seem to be correct, especially in light of the act that since public schools became mandatory in the early 19-teens, African American history has not been taught, while the Hispanics, as relative newcomers in the tides of American immigration have only been ignored by the educational system for a total of 25-30 years or so. So maybe the obligation of the Educational system then falls back to African history, by way of seniority? This all can get muddled up very quickly. How does one determine which histories are relevant, and which one's are not, when there is only so much time with which to teach America's children? Would African American scholars be happy with just having enough to gloss over African History (say, a semester or so), with Latin American history also getting a semester? What about other major Ethnic groups, like Asian Americans, with a population of 12.5 million in 2000? Or Native Americans, who surely deserve a whole year, if this is being decided on the seniority system...
It seems almost impossible to cram all of these histories into a 12 year curriculum, especially when serious study of subjects doesn't really begin until the 9th year of school, leaving only 4 years to really cover the history of the entire world, since almost every continent is represented by a large amount of the population in America.
It almost seems as though the current system has no real options but to stay the way it is, with individuals who find themselves interested in history responsible for educating themselves in their culture's history. I'm Irish and Italian; in America's educational system, Italy gets no mention after the Roman Empire (just as Africa gets little mention after Egypt's heyday), except in art class when it comes to the Italian Renaissance masters; Irish history is mentioned not at all. A substantial chunk of America's "white" population is Irish (the massive Irish migrations of the 1800's and early 1900's), and another substantial chunk is Italian (from the Southeastern European exodus of the 1910's-1940's), yet they get little mention. Neither do Poles, Hungarians, Russians (except for the history of the Cold War), Germans (oh, they get mentioned, but are certainly not portrayed well in American History...), etc. So one cannot even rightly make the claim that American History is Euro-centric... It is Anglo-centric. What, then, is to be done?

Originally posted by joeamonroe My fustration comes more from American culture then international. I also am fustrated at Black Amercian for getting fat and lazy. So I has a black american put the blame on us for not taking care of us in the end

Blame blame blame blame. Why should you blame anyone?

First of all, Egypt is not more the Afro-American's history than mine. Stop for a second and look at realities. One has a limited time in school devoted to history so  she should concentrate on what is the most relevant (i.e. closer).
Chinese learn Chinese history and Egyptians Egyptian history, nothing else or hardly. Sometimes it appears useful to teach a few other stuff, for instance if a strong minority of the population comes from another place in the world and recently migrated. For instance, learning Indian history in England or Northern African history in France could be a sensible idea.
This idea applied to the US would lead US schools to teach about China, Korea, Italy, Germany, and (in respect of the African Americans) Mozambique, Ghana, Angola, etc. Egypt comes last. The Egyptian population in the US is next to 0% so why bother?
The reason African Americans today don't care about Egypt is because it is too far away. Teach it to those who care but don't bother the others with that the same way as me (as a son of Ukrainians migrants I don't give a damn about Ukrainian history). Despite what some try to make us think, African Americans are human and as such "their" story is the story of humanity.
No invention belongs to any civilization, no man comes from any civilization. One has no pride to take from descending from a civilization that created complex temples, the same way as you'd have no pride to take from your brother passing an exam. The fact he did says nothing about you.
So my (humble) advise to you is to stop teaching your kids the history of Africa (which anyway, although very interesting is one of the most complex one) and instruct them in Swedish history, Japanese history and Brazilian history from all periods. Even better, stop thinking in terms of nations or continents or race and teach them the history of economics, demography, agriculture, urban history and such things. Like that you'll be able to draw parallels between what makes a city work in Zimbabwe, California and Ancient Rome.
I beg you, don't teach your children division in countries or races, don't teach them nationalism, jingoism and racism. Teach them that all humans work the same way and that the fact that this invention came from Africa have little interest, what matters is how the man who invented it came to that brilliant idea. As a Christian, you should understand the value of unity. We are one flock, ain't we? And the color of the sheep and their origin does not matter.