Sit back with a fat Buddha sack: so-treu: strugglingtobeheard: i think when people talk about…
i think when people talk about appropriation of various african cultures sometimes they don’t realize how fucking painful it is to be bastard children in many ways. appropriation is never cool and i am all for learning how and what is acceptable. there is…
this conversation needs to be said and Africans as well as Black Caribbeans need to listen and try to understand. When I read about how Africans don’t want me, a Black American to appropriate their culture what I hear is “we don’t want you either”. It is not my fault. Yes, it is fucking stupid that some folks think it’s okay to call your home Mama Africa and buy into stereotypes of your home, but we don’t have one. We are forever vagabonds. And it is completely fucking heartbreaking. So recognize that it is a great privilege to know your heritage. It really is. So many people take it for granted when I’d die to learn my own.
I always feel like I’m groping to find a part of myself in the darkness. I see myself in the art and in the music. In the fabric. In the stories handed down from one generation to another and find myself conflicted because in many ways because there is no knoweldge of my african or possibly caribbean ancestry beyond my skin and hair and a plantation, with a listing of my fourth great grandfather as property…a mulatto.Murkier still is my dad’s side of the family where we are tied to New Orleans creoles, my last name is dead give away. But he doesn’t know very much. His mother, Lord…what she knows I doubt she’d be willing to tell.
I say that all to say, for many black americans we desire to find our origins but are often left frustrated. White american reminds us, even and especially in the present day that it does not want us. A blow, that while painful, we as a people, have endured that hatred in such ways it’s taught to be expected.
But to hear and find that dark people around the world DO NOT want us either is devistating.
I don’t buy into the we don’t have a home bit. The United States is my home. I feel as connected here as an African would feel to their home country in Africa. Our history wasn’t fair. No, most can’t trace their genealogy past the civil war, however, many peoples the world over can’t trace their genealogy back past more than a few generations either due to lack of records.
And honestly, I don’t care if Africans don’t want to be associated with us. I understand it in some ways. We look the same but our cultures are very different. Of course there are African cultural remnants in Black American culture but it does not make us them.
I’m proud of what my ancestors were able to achieve and the culture they created when everything in their world was forcibly ripped from them. I just don’t feel any longing for anything else.
Everything bolded.
