Resistance is Futile
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. We will add your capability and technology to our collective consciousness. Your people will adapt to serve us. Your freedom is irrelevant. Your history is irrelevant. Your culture will cease to exist and you will become one with us. We will strip away your identity. You will no longer think independently. Your thought patterns will become one with the collective. Your only goal in life will be to serve us. Your defenses cannot withstand our attack. Your only hope of survival is to cooperate. Resistance is futile.
These words may sound like the monotonic speech of the scariest villains from the Star Trek universe. But these words could have just as easily been the words from the Europeans as they descended upon Africa and started to dice and slice the continent up into their colonies.
Like the Borg in the 24th century, the Europeans in the 15th and 16th century knew that to assimilate the people of Africa they had to strip away everything the African knew about his or her world. While the Borg would use technology to assault an individual’s will, the European managed to subdue the will of the African with intense pain, agony, and torment. Like the wild mustang that resisted a saddle or a bridle with every ounce of its strength, the strong willed African became a challenge to the descendant of Europe. The white man had to suffer the possibility of exhaustion and working up a sweat from having to swing a whip to rip away the African’s defiance and gain his or her surrender. The image from the television mini series Roots of a bloodied and beaten Kunta Kinte, played by Levar Burton, hanging from his manacles as he is asked what’s his name. The name Kunta Kinte was irrelevant. The key to salvation from the pain was to submit and admit that his name was Toby.
With the African’s acquiescence of having his or her name replaced by a new designation, the first step in the assimilation process has started. The African surrendered his language as well. It could really hardly matter to the African. All family and friends were gone and the chances of running across someone else from his community were pretty slim so the consequences of forgetting the familiar language were already in progress when he or she was abducted from the home land. In order to keep some kind of social interaction in the new strange place with all the other subjugated peers the familiar language was replaced.
But what was truly a stroke of African assimilation genius was the separation of the African from his or her spirituality. What the white community chose to misinterpret and under appreciate as mere superstition was the African’s native spirituality. The pagan belief system of the sub-Saharan African, who was the primary source of African slave labor, was forbidden and the belief system of the conqueror was provided in its place. The theory here is that the African could not be completely controlled by white people as long as he or she continued to gather their strength of character from their belief systems that operated independently of any Caucasoid influences. The Africans had to be trained to avoid their traditional beliefs like the plague.
The many Africans who continued to value their spiritual beliefs here in the land of severe enslavement did not give them up easily. Some were probably given beatings that would make even Jesus in the Passion of the Christ wince and say, “Damn!” So the old ways had to be abandoned. Some of our ancestors couldn’t quite make the transition to the new European based or European influenced belief systems completely and had developed a hybrid that consisted of elements of the African pagan spirituality with the traditional European belief system. An example of such a hybrid would be the Santeria beliefs that are a heavy dose of Catholicism and an equally heavy dose of the Orisa based Yoruba traditions.
But many of our ancestors had to learn to reject their African beliefs at the end of a whip. For those that learned and adapted quickly they became the overseer of the others and would take responsibility for the spiritual teachings of the slaves. These people were the slave preachers who studied the master’s bible and earned the master’s trust. The preacher spoke on behalf of the master’s god and therefore the master. In the world of the enslaved the preacher was an enforcer. African’s who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt to their new mandated spirituality would actually invite the entire community to suffer the consequences. The master was liable to cutoff privileges for everyone if they did not do their best to control the rebel rouser. Therefore, the slave community would work to make sure peer pressure is applied for the salvation of any one who defiantly tried to resist spiritual assimilation. The enslaved black community adapted the same assimilation techniques as the plantation. And resistance was futile.
This is not to say that the beliefs of the Christian, Catholic, Jewish, or whatever you may have of the white conqueror were necessarily inappropriate for the kidnapped Africans or for their future generations. Many people of African descent have adapted well and have developed their sense of religion based on the European traditions. There are many paths to god and one is just as good as the other.
But the real problem is that now that so many people of African descent have adapted the European’s belief system, we no longer value the spiritual traditions of our ancestors who lived in Africa free from the European or our ancestors who suffered through the middle passage. Indeed, the black community has learned en masse to turn our collective nose up at our brothers and sisters who still practice any form of African spirituality. We view these misguided souls as evil and anti-Christian. And if we see them as anti-Christian, then we must have no choice but to see ourselves as anti-African.
It’s not just a simple fact that it is different. Black Christians will tolerate the typical Jewish belief even though the Jews do not accept Jesus. The black community will accept the various forms of the Native American’s pagan beliefs. But as soon as we are faced with the beliefs that are our birthright, the African beliefs that go back thousands of years before Jesus and Moses walked the earth in the Middle East and Northern Africa, we are repulsed as if the devil himself has danced across our path.
People in the black community no longer have to fear getting hit with master’s whip for not conforming to his belief. Black people have pretty much adapted to the beliefs of the Europeans. But those of us who choose to honor our African ancestors and return to our African beliefs have to continue to contend with rejection and ridicule from our African peers as if master was still standing over us looking for one of us to slip up. As long as we continue to vehemently reject the spirituality that used to be ours as descendants of African people the more difficult a time we will have trying to establish our identity as descendants of African people. This is not a call for black people to cast their current European based spirituality aside. However, it is a request that you don’t immediately reject those of us who wish to embrace an African based spirituality. Acceptance of the African based spiritualities will no longer bring master’s wrath on your head. Acceptance is not futile.
Nice post! Love to use of the Borg metaphor.
I’m as white as one can get. From the time I was 2 until I was about 10 years old, I was raised predominantly by a black woman. My mother worked for the Red Cross and her primary interest was in working disaster relief, and so she was frequently gone. My dad was making pretty good money so my parents hired a black woman to be my nanny and for general housekeeping work.
Whatever shadowy echoes of slavery or race distinction there might have been in this situation were lost on me at the time. Those kinds of complexities have no place in the life of a child. I knew simply that it when I was hurt, she was the one I could count on to be there. If I was sick, she was the one that held my hand during the frightening fevers of childhood disease. A child instinctively seeks the reassurance of knowing that someone cares about him and will be there when needed. For me, that person was Auntie Mae.
I would frequently go stay with Auntie Mae at her home in Banning California, at this time a town primarily inhabited by black people with an air of poverty about it. Auntie Mae’s home was a very tiny, one-bedroom affair with paint peeling inside and out. She only rented. Her neighborhood was a cluster of about 20 identical little homes sitting on a dirt lot, not far from the train tracks and Interstate 10. Of course, back then, being close to the train tracks was a feature. One got to see real-life trains rumbling by up close and personal, and their occasional roar as they passed by in the night was somehow comforting. One could simply tell that monsters and trains did not go together, and so the obvious presence of the one guaranteed the absence of the other.
Auntie Mae snored like an Insinkerator. She’d turn on her soaps, and then is one like a light on the couch for hours. If I was within 50 yards of the open front door, I would know that everything was okay. Safety had a soundtrack.
I was the only white kid anywhere around. This was in 1964 to about 1969. My memory may be distorted by some sort of rose-colored filter, but I seem to recollect it was a particularly fun place to go. The other kids in Palm Springs where I lived always had lots of rules and cliques and I found it hard to fit in. By the time I was eight I had skipped third grade and the other kids avoided me like I was diseased. But the kids at Auntie Mae’s didn’t seem to care anything about that. At Auntie Mae’s, the kids always seemed to just accept me right off the bat and we were having a great time in minutes.
My favorite toy of all time I found near Auntie Mae’s house. There was a collapsed wrought-iron fence that had these pointy toppers on each bar of the fence. Not realizing that their original purpose had been to skewer people trying to get over the fence, I found that one of them had fallen off and was sitting there on the ground. It was shaped just like a spaceship, and because it was a solid chunk of heavy iron, it had the really sweet useful spaceship feature of being completely impervious. Every touchdown could be a dramatic crash landing leaving huge outerspace scorch marks in the dirt, but my spaceship could handle it and be flying again in seconds. I had that spaceship until well into my 30s, until it somehow disappeared in some move. I’m 50 years old now, and I pine after it to this day.
Back then, to me, black people were just… people. Perhaps a little more fun than other folks because they were easier to get along with and always seemed to be laughing. The differences between white people and black people were like the differences between red cars and blue cars. Lots of things in the world came in different colors; cars, houses, flowers and people. It was all the same. Some of the really black kids had cheeks that looked exactly like chocolate pudding. Chocolate pudding was way my favorite, and while I knew it was actually just their skin color, I often had to stifle a strong urge to just give them a quick lick on the cheek to see for sure. Wasn’t it possible that among all the mysteries of the universe (and the universe is mostly mysteries to a seven year old back then), that some people could be made partly of chocolate pudding? It seemed possible at the time.
I have a personality trait that makes me dislike new situations and having to get to know new people. Being in Auntie Mae’s neighborhood was the only time I can remember in my entire life when I felt completely at ease and like I fit in without having some vague sense of concern.
And I read articles like yours and now it seems to me that black people come from a different planet. Every contact with black people is all about hatefulness and resentment and envy now. The color of their skin is now involved in every dimension and every facet of every point of contact with them. I see no commonality anymore, no vantage point from where I can see the world as they do, and no way to reach them so that they may see the world as I see it. I’m told I should feel some great guilt for some imagined participation in some crime that I have no recollection of committing, and that there will be no end to the recriminations, apparently forever. With a mentality I cannot begin to fathom, everywhere are black people with contorted faces screeching about justice and equality, and yet every argument is transparent for its inherent nature of a self-righteous demand for a handout, for which I am somehow liable. Everywhere the tragic reality of the history of slavery in America is mixed with the illogic of fabricated entitlement.
Inconvenient documented facts in history about the poor track record with respect to slavery of the black races themselves are conveniently ignored. Ethiopia, as uniformly black as a nation can be, wouldn’t let go of slavery until 1935, and even then not without it being forced upon them by, of all people, Italian fascists. Haile Selassie didn’t even ban slavery until 1943, and only then under pressure from the Allies to do so. But, somehow, American slavery, perpetrated by European descendents, is somehow worse. And I can’t help but think it’s because that’s where the money might be and where the softheaded and soft hearted people might be willing to listen to such nonsense.
Racism is here to stay I’m afraid. It’s here to stay because you feel you are owed something, and you cling grimly to that belief in a vacuum rather than placing it in the context of a world that is imperfect at best and without the least comprehension that to seek balance for crimes committed generations ago (with the involvement of most of the planet) is insanity. You arbitrarily select this group for punishment and ignore far worse crimes committed elsewhere. You monolithically vilify white people everywhere and make no mention of the hundreds of thousands that died to secure your freedom. You seek to balance the inherent unfairness of crimes committed against your ancestors by visiting unfair punishment upon the criminal’s descendents. You accuse others of being racists all the while apparently unaware that you have achieved the most perfect state of racism there is, that of criminalizing people for their genetic inheritance.
Romeo and Juliet set aside the errors of their parents, looked past the crimes committed by the relatives of all concerned, and sought only peace and a life together. But there were too many on both sides who would not move beyond previous wrongs. And so the two clans destroyed their own futures.
And so, apparently, it will be with blacks and whites. What you see as recompense I see as stealing and a refusal to participate. What you see as righting past wrongs I see as insanity, ridiculous and inherently unfair. You think I owe you something, and I think you’re trying to take something that doesn’t belong to you under cover of the thinnest of all possible justifications. If there is common ground anywhere here, I cannot see it.
Thanks for the feedback S. C. Amos,
You are correct. You are as white as a white person can get.
Racism is here to stay because I feel like I’m owed something? That’s pretty typically for a white racist mindset. Black people like me should just be quite, sit back, and enjoy the disparity of white privilege and black subjugation.
White people like you feel that they are experts on the entire black experience or something because you have a history with black people. You know everything about what every black person goes through. There are no white people denying black people anything or forcing black people to assimilate.
Racism is here to stay because people from the dominant community feel entitled to dictate to the black community exactly the terms for their success. Romeo and Juliet my ass. White people who have denied black people their fair share in the accumulation of wealth, government services, free land that white people stole from the Native American and passed down through their family for generations, and just about everything else feel that they can judge black people because they grew up with black people. Please!
White people like you think its fair that black people just work harder. White people like you think black people are insane for wanting to be compensated for being excluded from everything that makes life somewhat bearable in this land of materialism. White people like you are the true source of problems in the black community as well as what happens in America in general.
Peace
S. C. Amos,
It is interesting that I read a comment that started out very similar to this on another site. And how this person made a comment about the “nanny” or “mammies” black skin and their white skin and it was hushed etc. Anyway that was just interesting to me.
Anyhow, your comment is interesting and the one thing that stuck out to me that you said was “You think I owe you something, and I think you’re trying to take something that doesn’t belong to you under cover of the thinnest of all possible justifications.” This is totally indicative of white people such as yourself.
IT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU! Exactly what you really think. You want blacks to shut up and stop trying to get a piece of the American pie. We should just be content to sit in a run down one bedroom shack in a shitty part of town and shut our mouths and just love it. Like you seem to believe that your “mammy or nanny” and all those fun loving Negroes did all the while lighting your fancy because you were such a special little white person.
You know you sit and talk about the thousands of white people who died for our freedom. What about the MILLIONS of blacks who sweat, bled and died for FREE to give you this white privilege laden land of prosperity. The wealth that was gained through slavery was passed down from generation to generation. What wealth did the slaves pass down to their offspring, in case you didn’t know, NOTHING!
You sit and act as if blacks wanting FAIR treatment is some freaking handout. I guess it couldn’t be any more of a handout than white people got with westward expansion or the welfare system which we know for a fact was not helping blacks for years. How about the handouts that whites get each and every day that they are hired over blacks due to discrimination. But I guess those handouts don’t mean anything to you.
I just don’t think that you have any idea what type of tripe you are spreading here. You act as if all the discrimination and racism suffered by blacks only happened back in the past and it was all your ancestors fault. Well who is responsible for the racism and discrimination happening today? Is it your contention that the white people of today are somehow immune to passing out the brand of racism their ancestors did, we are all equal now?
You are a joke and should consider your past dealing with a black “mammy, nanny” as something that didn’t teach you one damn thing about racism. You act as if she lived in that run down shack with the rest of those blacks because they wanted to. You didn’t care about how she lived while you lived in an area where the women didn’t have to be someone’s handmaid in order to survive was strictly because white people worked so hard. You have sickened me to the point I can’t even continue this reply.
Thanks BrotherP
Well, it sounds like you got it all figured out. Darn it. They’re going to be so disappointed when I tell them down at the weekly national top-secret Keep the Negro Down meeting.
Yes, it’s true, only black people have ever endured hardship, deprivation, or discrimination. Any time Whitey ever experiences that is as an oversight. That whole World War II thing alone where 50 to 60 million Whitey’s were killed, 38 million of them noncombatant civilians, sure had us all red-faced. Huge mistake. The fact that that is three times the total number of black people who were slaves in fact entire 250 year stretch in America was such a screwup we’re still trying to sort it out.
And we think it was a clerical error that led to the Jews being discriminated against and enslaved for almost 4000 years, 16 TIMES longer than slavery in America. We all MEANT to be screwing with black people from the get go; the fact that Jews took it in the shorts for so long was a problem in accounting.
I tell you, I simply MUST find my Whitey’s union card. Ever since I had my health insurance canceled because of too ill health and can’t get hired anywhere because I’m too old, they keep not letting me into the secret Whitey Money Store. Even though three of my diseases automatically qualify for disability (according to Social Security rules), I haven’t been able to secure any benefits for more than four years in spite of hiring a lawyer. I don’t know who keeps not getting the memo that I’m a white guy and therefore automatically get all the good stuff, but I’m sure tired of them screwing up.
And dammit, how did that stupid affirmative action thing ever happen? Someone must’ve been asleep at the switch. We’re all supposed to be unified in keeping blacks down. Since we so carefully control everything and can create sophisticated custom-made diseases like AIDS just to kill black people, and being so omnipotent and omniscient that we can exactly suppress just the blacks in every possible corner of the earth where they raise their nappy little heads, I just can’t account for how black people ever got freed in the first place. Lincoln must’ve been hung over that morning, that’s all I can think of.
Well, good for you. You’ve managed to manufacture your own little bloggy world where you never have to amount to anything and you never have to answer for any of your community’s failures because all your woes are magically traceable back to the blue-eyed devil that has such perfect control over every aspect of the world. All us crackers cooperate so well that we’ve managed to prevent every black sovereign nation on the planet from amounting to a hill of beans for the last thousand years. Damn, we’re good.
Well, I better send out a memo to all the black millionaires and black college professors and black business owners and black movie stars that all us Whitey’s are going to stop pulling the strings behind the scenes, letting them THINK they earned their own successes. You’ve got everything all figured out, so we might as well stop pretending that they’re all anything but Uncle Tom’s. Either that or we must’ve sent a few Whitey checks to the wrong addresses.
Here’s a last thought to leave you with. Some day, God knows how many years from now, you’ll be lying there on your deathbed looking back at your wasted life, and you’ll either realize that you were always your own worst enemy, or that Whitey really had you licked before you were even born. Either way, your life will have meant nothing. I just regret that I won’t be there to see the look on your face. But I know it’ll be there.
You go to weekly Keep the Negro Down meetings? That’s funny. You must be one of the incompetent ones without any real influence to keep black people subjugated that they keep on the fringes. Most of the meetings are held on a daily basis throughout corporate America. I guess they felt that they couldn’t trust you with all that time you spent in the black community and your beloved Aunt Mae. I guess this means you just have to try harder.
As far as black people being the only ones to endure hardship, deprivation, or discrimination I have no idea where you got such an assumption from. I think you may have got that information from your weekly propaganda meetings because no one here ever made such a dumb statement. However we do know that the hardship, deprivation, and discrimination that black people have endured has been enhanced, augmented, and amplified by white people, such as yourself, who are so insecure that they have to judge their self worth by how much better they have it over other people.
I am happy to inform your ignorance that World War II is over. Nobody is trying to subjugate the poor Jewish community these days. In fact, the Jewish homeland is doing its best to subjugate the Palestinian community. But nevertheless, it is a good analogy to demonstrate the differences between white people being subjugated and how other people respond and the way black people are subjugated and other people respond. In World War II, white people were able to gain the sympathy of the white world to end their subjugation by other white people. And when the subjugation was over, white people put together plans of reconstruction and finance to help destroyed predominantly white communities rebuild.
Compare that to the way the subjugation of the black community was ended. A civil rights law was past. Where are the reconstruction plans for the black communities? Whenever anyone even hints at some kind of recompense for the black community people roll their eyes and talk about how black people want a handout. Nobody’s hand is further extended than the white community’s super sized, baseball glove shaped, all encompassing mitt. White people don’t consider helping other white people a handout. A black person getting help is considered affirmative action and that’s too unfair to white people. Very good analogy.
Believe it or not, black people died in World War II as well. White people like you don’t even consider what happened to the black community that was in Germany before operation save white people. White people don’t consider what happened to black people in the areas that the Axis powers invaded. Black people died in the fight to liberate white people from other white people. But listen to you tell the story in typical white person fashion and the only people who mattered in World War II is white people. Very good analogy for more white discrimination.
In typical white fashion people point to the relatively few black millionaires who play sports for white billionaires or the handful of black actors and actresses who develop movies for white billionaires as proof that nobody is keep black people down. However, going back to your World War II analogy, nobody points to the handful of Jews that Oskar Shindler kept alive as proof that no Jews died. The very argument that relatively few black individuals do well proves that black people are not being subjugated is some of the finest evidence of white people’s disdain for the black community. World War II is over. The subjugation of the black community continues to this day.
If you need help finding your whitey union card let me help you. Try looking in the mirror. The whitey express membership is bound to get you into many, many places and it is impossible for you to leave home without it.
As far as my deathbed goes, if death can get me away from people like you it cannot come fast enough. When people die they enjoy a moment of clarity that puts their entire life into perspective. The very idea that you believe your hate is enough to transcend such a moment speaks of the racist hate you have in your heart. Your nappy headed Auntie Mae that you loved so dearly and all of your black playmates would be so proud of the racist you’ve become. And you will be mistaken, for the look on my face at the moment of my death will be one of joy. I will be free of this hell called life with all of its materialism, lack of compassion, and racist like you.
Without the least provocation you resort to racial slurs and name calling in typical white supremacist fashion. Maybe that is all you understand. If that’s the case, let me put things to you in your own base language.
You are a broke ass, retard! You’re too dumb to have a job yet you’ve hired a lawyer! You are a liar trolling the net looking to spread some myth about how you grew up with black people! I know for a fact that no black person would ever consider playing with your stupid ass. If you had an Aunt Mae she would’ve done the world a huge favor if she would have put her calloused hands around your neck and choke the life out your wet-chicken smelling, don’t know anything about deodorant, meat sack you’d call a carcass.
Your eyes bulging out their sockets and your tongue hanging limp out your mouth is the look I like to imagine as the end of your life. I bet when your beloved Aunt Mae died she looked back on her wasted life and wished she had buried you alive in a pine box inside of an ant mound, face down so you can see your descent into the deepest part of hell. I hope you believe in a hell after death, because there’s a nappy headed demon with a pitch fork just waiting for your lice ridden, mange covered, hair on the back as thick as a grizzly bear’s, dumb ass.
Peace
S.C. Amos,
It is funny that you are so obviously in over your head that you have to resort to silly name calling and silly scenarios. It is interesting that you call attention to the Jewish holocaust and WWII. No one said that the Black slavery holocaust was the only time in history when someone was maligned or enslaved. That was not the intent of the Blog. It seems to be talking about something specific. Do you go to Jewish Blogs on the holocaust and then tout how they shouldn’t speak of it since there were blacks in slavery and others maligned? Of course you don’t!
You obviously seem to think that Brotherpeacemaker is failing in life and doing poorly, but why? Is it because he chooses to speak freely and openly about the maligning of the black community TODAY! Or is this because it is in yours and everyone else’s experience that when blacks start doing well, they no longer talk of the disparity between blacks and whites. But start singing the praises of “whitey”.
The problem is that you suffer from the same bigotry that is being employed that keeps blacks from having a piece of the American dream. You feel that blacks are whining and doing poorly not because there are people who see them as inferior but because they ARE inferior. That is the thinking that makes white privilege even more Machiavellian than slavery. Subjugation of blacks didn’t just up and end after the passing of the civil rights initiative. Just as racism didn’t end because according to you “Lincoln must’ve been hung over that morning” he freed the slaves.
Why don’t you address what is happening to blacks today, not yesterday? Blacks are doing soooo well that we can see corporate America is sorely lacking in black representation. But then I guess according to you they are too happy living in their run down shacks entertaining little white boys or girls to care about making a better life. No blacks are too busy waiting for a hand out not applying for jobs only to be turned away by “whitey” or whatever you deem to call your race of people.
Isn’t it interesting that you have NO job, NO health care, are sick practically to the point of disability but you still hire a lawyer to beg for that handout that obviously you DON’T deserve. Where are you getting the money for that lawyer? Anyway, is the reason why you are leveling all the nappy headed insults and comments towards blacks because YOU are the one who is a failure. With all that white privilege you were to lame to make something of yourself. You flubbed to many of those free handouts that were no doubt thrown your way in the form of employment opportunities when you were probably NOT the best candidate.
I guess white people who run this country and others never went into black inhabited and Middle Eastern countries and played their own form of monopoly. Carving up the country in ways that it was never meant to be. Making countries where none existed before. Ruling over these places subjugating the people all the while sucking out the natural resources then leaving them in a shambles. And now you want to point the finger at generations of people who were damaged and say “why don’t you run your country better?” As if all it takes is to one day say, go free! And BAM! Those people are able to catch up and do right the moment they are in charge. Give me a break.
Maybe you should rethink NO, JUST THINK, period!! How come they didn’t go into these countries and rebuild, where is their rebuilding like what happened in Europe after WWII? You are a serious joke! No one cared enough to even ensure that those people had a fighting chance. You and people like you are so quick to point the finger but hate to have that same waiving appendage pointing at you. You my friend belong to a race of people that has fucked over almost each and every nation on earth. And now you want to sit and say things such as “why doesn’t the Native American stop crying foul and get a job, why don’t blacks stop whining and get an education, why doesn’t the African stop acting foolish and learn to run their countries.”
Yet, the Native American was practically decimated by who, the black man is discriminated against TO THIS DAY by who, the African learned their methods of ruling and were placed in power by who? Who are these phantoms that run amok and then act like the innocent bystander with their hands in the air crying “hey stop blaming whitey.” Why don’t YOU stop telling us blacks that we need to take responsibility for our culture, which we ARE and start taking responsibility for YOUR OWN! Which from what I can see you never have. Someone says slavery and white people like you say, “hey look at the holocaust or African’s had slaves too.” What happened to “yes it was a horrible thing we did.”
Someone says discrimination, white people like you say, “discrimination is over, hey look over there isn’t that Oprah and her millions? See there is no discrimination because there are a few black millionaires.” Maybe we should look at idiots like you and say, “look over there, white people have jobs and health care so S.C. Amos isn’t suffering without those things.
Get a clue!
Indeed, the black community has learned en masse to turn our collective nose up at our brothers and sisters who still practice any form of African spirituality. We view these misguided souls as evil and anti-Christian. And if we see them as anti-Christian, then we must have no choice but to see ourselves as anti-African.
It’s not just a simple fact that it is different. Black Christians will tolerate the typical Jewish belief even though the Jews do not accept Jesus. The black community will accept the various forms of the Native American’s pagan beliefs. But as soon as we are faced with the beliefs that are our birthright, the African beliefs that go back thousands of years before Jesus and Moses walked the earth in the Middle East and Northern Africa, we are repulsed as if the devil himself has danced across our path.
Yup. It’s crazy how this is currently going on in the Motherland as well.
I remember when my aunt’s sister (fresh off the plane from Nigeria) asked me if there was a church on my college’s campus. I said that I didn’t know. Her face got all screwed up and she said “What do you mean you don’t know? You don’t go to church?”
I said “No.”
“What do you mean ‘No?’ You should be going to church!”
I just rolled my eyes at her and walked away. I would’ve loved to tell her about herself but Africans raise their children to respect (i.e., worship) disrespectful elders. I can’t stand Jesus freaks.
It really puzzles me when native Africans reject their tailor-made spirituality. You speak your native tongue, give your children native names, adhere to tribal ideology, wear native attire, and then worship a man that’s not a reflection of you. I don’t get it. Then again, Nigeria’s nearly 50 years removed from colonialism.
Thanks for the feedback Anonymiss,
You hit the nail so well on the head. Nigeria’s only fifty years removed from colonialism. And it was colonialism that has ruined the African continent. My own brother in law, my sister’s husband, is from Nigeria. He’s the authority on African traditions in the family. And he has told the rest of my family that people who practice African traditions back in Africa are crazy and frowned on by the larger society. These people are considered religious fanatics. Go figure…
Peace