Nappy Headed Black Child

So i've been mulling this around my head for quite sometime. I've really been searching for a model a community i could get with. After leaving religion and gaining some understanding of my history, which opened my eyes to some very critical realities concerning who our friends are and who are enemies are in a historic and contemporary sense. And after months and months of searching study and intensely frustrating moments of clarity i've begun to gain some headway on this. And just a heads up will be speaking from the context of the black person in america.

Now in the arguments of black authenticity i often see 3 critical issues neglected the first is the sheer scope of blackness, the second is the sheer scope of black cultural destruction, and the third is the unique situation of the black person in america.

Issue 1. First of we have to qualify blackness In american diaspora we have 2 blacks. We have the Noun form and the Adjective form. Now we have a noun form because we are the diaspora violently separated from our respective groups and force to create something new. that something new is the noun form Black. And being a lil less than connected to the rest of the world some of us dont realize that that other "Black People" do not call themselves black. They refer to themselves by their ethnic denominations (ashanti, azande, bantu, etc). Now In the book Intro to African Civilizations by John G Jackson we know that the term ethiopian comes from the Greeks. Ethiopian is a greek term for burnt faces greek word for burnt being "ethios" and face being "ops". Jackson also tells us that Homer and Herodotus claimed that these burnt face people were the inhabiters of The Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Western Asia, and India and all were referred to as Ethiopians. So you have asiatic and african black people and there is still a debate going on from which group the first civilization began..But they were indeed black. From this point forward one can see the the breadth of blackness. Blackness as simply done it all. To put constraints on what it can and cant be is anti historical.

Issue 2. The scope of black cultural destruction is enormous. The records of our history were lost in large part due to the destruction of our libraries at timbuktu alexandria and carthage, the constant remixing of black heritage by eurocentric scholars, enslavement removing our people from their native cultures and thus in the process untold cultures were lost, all of these things separated from who we are and thats just on the african side what was lost on the asiatic side of things is unknown. Now this destruction means that what information we have has to be pieced together that leaves alot of room for error and misinterpretation. Some things are lost to us forever. Which brings to issue 3.

Issue 3. The unique situation of the black person in america. As i said in the beginning of Issue 1. Black people here in america have existed in isolation from their heritage. Now Frantz Fanon states in Black Skin White Masks that the first step a colonized group must do is redefine the society around them. Because the society that currently exists is one of oppression. Now as a result of instead of the colonizers coming to us. They brought us to them, so as chattel slavery was abolished we were not able to redefine the society around us. And the hostile and inhumane treatment of black people in america alone is enough to prove Fanon's assertion. Without self determination a standard to be authentic to cannot be set.

These 3 issues to me obliterates any discussion of collective authenticity particularly issue #3. However what we do have however are several groups out here attempting to establish such a paradigm. To me these groups represent various schools of thought. However the thing about it is not everybody is going to think the same. And the oppression does not give a damn about our respective schools of thought. So it makes sense to (mostly by my neutrality in this school of thought thing)work in favor of what is all of our best interest. At this time self determination would be that interests.

Thus if i had to point out something by which to measure black authenticity by in the context of the black in america. I think we would best be served if that measuring stick would be movement towards self determination.

Or we can sit around and keep calling everybody who dont think like us agents.