[QUOTE=Don26]
Charlize Theron
Date of birth (location)
7 August 1975
Benoni, Gauteng, South Africa
Ergo, Charlize is African American and NOT black.
[/QUOTE]
Not this old chestnut again!
Charlize Theron has a national identity - South African. So if she has become an American citizen, she’d be South African American. Just like Arnie is Swiss American. I’ve never heard Theron make this claim for herself, just by folks attempting to show the “inadequacy” of the term African American. (BTW, I’ve seen it with Dave Matthews as well.)
African American is an appellation chosen by Black Americans to signify their connection with the African diaspora. It also signifies the lack of specificity that most Black Americans have
Oh, I know, let me try one!
Fidel Castro
Place of birth: Cuba, which is part of the North American continent
Ergo, Castro is American.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
Risking sounding like an insensitive twit here, but… why does it matter what people who were in the same region of the world as your direct ancestors, and presumably looked a lot like your direct ancestors, but were not necessarily your direct ancestors, were doing 500 years ago? I mean, I see the value of knowing what you know as a combat to some racist who starts going on and on about what white people have accomplished and what black people have NOT accomplished. On the other hand, should modern day descendants of Eskimos or coastal Californian native Americans or Australian Aboriginies feel inferior because their “ancestors” happened not to ever build big stone cities?
[/QUOTE]
Well… do you have the same question for anyone who talks about their pride in the accomplishments of Italian Americans not related to them? Or with the accomplishments of women? It doesn’t have anything to do with combating the words of racists; it has to do with a sense of possibility and accomplishment of people with whom one shares a cultural identity.
I’m assuming you’re a White male, Max - please correct me if I’m wrong. So if you sat next to me in kindergarten when my teacher pointed to the picture of the American presidents and said, “Children, any of you can become president one day,” it might not have caused any cognitive dissonance to you, but it did for me. Not one was Black or looked like someone in my family. I suspect the girls in the class might have had the same feeling.
Or doing a heraldry project in fourth grade, tracing the origins of my name to Central England - and being fairly certain that nobody directly in my tree came from there, while many of my White peers could talk about where their ancestors came from in Europe and stick a pin in the map. That was a pretty shitty day, sticking a pin in the middle of England, knowing that’s not really where my folks came from. (Hell, maybe some of them did… there are some really light-skinned folks in my family.)
I’ve discussed this with a Native American friend - in school, the history book usually mentions Black or Red people when they’re getting the shaft. So we’re always losing a war, getting captured or enslaved, starving, strung out on drugs and alcohol. So when I learned who Garrett Morgan was, I read all the books I could read about him. When I learned that Benjamin Banneker more or less designed the street layout of Washington, DC, I told everyone in my class. Because for once, people like me accomplished something of enormous significance. It did wonders for my self-esteem and my confidence… and I saw the exact same thing happen in my completely Black fourth-grade class as a teacher.
And as I’ve said before, Africa was always an embarrassment in history and social studies. Africans are poor, they don’t wear clothes, they’re all starving - that’s all I learned in K-12 about the continent - if we even got around to studying it at all. I know an amazing amount about Western Europe and Japan but virtually nothing about an entire continent. I took an African Studies course in college and blew it off, more or less because I thought I had some magical knowledge of Africa due to my Blackness. After the first “D” I got the message. I studied, read, and learned - from a White prof, nonetheless - about pre-colonial Africa, great civilizations, the essential looting of a continent via colonialism, chattel slavery, genocide (read about the exploits of Leopold II in the Congo - the most extreme estimates have him above Hitler and Pol Pot and in the company of Stalin). So the images of Africa I saw made more sense, and then learning about how Africans prospered before, during, and after the colonial period taught me to respect the continent and the people from whom I am descended. (And yes, I know, as a Black American with a Jamaican parent, I’m probably more European than a lot of White people here!)
The reality is that many people of color who come from a heritage that has been disrespected or eradicated by White Europeans (let’s be honest here - in the examples of Native Americans and Aborigines, that’s who did it) do feel a sense of inadequacy and shame because history books are full of stories of how the savages were scratching their asses and eating each other until the missionaries came along and taught them how to read the Bible. When you have an opportunity to learn about what cultures and traditions existed before the Europeans - the systems of trade, the education - and perhaps as importantly, what native people did better than Europeans (things like equal rights for women, an openness and acceptance of homosexuality, a healthy respect for the environment) - it does wonders for your self-esteem and the sense of possibility. I could say more but that’s enough for now… hope this answers your question.
