Denmark Vesey: Why The Term "African-American" Sucks

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Why The Term "African-American" Sucks

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Intellectual dishonesty will take you a long way. Does this white boy claim his african ancestry onhis job applications or the census? Hell no. Is Irish American, or Italian American bullshit as well? Are the dark skinned people of African descent the only people in America who should have no cultural or kinship ties to a larger community of interest outside of the United States? A white South African will identify himself as a South African no matter how long he is in America. He will maintain those cultural ties and all of the privilege and connectivity that come with it.

The term African American sucks to those who do not want the descendants of African slaves to ever lift themselves out of the underclass that is the foundation of this so called land of the free. When we identify with something larger than America we begin distance ourselves from the overseer in ways that are inimical to the interests of R/WS. This has been going on since the first African slaves were brought to this country and stripped of their language, their culture, their gods. Stripped of everything that would give them reason to believe they were better than slaves; more than just the color of their skin.

This specious logic would be ridiculous coming from a descendant of African Slaves. It is an obvious manifestation of the R/WS system that this ignorant white boy expresses this "independent" thought process, with the pretense of just looking out for the best interest of us po Black folks.; Oct 14, 2007, 12:07:00 PM

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"