It is your own blog. You can do what you want. I came to the blog to discuss , and that’s what I thought I was doing… I think these kind of blogs are healthy and valid.

I will apologize flatly for any hurt feeling in this debate. However, I question the fundamentals of your logic.
You have the name of your blog as “Angry Black Woman”, and yet you don’t want to debate race and politics with a presumably “Angry Black Man.”

The latest news on tribal /political warfare in Kenya, and the persistence of Black-on-Black crime in the U.S. seems to focus even more on the effects of colonialism on the relations between African peoples. I teach in Washington,DC. This is not some remote academic issue for me. It’s good to have a open, frank forum on these subjects.

How I do present facts without your interpretation of them as “pronouncements, judgments,…etc”?
I didn’t write on your blog out of hate or even spite.
And I didn’t start the name-calling.
I want to play by the rules, but if we are going to debate, then let’s debate. Let’s even debate the facts. And then let’s actually arrive at some point of positive action…

Here is the Angry Black Woman blog. You seem to have trouble grasping the concept of “place” on the internet. might want to work on that.

Secondly, we also love to debate based on facts, but so far you haven’t really shown yourself worthy of me or anyone else taking time to engage you. You can here making pronouncements, judgments, and basically looking down your nose at us based on one or two posts. If you’d read more of the posts you’d notice that we already know about the problem of colonialism and how Africa was carved up by Europeans. As Nora pointed out, this book knowledge doesn’t really give you insight into the nuances I mentioned. In order to engage and educate you, I’d really have to care more about enlightening you. As it is, you come off like an asshole, and I have no inclination to do so. It’s not my job to give time and energy to every asshole who comes by here looking to put me down.

Calling me a neo-con or a Fox News wannabe doesn’t change the debate. I am saying to you that when Political Correctness draws semantic boundaries between marginalized African peoples around the world , ( and really just people around the world ) when we should be tactically drawing alliances , then that “Correctness” is neither political not correct, just impotent blathering.

PC doesn’t go far enough is my view. This dialectic spending time redefining terms of race, instead assaulting and shattering the genetically invalid concept of race finally for the sake of equality and freedom.

On the African vs. Black issue, African people around the world are still one people because we have been , and are oppressed like we ARE one people. That may never be “Black enough” for you, but I am starting to doubt your idea of “Blackness” anyway.

That said, you might as well just stop here. It really doesn’t matter how many articles you read and regurgitate, because your credibility is shot the instant you start equating political correctness with racism. Not only is this cliched neocon rhetoric that we’ve heard a billion times before, it shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire concept that you might as well be arguing that up is down. And while that works on, say, the audience of Fox News, it generally doesn’t fly far here.

i enjoy a good debate. especially when the uninformed assume that there are informed…
whatever nuances “Africans” and “African-americans” see as vast differences come from different interpretrations of the same problem : colonialism.

much of the nations in Africa today were literally carved up by the European powers of the 19th century. and those artifical divisions still breed friction today. there are more black people in Brazil than in the u.s., but there still is a perceived distinction between “those” black people and the black people of the u.s… in th brazilian state of bahia, blacks fought for and maintained a esentially seccesionist and autonomous state within brazil for nearly 100 years until slavery was finally overthrown in that country. Slavery ended in Brazil on May 13, 1888. That’s nearly 33 years longer than it took slavery to officialy end in the U.S.

but we both know, as fellow “African-Americans” ,that if you were teleport Afro-Brazilians into Harlem instananeously, there is a likely chance that they would NOT be regarded as fellow Black people by many Black residents in Harlem , just because of the language difference. In terms of their actual historical experience, the African culture in Brazil is very more intact than any group of Blacks in the U.S.

I am very aware of the degrees of racism, and the degrees of the debate about racism between Africans living in the Americas. But I am struck by the commonality that Africans all over the world share by their divisiveness toward each other. I would posit that this divisiveness allowed the slave trade to blossom in Africa to begin with….

Bluntly put, African dscendents living in Brazil are probably more African in culture than African descendents in America.

That is because slavery in the States was so much more complete in its execution upon its slave population. Language and cultural ties to Africa were successfully wiped out for many Blacks , with the notable exceptions of Gullah, Creole, Garifuna, and Seminole communities in South Carolina,Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida,respectively.

In Africa, Belgium and France , among other European conquerors, carved up the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, and Nigeria according to the their needs as colonizers , very much irrespectively of the tribal boundaries that divide and connect those countries throughout the history of the continent. Even some of the tribal identities like ” Yoruba” was constructed by Westernized exiles living in Sierra Leone. Then this “identity” was introduced retroactively to nearby communities in Lagos,Nigeria.

The “jeje” identity was similarly constructed in Brazil , and then applied to the African identity of Black people already living in Brazil.

Also,there are historical evidences that the term “Gullah” may have derived from the term Gola, which is the name of a people in Sierra Leone, as well as the origin of the national term for Angola.

Africans and Black Americans both have had to construct their cultural identities, in large part from their respective post-colonial realities.

(My source of information is the article , AfroAtlantic Culture: On the Live Dialogue Between Africa and the Americas, by J. Lorand Matory in the historical volume, Africana, compiled by Henry Louis Gates & Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1999.)

That being said, these nuanced differencesbetween Africans and African-Americans are real. They do matter when Black people are dealing with each other. But they are united in their post-colonial reasoning, and frankly, that can be overcome with humility and some research.

But political correctness has an inherent danger in what I would call “over-hyphenating” identities. As Black people living in this country, I believe we simply cannot afford afford even the divisiveness of our language. If we, as Black people, accentuate , rather than simply acknowledge and overcome, the differences between “us” and other Africans, then we only hurt ourselves. Over-hyphenating our identity will result in over-hyphenating our thinking, dividing us from Africans living in Africa, or Africans living in Latin America, or Europe, or Asia, ultimately dividing us from our political , cultural brothers and sisters.

Yes, I think Don Imus should have been fired from his radio show, just as I think he had the right of free speech to say “nappyheaded ho’s”, hatefully racist as the words, and his intentions are.Just as Al Sharpton, and the National Action Network had the right to protest for his dismissal. The Constitution is clear on both sides of the Debate. Nas AND Ice Cube have the right to use the word “nigger” on their albums, and upscale Blacks (and Whites) have the right to protest it.

( I often fantasize about Ice Cube and heavy metal gun activist Ted Nugent both at the same table on Bill Maher’s Real Time. Let the sparks fly.)

The fact are that when people say hateful words or language, in this country, The United States Constitution protects their right to free speech . Period.
That doesn’t mean people have to sit silently and take it. The Constitution also protects our rights to protest.

I have to go to work now, so I can’t keep writing much longer. I am a schoolteacher and a cartoonist. check out my site, http://www.clayharrisillustrations.com. This debate will most likely continue, much to my joy, because i believe firmly that this is kind of dialogue on race that we ALL need.

Whereas racism, sexism, and homophobia bring us all together. If by “us,” you mean straight white men, of course.