soulpole said:
Hey cracker.Blacks originated ALL OVER AFRICA.The pale arabs ONLY INVADED NORTHERN AFRICA.They are not AFRICAN.AFRICAN MEANS BLACK.When you say AFRICAN AMERICAN it means BLACK American.DID YOU KNOW THAT BLACKS WERE IN EUROPE WAAAY BEFORE THE WHITE MAN.Sorry cracker.I cant let you slide with your HIS-STORY.Blacks were in America before ANYBODY.WE are the real NATIVE AMERICANS.
Actually, all of that is not so . . . eeerrrr . . . black and white
I think a large part of it comes down to who you're talking to and/or what your "reality" is. For example, I have met people from North Africa (Morocco), and they referred to themselves as Africans. At least these that I met did. Not black Africans mind you, but Africans nevertheless. And why not? They're from the African continent!
And here's another experience I had. A long time ago, I was chatting with somebody online who was from Spain. I mentioned to her that I was African-American. OK, so a few weeks later she made some racist, anti-black joke based on something I said. I pointed out to her that I was black. She got embarrassed, said she didn't know, and apologized. I asked her how she couldn't know that I was black when I had told her that I was African-American??? She quite reasonably responded that not everybody from Africa is black! And that if you tell somebody from Spain that you are "African", they might not necessarily automatically equate that with being "black". Made sense to me . . . but I still didn't appreciate the joke though
! LOL!
Speaking of history, I want to go off on a little tangent here. There's always a racist peckerwood who wants to assert that black people never contributed anything to history and the advancement of mankind and all that jazz. Of course, that's not true and it's never been true going back into antiquity. Egypt stood as one of the world's greatest civilizations. And to think that the Egyptians of antiquity looked like the Egyptians of today? That would be like saying that the North Americans of centuries past looked like the North Americans of today! The face of modern-day Egypt is the result of waves of Arab invasions. And here's something else that's very, very telling. The Arabs don't claim the pyramids (and all the other antiquities of Egypt) as their own! They know they didn't build them! Like Obama said, "You didn't build that!" Hahaha
! They were there when you came!
So then next, a racist peckerwood wants to turn around and say . . . well . . . the ancient Egyptians were "white Greeks"! They were Greeks who looked like Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra and Yul Brenner playing Ramses in the movies! LET MY PEOPLE GO! HAHAHAHA ;D!!! There certainly was a connection between Egypt and Greece (see below). After all, where do you think that "mysterious" place was that Greek scholars often referred to, and where they were learning all of these things about math, science, medicine, and the cosmos???
I think . . . no I KNOW . . . that it's still not 100% certain who the ancient Egyptians were. But, I think it's safe to say they were NOT Arabs! Even the Arabs will tell you that! And they were NOT white, European, Elizabeth Taylor-looking people either :
I'm suggesting that they were a black people. I watched a program on Egyptology recently that was an investigation into the Ptolemy reign over Egypt. The Ptolemies were Greeks who took Egypt for themselves and declared that they were the legitimate rulers as Pharaohs. The later Ptolemies even took on Egyptian traditions and customs in order to be accepted by the people. But, the point is that Egypt had been around long before the Greek Ptolemies showed up! Interestingly, the program that I watched suggested for the first time anywhere that I have seen/read that the Ptolemies were not "pure" Greeks, but rather a bi-racial, Euro-African people. So, there's even some controversy over who the Ptolemies were!
In any event, here's one more tangent. In the U.S., by law (de jure) we had a thing called the "one-drop rule". That rule, which still exists de facto if not de jure, said that if you had even one drop of "non-white" blood, then you could not be white. You're black! Well, I was watching some program years ago about some country in Africa, and the subject of interracial dating came up. I was startled to learn that, at least in that particular African country that I now do not recall, if you had one drop of "non-black" blood, then you cannot be black. You're white! I was startled because that shook up and challenged my whole world view on the subject of race! Who you are, where you're from, and what your experiences are. That all shapes what your own personal "reality" of the world is. And what it can become.