Black descendants of the Enslavement; those colorful embellishments in the bowl I will call the black olives, and known now as part of an encapsulated people of color.
A dear friend and colleague recently called the United States a “salad” as opposed to a “melting pot.” I must agree. The only “melting” done was primarily among the European ethnicities and nationalities who all fall under the assignment of “white.” Nevertheless, there are as many nonwhite ethnicities and nationalities existing all over the world, all tossed together here in the United States inside a huge, virtual hollow bowl.
Many say this is where the beauty of the nation rests, although the behavior of many of the nation’s people would portend otherwise. The most interesting feature of this metaphor is…
The United States has a penchant for corralling people into stables of identify for their own supremacist, segregationist purposes, all the while enticing each group to believe self-segregating spaces are best for “unity” and “identity.” White people come from every conceivable place on Earth where the credentials consist of ancestral and current European geographical lineage, little to no melanin in skin pigment, and assignment of the color white by a government of wealthy white elites, as noted in the census for Egyptians and some other Northern Africans and Middle Eastern countries. Everyone should understand by now that the Africans who…
Egypt or its other name, Kemet and Khemet, whose literal meaning is “Black land,” with its kings and queens in antiquity, have come to mean the epitome of Blackness and supreme birthright among Africa’s formerly enslaved American descendants.
Black people have been in a perpetual argument for decades with some white scholars and others over their virtual theft of Africa, their claim of its Northern African regions and particularly Egypt as “white.” In fact, there are many Black Americans today who think that the enslaved from Africa to America literally came from Egypt itself. …
There were never “lessons” on Race. Later, we knew about colored people and white people, but never to the extent those terms would become clear during the late sixties and early seventies, when I was coming of age.
When I was a child, my Mother and my Nana didn’t talk about Race as an intellectual exercise and certainly not often if my brother and I were within hearing distance. There were never “lessons” on Race. Later, we knew about colored people and white people, but never to the extent those terms would become clear during the late sixties and early seventies, when I was coming of age. They never actually sat us down to explain the situation. There was never the “talk” Black parents know instinctively today to have with their children or the talks I am almost…
“How could the use of a seemingly benign color wheel to ascribe value to the performance of children have any connotation inside of the White Supremacist ideology when clearly the idea lives outside of it?”
My soon to be seven year old grandson came home excited about his performance in school. His mother asked him, “what color did you get today?” He pretended nonchalance, sighed once, and asserted, “I got Purple.” His mother was pleased.
I asked him what the color for his performance that day represented and he told me it meant he had done a “Great Job.” Other representations for performance in his first grade class were measured by the colors, Pink for “Outstanding,” Blue for “Good Day,” Green, for “Ready to Learn” Yellow, for “Stop and Think,” which was third to the…
This egalitarian society envisioned in the 1960s, however, could not have been further from the truth, and what Black people really got instead was much more insidious.
When the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964 and amended in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, many Black people in the United States thought they would finally receive an opportunity for Racial parity. The emphasis on desegregation and integration into white spaces and places, specifically within education, housing, and employment, was positioned as a panacea for equality, equity, opportunity and justice. The idea was strictly economic; sharing these spaces and places would cause an equality paradigm shift through erasure of color as a distinction. It was thought that if a viable comparison could be drawn among Black and…
Abraham Lincoln knew all too well about the assignment of the superior position of the white race by virtue of the assignment of the color white to human bodies.
“…and inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” — Abraham Lincoln
The Paradox of Having It Both Ways
During the last half of the twentieth century through part of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the Post-Racial Color Blind Era literally caused the color white to disappear out of the lexicon of American discourse after years of being prefaced with the word, “man.” For a nation that began its rise using a Racial color wheel, this Era was extremely consequential, even within the apparent invisibility of the Era’s movement through time.
For people who identify as “white” today but would rather be referred to as “normal,” a “colorless” distinction placed them into another position of separation from…
Racism is often misunderstood when people are given to convoluted expressions of bias borne out of the ideology of White Supremacy and are inadvertent victims of the Post-Racial Color Blind era where “individual behavior” virtually became synonymous with the term, “Racism” and rendered it an abstract concept as opposed to an actual, working system within all American institutions.
For average, everyday white people, much of what is unknown or allowed to be made willfully ignorant of with regard to Racism lies in both the bootstrapping and meritocracy myths perpetuated on these “everyday” white people by those in power who share…
Today, the Nation is in a position not very unique from just before the Civil Rights movements for change or even the period just before the Civil War erupted, even as it feels like nothing the nation has ever experienced before in its history. It may very well be that two or more eras will mark this period of time, people, and experiences in the future. One thing for certain, however, is the generational division which still exists among the nation’s people on account of Race.
Yet, the Nation continues to feign shock and surprise over the rise of White…
Dr. Cynthia Alease Smith
Anti-Racism Essayist & Educator offering discussions about Race, Racism, White Supremacy and the language used, from perspectives not ordinarily considered
