Black Americans are North Americans, not Africans. Black Americans are a
creolized ethnic group in North America. Our ethnogenesis happened here, on this soil, through centuries of cultural formation through different societies cultures and policies. I don’t know why this is so hard for people to accept.
We were not transplanted Africans maintaining an external homeland nor are we
apart an African diaspora. A portion of our ancestors did come from Africa and
were part of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade diaspora (a triangular trade that
involved the enslavement of many ethnic groups existing outside of Africa) but the
actual numbers and proportions remain debated. (TAST Database places this as :
388K to 400k trafficked directly to NA which was 2 to 4% of the 12.5 estimate for
the TAST in general without scrutiny abd in the high estimate) We became a new ethnic group with our own language (Black American English), music, foodways, religious expressions, and social codes, all amalgamated within North America.
This romantic view of Africa being home and the motherland is an origin myth
propagated by ideologues and race theorist seeking to reclassify BAs in order to
get rid of the BA population through colonial settlements. To call us “African” is to skip over the process that made us who we are. Some of us may have ancestral links to Africa, just as Irish Americans have to Ireland but culturally, linguistically, politically, and historically, socially, we are a
North American people group.
This is not anti black as black isn’t synonymous with African and it’s uniquely a
Black American sociocultural sociopolitical ethnonational identifier. It’s not Afrophobic either as Africa is a geographical location and the people groups that inhabitant it are diverse culturally ethnically socially politically nationally etc and flattening those unique groups into a singular label that was
invented and propagated as a colonial instrument of classification is simply Racist
African is a sociopolitical and geopolitical delineation device invented by Colonial
societies.
The scramble for Africa ?
If we take bananas from Africa Grow them in America. Are the bananas American or African? Does geography determine composition ? Do people adapt to environments and form cultures around it?
What if the bananas are grown in a garden that mixes bananas from Europe, From
Africa, and From America? Will the new bananas be African bananas?
I no African I’m North American.
Break the Spell Soulaan.
The idea of Continents and Geography (political geography man made fiction)
defending composition is a remnant of Racism.
The belief that people belong to continents is not scientific AT ALL. It’s a colonial
taxonomy built to justify racial taxonomic systems!
Europeans in the 17th–19th centuries divided the world by continent, color, and
capacity and created Allegories around these groups (Allegories of the Four
Continents)
They believed
Europe = “Civilized”
Africa = “Primitive”
Asia = “Exotic/Other”
America = “New World / Mixed”
This geographic essentialism made land a proxy for developments in Race Theory.
It’s foundational to its development in fact. For centuries these developments
occurred under the belief that climate and environment affected one’s biological
characteristics through adaptations splintering humans into “races” when the fact
of early human ancestors adapting to their environments after tens thousands of
years is doesn’t lock them to geographical locations. This has been debunked for
so long.
Environment influences culture
