MY ANCESTORS WERE SLAVES!!!
Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 11:17AM 
This was the snappy retort dashed upon me as if the person were throwing a bucket of water on a consuming fire. There seems to be some honor attached to considering one's self to be the decedent of slaves. The retort came after I introduced the idea that white people didn't come to the shores of west Africa and snatch up their human game, stored them below deck and made a wicked voyage across the deeply green Atlantic ocean to the eastern shores of the Americas to sell their manifest human cargo to waiting buyers. No, she WANTS to be a child of a slave. Not simply a slave by virtue of first becoming a prisoner of war, but snatched from her African village where she lived without problems until Ofay appeared and took her from her happy home. Just like that. To me that smacks of the nadir of the humanity of some African nation and not the supreme zenith of the African that so many in the Americas worship.
What is the value that has been attached to being the descendant of an African slave? The conversation was sparked by this same person touting slavery as an honor, berating a group of Africans as the stupidest people ever. Yet, at the same time they want to be one of them from long ago. Some astute, so called white person, could certainly ascertain from this that the person denigrating the Africans, then in the next instant stating they were one of them snatched away by the almighty white European from their African home to become a slave in America as saying they were glad to be captured by the white man because they have now become so much better in the Americas than the "stupid" African that was left behind. This, to me, smacks of mild a form of insanity.
We are in fact, more correctly, the descendants of prisoners of war. We fought wars throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. No white man came to Africa and took people without a fight unless there was some complicity by other Africans such as the Tinubu family of Lagos. The realization that we covered the Earth and were not merely trapped on the continent of Africa is the first lie we have to dismantle. When the great and learned Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. practically cried on screen because he found his ancestral roots in Ireland and not Africa I felt such shame for him. Here is a man educated at one of the highest institutions of learning in the United States, holds the highest degree to be earned and yet he is ignorant of our great past. He apparently didn't know of the power we held in the British Isles and were finally unseated from power in 1455 upon the defeat of the Dubh Glas or Black Douglas' Clan. It seems he had no knowledge of Adam Marsh in the 1200's (you do the knowledge on the name Marsh) that was institutional in making Oxford University what it is today. Nor could he stand on the defeat of the Moors in Spain in 1492, after holding power, meaning bringing enlightenment to Al Andaluz for more than 700 years. So, you tell me what is the value of proclaiming to be the sons and daughters of slaves, when you can be the sons and daughters of great nobles the world over?
Reader Comments (2)
Peace!