femme-filipina, i feel what you’re saying but i gotta be honest - i really feel uncomfortable with you in this conversation knowing that you’re neither African or African American. this is all going back to a convo between black folks in the diaspora and i am of the opinion that non-black pocs do not know what our lived experiences are like and thus have no business being in conversations amongst ourselves about what it means to be black in Africa and elsewhere. no shade, nothing personal. it’s a political position that i hold. so this will be the last time i talk to you in terms of this convo. but you can always message me.
ETA: especially since i’m not at all talking about white privilege. i dont know where you got that from. i’m talking about black people.
cosmisyoruba, this is exactly my question. *how exactly* are black americans oppressing africans? like, horizontal oppression is one thing. you can be an appropriative jackass who doesn’t listen to the people of the place you claim whatever investment in. but the idea that’s been coming out of this whole convo is that black americans are pretty much the same as white americans. like people are saying that. and i dont see how anyone can say that with any real sense of black american life in america and abroad.
and really, maybe no one’s explicity saying we’re not oppressed, but like i was trying to demonstrate in my post, there’s a lot of nuance that’s being missed by assigning to all black americans this nebulously defined “ability to oppress.”
esp considering the way africans are able to make strides in the u.s. on the back of black americans……….
This is gonna sound like a weird tangent, but this brings to mind a lot of what people were saying when a few asexuals put forth this idea of sexual privilege. A lot of the privileges on the Sexual Privilege Checklist that went around some time ago only applied to straight people, and the ones that even vaguely applied to LGBTQ people carried with them some significant disadvantages that were ignored. Also, upon deeper inspection, every single item on that checklist could be traced to cissexism, heterosexism and/or sexism.
While this current discussion has far more substance to its arguments, it does make me wonder if the privilege framework provides a deep enough analysis or if there is another framework that more accurately fits the complexities of indigenous and diaspora African relationships.
I personally disagree with those folks who are saying that Black Americans are the same as white Americans. I haven’t seen anyone I follow say that, and I believe we don’t because we have the privilege to know at least something on the history of people of African descent in the US and as Tumblr is very US-centric we are exposed to a lot of things we may not have known before.
Then again, if you live in an African country, and you see Black and white Americans coming together due to their being citizens of the US then I’m not sure you’ll be making the effort to differentiate…and the thing is a lot of people on the African continent do not have the privilege to know this history or to even know of racial inequality in the US. For the majority of Africans, race is a non-issue, until you step off that plane to whatever part of Europe and the US you’re moving to and are informed that you are Black, but this is another topic. If you’re someone who spent you life in a small village and people from the US came to further their economic and/or military interests on your land, you’re not going to stop and think about how Black Americans face oppression in the US from white people when in front of your eyes they are working together. I recall, last year or the year before, coming across an articlethat attempted to discuss how the face of the US in most parts of Africa is a Black one, the essay was trying to deconstruct what this means in terms of how Africans will perceive Black Americans I believe. The reason I’m bring all of this up is to the average African, there really is no difference between someone who is classified as “Western” whether by action, thought or privilege regardless of skin colour.
The next thing if we’re talking about Black Americans having the “ability to oppress” or of Africans who made strides in the US “on the back of Black Americans” is to mention Liberia. Liberia’s history is a perfect example of how Black Americans who were oppressed in the US went on to oppress the local Africans…
hm, well i’m not going to name names, but i’ve seen more than a few of your friends say things to the affect of black americans being no different from white americans. so maybe we were looking in different directions, but that is being said. on tumblr and irl.
The reason I’m bring all of this up is to the average African, there really is no difference between someone who is classified as “Western” whether by action, thought or privilege regardless of skin colour.
and i get that and i understand that, but is that really a useful attitude to bring to this conversation? or rather dont you thinkt hat’s worth examining? because that’s along the same lines as someone from america saying “i though africa was nothing but rural! and lions!” yes, much of africa is rural, but to say that is to ignore a huge varitey of the lived experiences of africans. to y’all, a westerner is a westerner. but here within the west, that whole being black thing really matters. and that “western” stance, as much as we emulate it, was and is designed to maintain white supremacy. so even though e may engage in it, ultimately we can never become white. running up behind white supremacy will only get us so far. so i get that that’s the popular assumption, but isn’t the whole point of this discussion to shake up those assumptions? isn’t that what y’all are asking us to do?
and in my experience, you’re painting a very rosy picture of the relationship of black and white americans abroad. that racial shit they hit us with here, gets replicated even when we’re supposedly sharing the same status as westerners abroad. it’s not always two americans relating to each other on an equal playing field over native africans.
The next thing if we’re talking about Black Americans having the “ability to oppress” or of Africans who made strides in the US “on the back of Black Americans” is to mention Liberia. Liberia’s history is a perfect example of how Black Americans who were oppressed in the US went on to oppress the local Africans…
yes!! exactly! we should be talking about this!!!!! because who gave these African Americans financial support to do this? the U.S. government. and white folks initially ran the government! which is why i’m trying to bring *structure* into this. those black americans would not have been able to colonize, would not even have got the idea if it weren’t for white westerners. it doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility for thoroughly thoroughly fucking shit up, but i think it’s worth asking who really came out the winners in that situation? the White West. i mean there’s a reason why there was only one Liberia. there’s a reason why black american colonization, Liberia style, didn’t become that extensive of a thing, like the british empire or something.
AND we should be talking about how Africans utilize anti-black american and anti-black caribbean discourse in order to get ahead in the west. we can talk about more than one thing at the same time. and we can talk about western privilege, but i’m not here for no dishonest conversations. i’m not here for conversations that ignore the vast variety of black american life or act like the fact that we are being systematically terrorized, brutalized, imprisoned and killed without impunity has no bearing on this “western privilege.” and i’m defeinitely not here for any convos that wanna pretend like black americans have the same access to western power that white westerners have.
(via thefemaletyrant)
