Hello hello,
As we approach the end of January and still see record numbers of Covid, I hope everyone is hopeful about the vaccine rollout and our return to ‘normalcy’ over the next 6 months. I’ll be honest, it’s hard to see the light. I just recently heard the phrase that “maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train!” I sure hope not… but the beginning of January had me wondering!
Breaking news!!! I hope the title of this post caught your attention. It’s something my husband has told me countless times over the course of our relationship, and also something I recently read in Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Here’s the excerpt:
“A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture, the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of. She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten, that startled me in its simplicity. “You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are. What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them,” she said. “They don’t become black until they go to American or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.”
This is not to say there isn’t discrimination or social hierarchy in Africa. It’s just a simple concept to reinforce the arbitrary assignment and subsequent inequities of “race” in America. To think, a continent full of “black people” is actually just a continent full of people. 🤯
#courageousconversations #blacklivesmatter #Caste
Be well,
-Jessica