NoCoPilot
Posts : 20326
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
 | | Subject: Book: Out of America Mon Dec 28, 2015 1:26 pm | |
| This controversial book from nearly twenty years ago looked at Africa from the point of view of a Detroit reporter for The Washington Post who happens to be black. As a black American, he has all sorts of conflicted feelings about the continent of Africa, but as a reporter covering the genocides in Rwanda, civil wars in Somalia and Tanzania and Congo he is repulsed by the mess Africans have made of Africa.
Apparently many Afro-centric "experts" took him to task for being so negative about the "homeland" but as he points out, most of them have never been there. It's very different on the ground.
Fascinating and very well written. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20326
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Out of America Thu Jan 07, 2016 7:40 am | |
| - Keith B. Richburg wrote:
- While I know that "Afrocentrism" has become fashionable for many black Americans searching for identity, I know it cannot work for me. I have been here, I have lived here and seen Africa in all its horror. I know now that I am a stranger here. I am an American, a black American, and I feel no connection to this strange and violent place.
You see? I just wrote "black American." I couldn't even bring myself to write "African American." It's a phrase that, for me, doesn't roll naturally off the tongue. Is that what we really are? Is there anything really "African" left in the descendants of those original slaves who made the torturous journey across the Atlantic? Are white Americans whose ancestors sailed west across the same ocean still considered "English Americans" or "Dutch Americans"? Haven't the centuries on America's shores erased all these ancient connections, so that we are now simply "Americans"? |
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