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(Dr. Janice Collins). Okay great, now let me
ask this just in case, just for clarification.
What is Africana Studies, African American Studies, Black
History, how would you classify or how would you describe
Africana Studies, is it different than Black History, or
are you saying it's all encompassing which includes
areas outside of one particular central point?
(Father Brown). Before he opens his mouth, what
would you think Sammy Sosa was, I mean before the skin change.
(Dr. Cha-Jua). Even then he changed the
color but the features just keep popping through.
(Father Brown). But before he would open
his mouth, what would you have called him, and then he opens
his mouth "baseball has been very, very good to me",
whatever he was trying to say, whatever the accent was,
we know what he would have been called externally.
That's part of reality, little story, one day when I was in
graduate school I was visiting a former student of mine from
Omaha, lived on Lower Avenue B in New York City and we were
walking down the street and a five year old child who I think
was probably of Puerto Rican descent, whatever that means,
looked at us both and called us ***.
If you're old enough to say that, then you're old enough to
get a history lesson, and I had to explain to him right
then and there, where he came from and why
he was talking bad about himself.
Our studies, Africana, Black, whatever, Afro-American,
whatever the term was that they put on the sign in front of
that building at that time was always global.
But because of political issues in the 1960s, it was a stretch
to get us to call ourselves Black anything.
But it has never been anything but global,
we have never lost our link with Africa.
The man just, he nailed it, we have to use different concepts,
periods but we've never been disconnected from
where we came from, either in our language, our, religion,
our gestures, or going back and forth.
Somebody was always going back over there,
from the very beginning.
So, to me whatever's the most inclusive term possible,
that's what it's supposed to mean.
But we've never really been categorized and limited by
somebody's title of the thing, that's my opinion.
(Dr. Cha-Jua). Yeah, you know, here's the
thing, in the most general way, I agree completely
right, but I think that we've got to also begin
to teach some things apart.
So that generally when we say African-American studies, and
this is not always the case right, but generally when we say
African-American studies we expect that we're going to enter
into a curriculum that predominately emphasizes people
who are the descendants of Africans who were enslaved
in what became the United States, right.
African diaspora studies have tended to be a field which has
focused on blacks in the Caribbean and sometimes, right,
sometimes, I should say blacks in the Caribbean and blacks in
Canada and England, and sometimes blacks
in South and Central America.
But it has always excluded Africa
and blacks in the U.S, right.
Africana has been more inclusive but even within these things,
we've got to also focus on, so when you say it's always been
global, African-American studies focuses on African-Americans has
always been global because it's always had a Pan-African vision
in terms of where liberation will come
and also in terms of understanding culture.
So, in that sense it's always been broad
and not narrow, right.
But we can't focus simply on the global because
we have to tell the story from a vantage point.
So when I say African-American studies I mean telling the story
from the interest, right, the experiences, the interest, and
the perspectives of African American people.
So for example, we know now that in the U.S, we've got Africans
from the continent, they are a growing percentage of the
population, we've got Africans from various places
in the Caribbean, and we have the traditional
African-American population.
Now while we are indeed a common people, we are also people of
very different social and historical experiences.
I'm going to call them racial formations, right.
The African-American racial formation has been one which
occurred in the, what would become the dominant society,
right, after WWI, the United States, dominant,
capitalist world economy.
And it's been an industrial economy that has now
morphed into an information age.
People who come out of the Caribbean, they were a majority
population always, right, but a rural political economy,
a continued political economy that festered
in cash crop production.
Not highly industrialized societies, right, continent
of Africa similar extracted, the Europeans
simply extracted mineral wealth.
And so, those political economies create a condition
under which certain types of different cultures emerge and
different social relations emerge.
So that, when people from the Caribbean come here,
they are treated somewhat different initially as long
as they hear the, they gotta speak.
And Africans who come here, the most educated single group
in the U.S, the most educated identifiable group,
are continental Africans living in the United States.
You find a continental African in the U.S and you've found
somebody with a PhD, worst case scenario, a Masters degree.
They might be driving a cab but they represent the bourgeoisie,
right, the leadership class on the continent of Africa.
Very different experience, African American people despite
what you might read, about 95% of all African-Americans
are working class people.
Different social, historical experiences, and those
things lead to different political perspectives
and different political agendas.
Our task, right, is not to wait for the second and third
generation of Africans and Caribbeans in the U.S to become
African Americanized because the good thing we know about
America, it's a deeply racist society and by the second
generation those children of African and Caribbean immigrants
will begin to think and act like African-Americans because
they're going to be called the N word and they're
going to be mistreated and abused.
That will always occur because this is the United States of
America, a deeply racist society.
But we can't wait for that process, we have to begin
to interact more so we can strengthen
the process of political unity.
So we've got to be clear about these differences
that are there while we work to overcome them,
we can't deny them we have to work to overcome them.
(Father Brown). Amen.