From our BMX-NY dialogue 2 weeks ago,  brothers continued our consideration of our relationship to Africa and Africanness.  Among angles through which we took up this deliberation included:

Copyright © 2007 ROD PATRICK RISBROOK

What is identity?

"Classification...labeling...self-labeling..."

"What I identify with...How I see myself...What I can relate to...How I choose to live my life..."

"My culture, belief system, practices..."

Shorthand for what you want other people to believe about you...and what you want to believe about yourself..."

{Facilitator asks: "When you think about identity, when do you think your identity coalesced or formed?" }

"Around five or six, about my homosexuality...[That's] when it became clear that it was not to be talked about..."

How might our understanding of identity serve us?

"Na'im Akbar asked, 'What function do you have in the world?...and you say, 'I am the protector...In the village, people have roles and functions...and the concept of an identity wasn't useful...The notion of identity is Western - psychoanalytic...It has nothing to do with who we are really..."

{Facilitator asks: "What is influencing how you see yourself?"}

"I grew up in Haiti...They tell you, 'This is what you eat...how you behave'..."

"Social Cognitive Theory [involves] likability...[people do what they learn makes them likable to others]..."

{Facilitator proposes, "[Consider the Kwanzaa] Kawaida questions, 'Who am I?'...'Am I who I say I am?'"}  

"As a forty-four-year-old Black man, I see our identity has been under attack from the beginning of our [tenure here]...In "Roots," when Kunta Kinte was whipped because he wouldn't identify as Toby...That's what has been [and continues to be] done to us..."

"Yes...and what was brilliant about Haley's depiction of his great, great's abuse at the hands of the white slave-owner was that it took the idea of having had our identity and culture stripped of us out of the abstract...We saw Kunta having his identity literally stripped of him...beaten out of him...And, while identity may be a Western construct, to the extent that we have been enculturated in, and operate in a Western context, that is why our understanding of identity vital...And  appreciate that our identity is connected to Africa and Africanness..."

"In the spirit of Pan Africanism...I don't see any other group of people who have been brought here as we were...Being descendants of slaves...not knowing where we come from has created a very distinct problem...I have a very unique African descendency...My relationship to Africa is an acknowledgement of descendency...But, we tend to ignore the [connection]..."

{Facilitator says, "[A behavioral theorist named] Abraham Cardner proposed that, If you can control a person's experiences, you can direct his behavior...Are our experiences under control?...Who dictates where we live...how we eat...how we pray?..."}

"Our relationship to Africa is conflicted...The lack of geological locator...property identification...creates enormous conflict...Europeans talk about being from the 'old country,' and they [have a clear sense of locale including traditions, mores, etc.]..."

"I think of identity as building something with bricks...Sometimes I bake the bricks myself and sometimes they're given to me..."

What is our relationship to Africa?

"As a child I was taught Africa was a place of savages...Tarzan...Africans had to be controlled by white people..."

"My first images of Africa were of Little Black Sambo, the little boy who ran around the tree and turned into butter..."

"The motherland...a place of greatness...with a history so rich, I developed a thirst for knowledge of it...I had to learn on my own [because there was nothing taught about it in school]..."

{Facilitator asks, "In the early grades, can you remember being taught anything about Africa?"}  [Group]  "No..."

"In one class I was taught, nobody knows who built the pyramids...In another we were told aliens built the pyramids!..."

"All I was taught regarding Africa [had to do with] slavery..."

"When I was reading about W.E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I learned a lot that we [West Africans] had to copy...There is a very bad attitude in Africa now where kids call themselves 'niggas'...When I cam to BMX I was so proud of you because you call yourselves African...The sense of belonging is so important...African Americans don't have that, and when I was in Senegal, I remember seeing Blacks talking about, 'I'm not African, I'm an American..."

{Facilitator asks, "How many have visited Africa?"}

Which, if any, African cultural items/practices do you observe?

"As I move through the world, I see all Black people younger than me as my sons and daughters...all in my age range as brothers and sisters, and all elders as my fathers and mothers..."

"We do it daily without knowing it...Eat curry...listen to R&B music...reggae...the way we speak and sound..."

"They are called Africanisms...[they include] the way we combine languages...Back in the nineties, white social scientists reflected on that natural tendency as "Ebonics"..."

"I collect Hummel [figurines]...and I know their history...and I think about objects of African art I am attracted to ... [but] if I don't know what it is, I refuse to have it in my home...until I understand its meaning..."

"The same way we were taught about European objects, we can learn about African art...The only way you're going to have that reconnection is if you [study]...Blacks don't buy African art...That's the next business I'm going into and it frustrates me that I know most of clientele will not be African Americans..."

Can monotheistic God-centered practices and ideas coexist with ancestors?

"I have always been attracted to African spiritual intelligences and practices but, during my first trip to Ghana, I experienced something like beatitude and, at one point, I went our on the terrace of the apartment where I was staying one morning and I just fell to my knees crying and praying...they were tears of joy...Now, I have always prayed, but I never prayed systematically...When I got back, I created an ancestors shrine at which I pray every morning after I pray to what I call God..."

Santeria Candles

"I practice Santeria..."

"I pray to the ancestors every day when I leave my house..."  

An African Village Practing Santeria (Olokun)

"I have altars...One has male energy...The other has female energy...Someone recommended recently that I combine them...Ancestors visit me in dreams...It's always scared me, but as I get older, I'm becoming more comfortable with it..."

What is the mindset(s) of Africans about African Americans?

There is also that animosity of Africans toward African Americans...The same way you've seen negative images of Africans, [we've] seen negative images of you..."

"Because we can't say, 'I'm Fanti, or Wolof or Fon...can I really connect to Africa or these people I don't know?..."

"I'm not at odds with myself anymore because I'm not at odds with my history anymore..."

"The Black man is largely in an identity crisis...When you can step out of the door in most any Black community and hear five-year-olds calling each other nigga'...We have passed that on to them..."

"Tautology...Kwanzaa is East African, and we're not East African...We are descended from West Africans...So, I don't think it's about [latching onto] African stuff [we don't have any real connection to]...[Maybe] whites were giving them [Africans] the implementation of identity because they needed to have an identity... My thing with African Americans having connection with Africa...We should make sure it makes sense..."

"My grandmother threw rocks...Ju ju...The dead know what the living are doing..."

"To me, everybody on the planet is African because we are the first people..."

"I am possessed of many identities...I am a man...I am African...I am an African American...I am an American African...I am an artist...I am an educator...I am a  Gatekeeper...All these identities are mutable...Ever evolving, changing and growing and I grow and change...None of these identities should be in conflict with each other, and so, through all this, I have found that it is imperative for me to maintain and deepen my connection to my Africanness...As I do, I find I am more empowered in all of them..."

In our first dialogue of the New Year, Brothers considered Responding to the Drum, as in, our connection to Africa and Africanness.  Among questions we took up included: 

Copyright © 2007 ROD PATRICK RISBROOK

Are you African?

"No, I just see myself as a Black American...Because I don't speak it [any African language]...and I wasn't raised to see myself that way..."

"I identify as African American...I'm not indigenous African...not born on that soil...but my roots go back to Africa...I recognize that the struggles I'm going through, they're going through...They're not in control of the continent..."

"I consider myself African...The Ghanians treated me so kindly...I don't know if it was because of the money or the reason is the struggle Africans face in America...I actually think there's a need for a better description like 21st Century African...There's no need to describe Germany or England because they haven't changed in hundreds of years...I long for a more substantial term that describes a geographic [relationship]...The otherness and the regional phenotype..."

{Facilitator says, "As a matter of fact, there are a couple of identifications being taken up currently which embody the intention you point to...They are 'Afrikan,' and 'New Afrikan',,,"}

Do we think about Africa in any meaningful way in relation to ourselves on any regular basis?

"If you are an involuntary immigrant and haven't had an opportunity to [maintain your cultural bearings, it stands to reason that you might not]..."

"There's a cable channel called the Africa Channel...I'd like to get it...I think Time Warner and Dish TV carry it..."

Is there a general disinterest or disregard for Africa among us?  If so, why?

"I don't read any news about Africa...I love RSS feeds...[It's a] program on a web page that puts a link in...The page is updated regularly...A continuous feed of information [about Africa]...My aim is to make my thinking about Africa more regularly...Consider Africa in relation to everything else...Also, I want to think in terms of investing in Africa...There's such a huge untapped market for so many things there...Right after the war in Rwanda they started putting up the cell phone towers and [made a mint]..."

In our psyche, is there anything sexy (alluring, captivating, exciting) about Africa?

"Inspirational...Look what these people can do when given a fair chance?...I guess, hope...I have this imagination that it [will flourish] in the future..."

{Facilitator says, "During my first trip to Ghana, I found it terribly sexy that everywhere I looked, I saw Black people running things...And while I knew that European interests were still controlling most of the country's natural resources, I was thrilled by the promise that Jerry Rawlings [then President] was  inspiring...Proposing free public education for all and other progressive initiatives...and there was a delicacy about the people, from the most high-born to the most rustic that I found ennobling..."}

"I don't think of Africa on a daily basis like I once did...I'm forty-five...Africa is a very complex place...Fifty-five countries...[The] French, Port...Spain...[The] Lagos Stock Exchange is a great investment...India and China are investing, so it will be an economic engine..."

{Facilitator says, "In fact, Africa has been an economic engine [for Eurocentric interests] since ancient times...and more recently, particularly since 1884 when European interests convened in Germany to set about the scramble for Africa..."} 

Other than Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe and Ifa (Yoruba), what, if any personal connection do you have with Africa?

"I'm Dominican...Yes, I'm African..."

"I've worked with African people...I'd love to go to Lagos...Nigeria is one of the biggest importers of oil in the world..."

"I'm a free spirit...Pangaea is what we all came from...We're all still animals...So, when people say, 'I'm better than you,' [based on some artificial racial difference] it bothers me..."

"I personally have always had an interest in Africa...Africans have been denigrated as an excuse to exploit the people out of ignorance...Out of African theory...[The] Sand People..."

Does the way we currently relate to Africa help or harm us?

"When people devise identities for themselves...I would be careful...Many people create identity to raise their level of humanity [above that of others]...People who cannot speak for themselves are [damaged]..."

"There's a lot of self-hatred going on...I remember as a child, if you wore African symbols, [other Blacks would say,] 'Who you supposed to be, Kunta Kinte?'...'Are you African?'...Hell no!...I'm a Nigga' from Brooklyn!'..."

"In this country I don't feel comfortable...I don't think I will ever feel comfortable because of the level of disrespect that happens every day to African people..."

"I don't quite identify as American...I think of America as The Other...I've owned an American flag and I've kind of used it oddly...There are people I will never meet...The Queen, the Pope...I won't kneel before the Queen...Kiss the Pope's ring...I throw out the White book...I ask people, 'Where you from?'...'Where are your people from?'..."   

"You [African Americans] are the ramification of slavery...Hegemony...The first thing that was taken away from us was the knowledge of what we are...When I know who I am, I don't [require others' sanction]...I don't want to be part of a melting pot..."

"I'm [walking along one day] looking at the bill boards in Times Square...Diddy taking the Chiroc...[And on Oprah] talking about having given his sixteen-year-old son an Maybach...There ain't too much room in Africa for all of that...I live in the Bronx...There hasn't been a Black Borough President..."

"We don't love ourselves...In this recession, people close ranks...So, if you are not among the controllers, you are left out..."

"We were talking about going back to Africa...We were talking about how much of Africa is not owned by Africans...We still allow Europeans to come and rape [its resources]...If we're always looking for other people to define us [we'll never know who we are]..."

" "Roots" was the first opportunity that America had to glimpse Africa and what had happened to Africans..."

"Having been there...the lack of development...sanitation...poverty...for me there's not [a positive vision]..."

"I visited a village north of Kumasi...I helped build a school...I do have a romantic vision of Africa..."

What stereotypes, conceptions and/or misconceptions do we harbor about Africa?

"I grew up with Tarzan...The natives were chasing Tarzan, and I was angry at them [for messing with Tarzan]...In the 70's I discovered a Pan African group who helped me discover a romantic vision of Africa, and how, what was being done to the people there was what was being done to me..."

"It starts with teaching each other about what happened...[While slavery has existed throughout human history] I don't think there's been slavery like that [which was carried out] in America...Do we have a concept of what has been stripped of us?..."

"I like the Africa Channel..."

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"There's a fine line between shame and privacy...The shaming of one's identity...thinking about Blackness...Even the medium brow that I am is distasteful...[which is why, when we would think we are different from each other, we have to remember] Same boat, different stop..."

"1.2 million children are registered in public schools in New York...550,000 drop out every year...Most are our children..."

"I was open to having my mind changed about being African descended..."

"How important is it for us to return to Africa?..."

""I've been in the homes of so many people who are not African and they own so much of our art...And we could care less...They know they secrets we have not been privy to, of the beauty of Africa...They were travelling to Africa while I was watching movies about us...[They know] the reason the noses were chopped off the ancient Egyptian sculptures..."

"I had a [social studies] teacher and the first thing she would teach in her class was that the Middle East is part of Africa and they kept that separate..."

"The F.B.I. came to my room when I was in college because I composed a paper on the Scale of Black Self-Concept to see if Egyptians saw themselves as Black...My Professor said, 'You can't present that paper..."

What possibilities or hopes might we have for Africa?

"To go and start up my art business..."

"That I can go there and they will see me as a cousin, and not an American..."

"That Black Americans will not see Africa as a monolith...[understanding] Africa is not a place that is one thing...We are a people who have been separated from our history...The African experience is as varied as the state to state experience here..."

 "It is my hope that Africans in all those countries can run their own shit..."

"[That  we] think about investing in Africa...I donate $2 to the African Leadership Foundation...A prep school for African children in Johanesburg..."