I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.
After Nigeria, we are the second biggest black African nation. We are the headquarters of the African Union. We are the only African country that has never been colonized. This is perhaps the last surviving African civilization.
If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.
You draw a district for that particular minority – African American, Asian, Hispanic – so those folks have the right to elect whoever they want. If they don’t decide to elect someone who sounds like them or looks like them, they can pick anyone they want.
What you have to understand is that blues… it’s in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you’re playing it like it’s an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident – in the way that only 17-year-olds are – that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.
We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.
America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It’s a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it’s a sign of weakness to ask for help.
I am convening the African Leaders Forum on Disability in partnership with Special Olympics so that a marginalized population long unrecognized does not remain in the shadows. I consider this a critical, moral and practical challenge.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses – it was right after ‘Roots,’ and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I get so tickled when that pilot happens to be an African American because I rarely see that. The same is true when I go to find restaurants. I mean, most places I go, I kind of have some idea who the chef is, which is why I want to go.
The humanity that is given to other people isn’t given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.
The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities – powerful new tools like African fractals – and then just get out of the way.
We say that the ICC is targeting Africans, but all of the victims in our cases in Africa are African victims.
I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.
I have run two Olympic ‘A’ standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.
I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.
We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation’s greatness.
I am a musician by rights, and I played in Asbury Park in the old African Room in the Robert Trent Hotel next to the Albion. That was in the early ’60s.
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.
Winning an official World Cup with the South African team had become my burning ambition.
So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be ‘blackish’ – really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.
There’s still racism. Western Europe… has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.
I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to.
I am an African. I live there and my children live there, and as far as I understand, they intend to go on living there.
In 1985, I was arrested, along with my mother and brother, Martin III, in a protest against apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Geography was the lesson I always looked forward to most. It was a form of escapism. It could be bleak midwinter outside but inside you’re learning about African farming methods or the Great Lakes. No other lesson had that excitement.
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I’ve heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
In 1985 I graduated from Deshler High School in Tuscumbia, Alabama, and I was their first African American homecoming queen. You would have thought I won Miss America or Miss U.S.A. (wink), because of my excitement.
African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
Well, I’m a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It’s that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.
Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves – the areas set aside in law for African occupation – as early as 1959 and 1960.
I remember talking to old-school African American grandpops, and they’re just like, ‘When I saw my wife, I looked up from across the street, and I said, ‘That girl gon’ be my wife someday.’ And we’ve been married 45 years.’ Like, what? That’s all it took?
What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.
The thing people have to remember is there’s nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.
From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.
I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.
The diversity lottery program is a proven method of offering a path to legal permanent status for residents of African nations and other underrepresented regions seeking a better life here in the United States.
It’s troubling that by eliminating weekend voting hours, the state of Ohio specifically banned a popular voting time of choice for minorities. In Cuyahoga County, which I represent, 56 percent of weekend voters in 2008 were African American while adult African Americans comprise 28 percent of the county population.
The power of Haitian heritage and the strength of the Haitian people is tremendous. And Haiti holds a unique and rich role in the history of African Americans.
When you walk into a room, and you’re the only one of something – the only woman or the only African American – that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.
