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Greg Krasovsky
June 2, 2024
Why do we have to ‘SELL BEING AFRICAN BACK TO THE AFRICAN’ -- especially to African-Americans?
See
Africa is not just the genetic cradle of Humanity, see
Mitochondrial Eve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
Africa is also the cradle of civilization as well.
Let's not forget that even Egypt is in Africa.
My father is a Igbo from Nigeria's Biafra.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria
I am proud of my African, Nigerian, Igbo and Igbo heritage!
Who remembers
- The United Negro College Fund?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCF
- The National Merit Scholarship for Outstanding Negro Students?
Well scrubbed from today's politically correct Google search, but you can find references to it in
"Black Students'School Success: Coping with the "Burden of 'Acting White'."
By Signithia Fordham
National Institute of Education (Washington, DC)
December 5, 1985
See https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED281948.pdf
Or you can ask me as a past NMSONS winner in 1985 from The School District of Philadelphia! :-)
- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP
So why are some people embarrassed or offended today by terms like
- "Negro" (black in Spanish),
- "Black",
- "Colored"
Did they forget about all those people with pigmented /colored skin who are proud of their complexion, like
- All Africans living North, West, South and East of the Sahara Desert,
- Native / Indigenous Americans (in North, Central and South America),
- South Europeans and those from and beyond the Caucus mountains (Adyg, Chechen, Ingush, Dagenstani, Azebaidjan & etc.)
- Semites, Arabs and other peoples from the Middle East (Levant, Persia)
- Asians (with darker complexions than Northern Asians),
- Polynesians & Pacific Islanders,
- Australian Aborigines, Native New Zealanders (Maori) & etc.
Let's unite to make being Black (with African DNA & Heritage) a Blessing!
Peace, Freedom, Brotherhood, Equality and Justice to Africa!
Please watch the Reel and let me know your thoughts!
And please don't forget to share, like, follow and subscribe!
***
african_stream
Instagram
June 2, 2024
‘SELL BEING AFRICAN BACK TO THE AFRICAN’
Why do some Africans in the diaspora refuse to call themselves African?
Why do you Black people in the Caribbean identify as Latino or Hispanic or French or British?
According to activist, Dr Umar Ifatunde also known as Dr Umar Ifatunde, also known as Umar Johnson, many reject their link with Africa because of negative perceptions and ‘not wanting to be on the losing team.’
But he gives a simple solution during this interview with Penuel the Black Pen.
Sell being African back to the African. Or, as Pan-African icon Marcus Garvey said, ‘The white man, has made being Black a curse we need to make being Black a blessing’.
It starts in the mindset. We must be proud.
What are the first steps needed to make all Africans in the diaspora proud to call themselves Africans? Let us know in the comments.
#Africans #Diaspora #BlackPeople #Caribbean #Latino #Hispanic #French #Britain #PanAfrican #MarcusGarvey
...
African Stream
Media/news company
African Stream is a pan-African digital media organization based exclusively on social-media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad through cutting-edge, African-centered content.
Pan-African digital media organisation, focused on giving a voice to all Africans through cutting-edge, African-centred content.
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/african_stream/
Website: https://africanstream.media/
Telegram - https://t.me/AfricanStream
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@AfricanStream
Patreon - https://patreon.com/AfricanStream
***
The Ukrainian-Russian-American Observer
Gregory Krasovsky's commentary on Russia, Ukraine, the United States of America, including politics, economics, culture, religion and human rights.
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***
'We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish': Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month
Blanca Torres
KQED
Feb 18, 2022
Excerpts:
Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.
“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”
Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.
“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there's a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”
'The contributions of Afro Latinos to this country and Black history go hand in hand.'
Jacqueline Garcel, Latino Community Foundation
“So, I always say Afro Latino,” he said.
German finds himself fielding numerous requests during Black History Month for interviews, cooking demos and lectures to talk about his African roots. The same thing now happens during Hispanic Heritage Month, a trend he welcomes.
Many Latinos who identify as Black or of African descent have felt sidelined in broader discussions of race and ethnicity. In recent years, advocates and scholars have called for the experience of Black Latinos to be given greater consideration during Black History Month.
...
In the 2020 U.S. Census, about 2.4 million people identified as "Black and Hispanic" or "Black Hispanic," accounting for about 5% of the nation’s 46.8 million people who identify as Black. Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said that is likely an undercount.
Some Afro Latinos might not select Black as their race or instead choose multiracial, Lopez explained. In 2020, the number of Latinos who selected multiracial ballooned from 3 million to 20.3 million, or nearly a third of the country's roughly 65 million Latinos.
“There's a number of things that have happened over the last 20 years which have begun to change the way we talk about race and the labels we use to describe ourselves,” Lopez said. “People are more aware of and are seeking to understand better who and where they're from. And that's true of Latinos, too.”
...
Garcel, of the Latino Community Foundation, is another Dominican American Bay Area transplant from Washington Heights. Growing up, she noticed that her mother, who was light-skinned, was often treated differently from her darker-skinned father. When they first arrived in New York, she remembers, her mother went to apartment viewings alone to avoid discrimination from landlords.
Like German, Garcel also has gone through a process of embracing her Blackness in spite of the anti-Blackness and preference for European features that pervade many Latinx communities. She was often advised to straighten her curly hair “to fit in better.”
Garcel saw how her father found more acceptance and support from Black people in Harlem than from white people, and even some other Latinos. And throughout her own career in public health and nonprofits, Black women have been some of her greatest champions and mentors, Garcel said.
Sponsored
After moving to the West Coast, Garcel said she continued having to deal with people questioning her background, but in new ways.
“Because Dominicans are so small in numbers outside of New York City, people don't understand who we are or where we come from,” she said. “I’ve been told, ‘You head up a Latino organization in California, but you're not Mexican?’ I've been told that to my face.”
For her part, de Leon, the novelist, spent years reflecting on her identity and learning how to overcome pervasive racist, anti-Black attitudes. She is heartened that younger people tend to be much more aware of the nuances of race and identity.
“I can be 100% Black. I can be 100% Puerto Rican. I can even be 100% West Indian. I can be all those things,” she said. “I don't have to know all the history, I don't have to speak all the languages and all the patois. Those are my roots. That is my heritage. Those are my ancestors. And, I am enough.”
https://www.kqed.org/news/11905454/we-are-black-we-just-speak-spanish-why-some-afro-latinos-want-more-visibility-during-black-history-month
https://mixedracestudies.org/wp/?p=63391
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Chinese Roots Lie in Africa, Research Says
Los Angeles Times
Sept. 29, 1998 12 AM PT
By Robert Lee Hotz
TIMES SCIENCE WRITER
Most of the population of modern China--one-fifth of all the people living today--owes its genetic origins to Africa, an international scientific team said today in research that undercuts any claim that modern humans may have originated independently in China.
In the search for human origins, in which political beliefs and pride of place can figure as prominently as fossil evidence, the genetic findings dramatically illustrate the intricate weave of prehistoric migrations and human evolution, the scientists said.
Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the product of the Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project, a consortium of seven major research groups in the People’s Republic of China, and the Human Genetics Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. It was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Detailed Genetic Profiles Created
The group used the advanced tools of DNA analysis to create detailed genetic profiles of 28 of China’s official population groups, which comprise more than 90% of the country’s population, to better understand the roots of complex chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension. By exploring the genetic relationships that exist today among so many of China’s ethnic groups, the team also shed light on the ancestry of people in East Asia, who, like everyone, carry in every cell of their bodies genetic hints about their evolutionary history and the journeys of their forebears.
In all, the Chinese government today recognizes 56 ethnic groups. Just one of them, the Han, makes up the bulk of the population, comprising about 1.1 billion people. The other 55 ethnic minority groups encompass about 100 million people spread throughout China.
To study the diverse genetic inheritance of such an enormous population, the researchers used a special set of genetic markers called microsatellites. These extremely short chemical segments of DNA mutate very rapidly. That allows scientists to use them as signposts to mark how populations diverged or merged over time, reconstructing their evolutionary journey through time and across the continents to their contemporary abodes.
The scientists looked at 30 such microsatellite markers across 28 of the population groups in China and then compared the pattern to 11 other population groups around the world.
...
The researchers demonstrated that the peoples of northern and southern China cluster into distinct regional genetic populations that share inherited characteristics. Those groups, in turn, can be divided into even smaller, separate genetic groups.
Yet, overall they all are descendants of a single population group that may have migrated into China from the south eons before humans learned to forge metal tools or use a written alphabet, the new research suggests.
“Populations from East Asia always derived from a single lineage, indicating the single origins of those populations,” the researchers said. “It is now probably safe to conclude that modern humans originating in Africa constitute the majority of the current gene pool in East Asia,” they said.
Although few scholars today dispute the idea that the earliest ancestors of the human species evolved in Africa, there still is considerable debate over how modern humanity evolved from its more primitive ancestors.
Many anthropologists believe that humans may have migrated out of Africa in waves. More than a million years ago, humanity’s primitive ancestors, known as homo erectus, walked out of Africa to colonize Europe, the Middle East and Asia. On that everyone agrees.
Then several hundred thousand years later, some theorize, a second wave of more sophisticated tool-using humans migrated out of Africa and overwhelmed those earlier ancestors. According to that theory, modern humans are descended solely from those especially sophisticated tool-users.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-29-mn-27603-story.html
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How China Is Rewriting the Book on Human Origins
Fossil finds in China are challenging ideas about the evolution of modern humans and our closest relatives
By Jane Qiu & Nature magazine
July 13, 2016
Excerpt:
But the continuity-with-hybridization model is countered by overwhelming genetic data that point to Africa as the wellspring of modern humans. Studies of Chinese populations show that 97.4% of their genetic make-up is from ancestral modern humans from Africa, with the rest coming from extinct forms such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. “If there had been significant contributions from Chinese H. erectus, they would show up in the genetic data,” says Li Hui, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai. Wu counters that the genetic contribution from archaic hominins in China could have been missed because no DNA has yet been recovered from them.
Many researchers say that there are ways to explain the existing Asian fossils without resorting to continuity with hybridization. The Zhirendong hominins, for instance, could represent an exodus of early modern humans from Africa between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago. Instead of remaining in the Levant in the Middle East, as was thought previously, these people could have expanded into east Asia, says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK.
Other evidence backs up this hypothesis: excavations at a cave in Daoxian in China's Hunan province have yielded 47 fossil teeth so modern-looking that they could have come from the mouths of people today. But the fossils are at least 80,000 years old, and perhaps 120,000 years old, Liu and his colleagues reported last year. “Those early migrants may have interbred with archaic populations along the way or in Asia, which could explain Zhirendong people's primitive traits,” says Petraglia.
Another possibility is that some of the Chinese fossils, including the Dali skull, represent the mysterious Denisovans, a species identified from Siberian fossils that are more than 40,000 years old. Palaeontologists don't know what the Denisovans looked like, but studies of DNA recovered from their teeth and bones indicate that this ancient population contributed to the genomes of modern humans, especially Australian Aborigines, Papua New Guineans and Polynesians — suggesting that Denisovans might have roamed Asia.
María Martinón-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London, is among those who proposed that some of the Chinese hominins were Denisovans. She worked with IVPP researchers on an analysis, published last year, of a fossil assemblage uncovered at Xujiayao in Hebei province — including partial jaws and nine teeth dated to 125,000–100,000 years ago. The molar teeth are massive, with very robust roots and complex grooves, reminiscent of those from Denisovans, she says.
A third idea is even more radical. It emerged when Martinón-Torres and her colleagues compared more than 5,000 fossil teeth from around the world: the team found that Eurasian specimens are more similar to each other than to African ones. That work and more recent interpretations of fossil skulls suggest that Eurasian hominins evolved separately from African ones for a long stretch of time. The researchers propose that the first hominins that left Africa 1.8 million years ago were the eventual source of modern humans. Their descendants mostly settled in the Middle East, where the climate was favourable, and then produced waves of transitional hominins that spread elsewhere. One Eurasian group went to Indonesia, another gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and a third ventured back into Africa and evolved into H. sapiens, which later spread throughout the world. In this model, modern humans evolved in Africa, but their immediate ancestor originated in the Middle East.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-china-is-rewriting-the-book-on-human-origins/
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