Excellent piece on being Black and Nerdy....


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BigNorseWolf wrote:
Quote:
Personally I don't understand where the black people are bad thing comes from, when you consider China has little if any interaction with Africans until modern times.
Probably from American films, and news reports on American big cities like New York and Detroit.

The etymological implications of the Chinese word for Africa do not help either. In Chinese, Africa is 非洲 (Feizhou). Where 洲 just means continent, but 非 literally means "wrong" or "to blame". So in Chinese, Africa literally can be parsed as "Bad/Wrong Continent". It does not actually mean that since it is one word and not just two characters and the word was actually coined to echo the sound of "Africa", but 非 as a character or radical has negative connotations since it is both a grammatical negator and sounds like and appears as a component of characters like 菲 (poor; unworthy), 匪 (bandit; robber), 罪 (crime; guilt) and 䨿 (evil; wicked). I remember being really taken aback when I learned this in China.

I kind of wonder to what extent the coining of this word was influenced by Western attitudes of the 18th and 19th centuries and/or to what extent it unconsciously shapes Chinese attitudes today.

Sorry that is kind of off-topic, but language definitely shapes the way that people think about things.


Yikes.


Draco Bahamut wrote:
Tormsskull wrote:


They do, but you have to be able to empathize with who you're watching. The messages we receive in the US are much different than what is received else where (at least IMO.) We are told by our leaders that we are the greatest country in the world. How do you think that makes the average American view foreign countries?
You are right. We are told that Brazil is the happiest country in the world (so we party all the time) and the luckiest country in the world blessed by god himself (hence we don't need to work, we have all the natural resources we need, our climate is good, no earthquakes, volcanos or natural disasters, and no one want to conquest us or consider Brazil an enemy [except Canada, we fight for the friendliest country ever place].

I would hardly call Brazil the happiest country now with all the world cup riots and their violent clashes with the police.


Aranna wrote:
Draco Bahamut wrote:


You are right. We are told that Brazil is the happiest country in the world (so we party all the time) and the luckiest country in the world blessed by god himself (hence we don't need to work, we have all the natural resources we need, our climate is good, no earthquakes, volcanos or natural disasters, and no one want to conquest us or consider Brazil an enemy [except Canada, we fight for the friendliest country ever place].
I would hardly call Brazil the happiest country now with all the world cup riots and their violent clashes with the police.

What you are told and what is are not necessarily linked.

The US has that problem too. There are some myths that are important to tell.


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Was reading some more last night in my Eugene Genovese book about studying slavery "hemispherically." Brazil comes up a lot.

The book was written in the sixties, so it's quite possible that modern scholarship disagrees, but essentially: most Western hemispheric slavery systems had a gradation system where there was a free "colored" or "mulatto" layer in between the narrow layer of slavemasters and the slaves. This led to a much less hardened race-color caste system than in the proto-US where Britain dumped a lot of their excess poor population and, thus, never needed the intermediary layer and one drop of African blood made you black.

Reductio ad adbsurdum, I'm sure, but that's what I got from it.


Comrade Anklebiter wrote:

Was reading some more last night in my Eugene Genovese book about studying slavery "hemispherically." Brazil comes up a lot.

The book was written in the sixties, so it's quite possible that modern scholarship disagrees, but essentially: most Western hemispheric slavery systems had a gradation system where there was a free "colored" or "mulatto" layer in between the narrow layer of slavemasters and the slaves. This led to a much less hardened race-color caste system than in the proto-US where Britain dumped a lot of their excess poor population and, thus, never needed the intermediary layer and one drop of African blood made you black.

Reductio ad adbsurdum, I'm sure, but that's what I got from it.

Going by my own experiences, this is quite true.

Verdant Wheel

Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
The book was written in the sixties, so it's quite possible that modern scholarship disagrees, but essentially: most Western hemispheric slavery systems had a gradation system where there was a free "colored" or "mulatto" layer in between the narrow layer of slavemasters and the slaves. This led to a much less hardened race-color caste system than in the proto-US where Britain dumped a lot of their excess poor population and, thus, never needed the intermediary layer and one drop of African blood made you black.

Yes, that and pretty much Brazil before being colonized, was an adventurer paradise. The men that came here, never would bring their wives, they only came for fortune and planned to got back or bring their wives eventually. This created a huge number of mixed people with native blood and european blood. The mixed people were so many that they were the major population very soon and they had to be accepted and even propered becaming rich. this opened the minds to accept the mixed black in the future. Some were regular slave became as powerful as their owners by being smart and manipulative.

The problem was that the african were so accepted that they mixed to well with white population, to the point that the government import white poor from europe and put them together with the black trying a whitening of the population. So rich black mixed more than poor black, and created the situation of today were how darker your skin is, more poorer other people see you.

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