OT: German identification with/appropriation of civil rights movement/Black power movement was Re: antedating banjo (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 27, 2012, at 9:53 AM, Amy West wrote:

> On 4/27/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>> Date:    Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:21:26 -0400
>> From:    Wilson Gray<hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Re: antedating banjo (UNCLASSIFIED)
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard<gcohen at mst.edu>  wrote:
>>> >  Lumumba, Mobutu, and Kasavubu
>> Used by Germans as terms of opprobrium for black GI's, back in the
>> day. This kind of demonstration of antipathy was rare, though. The
>> typical reaction of the German_strasse_  to black people was one of
>> "really intense curiosity*, as though we were some kind of life-form
>> so totally alien that they couldn't quite wrap their minds around what
>> they were seeing. And I'm talking about the streets of Frankfurt,
>> Stuttgart, Koeln, and Berlin and not those of some tiny, Black Forest
>> village.
>>
>> It was this kind of reaction that caused the former expatriate black
>> author, James Baldwin, to return to The World and to comment that he
>> had more in common with the most ignorant, racist "Mississippi
>> wool-hat" than he had with any European. Of course, Baldwin, like
>> Steve Buscemi, was "kinda funny-lookin'." But, still...
> Wilson, in the fall I heard an *excellent* presentation by a German
> prof. from Uni Hamburg about Germans, and esp. German youth, in the '70s
> identifying with the US civil rights and Black Power movement: holding
> protests, wearing afros, reading and identifying with activists like MLK
> and Audre Lourde. It explained to me why I came across an MLK Strasse in
> Kassel when I was there in 1989. A lot of it was admiration for the
> resistance and also an air of superiority -- "we're not that rotten" --
> according to the presenter. She also went on to argue that Germans have
> this amnesia about their own colonial and African slavery history
> (quick: who remembers which African nation is a former German colony?)

I do! I do!  Tanganyika!  (Now folded into Tanzania, and later wrested from Germany by the British, maybe as a result of WWI.  And no, I don't remember about this from my childhood, but from my years studying Swahili at UCLA.)

LH

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