[Ads-l] Twerk the night away

[Z Rice]

I would not normally engage in this type of conversation here, but I will
say the following: from slavery onward, the drylongso of this population
has seen their African retentions as symbols of resistance to barbarism and
assimilation. So when you feed them lies, including the idea that their
ancestral cultural artifacts are coming from "merry old england", they're
going to have a problem with you, and they will assert the ancestral
origins of those artifacts. We witness the same thing in Cuba (especially),
in Brazil, and so on - so it certainly should not be surprising that we
witness this same thinking in the United States.

I do not dig at all the idea that they created a wholly-original culture
out of "bits and pieces of the cultures of so-called "racially-superior"
peoples and the few remnants of their own various original cultures". This
completely underestimates the cultural continuity of this population and
smacks of the propaganda promoted by euro-centric scholarship.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 7:01 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Twerk the night away
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 8:43 PM, Gordon, Matthew J. <GordonMJ at missouri.edu
> >
>  quoted:
>
> > "... the dance itself is generally considered to be of West African
> > origin."
> >
>
> "By whom?" as Wikipedia likes to ask.
>
> Black culture in the United States is an original, built from the ground
> up, by African slaves and their descendants and that culture has gone on to
> affect aspects of every other culture on the face of the earth. It is, on
> the face of it, a truly amazing accomplishment. Surely, this is the most
> astounding instance of "topping from the bottom" in the history of mankind.
> Yet "African-Americans," whether holding doctorates or crack pipes, have no
> interest whatsoever in taking credit for having created a wholly-original
> culture out of bits and pieces of the cultures of so-called
> "racially-superior" peoples and the few remnants of their own various
> original cultures. Rather, in their desire to be regarded as supposedly
> "equal," in some ill-defined sense of the term, to these erstwhile
> "superiors," they prefer to pass up credit for having produced another
> Novus Ordo Seclorum fully as marvelous as the first, as opposed to
> accepting weak acknowledgment as having been the economic engine of the
> success of the other one and, instead, ape the white model of cultural
> history. They thereby give to others, who have and have had nothing
> whatsoever to do with shaping, and being shaped by, the black experience in
> America, all of the credit for their successes, even as they continue to
> bear all of the blame for their failures: "Nothing except the embarrassment
> of slavery began with us, here in the New World. We can trace the origin of
> the culture of our people back to the Old World, too, just like white folk
> can! 1619 Virginia? Feh!" Because the "European-Americans," as they feel no
> compulsion whatsoever to style themselves, choose to trace what they adduce
> to themselves as "Western" - or even solely "European" - civilization back
> to the distant ancestors of today's peoples of the Middle East,
> "African-Americans" feel that they must likewise arrogate to themselves a
> cultural history that supposedly has its origins elsewhere in time and
> space other than in the American South as though that claim of non-American
> origin, - if we could only *prove* it! - in the past were, somehow, to be
> regarded as having genuine relevance to, and a source of pride for, black
> Americans today. "African-Americans" apparently lay great store on being
> able to say, even in the case of a matter as trivial as a way of
> rhythmically clapping one's buttocks instead of one's hands,
>
> "We didn't build that! Africa built that!"
>
> to coin a paraphrase.
>
> _Jambo, bwana!_
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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