Aaah!  The chicken has come home to roost.  When one intends to enslave
another, the first things they impose on the enslaved is their religion and
culture.  The Arab world is just as racist as westerners, Latin Americans,
and Asians.  Folks, where ever you have Africans and non-Africans, you
always see the latter try to dominate the former.  And it is this ignorance
that has been fed to us as Africans to also believe in the superiority of
our lighter hew.  Iraq is not unique in this embarrassment.  If you go to
Cuba, Brazil, Mauritania, India, Australia, Egypt, Japan, Britain, US, and
any other real estate on this earth as we know it, you see the same
practice.  However, when one exercises their right to self determination as
Africans, you see their fellow African try to suppress them, using religion
and other inferiority complexes.  Why on earth would an African call our
religions Atheistic, Animistic, and other descriptions that those who wished
to enslave us coined for us?  Hinduism has many Gods, how come the rest of
the world do not brand it as atheistic or Animistic?  The Greeks that we
love to quote, have their many Gods, and how come they are also not called
atheists or animists, either?  But the rest of the world is comfortable to
belittle our religions and we Africans lead that charge.

Bringing it closer to home, I once heard a Gambian my skin tone made
reference to her Mulatto heritage.  I could not help but ask, if the
description of a Mulatto is one who has one parent African and the other a
non-African, then how is she a Mulatto?  All in her family are as dark as I.
  To some of us in Gambia, one is a Mulatto by your last name, you better
not try to strip them of that thought.  This is just an extension of the
inferiority complexes of the past, where folks change their last names to
European last names.  Thus, many that fit that category cannot tell you how
their parents got that name with their roots in Berending.  Our First names
are not spared either, mine included.  Are the rites that are performed in
our naming ceremonies African, Arabic, or European?  European and Arab first
names also dominate our landscape.  So, you see, subconsciously, we enslave
our minds.  Unless we break from that mental slavery, we shall forever aid
those that wish to subjugate us.


>From: "Fye Samateh" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>To: <[log in to unmask]>,   "The Gambia and related-issues mailing
>list" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: [>-<] VS: [Network Africa Sweden] afro iraqis and the racism
>Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 16:46:29 +0200
>
>Folks.
>
>Here's another burning issue on racism.I wonder why this is still happening
>in the
>arab world and some parts Africa.
>
>Fye
>
>
>By Gregory Kane
>Special to BlackAmericaWeb.com
>
>Flapdoodle trumps truth in any war. The current
>U.S.-Iraq conflict is no exception.
>
>For some African Americans, Iraqi leader Saddam
>Hussein is our brown, Third World brother fighting
>against the forces of racism and white supremacy,
>manifested by President Bush and crew. That view
>belies the truth: for years, perhaps centuries, Arabs
>in the Middle East and Africa have had a white
>supremacy agenda of their own.
>
>Sunni M. Khalid is an African American journalist and
>Muslim who's lived in Egypt and traveled extensively
>in the Middle East. He's commented on the situation
>there and pulls punches about as often as his boxing
>hero, Joe Frazier, did - which is to say not at all.
>
>Seven years ago he found himself on assignment in Iraq
>when he noticed that the principal of a Baghdad
>elementary school looked just like his aunt back home
>in Detroit. After noticing other Iraqis who might be
>considered black here in the states, Khalid asked from
>whence they hailed.
>
>Most said they came from Basra, a town in southern
>Iraq. Africans got to Basra in pretty much the same
>way they arrived in the Americas: on slave ships.
>
>"Basra was the entrepot for Africans who were enslaved
>by the Arabs," Khalid said last week. He estimates
>that 10 to 15 percent of Iraq's population is
>Afro-Arab, but you'd never know it to look at
>Hussein's inner circle of advisors and leaders. Are
>there any? The question was put to Khalid.
>
>"Not at all," he said. Iraqi Afro-Arabs, according to
>Khalid, "have been marginalized like all the other
>people of African descent in the Arab world. The
>treatment that Africans have historically received at
>the hands of Arabs is not very good, especially in the
>last 30 years."
>
>Our "brown Third World brothers" in Arab countries
>haven't got a thing on Bush and Co. in the white
>supremacy department. Khalid remembers living in Cairo
>and talking to Muslims from sub-Saharan African
>countries. "They told me they were stoned, harassed
>and mistreated on the streets of Cairo everyday,"
>Khalid recalled. "They told me they were Muslims in
>spite of the Arabs, not because of the Arabs."
>
>Khalid's wife is a dark-skinned Somali woman. He
>remembers the glares he got from Arab women when he
>took his wife to dinner. (Khalid is a caramel-colored
>African American who looks Arab in the Middle East.)
>One woman even asked how he could shame himself by
>being seen with such a woman.
>
>Similar incidents occurred when his wife went grocery
>shopping. Lighter-skinned women would cut ahead of her
>in line, a practice Mrs.. Khalid ended quickly.
>Khalid's stepfather, a Nubian, was in line at a bank
>one day when a light-skinned Arab walked up beside him
>and was immediately waited on by the teller. "I've
>been going through this my whole life," he told Khalid
>afterwards. White Europeans received more deference
>and better treatment from Arabs than darker Afro-Arabs
>do, Khalid said.
>
>"A lot of African American Muslims don't want to deal
>with that," Khalid said. There is racism in the Arab
>world directed against black people."
>
>It is a racism that closely parallels that practiced
>against blacks in this country. Most, if not all,
>African Americans have had similar run-ins with
>racism, or know someone else who has. While America's
>white media are often chided by African Americans for
>ignoring stories important to blacks, Khalid noticed
>the same thing in the Arab world.
>
>"You can pick up any newspaper in Egypt and there will
>not be one word about the Arab treatment of, and
>genocide against, Africans in the Sudan," Khalid said.
>
>So bash Bush for starting what you may consider an
>unjust war if you must, but spare me the notion that
>Hussein or any other Arab is a Third World brown
>brother.
>
>The history just doesn't support the notion.
>
>
>"...What has been cast abroad is not a thousandth of Our history,
>even if its quality were truth. The people called Our people are
>not the hundredth of Our people. But the haze of this fouled
>world exists to wipe out knowledge of Our way, The Way. These
>mists are here to keep Us lost, the destroyers' easy prey."
>-2000 Seasons, Ayi Kwe Armah
>
>_________________________________________________________________
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>
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