The 2017 Coli census, are AA's really a minority on this board?

[September]

You actually chose Caribbean. Why if I may ask?

Because by the poll guidelines, OP said Dominicans are Caribbeans.


I am both, but Afro-Latino is a bit more broad than Caribbean.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Because by the poll guidelines, OP said Dominicans are Caribbeans.


I am both, but Afro-Latino is a bit more broad than Caribbean.

To me Caribbean is more broad imo.

 

[September]

To me Caribbean is more broad imo.

Culturally? I don't think so honestly.

When I think Afro-Latinos I think of all of em, from Mexico to DR to Honduras and down to Ecuador.

Culturally, I do not feel as if I have more in common with a black woman from Ecuador than, let's say, a Chinese Jamaican or a white Puerto Rican. Even though there's the different racial components in the West Indies, they all live together in one place, interact with each other, etc so the whole culture becomes a mosh of everything.

With the latter two, we eat the same things, listen to similar music, etc. Caribbean culture from country to country is just very similar. You more than anyone knows that.

That doesn't mean that I wouldn't feel a connection to an Afro-Ecuadorian because of our backgrounds and similar struggles, but she would still be brought up in Ecuadorian culture which is not something I feel connected to.

I hope I'm making sense lol.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Culturally? I don't think so honestly.

When I think Afro-Latinos I think of all of em, from Mexico to DR to Honduras and down to Ecuador.

Culturally, I do not feel as if I have more in common with a black woman from Ecuador than, let's say, a Chinese Jamaican or a white Puerto Rican.

With the latter two, we eat the same things, listen to similar music, etc. Caribbean culture from country to country is just very similar. You more than anyone knows that.

That doesn't mean that I wouldn't feel a connection to an Afro-Ecuadorian because of our backgrounds and similar struggles, but she would still be brought up in Ecuadorian culture which is not something I feel connected to.

I hope I'm making sense lol.

You make sense but what I mean is that there CAN and ARE non-African descent Caribbean people. And many of them. Since YOU yourselt state you're Afro-Latina then the term imo is more specific than Caribbean. Because all Afro-Latina means is a latina person of African descent.

But you're 100% right about the culture part.

 

[September]

You make sense but what I mean is that there CAN and ARE non-African descent Caribbean people. And many of them. Since YOU yourselt state you're Afro-Latina then the term imo is more specific than Caribbean. Because all Afro-Latina means is a latina person of African descent.

But you're 100% right about the culture part.

I'm complete aware of the fact.
Breh, for the purpose of this poll, i am assuming OP meant for Caribbean=Afro-Caribbean not a coolie from TnT since it's a diaspora poll. Just like I'm assuming a white South-African would classify as other.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

I'm complete aware of the fact.
Breh, for the purpose of this poll, i am assuming OP meant for Caribbean=Afro-Caribbean not a coolie from TnT since it's a diaspora poll. Just like I'm assuming a white South-African would classify as other.

True.

 

[Karb]

Interesting discussion on identity and how its formed.

This is why I made this thread.

The poll was just a cover. I wanted y'all to think deeply and reflect on your own sense of identity. I wanted brehs to research their history. I'm scholarly like that

 

[im_sleep]

repost from me

The Black Yankees




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On the interactions between the Black Yankees and Southern Plantation Blacks:



Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North

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Interesting


I feel some northern elitism in the article that's bugging me, especially the part that says, "They built the schools, printed the newspapers, and opened the businesses that taught the newly freed to flourish as Americans". I can see how northern influence may have made it's way in the church and within education for some southerners. But it completely ignores the roles of business owners and educated AA southerners who made gains and held influence independent of AA northerners during and after reconstruction. I say this cause I have multiple examples in my own family history.

Nor am I convinced that northerner's "developed the supportive church-centered social structure found in African-American communities today". Religion had long been a sort of social glue for us prior to emancipation.

Still it's an interesting perspective, and it brought up some things I never considered. I still gotta check those video out when I get some more time.

Its funny cause this article reminded me of how one of my ex's grew up in the AME church, but when we dated she had already switched to pentecostal (COGIC). Her mom used to go in on how she wasn't with all that "hoopin and hollerin" and used to give her shyt about it. This really put that into perspective for me

 

[BigMan]

Interesting discussion on identity and how its formed.

This is why I made this thread.

The poll was just a cover. I wanted y'all to think deeply and reflect on your own sense of identity. I wanted brehs to research their history. I'm scholarly like that

if you're interested in Caribbean identity we can make a separate thread

 

[September]

if you're interested in Caribbean identity we can make a separate thread

This sounds like it could be interesting. I'd participate in the conversation

 

[IllmaticDelta]

This also has me


Chitlins are served in five star restaurants around the world
Spare ribs were considered slave food. Now its the staple of American BBQ
Hell,we created bbq which also has quote on quote slave origins
Is lobster still considered jail food lol

Some dudes be going out of their way to give AA cultural elements a L

I had to school a few people/lames on this board over tripe/animal inners and calling chitlins, "slave food"....cat's with these weird double standards where that type of thing is african influenced cuisine in the carrib/latin america/south america but somehow it's reduced to "slave food" in the USA

 

[BigMan]

This sounds like it could be interesting. I'd participate in the conversation

Might make it tonight or tomorrow

 

[King P]

I originally voted Afro-Latino, until I saw this post

Just to further clarify: Afro-Latino = African descent ppl from South and Central America. Dominicans = Caribbean.

I didn't think this one through

Forgive me brethren

So for the purpose of this thread, I'll vote Caribbean

 

[K.O.N.Y]

I am but I know my culture

Something i've always wanted to know

Did the black successful yankee. Stop the mulatto/creole buffer class from being a thing

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Something i've always wanted to know

Did the black successful yankee. Stop the mulatto/creole buffer class from being a thing

partially, yes

Differences in identification or "Blackness" of Black Yankees vs their Southern counterparts

Douglass considered himself to be neither White nor Black, but both. His multiracial self-identity showed in his first autobiography. Introducing his father in Narrative, Douglass wrote, “My father was a white man.” In this text, his mother was a stranger whom he had never seen in daylight, he could not picture her face, and he was unmoved by news of her death.4 Not only did Douglass adopt a fictional Scottish hero’s name, he emphasized his (perhaps imagined) Scots descent through his father. When visiting Great Britain in 1845-47, Douglass extended his stay in Scotland. He immersed himself in Scottish music and ballads, which he played on the violin for the rest of his life. Having plunged into a Scottish ethnic identity, Douglass wrote to his (then) friend, William Lloyd Garrison, “If I should meet you now, amid the free hills of old Scotland, where the ancient ‘black Douglass’ [sic] once met his foes… you would see a great change in me!”5 Upon arriving in Nantucket, Douglass hoped to represent a blending of both endogamous groups, a man who was half-White and half-Black:

Young, ardent, and hopeful, I entered upon this new life in the full gush of unsuspecting enthusiasm. The cause was good, the men engaged in it were good, the means to attain its triumph, good…. For a time, I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped.6

But acceptance by White society was out of reach for Douglass. He discovered that, in the North, there was no such thing as a man who was half-Black. White ships’ caulkers in New Bedford denied him a chance to work at his craft because in their eyes he was all Black.7 When he joined the Garrisonians on a boat to an abolitionist convention in Nantucket, and a squabble broke out because the White abolitionists demanded that the Black abolitionists take lesser accommodations, Douglass found himself classified as Black by his friends. Later in Nantucket, Douglass so impressed the Garrisonians with his public speaking that abolitionist Edmund Quincy exchanged reports with others that Douglass was an articulate public speaker, “for a ******.”8 Repeatedly, Douglass tried to present himself as an intermediary between America’s two endogamous groups. But the Garrisonians made it clear that he was expected to present himself as nothing more than an intelligent “Negro.” He was told to talk only about the evils of slavery and ordered to stop talking about the endogamous color line. “Give us the facts [about being a slave]. We will take care of the [racial] philosophy.” They also ordered him to “leave a little plantation speech” in his accent.9 In their own words, they wanted to display a smart “******,” but not too smart.

Douglass’s cruelest discovery came after he broke with the Garrisonians and went out on his own. Abolitionist friends of both endogamous groups had warned him that there was nothing personal in how Garrison had used him. The public did not want an intermediary; they wanted an articulate Black. Douglass soon discovered that his friends were right. His newspaper, The North Star,failed to sell because it had no market; White Yankees wanted to read White publications and Black Yankees wanted to read Black ones. Indeed, Black political leaders resented Douglass’s distancing himself from Black ethno-political society. There was no room in Massachusetts for a man who straddled the color line.

Douglass dutifully reinvented himself. He applied himself to learning Black Yankee culture. “He began to build a closer relationship with… Negro leaders and with the Negro people themselves, to examine the whole range of Negro problems, and to pry into every facet of discrimination.”10 Eight months later, The North Star’s circulation was soaring and Black leader James McCune Smith wrote to Black activist Gerrit Smith:

You will be surprised to hear me say that only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phrase after phrase develop itself as in one newly born among us.11

From that day on, Douglass never looked back. The public wanted him to be hyper-Black and so hyper-Black he became. His later autobiographies reveal the change.12 Narrative (1845) says that his “father was a white man,” My Bondage and My Freedom (1854) says that his father “was shrouded in mystery” and “nearly white,” and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882-1892) says flatly, “of my father I know nothing.”13 Narrative says that his mother was a stranger whose death did not affect him, and Bondage and Freedom reports that he was “deeply attached to her,” Life and Times says that “her image is ineffably stamped upon my memory,” and describes her death with “great poignancy and sorrow.”14

And yet, although he donned a public persona of extreme Blackness, he continued to see himself as half White Scottish in his private life. When he eventually married Helen Pitts, a woman of the White endogamous group, even close friends were bothered by the mismatch between the public and private Douglasses.15 In a speech in 1886 Jacksonville, Florida, Douglass justified his intermarriage on the grounds of his own multiracial self-identity. According to James Weldon Johnson:

Douglass spoke, and moved a large audience of white and colored people by his supreme eloquence. … Douglass was speaking in the far South, but he spoke without fear or reservation. One statement in particular that he made, I now wonder if any Negro speaker today, under the same circumstances, would dare to make, and, if he did, what the public reaction would be; Douglass, in reply to the current criticisms regarding his second marriage, said, “In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father.”16

* * * * *

The clash between how Douglass saw himself in 1838 and the public persona that he was forced to portray, was due to the presence of African-American ethnicity in the North.17 Free citizens of part-African ancestry in the South, especially in the lower South, lacked the sense of common tradition associated with ethnic self-identity. This essay traces the emergence of African-American ethnicity and the subsequent evolution of the color line in five topics: Origins of African-American Ethnicity explains how the imposition of a unique endogamous color line eventually led to the synthesis of a unique ethno-cultural community in the Jacksonian Northeast. African-American Ethnic Traits outlines the customs of the Black Yankee ethnic group to show that they gave birth to many of today’s Black traditions. The Integration versus Separatism Pendulum introduces a debate that has occupied Black political leaders since colonial times. The Color Line in the North contrasts the harsh enforcement of the intermarriage barrier in the free states with the more permeable systems of the lower South (as presented in the preceding three essays). The National Color Line’s Rise and Fall concludes this section on the endogamous color line by presenting two graphs. The first shows that which side of the endogamous color line you were on was most hotly contested in U.S. courts between 1840 and 1869. The second shows that the color line grew abruptly stronger during Reconstruction, was at its harshest during Jim Crow, and began to recover only around 1980.

Origins of African-American Ethnicity
Early in the nineteenth-century, the American North saw the emergence of invented ethnic self-identities that became political power groups: Germans, Irish, Jews, Hispanics (from Louisiana and Florida), and, of course, Black Yankees. Each ethnicity was synthetic in the sense that, while adopting symbols (traditions, language, rituals) associated with some land of origin, it absorbed diversity under a single label. Residents of what would become western Germany (Bavaria or Hesse-Kassel), for example, did not think of themselves as kin to Prussians until after they became a U.S. ethnicity.18

An incident in early nineteenth-century Buffalo, New York, exemplifies immigrants’ initial perception of separate identity, before the formation of a shared sense of common ethnicity. Some fifty families of German Jews came to Buffalo. They soon felt compelled to build their own synagogue, to avoid attending services with prior American Jews who had already been accepted as Americans. Before long, they had to split again into two congregations because of doctrinal differences between those from western and eastern Germany. Finally, the eastern congregation split in half due to liturgical disagreements between Prussians and Poles.19 Similarly, residents of county Cavan in Ireland looked down on Corkers as profligates, and those from Cork or County Claire used the term “meanCavanb*stard” as a single word (rather like “damnYankee” in the U.S. South).

Despite such initial divisions, immigrants quickly learned that power in America comes to those who command bloc votes. Each ethnic label became an umbrella designation covering all who joined. Voting was not the only manifestation of group power. Parades, public rituals, even riots and gang wars pitted group against group. Ultimately however, the aggressive, in-your-face umbrella ethnicities of the period arose as a consequence of democracy and surged with the widening Jacksonian franchise. Ethnic groups were voting blocs.20

One would think that Black Yankees would have been initially more diverse than Europeans because Africa is larger and more populous than Europe. The geographic triangle bounded by Cape Town, Casablanca, and Cairo is a vast kaleidoscope of thousands of cultures, religions, and mutually unintelligible languages. Nevertheless, Northerners of the Black endogamous group were not exempt from the need to define themselves as an ethnic group. Like other ethnicities, Black Yankees in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati also conducted parades, processions, and festivals to, “strengthen and solidify the boundaries of class and ethnicity that buttressed and circumscribed American politics of self-interest.”21

Amid much pomp and parade, with carriaged processions of Revolutionary War veterans, members of benevolent and literary societies, and the committee on arrangements, entire communities made a public show of their “industry, integrity, [and] temperance.” Women and children joined the parades, waving flags from the windows of omnibuses. Along waterways like the Hudson and Susquehanna rivers, chartered steamboats brought ‘large delegations from different localities’ to common points of celebration like Geneva, New York, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In a resonant declaration of Pan-African unity, African-American communities made clear [their solidarity].22

In Cincinnati, a three-way fight for jobs, among Black Yankees, Irish, and Germans, led to an attempt to exile Black Yankees from the state.23 The struggle among Irish, German, and Black laborers for lucrative work on Cincinnati’s docks led to demonstrations, then parades, then riots. Previously, Cincinnati’s Black caste had provided the bulk of construction laborers, porters, vendors, shoeblacks, messengers, and domestic workers—steady work in an expanding economy. The growing political power of Irish and German immigrants struggling to distinguish themselves as White men too, manifested itself in the enforcement of the repressive Ohio Black Codes, laws that had long been on the books but ignored.24 The city expelled Black Yankee children from public schools and forbade the construction of Black private schools.

By the summer of 1829, Black Cincinnatians were avoiding going out in public. They stopped going to hotels, restaurants, theaters, or riding public transportation. They found that they were no longer welcome to attend White church services.25 Former Virginian John Malvin organized a petition drive calling for a repeal of the Black codes. In angry reaction, the city council gave each Black Cincinnatian thirty days to leave the state or post $500 surety bond (roughly $25,000 apiece, in today’s money). Desperate, Malvin negotiated a sixty-day extension from the city in order for the refugees to find new homes in exile. The city’s White zealots—led by not-yet-fully-White immigrant German and Irish laborers—responded to the extension on August 19, 1829 with a riot that burned down all of Cincinnati’s Black residential areas.26

The expulsion order and subsequent arson riot shocked Americans everywhere. It was even reported overseas. Compassion for the victims sparked collection drives for money, food, and clothing even among Southern slave-owners, and brought about the first meeting of the National Convention movement. Zephaniah Kingsley, one of Florida’s wealthiest slaveowners, a man who, seven years earlier had been appointed by President Monroe to Florida’s Legislative Council wrote that, “[racial tolerance] may be considered as a standard measure by which the comparative state of civilization… may be fairly estimated.” He opined that Ohio had stepped outside the limits of civilized society, “in its acts of oppression against its free colored inhabitants, by which their existence seems so far to have been threatened….”27

Looked at rationally, immigrant Irish and German resentment of Cincinnati‘s Black workers made little sense. From the viewpoint of strict self-interest, the most severe competition that each unskilled Irish worker faced in selling his labor was not from already-employed Black workers, but from the dozens of identically unskilled Irish laborers who had just stepped off the same boat.28 Returning to the experience of Frederick Douglass, the former slave had no more success at portraying himself as biracial in such an environment than an agnostic resident of Belfast would have in adopting a dual Catholic/Protestant persona today. Membership in an ethnicity in many ways resembled membership in a gang

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North