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Final Notebook Prompt- You may cut and paste this same response into your  final notebook and use it towards your post learning self-assessment. 

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Final Notebook Prompt- You may cut and paste this same response into your  final notebook and use it towards your post learning self-assessment. 

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Describe how your perceptions of West Africa and the cultural legacies of the African Diaspora changed  since taking this course. Did you learn something new, cast aside previous misconceptions, or gain a better understanding of a particular theme, key term or concept?

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Discover the Sounds of Luedji Luna - Bahia Brazil 

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Discover the Sounds of Luedji Luna - Bahia Brazil 

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mong the wealth of images in the beautiful new "visual album" by Brazilian singer Luedji Luna - her swimming underwater pregnant, dancing with strangers during a street carnival in her native Salvador, crying alone - one shot lingers in the mind. A phrase in Portuguese spray-painted on a wall: "Black women are the revolution."

Bom Mesmo É Estar Debaixo D'Água (It's Really Good to Be Underwater), replete with references to Afro-Brazilian religion, Black feminism, love, revenge and celebration, is one of the most rapturously reviewed albums in her country this year. "It's an album that talks about me, that is about me," she says over a video call, "but I also bring other voices and images of Black women. Because it is an 'I' that is an 'us', that is collective."

The phrase "Black women are the revolution" appears during the ominous, bass-led Ain't I a Woman, whose title is also the name of the book by Black feminist writer bell hooks and originally comes from an 1851 speech by former enslaved woman Sojourner Truth. "bell hooks said that love heals, and I'm bringing the perspective of healing to this record," Luna says, asserting that Black women "need to claim and have the right to love and be loved".

That right is hard fought in Brazil. Three days after this interview, on the eve of Brazil's Black Consciousness Day holiday, João "Beto" Freitas, a Black man, was beaten and asphyxiated to death by security guards outside a Carrefour supermarket. His family called the killing "racist" and it was widely condemned in Brazil. As protests broke out at Carrefour supermarkets in Brazilian cities, Eduardo Bolsonaro - congressman son of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro - sneered: "They got their George Floyd."

On the day Freitas was buried, president Bolsonaro addressed the G20 by video, stressed Brazil's racial diversity and denied the deeply rooted racism that makes Brazil's Black majority poorer, and more likely to die of Covid-19, be unemployed, killed, imprisoned or shot dead by police. Sérgio Camargo, his choice to head Brazil's leading Black culture and history foundation, has called Black rights movements "scum" and said slavery was "beneficial".

"This false idea, this fallacy of racial democracy is old," Luna says. Relaxing on a sofa, she is warm, keenly intelligent and eager to talk about racism and politics under Bolsonaro, who she describes as an "aberration" and relic of Brazil's brutal colonial past. "We have all the data that confirms and statistically proves that Brazil is a racist country," she says. "We are a country that was built on slavery."

Her first album, 2019's Um Corpo No Mundo (A Body in the World), was named after the dislocated feeling of being a "Black woman of the diaspora, in a country where we don't see ourselves represented." The tracks on her new album were partly made on her third visit to Africa - which felt like a homecoming for Luna, who was pregnant with her son Dayo during recording and filming. Recorded in Nairobi and São Paulo with Kenyan producer and jazz guitarist Kato Change, it is richly melodic, elegantly percussive, jazzy, contemporary and drenched in Brazilian culture; Luna's voice swings from quietly assured to forceful and soaring, her lyrics clinical and poetic.

Luedji Luna.

Luna was born Luedji Santa Rita in Salvador, capital of the north-eastern state of Bahia (the city with the highest proportion of Black people in Brazil), where she grew up in its blue-collar Brotas neighbourhood. Her parents met in its Black rights movement. Their home was filled with music, but Luna's parents wanted her to have a steady job, so she graduated in law.

Words had provided an escape from the bullying Luna experienced as a teenager, "one of the few Black girls in a private school, very shy, very silent. And writing came to break this silence," she says. "This writing became music."

Also deeply unhappy after university, she practised yoga and meditation, realised she wanted to sing, and spent wages earned as a court intern on singing lessons. She moved to São Paulo and fell in with film-makers such as Joyce Prado, who directed the 23-minute film version of the full album in Salvador and the video to her contagious 2017 breakthrough hit Banho de Folha. "In Salvador, it's who you know," she said. "Here in São Paulo, you need to be good."

Black Brazilians are expected to sing about hunger, pain, hunger, sadness. But we can sing other things, too

Visually and musically, there are allusions to Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion Luna follows, imported and developed by enslaved Africans. It is a tolerant, subjective religion whose deities are also forces of nature. Worshippers celebrate during overnight ceremonies, driven by hypnotic percussion, where they are taken over by deities. Each worshipper has a patron saint, or "orixá" and the album opens with a song and rhythm dedicated to Luna's, called Bessém or Oxumaré, sometimes represented by a rainbow or a snake.

Intertwined with the birth of samba in Rio and carnival - both of which it predates - Candomblé is present in the works of Brazilian musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Dorival Caymmi. But its followers increasingly come under attack from extremists among Brazil's growing number of evangelical Christians, many of whom support Bolsonaro and see Candomblé as diabolic. Luna hopes to "demystify, stop it becoming demonised", something she wants to do for Black Brazilians more broadly, too.

"We're expected to sing about hunger, pain, hunger, sadness. But we can sing other things. We live other things, too. That's why I talk about love, to escape this stereotype, this expectation of pain when you think about a Black woman," she says. "I'm talking about love as healing. I'm talking about love as power."

* Bom Mesmo É Estar Debaixo D'Água is out now.

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'Brazil is a racist country, statistically': Luedji Luna, the bold voice of Bahia

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mong the wealth of images in the beautiful new "visual album" by Brazilian singer Luedji Luna - her swimming underwater pregnant, dancing with strangers during a street carnival in her native Salvador, crying alone - one shot lingers in the mind. A phrase in Portuguese spray-painted on a wall: "Black women are the revolution."

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England Is A Dump But Africa Is A Paradise

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England Is A Dump But Africa Is A Paradise

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What was the main idea behind Juliet's argument that Africans are not living in England, they're merely just surviving? What is England's "tax trap", what is the example Juliet mentions on how the tax trap hinders Africans living in England?

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England Is A Dump But Africa Is A Paradise

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Married In Netherlands But Ghana Saved Our Marriage!

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Married In Netherlands But Ghana Saved Our Marriage!

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According to the Acheampong Family, what were some of the main reasons for moving from the Netherlands to Ghana? For the children of the Acheampong Family, what are some of the benefits of growing up in Ghana as opposed to growing up in the Netherlands?

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Married In Netherlands But Ghana Saved Our Marriage!

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Digital Diasporas: Blaxit, YouTube and The Year of Return

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Digital Diasporas: Blaxit, YouTube and The Year of Return

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In the Al Jazeera discussion panel, how do the guests tackle the issue of young African American's romanticizing the land of Africa? How do local African's caution these recent trends of "Blaxit", "Year of Return"?

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Year of Return: The African Americans moving to Ghana - BBC Africa

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Africans Must Focus On Africa's Problem-PLO LUMUMBA 

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Africans Must Focus On Africa's Problem-PLO LUMUMBA 

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Questions regarding an Important figure currently in Africa:

- During the interview with Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba, what were his takes on the issues keeping Africa from unifying as one? What were the steps he would take to make Africa as prosperous?

https://www.aasciences.africa/fellow/patrick-loch-otieno-lumumba

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Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba on African unity.

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New! Scientists say thousands of years ago West Africans migrated to east and southern Africa via Zambia

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New! Scientists say thousands of years ago West Africans migrated to east and southern Africa via Zambia

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African Migration, or the forced, induced or voluntary movement of people throughout, and out of the African continent shapes much of what we come to know about the African Diaspora. How might this pre-colonial research on African migration expand, enhance or complicate our understanding of movement and migration on the Continent of Africa? Read the article and weigh in?

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Africa is the cradle of humankind. All humans are descendants from this common pool of ancestors. Africa and its multitude of ethnolinguistic groups are therefore fundamental to learning more about humankind and our origins.

A human genome refers to the complete set of genetic information found in a human cell. We inherit our genomes from our parents. Studying the variations in different people's genomes gives important clues to how genetic information influences people's appearance and health. It can also tell us about our ancestry. To date, very few African individuals have been included in studies looking at genetic variation. Studying African genomes not only fills a gap in the current understanding of human genetic variation, but also reveals new insights into the history of African populations.

My colleagues and I, who are all members of the Human Heredity and Health (H3Africa) consortium, contributed to a landmark genetics study. This study focused on 426 individuals from 13 African countries. More than 50 different ethnolinguistic groups were represented in the study-one of the most diverse groups of Africans ever to be included in such an investigation. We sequenced the whole genome of each of these individuals-this means we could read every part of the genome to look for variation.

We were able to show that Zambia was most probably an intermediate site on the likely route of migration from West Africa to east and southern Africa.

This study contributes a major, new source of African genomic data, which showcases the complex and vast diversity of African genetic variation. And it will support research for decades to come.

Our findings have broad relevance, from learning more about African history and migration, to clinical research into the impact of specific variants on health outcomes.

Gaining new insights

One of the key outcomes was the discovery of more than 3 million new genetic variants. This is significant because we are learning more about human genetic diversity in general, and discovering more differences that could be linked to disease or traits in the future.

This study also adds details to what is known about the migration and expansion of groups across the continent. We were able to show that Zambia was most probably an intermediate site on the likely route of migration from West Africa to east and south Africa. Evidence supporting movement from east Africa to central Nigeria between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago was also revealed, through the identification of a substantial amount of east African ancestry in a central Nigerian ethnolinguistic group, the Berom.

The study also enabled us to reclassify certain variants that were previously suspected to cause disease. Variants that cause serious genetic diseases are often rare in the general population, mostly because their effect is so severe that a person with such a variant often does not reach adulthood. But we observed many of these variants at quite common levels in the studied populations. One wouldn't expect that these types of disease-causing variants would be this common in healthy adults. This finding helps to reclassify these variants for clinical interpretation.

Finally, we found a surprising number of regions with signatures of natural selection that have not been previously reported. Selection means that when individuals are exposed to environmental factors like a viral infection, or a drastic new dietary component, some gene variants may confer an added adaptive advantage to the humans that bear them in their genome.

Our best interpretation of these findings is that as humans across Africa were exposed to different environments-sometimes as a result of migration-these variants were likely important to surviving in those new conditions. This has left an "imprint" on the genome and contributes to genomic diversity across the continent.

Our data has shown that we have not yet found all the variation in the human genome. There is more to learn by adding new, unstudied population groups. We know that less than a quarter of participants in genomics research are of non-European ancestry. Most available genetic data come from just three countries -the UK (40%), the US (19%) and Iceland (12%).

It is essential to keep adding more genomic data from all global populations-including Africa. This will ensure that everyone can benefit from the advances in health that precision medicine offers. Precision medicine refers to the customization of healthcare to fit the individual. Including personal genetic information could radically change the nature and scope of healthcare options that would work best for that individual.

Next steps

The Human Heredity and Health consortium is now in its eighth year of existence, and supports more than 51 diverse projects. These include studies focusing on diseases like diabetes, HIV, and tuberculosis. The reference data generated through our study are already being put to use by many of the consortium's studies.

Next, we are planning to take an even deeper look at the data to better understand what other types of genetic variation exist. We are also hoping to add further unstudied populations to grow and enrich this data set.

Building capacity for genomics research on the African continent is a key goal of Human Heredity and Health. An important aspect of this study is that it was driven and conducted by researchers and scientists from the African continent. Researchers from 24 institutions across Africa participated and led this investigation. This study showcases the availability of both infrastructure and skills for large-scale genomics research on the continent. It also highlights the prospect of future world-class research on this topic from Africa.

Zané Lombard, Principal Medical Scientist, Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Scientists say West Africans migrated to east and southern Africa via Zambia in ancient times

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Africa is the cradle of humankind. All humans are descendants from this common pool of ancestors. Africa and its multitude of ethnolinguistic groups are therefore fundamental to learning more about humankind and our origins. A human genome refers to the complete set of genetic information found in a human cell.

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New! Diaspora In the News - The Rise, Black Chefs' influence on American Cuisine

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New! Diaspora In the News - The Rise, Black Chefs' influence on American Cuisine

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We have learned that the African Diaspora not only includes the circulation of people, ideas and culture, but it also includes the circulation of food staples, recipes and ways of connecting to the past, present and future all while sitting at the dinner table. Read the article and weigh in.

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IT'S the last day of July, and there's a heat wave in New York City. I wake up at 7:30 a.m. to roast bell peppers and prepare my mise en place. I'm about to have a Zoom video cooking lesson with Marcus Samuelsson, chef and co-owner of Red Rooster and author of numerous cookbooks, including this month's The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.

Marcus is an old friend, and normally we would talk over a meal at Red Rooster, but we're doing a virtual meetup because I'm in strict quarantine, and his landmark Harlem restaurant is undergoing COVID-related renovations (as the lockdown began last spring, it began providing meals to Harlem residents in collaboration with the hunger nonprofit World Central Kitchen). I arrive to our Zoom with oily fingers, having just peeled the last of the peppers; Marcus, meanwhile, has his ingredients neatly laid out on the restaurant's stainless-steel kitchen counter. Two assistants film him as he shows me how to pickle blueberries for Chilled Watermelon and Red Pepper Soup With Pickled Berries, one of more than 150 recipes in The Rise.

Marcus, in true pandemic fashion, is dressed casually in a baseball hat, black T-shirt, and drop-crotch sweatpants. He explains that I should bring vinegar, sugar, cardamom pods, mustard seeds, and water to a boil, and coordinates with his assistants to figure out which angle best allows me to see his mixture bubbling on the range. He points out that the peppers and vinegar should be the first things I prepare: "Get the time-intensive things out of the way first." I proudly announce that I did my peppers in the morning. In terms of pickling the fruit, he says, it's about celebrating the season you're in-and since it's summer, "Get your berry game on."

He recalls pickling berries as a boy growing up in Sweden and then dives into talking about The Rise, a book he's been working on since the 2016 election. "The moment of 45 shocked me to the core," he says (he will not use President Trump's name). "I always thought Red Rooster was my responsibility, providing jobs and connecting people. I felt like we were doing it. But the shock of 45 made me ask, 'What's going to be my contribution?' For me it felt important to document the authorship of Black cooking and how diverse it is. If it's not documented, that has consequences."

The Rise is more than a cookbook; it is a conversation, a collaboration, and, above all, a declaration that Black Food Matters. The recipes bear influences from southern cooking, West Africa, the Caribbean, and East Africa, and are accompanied by a collection of chef profiles and essays by Samuelsson's cowriter, Osayi Endolyn. These introduce readers to figures such as the historian Jessica B. Harris, a personal hero of mine, whose work focuses on the foodways of the African diaspora; chef Mashama Bailey of The Grey, in Savannah; Michael Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene; Leah Chase, queen of Creole cooking and former chef and owner of Dooky Chase's Restaurant, in New Orleans; activist Shakirah Simley; Stephen Satterfield, cofounder of Whetstone magazine; winemaker André Hueston Mack; and chef Nina Compton of Compère Lapin in New Orleans. The Rise begins with a look to the future, exploring where Black food is heading, and then pays homage to cooks on whose shoulders Black chefs stand, and the migration stories that make the cuisine so diverse and rich.

I ask Marcus which five ingredients in the cookbook he would advise people to put in their regular rotation. "Everybody should have a jerk mix at home," he says, "a good Jamaican jerk you can rub on fish, you can rub on vegetables, you can rub on anything. A really good pickle, a southern pickle. The acid-whether it's a Haitian pickle or southern pickle, I think there's something universal about that. Grits: We learned how to have polenta at home; why can't we have grits at home? Broken rice came to us from South Carolina through slavery. The grain teff, so you can make injera, an incredible flatbread from Ethiopia."

To appreciate how Marcus is uniquely positioned to push this particular conversation forward, it's important to understand that his roots run through Ethiopia, Sweden, and a series of French kitchens in which he trained. Samuelsson moved to the United States in 1995, quickly made a name for himself, and, at the age of 25, earned three stars from The New York Times as chef at New York's Aquavit. But the culture and foodways of Black America had been a preoccupation of his even as an adopted child in Sweden (where he was moved at age three). "He's someone whose life has been shaped by migration," says Endolyn, "some of which was not his choice and some of which was. The migration story is something he has thought a lot about, especially The Great Migration, and how much that impacted American food."

"I've been on a journey since I came to this country," Samuelsson explains. "I went to restaurants in New York, like Jezebel and B. Smith, and they were very different kinds of restaurants than the ones I cooked at in France. For me it's ongoing work." Nearly 15 years have passed since Samuelsson explored his African heritage in his book The Soul of a New Cuisine. "I had just met my family then," he says. "I had just reconnected with my Africa. Today, I want to talk about the Black cooking family that is so large here in America and link the stories."

The support of Black chefs played a significant role in his career. "When I came here, people like Patrick Clark [formerly of the Odeon and Tavern on the Green in New York] and Leah Chase showed me the way." He has returned the favor in the years since, cooking with dozens of the chefs featured in The Rise. "I specifically opened Red Rooster in Harlem so aspiration and inspiration would take place in Harlem-that's an amazing megaphone and stage for being able to cook Black food. I look at that as a privilege. I have to share these stories."

The timing is ripe for The Rise. In a year that brought the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, and many others, as well as the subsequent civil uprisings and the centering of Black Lives Matter, food is playing a significant role in the movement for social justice and equity. Building on the legacy of Georgia Gilmore, a cook who helped fund the Montgomery bus boycott by baking and selling food, are 2020 groups such as Fuel the People, which feeds protesters on the front lines, and Bakers Against Racism, which has been staging virtual bake sales to raise money for organizations that support Black lives. "We need to know these incredible roots, techniques, and storytellers are around and inspire people to say Black food matters," Samuelsson says. "It is a field that you can and should go into, and here are the storytellers and the chefs and the creators behind it. We deserve a day in the spotlight."

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Marcus Samuelsson's The Rise Places Black American Food at the Center of the Conversation

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IT'S the last day of July, and there's a heat wave in New York City. I wake up at 7:30 a.m. to roast bell peppers and prepare my mise en place. I'm about to have a Zoom video cooking lesson with Marcus Samuelsson, chef and co-owner of Red Rooster and author of numerous cookbooks, including this month's The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.

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New! Diaspora In the News - Slavery, History and the Dominican Republic 

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New! Diaspora In the News - Slavery, History and the Dominican Republic 

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Due to centuries of racism and the silences it creates, there are whole histories of place that are yet to be told. Here is one of them - read the article and weigh in.

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Thick red-brick walls towered over me as I made my way inside the gated 16th-Century ruins of Hospital de San Nicolás de Bari in the heart of Santo Domingo's Unesco-inscribed Colonial City. My guide, Maribel Nuñez, an activist and leader of Acción Afro-Dominicana, a non-profit organisation based here in the Dominican Republic's capital, began telling the story of Micaela - " la negra del hospital ", or the black woman who lived here in the early 1500s and inspired then-Spanish governor Nicolás de Ovando to build this historic, first hospital in the Americas.

"There was a black woman curing the sick in her humble shack, which was located right where Hospital de Bari was built," Nuñez said. "She used her knowledge of natural medicine to save lives."

The story of this faceless, nameless Afro-Dominican heroine - who Nuñez decided to call "Micaela" to humanise her story, since part of the dehumanisation of slavery was to erase people's names - is documented in a 16th-Century manuscript that scholars at the City University of New York's Dominican Studies Institute transcribed when researching the first African presence in the Dominican Republic. In a letter to the Spanish Crown about the new hospital, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo described its origins as linked to "a pious black woman who sheltered all the poor people she could and cured them as far as she was able to".

Let there be a sign telling the story of this heroic black woman!

Outside the ruins, I glanced at the newly installed tourist plaque, whose description recognised the city's former Spanish governor for its creation, but omitted Micaela - his black muse and the first person to establish and run a hospital in the Americas.

"Let's honour Micaela and keep her memory alive!" Nuñez said. "Let the National Congress and the whole nation recognise her! Let there be a sign telling the story of this heroic black woman!"

She then turned on a portable loudspeaker and a traditional African chant known as Ogun Balenyó, dedicated to an African deity, began to echo off the surrounding ruins. Within seconds, a handful of Afro-Dominican women, including Nuñez, began dancing under the hot sun. They shook their hips, hands on their waists, as the circle grew wider at the foot of the old hospital.

Few people realise that the Dominican Republic was home to the first black people in the Americas, who were initially brought here from present-day Senegal and The Gambia in the 1490s by Christopher Columbus. It was also where the Atlantic slave trade began in 1503 - 116 years before the first slaves arrived in the US Colonies. And, after Haiti, next door, it was the next nation to abolish African slavery in 1801.

The Dominican Republic was home to the first black people in the Americas, who were brought here by Christopher Columbus

The story of the country's colonial past began where I stood that morning, and where the women were dancing in remembrance of their ancestor. In an effort to boost tourism, in 2014 the Colonial City experienced more than $100m in renovations over a three-year period. Building facades were repainted and restored, transforming into bistros, art galleries and shops. Yet, to this day, however, la Zona Colonial, as locals call it, reveals little about its African past. Visitors who flock here leave after learning a single version of the Dominican Republic's history: that of Spain.

Touted as "a city of firsts", the Colonial City is the oldest, permanent European urban settlement in the Americas, and there's no doubt that this 10-block neighbourhood is a historical and architectural gem. The former walled city - its original fortified entrances remain standing - boasts the first paved roads and the first military fort, cathedral, convent and university built in the New World. Its narrow cobblestone streets are lined with Spanish-style colonial architecture, including pink, green and yellow pastel-coloured stone buildings, many of which retain their original metal doors, arched entrances and windows, stucco walls and wrought-iron balconies. Sprawling plazas remain punctuated with statues and busts of Spanish colonialists.

The Spanish chose this location on the west bank of the Ozama River after two failed initial settlements on the island's north coast. Columbus' 1492 arrival and his pursuit of the island's gold for the Spanish Crown had led to the enslavement and extermination of more than 400,000 indigenous Taino over a two-decade period. As the Spanish turned their attention from gold to sugarcane, they imported African slaves to work on the first sugarcane plantations in the New World. The city's history is intertwined with more than 28 African tribes who were brought to the island over a period of three centuries. Yet walking around the Colonial City today, it's easy to think that the Spanish were the only protagonists in Santo Domingo's rich heritage and past.

We have to give our heroes faces. It's about honouring ourselves

That's why every year, Nuñez, with support from the University of Santo Domingo, and Afro-Dominican activist groups like Afros RD and Reconodi.do, plans a Jornada de Visibilización del Cimarronaje, or a "Maroon Awareness Tour" - a regional term referring to escaped African slaves who established free communities in secluded areas throughout the Caribbean. The two-day event, held each October, attracts university students, city residents and expats like me curious to learn of the city's little-told African past. The tour stops at historical locations across Santo Domingo, revealing the contribution of Africans to the history of the Dominican Republic.

"We have to give our heroes faces," Nuñez said. "It's about honouring ourselves."

After leaving the hospital, Nuñez took our group 24km south-west of Santo Domingo to the small town of Nigua, once the heart of the Spanish-run sugarcane plantations and mills. It's also where, on 30 October 1796, 200 enslaved Africans led one of the island's largest rebellions at the Ingenio Boca de Nigua mill.

They want to keep silencing what unfolded here

"Boca De Nigua was the most significant expression of the African resistance to slavery in the Spanish part of the island," said Dario Solano, an Afro-Dominican history expert and native of Nigua, who sits on the Unesco Slavery Route's Dominican Republic Committee. "[It was] the first rebellion that had a political dimension, with the aim of abolishing slavery and creating a government representing the ethnic diversity that existed on the island."

Part of the strategic attack involved seizing the property's ammunitions and burning the sugarcane fields and the plantation owner's house. Nuñez revealed that the uprising's leaders included a woman: Ana María, who was crowned "queen of the freed slaves" during the rebellion.

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Although Boca de Nigua is mentioned in Unesco's Places of Memory on the Slave Route in the Latin Caribbean project, the site's significance remains "relatively unknown" on a national level, according to Solano. There's no interpretive centre, no signs here - only ruins. "It's paradoxical, for a country like the DR where tourism is fundamental," he said. "There's a muting; they want to keep silencing what unfolded here."

Every year on 30 October, Solano hosts an official Festival del Cimarronaje, or "Maroon Festival" at this site, to commemorate Boca de Nigua's rebellion. Nigua is the only town in the Dominican Republic that honours the abolition of slavery and the contribution of enslaved Africans to Dominican history. "This year, we're going to formally propose to the national commission for Unesco and to the Ministry of Culture that Boca de Nigua be presented as a candidate for World Heritage Site status," Solano said. Additional plans include designating 30 October as " Día de la Africanidad " (African Heritage Day) in Nigua, which Solano is certain will become a national event in the future.

History reveals that black resistance in the Americas actually began here in the Dominican Republic

While Boca de Nigua's rebellion was inspired by Haiti's revolution of 1791, history reveals that black resistance in the Americas actually began here in the Dominican Republic. The first sugarcane plantation rebellion took place in Nigua in 1522 in a mill owned by Christopher Columbus' eldest son. "The men who rebelled were of the Wolof ethnic group, from the Senegambia [the former confederation in West Africa between Senegal and The Gambia]," Solano said. "In two years, we will commemorate the 500th anniversary of that first black rebellion in the New World."

Another significant moment in the Dominican Republic's resistance movement came courtesy of Juan Sebastian Lemba, who was a child when he was forcibly brought to Santo Domingo from present-day Congo in the early 16th Century. In 1532, Lemba escaped slavery and began a heroic 15-year journey across the Dominican Republic, growing an army of 200 to 400 Marooned Africans who joined him in liberating enslaved communities around the nation. Lemba's statue - the only one nationwide that honours an African - stands outside the entrance to the Museum of the Dominican Man, a 15-minute drive east of the Colonial City.

The last stop on our Maroon Awareness Tour took us 20 minutes north of Santo Domingo to the town of Villa Mella, an area home to centuries-old brotherhoods formed by enslaved Africans starting in the 16th Century. Their descendants have preserved their ancestors' drumming traditions and syncretic religions. Among these groups is Los Morenos de Villa Mella.

A turquoise-coloured wooden house with zinc roofing serves as the church and headquarters of Los Morenos. Entering the structure, I saw a group of three men at the altar, with tall, goat-skin covered drums tucked between their thighs and strapped to their lower waists with a thin rope string. They were surrounded by other community members and welcomed us with a spiritual chant and drumming. The sun was setting and a downpour followed, but the drums, tambourines and call and response overpowered the rain splattering overhead.

Our group took over the empty floor facing Los Morenos - waists bent, hips shaking and arms moving side to side. I asked Solano about the tall drums that I rarely heard in the city centre.

"That's the palo or atabales - it's our original musical expression in the Dominican Republic," he said. "Merengue became official during the Trujillo era, like an imposition, but the African palo was already present. Palo is our national music."
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Santo Domingo: The city that kept slavery silent

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Thick red-brick walls towered over me as I made my way inside the gated 16th-Century ruins of Hospital de San Nicolás de Bari in the heart of Santo Domingo's Unesco-inscribed Colonial City.

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Strange Fish West African Migrants and Death in the Mediterranean (11/17)

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Strange Fish West African Migrants and Death in the Mediterranean (11/17)

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1. Now knowing the dangers at hand do you feel you would attempt to move along these dangerous routes in search of a better life?
2. Why do you think the International Organization for Migration initially low balled their first death count in the Mediterranean?
3. Of those that make the trek and land in Europe what other problems do you think are waiting for them in Europe that they probably don't expect?

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Tips and Best Practices for Analyzing Texts and Sources/Precis

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Tips and Best Practices for Analyzing Texts and Sources/Precis

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Tips for Precis and Analyzing Texts and Sources

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Tips for Precis and Analyzing Texts and Sources

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New! Diaspora in the News - Atlantic Ocean

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New! Diaspora in the News - Atlantic Ocean

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Given what we know about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage, should the Atlantic seafloor be labeled a Memorial - Read the Article and weigh in.

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BEAUFORT, N.C. - Before deep-sea mining begins on the seafloor in international waters of the Atlantic Basin, a group of scholars is suggesting that a portion of the seabed be marked on maps and charts as a virtual memorial to the estimated 1.8 million Africans who lost their lives at sea during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the 11 million who completed the voyage and were sold into slavery.

A memorial ribbon on maps would remind mining companies and others working on the seabed of the historical importance of the Middle Passage and the possibility that culturally significant artifacts might be found there, say the authors from Duke University, Emory University, the University of Southampton, The Ocean Foundation, and the Permanent Mission of Sierra Leone to the United Nations.

The commentary appears Nov. 3 in the Journal of Marine Policy.

"We hope that this research encourages conversation about the cultural significance of the Atlantic seabed in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and for these cultural values to be considered alongside the environmental concerns and economic interests associated with deep-sea mining," said Phillip Turner, the lead author on the paper and a PhD alumnus of Duke's marine science and conservation program.

According to the group's research, more than 12.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic on an estimated 40,000 slave-trading voyages between 1519 and 1865. At least 1.8 million perished under horrendous conditions on the two-month voyage and were thrown overboard.

It may be possible, the authors suggest, that mining operations working a mile or more underwater will come upon artifacts of the Middle Passage, including an estimated 1,000 slave-trade shipwrecks. A wreck, if found, might contain human remains and artifacts deserving preservation like that afforded to the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

Through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), nations that are members of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) have a duty to protect objects of archaeological and historical significance under Articles 149 and 303 (1) of UNCLOS. The ISA is the agency granting permits for deep-sea mining.

"The remains of the slave trade are tangible and intangible heritage that should be memorialized as the final resting place of the victims of the slave trade," said Ole Varmer, a Senior Fellow of The Ocean Foundation and retired NOAA attorney.

The draft regulations for sea-floor mining in the Atlantic put responsibility for recognizing historic sites on the mining companies, and say that if artifacts are found the companies must stop operations in the area and notify the ISA.

Around volcanically active areas of the ocean floor like the mid-Atlantic Ridge, it's common to find occurrences of copper-rich minerals. Elsewhere, crusts rich in cobalt are exposed at the surface of the seabed. Cobalt and copper are in demand for commercial uses such as electrical systems and batteries. Deep-sea mining companies are exploring for such materials from seabed environments and ultimately intend to extract the minerals with giant submersible robotic mining machines.

"We're not in any way suggesting a ban or restriction on mining, but we do want to help ensure that activities on the seabed are sensitive to the cultural heritage of the Middle Passage in the Atlantic," said co-author Cindy Van Dover, the Harvey W. Smith Distinguished Professor of Biological Oceanography in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

The Middle Passage should be treated as an important site for human heritage, Turner said. "It holds a central place in the cultural memory of the slave-trade because of the staggering number of African people who came to rest on the ocean floor there," Turner said. "Maryland poet Lucille Clifton called it 'a bridge of ivory,' for all the African bones that lie between the continents."

For Sierra Leone, whose shores served as major posts for the transatlantic slave trade, "the proposal for the Middle Passage memorialization also represents an important aspect of educational outreach on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery, with the solemn objective of honoring the past, celebrating the present and creating a new pathway for the future, one that is truly free and fair to all," said co-author Ambassador Michael Kanu, Deputy Permanent Representative of Sierra Leone to the United Nations.

CITATION: "Memorializing the Middle Passage on the Atlantic Seabed in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction," Philip Turner, Sophie Cannon, Sarah DeLand, James Delgado, David Eltis, Patrick Halpin, Michael Kanu, Charlotte Sussman, Ole Varmer and Cindy Van Dover. Marine Policy, Nov. 3, 2020, DOI:10.1016/j.marpol.2020.104254

View the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2020.104254

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Group Urges Atlantic Seafloor be Labeled a Memorial to Slave Trading

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BEAUFORT, N.C. - Before deep-sea mining begins on the seafloor in international waters of the Atlantic Basin, a group of scholars is suggesting that a portion of the seabed be marked on maps and charts as a virtual memorial to the estimated 1.8 million Africans who lost their lives at sea during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the 11 million who completed the voyage and were sold into slavery.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JOGboXLhqnyHXZp6iFFce46kcdTOd0CJpJ4VK6dihPg/edit?usp=sharing

This is a direct link to my notes for the presentation, I will warn though however that they're not very well organized.

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Theorizing Blackness: Negritude and 20th Century Pan Africanism Discussion Questions:

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Theorizing Blackness: Negritude and 20th Century Pan Africanism Discussion Questions:

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1. What did Suzanne Césaire  mean by “La Grand Camouflage,” why did she advocate for its use, whom did she think it is useful for?

2. Why did Suzanne Césaire think poetry was so important to the Caribbean?

3. What did Nardal mean by Antilleans not having “full French citizenship,” why did this matter to her?

4. How were the ideas and/or topics addressed by Suzanne Césaire and Nardal emerge within The Future is Elsewhere?

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By Youssoupha

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Black Missionaries and African Colonization in West Africa

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Black Missionaries and African Colonization in West Africa

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1. In what ways did religion allow for the continued colonization of West Africa, and who were some of the main colonizers (which groups)?
2. How does this weeks topic relate to last week’s and more specifically how can we connect it to the concept of “spiritual decolonization”?
3. What role did Black missionaries play in colonization as opposed to White missionaries?

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Early Developments on the Concept of Pan-Africanism

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Early Developments on the Concept of Pan-Africanism

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1.    How do you think papers and journals such as the Negro, Freedom Journal, and Rights of All contributed to development of Pan-Africanism?

2.    In your estimation, why is Delany arguing for an African or Black capitalism?

3.    Blyden worked to construct the concept of the African personality. Do you agree with his criteria? Do you think it aligns with modern concepts of Pan-Africanism?

4.    Did you find it troubling that Blyden justified colonialism? Why? Given his context and time, is there a logical reason for these commitments?

5.    While Blyden advanced an African identity, some scholars suggest that his views developed harmful outcomes.

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic  

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic  

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Ada Ferrer, Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic
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Questions
1) What are the differences between the Northern and Southern parts of Haiti and how did this influence the choice of the seven enslaved men from Jamaica on where to sail towards?

2) Why was the North so bothered by the actions that the Southern part did with the enslaved men from Jamaica?

3) Who is Alexandre Petion and why is he so important within Haitian history and the article?

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Creole Common Routes; St.Domingue (Haiti) - Louisiana Part 4

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Part II)

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Part II)

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Examines the connection between Haiti and New Orleans

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic

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Negotiating Race and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic

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Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation
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Questions:
1. Why was there such a hesitation in the acceptance of individuals from Saint Domingue?
2. How did slavery affect free people of color in New Orleans?
3. What alternatives did slaveholders and Haitian refugees have in combating Louisiana legislation in regards to manumission and interracial marriage?

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Haitian Revolutions: Crash Course World History #30

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W.E.B. Dubois " The Double Aimed Struggle"

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W.E.B. Dubois " The Double Aimed Struggle"

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In Chapter One of The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Dubois mentioned "double aims" as seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals causing people to woo false gods, invoking false means of salvation , and making the individual ashamed of themselves.  What does Dubois mean in detail about "double aims" (double consciousness)?

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1. What best describes "Black Rice"? pg 141
2. What were some ways did Black gender play a role in rice cultivation/agriculture?
3. Do you think there is relevancy to why whites in the Americas like the white rice when the regular white rice (Carolina Gold) was more nutritious? Also verses Red rice or Sative

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Discussion Questions: Spirited Things Video

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Discussion Questions: Spirited Things Video

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1. How do contexts like enslaved African to white colonizer ratio and catholic versus christian religious dominance influence African cultural retention in the Americas? What are some examples?
2. In what wats does African cultural retention occur differently in contexts where it is stifled heavily, such as in the US, versus contexts where it can flourish more, such as in Cuba?
3. In what ways do Europeans react to African cultural retention?
4. What are some examples of African culture blending with Native American and European cultures? In what contexts does this occur least, and in which contexts does this occur most?

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An African American discusses his experiences and theories about African cultural retention in the Americas

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Spirited Things: Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic

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Map of Sea Islands, U.S.

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As part of renewed calls for racial justice and an end to all forms of racism in American culture the parent company who makes Uncle Ben's had decided that it is time to change its name.

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NEW YORK (AP) - The Uncle Ben's rice brand is getting a new name: Ben's Original.

Parent firm Mars Inc. unveiled the change Wednesday for the 70-year-old brand, the latest company to drop a logo criticized as a racial stereotype. Packaging with the new name will hit stores next year.

"We listened to our associates and our customers and the time is right to make meaningful changes across society," said Fiona Dawson, global president for Mars Food, multisales and global customers. "When you are making these changes, you are not going to please everyone. But it's about doing the right thing, not the easy thing."

Several companies have retired racial imagery in recent months, a ripple effect from the Black Lives Matters protests over the police killing of George Floyd and other African Americans.

Quaker Oats announced in June that it would drop Aunt Jemima from syrup and pancake packages, responding to criticism that the character's origins were based the "mammy," a black woman content to serve her white masters. Quaker said packages without Aunt Jemima will start to appear in stores by the end of the year, although the company has not revealed the new logo.

"It's a chain reaction of sorts and it's really good and interesting to see so much introspection being done in these companies to change the trademarks that they've invested in," said Riché Richardson, an associate professor of African American literature at Cornell University, who called for Aunt Jemima's retirement five years ago in a New York Times opinion piece. "There is a challenge for some people in letting go of these images because they wrongly link them with a sense of Black identity and empowerment when in reality these images have never empowered Black people."

The owner of Eskimo Pie has also said it will change its name and marketing of the nearly century-old chocolate-covered ice cream bar.

Geechie Boy Mill, a family-owned operation in South Carolina that makes locally-grown and milled white grits, is also planning a name change, according to owner Greg Johnsman. Geechie is a dialect spoken mainly by the descendants of African-American slaves who settled on the Ogeechee river in Georgia, according to Merriam-Webster.com.

Beyond food brands, the Washington NFL franchise dropped the "Redskins" name and Indian head logo amid pressure from sponsors including FedEx, Nike, Pepsi and Bank of America.

Mars had announced in the summer that the Uncle Ben's brand would "evolve."

Since the 1940s, the rice boxes have featured a white-haired Black man, sometimes with a bow tie, an image critics say evokes servitude. Mars has said the face was originally modeled after a Chicago maitre d' named Frank Brown. In a short-lived 2007 marketing campaign, the company elevated Uncle Ben to chairman of a rice company.

Dawson said months of conversations with employees, customer studies and other stakeholders led the company to settle on "Ben's Original. She said the company is still deciding on an image to accompany the new name.

Americus Reed II, professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the challenge for brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben's is to come up with an new image that isn't boring. He said Mars likely settled on keeping the name "Ben" to avoid "throwing the baby out with the water." But now, Reed said, the brand might have to define who Ben is without sparking a new controversy.

"You don't want to step in it twice," Reed said. "I think what you might see is a very watered-down, safe creativity. Let's not step on anyone's toes. You'll see that for a while."

Mars announced several other initiatives, including a $2 million investment in culinary scholarships for aspiring Black chefs in partnership with the National Urban League.

It also is planning a $2.5 million investment in nutritional and education programs for students in Greenville, Mississippi, the majority African-American city where the rice brand has been produced for more than 40 years.

Greenville Mayor Errick D. Simmons said it's always been a source of pride for the city to be home to the famous rice brand, despite the controversy over the name. He said Mars is the third-largest employer in Greenville, creating more than 1,000 direct and indirect jobs, from rice farmers to truck drivers.

Simmons praised Mars for seeking the city leadership's input on the name change through several meetings in his office. For Greenville, he said it was important that shoppers continue to seek and find Ben's Original in stores with its signature blue and orange packaging "so that people here can continue to stay employed."

"For a company, a global multinational company, to be having these conversations with an African American male mayor sends the right signal to the world," Simmons said.

___

AP Writer Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit contributed to this story.

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Mars drops Uncle Ben's, reveals new name for rice brand

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NEW YORK (AP) - The Uncle Ben's rice brand is getting a new name: Ben's Original. Parent firm Mars Inc. unveiled the change Wednesday for the 70-year-old brand, the latest company to drop a logo criticized as a racial stereotype. Packaging with the new name will hit stores next year.

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1. What were some of the methods that slave ships would use to keep slaves from committing suicide?
2. What were some of the purposes of drums and songs on slave ships?

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1. How did newspapers at the time respond to uprisings onboard slave ships?
2. Do you think that the extreme methods that were intended to break the spirit of slaves and keep them from rebelling worked? or do you think it had the adverse effect of pushing slaves to the point of rebelling?

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A day by day Log of life onboard a slave ship.

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents more than 36,000 voyages in which enslaved persons were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Select any entry in the register and you'll find a checklist of shockingly precise information: the size of the ship, the name of the captain, the number of enslaved persons initially on the ship as it embarked from Africa-and the number of those who died on the Middle Passage. It's an eerie testament to the clerical cruelty of the slave trade as big business. "For those Europeans who thought about the issue," the Emory University historian David Eltis wrote in a 2018 introduction to the database, "the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar."

Despite the overwhelming density of these kinds of records, masking brutality with meticulous documentation, far less survives to describe daily life on these ships, or the experience of being on board. That's what distinguishes the "Journal of the Slave Ship Mary," recently acquired by Georgetown University Library in Washington, D.C. Written by an unidentified assistant of the ship's captain, Nathan Sterry, it's one of only a dozen or so known logbooks, or dated journals with daily entries, that survive from slave ship voyages between Africa and North America.

It had already been known, for example, that the ship departed Providence, Rhode Island, in late 1795 and arrived in Savannah, Georgia-by way of present-day Senegal, Liberia, and Ghana-in August 1796. The logbook clarifies what happened every day in between-information that is not documented in the administrative records of most voyages. The journal is told from a white, empowered perspective, of course, but it can't conceal the Mary 's daily horrors.

In a video accompanying the text, Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown and curator of the university's Slavery Archive, calls the logbook "a record of death and dying." Enslaved persons died on the ship "almost daily," he says, and their bodies were thrown overboard. But the logbook's keeper did not record the names of the dead or really any identifying characteristics. "Buried One Woman N.26," reads an entry from July 20, 1796. Every enslaved person who died on the ship is referred to with a number only. In total, there were 38 deaths over the duration of the voyage. The causes range from suicide, to disease, to deadly beatings.

"We have a lot of documentation" from the slave trade, says Herbert Brewer, a historian of slavery at Morgan State University, in Maryland, "but we also don't have a lot of stuff. The greatest missing thing, if you think about it, is we don't have the names of the people. That's a big, black hole issue: We don't know the names of the people. And these are people." Brewer previously contributed a study of the slave ship Margaret to the Georgetown Slavery Archive, which launched as part of the university's broader initiative to investigate its own historical relationship with slavery.

Echoing Brewer, Rothman emphasizes in an interview that the Mary 's logbook "is not a photographic portrait of reality." Instead, he says, "it's a representation from a certain perspective, one of the officers on board this vessel for whom the Africans were commodities, potential sources of profit and loss. That helps you understand why the deaths are recorded the way they are"-in what Rothman calls "the numbest way" possible. Indeed, he says, the precise records for how many people were on slave ships come from customs, where ships were taxed based on how many enslaved persons they carried as cargo.

Four of Mary's casualties resulted from an attempted rebellion. On June 10, 1796, before Mary had left Africa for Georgia, a group of enslaved men managed to escape their chains, and attempted to wrest control of the ship. In a full-page account, the logbook's writer describes the fight and subsequent deaths. According to his account, two of the men jumped overboard while two were killed during the fight with the crew. Without any transition, the writer concludes the day's entry: "The Weather ends pleasant." (Just three months earlier, on March 21, several white members of Sterry's crew had also attempted to take control of the ship. In striking contrast, none were killed; the men were simply dismissed.)

The logbook was donated to Georgetown by Robert S. Askew, who discovered it sitting in his closet. Rothman says that it had likely been in the donor's family, and traveled with them as they moved west from Rhode Island to California, where the book was eventually found. While the book arrived in fairly good condition, the library hired specialists to clean it, rebind it, and apply Japanese paper over spots that had deteriorated. Now, Hillary MacKinlay, a Georgetown doctoral student, is at work transcribing the largely inscrutable 18th-century text. Once that transcription is complete, Rothman hopes to develop an interactive digital map that will trace Mary 's path. Users will be able to click on a day, see where the ship was, and read what happened on board.

Though these digital opportunities are welcome, especially in the time of COVID-19, Rothman hopes that students and other visitors will still engage with the physical logbook, in person. The library has already digitized the text, "but the experience of actually seeing this artifact in person and turning the pages yourself is absolutely terrifying," he says. "It's a really emotional experience. It's a record of so much pain and trauma, and just to have it in front of you-it's just a kind of testament."

As rare a find as the logbook is, its omissions also serve as a reminder of how much research remains to be done. "If you can come closer to who these people were," says Brewer, then "you're uncovering something big."

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A Rare Day-by-Day Document of Life Aboard a Slave Ship

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents more than 36,000 voyages in which enslaved persons were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Select any entry in the register and you'll find a checklist of shockingly precise information: the size of the ship, the name of the captain, the number of enslaved persons initially on the ship as it embarked from Africa-and the number of those who died on the Middle Passage.

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Historic Slave Ports and how they are used today.

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KUNTA KINTEH ISLAND, Gambia - When Gambian boat captain Abdoulie Jabang ferries visitors to Kunta Kinteh Island, he tells them that the waves lapping the shores of the former slave site threaten to wash history away.

Situated at the mouth of the Gambia River, the island is home to one of the many forts that dot the West African coast - crumbling reminders of the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade, which tore millions of Africans from their homes.

As Jabang steered his blue-painted wooden boat through the water, he gestured towards Kunta Kinteh, whose ruined fortress, shaded by giant baobab trees, is threatened by erosion.

"You see the island is very small now," he said.

"We have to preserve this island for the young coming generations - we need to let them know about it. We should never forget what this land has been used for."

From Senegal's Gorée Island at Africa's westernmost point to the Nigerian port of Badagry on the Gulf of Guinea, the sites where slaves spent their final days on African soil have turned into places of pilgrimage and remembrance.

Many have seen a surge in visitors this year, which marks 400 years since the first record of African slaves arriving in North America.

Tourists can walk along the cannon-studded ramparts of slave fortresses or pass through the points of "no return," where slaves were marched in chains to waiting ships.

Some who live and work in the shadow of the landmarks see the sites as a reminder not to let history repeat itself.

"Future generations need to know what is happening so that it does not happen again," said Chief Seraphin Kpissi, whose village in Ivory Coast lies near a slave site on the banks of the Bodo river.

A tall stone slab wrapped in chains now stands as a memorial to the slaves who were forced to take a last bath in the Bodo's muddy waters toward the end of their march to the coast.

The memorial was erected with the participation of UNESCO, which has granted world heritage status to Kunta Kinteh Island and several other West African sites due to the important testimony they provide of the slave trade. (Reuters)
Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Gareth Jones Photography by Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters, Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters, Zohra Bensemra/Reuters Photos taken June and July 2019
_____
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PHOTOS: West Africa's historic slave sites bear witness to brutal trade

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KUNTA KINTEH ISLAND, Gambia - When Gambian boat captain Abdoulie Jabang ferries visitors to Kunta Kinteh Island, he tells them that the waves lapping the shores of the former slave site threaten to wash history away.

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News: Mayan Slave Ship Discovery 

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News: Mayan Slave Ship Discovery 

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Watch this piece about the discovery of the Mayan slave ship and consider how this discovery complicates or expands our understanding of slavery in the Americas.

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Archaeologists in Mexico find first Mayan slave ship

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News: Dr. Jessica Krug's "Blackface"

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News: Dr. Jessica Krug's "Blackface"

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Read the New Yorker piece on the African History professor who pretended to represent various Black people from throughout the African Diaspora and see how this author interprets this as cultural appropriation.

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At the end of August, a famous white celebrity appeared on Instagram wearing a hair style best known for gracing the heads of Black women. No, it wasn't Khloe (Koko) Kardashian, or anyone of that tribe, nor any of the usual-suspect pop girls, Miley Cyrus, et al. It was Adele, of the power-ballad tribe, sporting Bantu knots-but that's not all. Posted late on a Sunday evening London time-a few hours before this year's virtual-ish MTV Video Music Awards-the photo showed the blue-eyed-soul singer, usually known for smoked-out red-carpet glamour, frolicking as part of what appeared to be a homespun Carnival celebration. She was costumed for the occasion in gold hoops and a Jamaican-flag bikini top, a yellow-feathered headdress arrayed about her neck. I'm told jokes were made, but by the time I approached social media, on Monday morning, the conversation had already coalesced around the dreaded phrase "cultural appropriation." This time, however, the culture, or some portions of it, pushed back against the label. Black Britons chided Americans for their ignorance of Carnival tradition-it is welcome to all who come respectfully. West Indians in the United States, in turn, were irritated by their imperious compatriots. Jamaicans on and off the island bemoaned that the hand-wringing was thieving joy from their moment in the sun. (Whites, I imagine, clung to whichever angle most eased their secondhand guilt.) These lines of contention-cultural, ethnic, national-were overlapping and inexact; the diaspora, made up of so many ongoing resettlements, resists summary. The only stable reference point in the debate was the singularity that is Adele, looking snatched and a bit silly in her Bantu knots and tie-dye leggings.

Across the pond, a few days later, a woman waved a white flag. The historian Jessica A. Krug, then an associate professor at George Washington University, posted a confession on the publishing platform Medium, last Thursday, explaining that she is not who she'd been claiming to be. "To an escalating degree over my adult life," she wrote, "I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness." Her life and, by extension, her scholarly career-or is it the other way around?-had been based on a lie, she admitted, or rather a glut of them, feeding on good faith like, as Krug put it, "not a culture vulture" but "a culture leech."

The blog post is light on details-the where, when, and how of Krug's masquerade. She speculates that "mental health issues" were an impetus for her behavior; professionals have assured her that altered identity is a "common response" to "the severe trauma" that she incurred during childhood. But she does not name a diagnosis or elaborate upon the instigating traumatic events, resorting instead to the generic jargon of self-help, blended with the D.I.Y. verbiage endemic to the self-care branch of social justice: "redress," "harm," "gaslit," "belonging," "accountability." (Absent are the words "sorry" and "apologize.") The post is not well written, but it wants to be-its self-flagellations taking on the repetitious rhythms of slam poetry. ("I am a coward.... I am a coward"; "Intention never matters more than impact.") The performance is, above all, profoundly awkward. For all her apparent study of the ways in which certain oppressed groups address wrongs that are done, Krug proves incapable of writing her way to recompense. "You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself," she writes, borrowing, with all sincerity, a term of cultural panic that lost its candor eons ago. "What does that mean?" she asks. "I don't know." Within twenty-four hours, a group of Krug's colleagues at G.W. released a statement calling on her to resign or, if not, to be stripped of her tenure and fired. "With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching," the G.W. Department of History said in a written statement posted to its Web site. On Wednesday, it was announced that Krug had resigned. (She did not respond to my requests to speak with her.)

It seems that Krug exposed herself to avoid being exposed. "I had been following her transformation for a while," a scholar in Krug's field told me. The scholar, a junior professor who wished to remain anonymous, met Krug more than a decade ago. "The first time I encountered her, she would talk about 'us' and 'we,' " the junior professor said over the phone. "And I was scratching my head, like, 'us' and 'we'? And then I realized she meant Black." Specifically, "part Algerian"-Krug said that she was the daughter of Algerian immigrants on her mother's side, and that her father was a white man of German origin. "I took her at her word," the professor said, "But I always had certain misgivings." Krug spoke back then of trauma as part of her heritage, describing herself as the product of rape between her mother and father, and the junior professor said that she didn't want to impinge on Krug by bringing it up, even as she and other friends, all Latinx, harbored doubts about Krug's claims. The way Krug spoke about the junior professor's own identity was part of what aroused her suspicion. "I'm middle class. I've never tried to be anything else," she said. "I think she was pushing me or encouraging me to adopt a more radical political position." These sorts of challenges ate away at the remaining amiability between Krug and her Afro-Latinx peers. "There came a point when we were just, like, 'This is bullshit.' " Still, they were operating on a feeling. Without proof or a violation of academic protocol or issues with Krug's scholarship-"I always respected her intellectually," the junior professor said-there was nothing to be done but add distance. "There wasn't any big dramatic moment. I just quietly severed the relationship on all fronts."

Years later, Krug came back on the scholar's radar when mutual friends on Facebook shared articles Krug had written for RaceBaitr, a platform for race-forward news and criticism, and later for Essence. Those articles, now deleted (though Krug's work appears in the September/October print issue of Essence), made it apparent that a change had occurred. Krug had left her Algerian roots and been remade, chameleon-like, by Spanish Harlem. "I am boricua, just so you know," she wrote for Essence last year. Still, the junior scholar told me, "I just sat quietly with it, because who is going to believe me?"

Krug's reckoning was finally set in motion after another G.W. professor, H. G. Carrillo, died, in April, at the age of fifty-nine, due to complications of the novel coronavirus. Carrillo, who went by the nickname Hache ("H" in Spanish, spelled out), was known as a queer Cuban-American author who captured the estranged experience of the Latin American diaspora, notably in his novel " Loosing My Espanish," from 2004. Upon reading a tribute to the author in the Washington Post, however, Carrillo's sister and niece contacted the paper with some critical updated information: Carrillo was not born in Cuba but in the United States, Detroit to be exact. His parents were also born in Michigan, and they, like Carrillo (born Herman Glenn Carroll), were Black Americans with no Latino heritage. This was a shock to Carrillo's husband and to the literary community, prompting conversations among Afro-Latinx writers who had counted him as one of their own.

It was also, the junior scholar told me, "a moment of synchronicity." On August 26th, she texted two other Afro-Latinx scholars, after hinting, on Twitter, about a possible Carrillo-like situation within her field. One of the people she texted was Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, an associate professor of Afro-diaspora studies at Michigan State University. Together with a third scholar, Figueroa-Vásquez began doing research into Krug's background and found proof of her identity once and for all in the obituaries of Krug's parents. But there remained the question of what to do with the information. "We were not going to write some big flashy letter. We were not trying to ruin her life," Figueroa-Vásquez said. "We were really thinking, as Black Latina women, how do we do this ethically?" They had no plans to contact G.W.; what they wanted, Figueroa-Vasquez said, was simply for Krug to "stop lying" and apologize. They reached out to people who know Krug personally, colleagues in her field and editors she had worked with, to gather more information. But Figueroa-Vásquez suspects that Krug was "tipped off" by one of those people. Within eight days of their initial conversation about Krug ("Black women are efficient if nothing else-we get to the bottom of things," Figueroa-Vásquez joked), the Medium post was online and a frenzy of news coverage had begun.

Jessica Anne Krug grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents, Stuart and Sherry Krug, worked as a grocer and a teacher, respectively, according to obituaries in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. Krug attended the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school located in the suburb of Overland Park, followed by the Barstow School, a prep school in the city proper. In 1996, when she was in the eighth grade, Krug wrote an op-ed in the Kansas City Star against "white-male bashing," despite her experiences with harassment from people in that demographic. "A few years ago, while taking a shortcut through a local country club, I was confronted by people who uttered slurs about the Jewish star hanging around my neck," she wrote. She attended Portland State University and later received her doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2012. She was "passionate about African and African Diaspora history," Francisco Scarano, a member of her dissertation committee, told me via e-mail, describing her as a "voracious reader." After travels to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, he said, "she always seem to come back energized by experiences she had and by the people she had met here." They never had conversations about her race and ethnicity, though, and Scarano said that he was shocked by the news of her forged identities.

"North African Blackness," "US rooted Blackness," "Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness"-even the coming clean reverts to a sweeping shorthand. In the course of her academic career, Krug has identified as Algerian, African-American, Black Boricua, vaguely Afro-Latinx, vaguely Caribbean; she's been from Kansas City, from the Bronx, and "of the hood." Krug's students, interviewed by The Cut, recalled a "very heavy accent" and an affected brown-girl cool. The trail of locales and labels explicates little besides their author's own ethnographic tastes. What unites them, though, is Krug's affinity for Blackness as an instrument of authenticity as she made her way through academia.

Much of the coverage of Krug has reduced her story to this point: the want of Blackness. The comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane woman, now known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, who went viral, in 2015, for her own living minstrel act, write themselves. But while Dolezal's fabrication relied upon a flat sense of Black American identity (the Howard University degree, the leadership position at the N.A.A.C.P.), Krug's transformation from white to Black was knottier. The places Krug chose to identify with-North Africa, the West Indies, East Harlem, the Bronx-cannily preyed upon a certain American laziness when it comes to parsing race beyond Jim Crow. It is germane that Krug hid among the bona fides of the American humanities, which, still, as a whole, like the nation as a whole, tend toward incuriosity about the difference between race and ethnicity, let alone how one cuts across the other. (Hence the tendency of so many outlets to account for Adele's showing only in Black and white terms.)

Consider, for instance, the footage that has been circulating from a New York City Council hearing, held over Zoom in June, which shows Krug in her Afro-Latinx pose. She introduces herself as Jess La Bombalera, a nickname apparently of her own making, adapted from Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican genre of music and dance. Broadcasting live from "El Barrio," and wearing purple-tinted shades and a hoop in her nose, she lambasts gentrifiers, shouts out her "black and brown siblings," and twice calls out "white New Yorkers" for not yielding their speaking time. What stands out, though, is the way Krug speaks, in a patchy accent that begins with thickly rolled "R"s and transitions into what can best be described as B-movie gangster. This is where desire outruns expertise. The Times, in a piece on Krug's exposure, last week, nonetheless called this a "Latina accent," lending credence to Krug's performance. (The phrase was later deleted.) The offhand notation is a tiny example of the buy-in Krug has been afforded her entire scholastic career, by advisers and committee members and editors and colleagues. They failed to recognize the gap not between real and faux, so much, as between something thrown-on and something lived-in. That inattentiveness was Krug's escape hatch.

A symptomatic reading of the situation is almost too easy. Krug's academic research is focussed on unhomed peoples whose identities are not reducible to state or tribal filiation-indigenous peoples turned Africans turned slaves turned fugitives who forged a new sense of themselves out of thin air. Her book, " Fugitive Modernities," from 2018, centers on Kisama, a region within present-day Angola whose people resisted Portuguese enslavement and colonialism in the seventeenth century. It was published by Duke University Press, which is known for its cutting-edge monographs in the area of Black studies. The editorial director, Gisela Fosado, explained in a post on the press's blog that she, too, had been lied to-in their initial contact, Fosado wrote, Krug claimed that her surname was actually Cruz. Fosado added that she is not sure what's to be done now with Krug's scholarship, which "has been widely praised and recognized as important." I, working far afield from Krug's work in period, region, and methods, am not equipped to evaluate the fitness of her research. I can only say that her writing is heavy on the kind of equivocation ("and" ... "but" ... "furthermore") that, in academic texts, can reflect broad-mindedness-or insecurity. After the Medium post was published, excerpts from "Fugitive Modernities" circulated on Twitter. Seasoned authors like to joke about the length of the acknowledgements section in books by début authors, who tend to thank everyone they've ever encountered, down to their kindergarten teachers. But Krug is light on thanks, and takes a combative tone. The only person acknowledged by name is the late rapper Biggie Smalls; Krug is tempted, she writes, to just "crib" her comments from him, "to stunt on every institution and person who has ever stood in my way."

Black studies, a collaborative and multidisciplinary field, is whiter than anyone who hasn't been in a room with us might assume. Here I'm referring not to the white scholars, though they are plentiful, but to the rest of us: gather us in a group and you'll be hard pressed to find a tenure-track scholar darker than the proverbial paper bag. There's a familiar story that accounts for the prevalence of lighter-complected folk in America, the post-bellum legacy of rape-the same narrative that Krug latched onto in making the myth of her "lightskin" presentation, wielding it as a cudgel to protect her against those who might try to pry into the finer points of her background. (According to the junior scholar, during grad school Krug called herself "high yella," a playfully derogatory term for the fairer African-American set.) But then there is another story that helps account for how someone who looks like Krug can blend in, so to speak: the story of how the lightest among us have a way of perpetuating their lightness over generations, prizing it as it is prized by the institutions they move within. This presents an odd paradox among the scholars presumably best poised to confront white supremacy from inside the university: all of this light skin is not incidental to how Black studies sees itself-to who is promoted, professionally and ideologically, within the field, and to who is extended, as Krug was extended, so much benefit of the doubt.

These things are known but rarely acknowledged in such mixed company. There may be a shift in the air, though. The unravelling of Krug's charade began with a whisper network of sorts, as so many of these things do. The whispering continues. I am aware of at least one scholar, known for playing with the color line, who quietly modified her institutional bio recently. The self-description now specifies "white."

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The Layered Deceptions of Jessica Krug, the Black-Studies Professor Who Hid That She Is White

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Last week, a famous white celebrity appeared on Instagram wearing a hair style best known for gracing the heads of Black women. No, it wasn't Khloe (Koko) Kardashian, or anyone of that tribe, nor any of the usual-suspect pop girls, Miley Cyrus, et al.

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Debating the volume and impact of Trans-Atlantic Slavery

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Debating the volume and impact of Trans-Atlantic Slavery

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What is Walter Rodney's argument and what key pieces of evidence does his analysis rely on?

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Debating the volume and impact of Trans-Atlantic Slavery 

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Debating the volume and impact of Trans-Atlantic Slavery 

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What is J.D. Fages' argument and what key pieces of evidence does his analysis rely on?

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What effects did Musa's wealth and ambition have on the world beyond Mali's borders?
How did Musa utilize Islam to secure political dominion?

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Akon on Why African Americans Should Invest in Africa

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Akon Unveils Plans For Utopian 'Akon City' In Senegal

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Akon Unveils Plans For Utopian 'Akon City' In Senegal

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Black Atlantic Sound Track Selected and Compiled by Dr. Moore Pewu

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News:  Adele's Bantu Knots 

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Dissecting Diaspora in the News:  Adele's Bantu Knots 

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Let's Recontextualize Adele's hairdo in light of what we now know of the Black Diaspora, West Africa and Cultural Identity...Charles Piot writes...
"No idle symbol, then, the Kabre head is site of multiple inscriptions, both personal and cultural. Trading on this set of associations, these traveling teens, recent initiates both, are playing with and signifyin(g) on the head, at once marking their liminal status as travelers and drawing attention to the mystical powers that they hope will protect them on their journey, while at the same time proclaiming their identity as members of global teen culture and in the process differentiating themselves from the local."

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Adele has faced accusations of cultural appropriation after sharing an Instagram picture showing her wearing a traditional African hairstyle while marking what would have been Notting Hill carnival.

In the photograph, the 32-year-old chart-topping act wore a string bikini decorated with the Jamaican flag and had her hair in Bantu knots - small coiled buns typically associated with people of African descent.

The Tottenham-born singer captioned the post: "Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London."

However, Adele was quickly accused by Twitter users, many of them from the US, of cultural appropriation for using the hairstyle.

One tweeted: "If 2020 couldn't get anymore bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for. This officially marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic. Hate to see it."

Another said: "If you haven't quite understood cultural appropriation, look at Adele's last Instagram post. She should go to jail no parole for this."

Writing in the comments section of the Instagram post, a user said: "Bantu knots are NOT to be worn by white people in any context, period."

However, others came to Adele's defence. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham and shadow justice secretary, dismissed the allegations of cultural appropriation as "poppycock".

He tweeted: "This humbug totally misses the spirit of Notting Hill Carnival and the tradition of 'dress up' or 'masquerade' Adele was born and raised in Tottenham she gets it more than most. Thank you Adele. Forget the Haters."

Claudia Webbe, the Labour MP for Leicester East, said: "Carnival is a contested event in which either the usual order of things are overthrown, unhinged and disturbed, or it can reinstitute and reinforce the very order its meant to overthrow. In this sense Adele embraces the spirit of carnival as an event which is qualified to do both."

The singer's celebrity friends also appeared to approve of the look. The model Naomi Campbell, whose mother was born in Jamaica, commented with two love heart emojis and two pictures of the Jamaican flag.

Jamaican musician Popcaan also appeared to be a fan, sharing a fist emoji and a love heart. And the actor Tessa Thompson, who stars in the sci-fi TV series Westworld, commented with a flame emoji.

The Notting Hill carnival is an annual event that celebrates black British culture, but this year it moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Adele recently shared a snap celebrating "Queen" Beyoncé, following the release of the visual album Black Is King. Adele was pictured with her curly hair down while raising her hand in tribute to Beyoncé.

This article was amended on 1 September 2020 to offer a more accurate description of the Notting Hill carnival.

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Adele accused of cultural appropriation over Instagram picture

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David Lammy came to the singer's defence while Naomi Campbell also showed support

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What evidence does Piot use to demonstrate the ways that Africa is also being remade by processes, and products of the African Diaspora?

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According to Stuart Hall why is having an imaginative African identity problematic?  In what ways might it be useful?

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According to DuBois, what is Double Consciousness?

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What is DuBois getting at when he asks this question?

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A Short Bio

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W.E.B. Du Bois: Activist Leader in Niagara Movement & Co-Founder of the NAACP | Biography