Does the African Diaspora Really Have Black Skin to Call Ourselves Black People?

I am on a mission to heal our racial identity with so-called “Black People, Black Americans, Blacks, Colored People, or People of Color” that originated from prejudiced race perception of the African race. We have questioned our identity in some communities nationally, but it’s not part of the mainframe discussion of police brutality and racism. We must realize that our racial identity is more than a color, and it wasn’t what Africans called ourselves. I don’t know if some of us want to forget, don’t care, or even realize that colorizing our race is part of racism igniting colorism.

When we use these words, “black & negro” we represent our identity through Europeans’ eyes within their language of how they see our people. The Portuguese, the Spaniards, the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Arabs, and the English. At a specific time in history, the past European tyrants disrespected our African people by slaving us to work for them in their condition without pay. Disrespected our original names, culture, and our African identity we had already established.

So-called Black Americans who identify as black have historically imprinted these identity terms from verbal communication and signs. These context words like blackness to describe their human self-identity, People of Color, Colored People, or Negro. The oppressors have heavily conceptualized Black Americans to identify themselves and their race by black; rather than African. Some Black Americans have honestly questioned their race identity since not having much cultural heritage practiced, African food, and mother language stripped. The African people in the United States have transformed their identity to Black Americans, People of Color, and Colored People.

I personally, as an Angolan American, would not identify our race by a color.

Black Americans stand by their black identity by affirming their blackness by talking about themselves, about others, about our people they’re black, writing their black, and to this day in 2021, see our people as a color, a “Black race than an African race.

Suppose Black Americans were the color black. I feel that most human beings know what the color black looks like, but when it comes to identifying a human race to this color concept of identity. It is purely to dismantle the original identity into color, for that new color race of people to assimilate into the oppressor’s idea of culture.

Did this concept work from our oppressors to dismantle the Africans’ identity to black?

If majority African Americans identity as black, then the Europeans have successfully demeaned our African identity to black identity.

I believe it’s important to challenge black identity in the African Diaspora.

Prince Ea has inspired me, ” I Am Not Black, You Are Not
White,” video and Amexmen videos, “You Are Not Black (Here’s Why).”

I support their video ideas in speaking to Black Americans that we’re not black. The power of denial is prevalent in Black Americans’ minds being in denial about saying they’re African. The psychological effects of colorism have brainwashed our race of people into forgetting their African identity.

I find it crazy that we’re debating about capitalizing the word black. In English grammar, we don’t capitalize colors because colors are usually describing something, which is an adjective term. The Associated Press changed its writing style guide to capitalizing the “b” in the term Black.

The change conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity, and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa,” John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president of standards, said in a blog post Friday. “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”¹

And, so, the upper case B is supposed to dignify that person’s color nationality. The word till says black, either if it’s upper or lowercase. The context to the word black represents a color that doesn’t match the skin tone.

Black Americans need to realize when you use the word black. You are undermining your African-self. Your masking your African identity by using the word black. You miss the chance to say and represent yourself as an African. I understand we lost the majority of our African ways while living in the United States. Our people were stripped of human rights and adapted to survive on Native American land in whatever terms they needed to identify with the oppressors.

We are now in 2021. If you are truly black, then why don’t you match your hair? It’s time to heal our racial identity from Black 2 Afro/African American. We truly need to be universal about our racial identity because we Africans are all over the planet.

We need to be proud of being African and saying it. And yes, African Americans will need to learn their African nation according to their DNA; hopefully now, in your life-time process, you’ll heal into self-realization, we are not a mere color, but an African continent filled with Africans on the Diaspora of Earth.

The truth matters about where WE come from, it’s called Africa. Go find your African nation.

AfriEspiritu / AfriEsprit / AfriSpirit / AfriEspirito

References

1. Press, A. (2020, June 20). AP changes writing style to capitalize ”b” in Black. Retrieved January 20, 2021, from https://apnews.com/article/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a

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