From what you're saying, when my father was young, there was a switch to less British ideas of history, and then somehow it switched back and then it's switched back again?
I think we are still struggling with ideas of who we are outside of the white gaze, exactly. Many of us still think in "white" ways, because we were educated by whites using white philosophies. We say "Out of many, one people" but I don't think a lot of people actually have thought about what it means to live that statement. I think there is a fuckload more decolonizing to do, especially with class being tracked so closely with race. And the politics. And American cable tv, which in my opinion is poisonous shite reinscribing awful ideas about race and class. People who are fighting stuff like this, like Carolyn Cooper, are making progress though. But its been against a buzzsaw of fighting from the middle and upper class. My parents were not happy with the idea of accessing more of their African heritage, and the idea of much redeeming being found therein. And a whole lot of people think like them. And stuff is percolating in the universities, but by the time I left high school, it still hadn't branched down too far down there, you see? And so people are so consumed with their own identities, that they don't have time for others. And then there is the commodifying of identities for tourism and other ways of making money. There is a lot of survival talk, a lot of political things turning on race and class and gender. I don't know, I haven't been there for years so I am sure stuff has changed. But when I think about what was going on that I was aware of when I was living there...
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I think we are still struggling with ideas of who we are outside of the white gaze, exactly. Many of us still think in "white" ways, because we were educated by whites using white philosophies. We say "Out of many, one people" but I don't think a lot of people actually have thought about what it means to live that statement. I think there is a fuckload more decolonizing to do, especially with class being tracked so closely with race. And the politics. And American cable tv, which in my opinion is poisonous shite reinscribing awful ideas about race and class. People who are fighting stuff like this, like Carolyn Cooper, are making progress though. But its been against a buzzsaw of fighting from the middle and upper class. My parents were not happy with the idea of accessing more of their African heritage, and the idea of much redeeming being found therein. And a whole lot of people think like them. And stuff is percolating in the universities, but by the time I left high school, it still hadn't branched down too far down there, you see? And so people are so consumed with their own identities, that they don't have time for others. And then there is the commodifying of identities for tourism and other ways of making money. There is a lot of survival talk, a lot of political things turning on race and class and gender. I don't know, I haven't been there for years so I am sure stuff has changed. But when I think about what was going on that I was aware of when I was living there...