Let's start with the following simple premise and see where it leads.
The primary defining characteristic of the unique contributions to American society of the African American is his capture into, exploitation by and liberation from chattel slavery. All legitimate arts, letters, spiritual matters and work of the African American owes strictly to that history. Any claim to personhood or modernity absent the context of American slavery is a defiance of reality so stark as to be ridiculous. Whatever one things of genetic race, the one true social construction of race is the historical fact of slavery and the struggles it created. It is the overwhelming and thus defining core of African American identity. There can be no success for the African American, no true self-actualization without making the business of slavery central to this identity.
I think that's a fair assessment of the multiculturalist role of the ex-Negro.
What say you?
(In what I hope to become a small growth industry for me, I am pulling Facebook folks out of that world into the blogging world, were you can own your own words and thoughts basically into perpetuity. )
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