Do You Only Consider Black People Born In The States Black?

[Inori]

All too often, many of them (the ones in Africa) only seem interested in us when there is tourism money to be had.

Have you been?

 

[Gray Matter]

Have you been?

No, but I read.

Case in point, this NYT article from earlier this month on Angola.

When he visited Angola last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first African American to hold the position, drew a blunt connection between himself and the Angolans he was addressing. “Four centuries ago, slavers from far away put the men and women and children of this country into shackles — people who looked just like you and me,” he said.

About a quarter of all enslaved Africans confirmed to have arrived in the United States came from a region that included Angola, according to SlaveVoyages, a digital database. That is more than anywhere else in Africa.

“They cry. Always cry,” Afonso Vita, a historian who works for Angola’s tourism ministry, said of African American visitors.

The effort to elevate Angola’s history in the slave trade has prompted new awareness and conversation nationally, local historians said. The legacy of the slave trade is rarely discussed in Angola, in part because its consequences are not as easily felt as in the United States, where many African Americans are aware of lingering racial disparities, said Vladimiro Fortuna, the director of the National Slavery Museum in Luanda.

Mr. Fortuna said that by next year he hopes to have a plan in place to construct a new, larger slavery museum. Visitors to Luanda are increasingly touring sites related to the slave trade. That includes the Street of Flowers, where slave traders once laid flowers to cover the blood of brutalized enslaved people.

Mr. Vita, the historian, said that when he gave lectures about the atrocities endured by the enslaved, Angolans became visibly angry. “The time is right,” he said, “for us to start a revolution to reclaim our history.”

Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola

When President Biden visits the country this week, he is expected to highlight a largely overlooked bond between Angola and the United States that was born out of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

www.nytimes.com

And it's not just Black Americans. It's a lot of Brazillians, it's West Indians, Afro-Latinos, etc. who are descended from Angolans.