Talk:Back to Africa

Liberia was never colonized

It wasn't colonized by Europeans, but it was set up as a colony, and relationships between the repatriated Americans and the local indigenous population where akin to a colonial relationship in many ways. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 19:28, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Mission.

Now that the article is marginally less embarrassing, do tell: how is in missional? Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 19:48, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

It has to do with racist nationalism. I thought that'd be missional. CorruptUser (talk) 19:55, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Do you want to frame the desire of people forcibly removed from their homes, and enslaved for four centuries and who were then, upon their emancipation, rejected, marginalized and victimized by their former enslavers to break with a society built on the extraction of their labour with total disregard for their basic humanity and go "home" as "racist nationalism"? Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 20:00, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I didn't say they were the ones being racist; it was racist nationalism among the white Americans. CorruptUser (talk) 20:02, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Ah, sorry. My most profound apologies. In that case, I'm not sure that a high-school-level history of Back to Africa is really needed--a few sentences in some existing article on white nationalism might be a better sell. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 20:04, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, that could work. Maybe add it to to the Liberia article? CorruptUser (talk) 20:07, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Or here? Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 20:18, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Either works. CorruptUser (talk) 20:29, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems obviously missional: this is a noteworthy part of some terrible and stupid thinking - David Gerard (talk) 12:42, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Maybe a more general article on repatriation would be a good idea. In the UK, racists like Enoch Powell & the BNP have been advocating repatriation of the post-war immigrants from India, Pakistan & the West Indies, plus their descendants, for decades. Wėąṣėḷőįď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 12:55, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

It's definitely missional - whether it should be a stand-alone article or part of a (forced) repatriation article is of course another matter. The latter version could also include other cases of outright expulsion, i.e. where you simply kick out "foreigners" without a "return to sender"-address (e.g. the expulsions of Jews from various European kingdoms, incl. England in 1290 and Spain in 1492, the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609, of Arcadians from British Canada in the mid-18th century, the "population exchange" (mutual expulsion) between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the expulsion of Germans from various parts of Central and Eastern Europe 1944-'50 etc. etc. etc.). ScepticWombat (talk) 13:22, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

My concerns about missionality were directed at those who wanted to attack the sentiment as expressed by people in the African diaspora. If people want twrite about forced resettlement/purging the New World of African-descended people, knock yourselves out. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 13:37, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Why would it be wrong "to attack the sentiment as expressed by people in the African diaspora", AH?

I don't think it's necessarily wrong, if said the bit of the "African diaspora" (a rather vague concept, btw) is of the more woo'ish persuasion, e.g. black supremacists or the wackyer bits of Rastafari. They are simply inversions of the (probably better known) white supremacy and chauvinism, being no less racist for that. ScepticWombat (talk) 13:48, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

The "African diaspora" is a concept with an accepted set of meanings among scholars. I'm not really interested in debating the idea of "reverse racism" today, or in debunking a false equivalence between institutional white supremacy and black-centered ideologies that emerged as a response to it. If you think it would be fair and balanced to "debunk" Rastafari, or to say that the police isn't a racist institution but only a palce where there are some "racist attitudes," knock yourself out. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 14:12, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Where is this alleged false equivalence? I'm clearly not referring to institutional racism at all, but I am making an equivalence between, say, the melanin "theory" and racialism, because both are pseudoscientific ideas grounded in racism. I really don't see how racism towards blacks makes black supremacists any less repellent or wrong, so your argument sounds more like whataboutism.

Where have I written anything about wanting "to "debunk" Rastafari"? I was pointing out that it contains woo, or perhaps you think it's a special "factual religion" or something? In contrast to "Westerners" who blame all ills on ("non-Western") immigration, miscegenation, Islam or whatever takes their fancy, blaming all the ills of the world on "Babylon" hardly sounds like a huge improvement.

Do we know that "the police" (in general) constitute "a racist institution", or is racism "only" more or less prevalent/dominant in various police departments? And before you get your knickers in a twist, I do think that racism is actually quite widespread (and not only) in U.S. police forces. ScepticWombat (talk) 14:31, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

"Racist institutions like the police"

Doesn't that depend very much on the jurisdiction and department? Alec Sanderson (talk) 14:11, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Wait, are we bringing in the debate over the definition of racism? Long story short, bunch of us disagree whether racism should be defined at the societal or the individual level. CorruptUser (talk) 14:14, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

EC Have you not read any of the myriad of studies that have been circulating since the Mike Brown shooting revealing the extent to which African-Americans are systematically targeted by the police? Have you not heard anything about the incarceration rate of African-Americans? Check out Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. She's a legal scholar who produced an incredibly well-documented historical and sociological study about relations between black people and the law. It's the best primer on the subject. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 14:17, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I once lived in a town where interactions with the sheriff's department tended to be very different from encounters with the city police. The sheriff's guys were pigs, while the city cops were smooth, well-educated peace officers. One department was racist, the other not so much. How does defining racism at the societal level apply to that? Alec Sanderson (talk) 14:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I think my only contribution to this would be that viewing/speaking of all the police as a single institution might not be the best when we could be more specific. PacWalker 14:27, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, Alec I guess your personal experience is a better basis for analysis than the dozens if not hundreds of peer-reviewed studies there are the subject. That's how knowledge works, right? Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 14:31, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, excuse the fuck out of me for offering an illustration. Are you saying that every department, nationwide, is equally racist? Because that is unsupportable bullshit. Alec Sanderson (talk) 14:37, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm saying that "the police" is an integral part of a society that was built upon white supremacy and that continues to operate as such, and that when you examine the relationship between people of color and the law, as sociologists, historians and other social scientists have, the role of "the police" as a general institution in maintaining white privilege is well-established. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 14:44, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

And since in modern society racism is getting less and less prevalent, the same goes for the police. Racism among the police exists, no argument there, but that doesn't justify blanket statements such as claiming, that police is racist as a whole.--Arisboch (talk) 14:52, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Going to propose a big ol' Citation Needed for the claim that the primary purpose of police is promoting prejudice. CorruptUser (talk) 14:57, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I doubt anyone is claiming that as the primary purpose.

It will be tough to make the case that the police in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard are in the business of "maintaining white privilege." Of course, it's a different story in sundown towns like Howell, Michigan. Alec Sanderson (talk) 15:08, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Hey, 141.get.a.username did a thing. I like said thing fairly well. PacWalker 15:10, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. :) 141.134.75.236 (talk) 15:22, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh my goodness! It's a non-winky smiley! In the wild! PacWalker 15:29, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I liked it fairly well too. It was a bit of a run-on sentence, so I did some desultory wordsmithing on it. Not married to my changes; have your wicked will with them. Alec Sanderson (talk) 15:33, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, the run-on sentence was possibly a bit hard to follow. But institutional racism and racist attitudes in individuals are quite distinct problems, though one may encourage the other and vice versa. Institutional racism isn't a matter of the people in charge being racists. Rather, it's a diffuse form of racism where certain racist policies/tendencies have been entrenched in an institution. People perpetuating institutional racism are usually not blatant racists, but are often blind to the fact that the policies they're enacting amount to racism or just accept that the system is the way it is, unfair though it may be. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:03, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

What (s)he said. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 16:45, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Another problem

'This long after' people of African descent in the US will have probably have ancestors from what are now several different countries/geographical regions.

Likewise people from MittelEuropa (if someone came from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, or their ancestors from the German Empire or Austro-Hungary where would they now belong?) Anna Livia (talk) 12:31, 7 January 2021 (UTC)