Method Man ft Mary J Blige: I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By

Remarks:

The 1995 hip hop remake of the 1968 Motown song, “You’re All I Need to Get By”, sung by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrill song. Both versions hit #1 on the American R&B charts. I like this version better.

This is not the first time Method Man and Mary J. Blige have appeared in this space: they also did “Love @ First Sight” (2003).

Lyrics:

You’re all, I need
to get by, ahhhhh
You’re all, I need
to get by, ahhhhh

(Background sample: Notorious B.I.G.)
[Lie together, cry together, I swear to God I hope we fuckin’ die together]

Shorty I’m there for you anytime you need me
For real girl, it’s me in your world, believe me
Nuttin make a man feel better than a woman
Queen with a crown that be down for whatever
There are few things that’s forever, my lady
We can make war or make babies
Back when I was nothin
You made a brother feel like he was somethin
That’s why I’m with you to this day boo no frontin
Even when the skies were gray
You would rub me on my back and say “Baby it’ll be okay”
Now that’s real to a brother like me baby
Never ever give my booty away and keep it tight aight
And I’ma walk these dogs so we can live
In a phat-ass crib with thousands of kids
Word life you don’t need a ring to be my wife
Just be there for me and I’ma make sure we
Be livin in the effin lap of luxury
I’m realizing that you didn’t have to funk wit me
But you did, now I’m going all out kid
And I got mad love to give, you my nigga

(Chorus) 2X’s

Mary J. Blige

Like sweet morning dew
I took one look at you
And it was plain to see
You were my destiny
With you I’ll spend my time
I’ll dedicate my life
I’ll sacrifice for you
Dedicate my life for you

I got a love jonz for your body and your skin tone
Five minutes alone I’m already on the bone
Plus I love the fact you got a mind of your own
No need to shop around you got the good stuff at home
Even if I’m locked up North you in the world
Wrapped in three-fourths of cloth never showin your stuff off, boo
It be true me for you that’s how it is
I be your Noah, you be my Wiz
I’m your Mister, you my Mrs. with hugs and kisses
Valentine cards and birthday wishes? Please
Be on another level of planning, of understanding
the bond between man and woman, and child
The highest elevation, cuz we above
All that romance crap, just show your love

(Repeat chorus till fade)

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Diop: Peopling of Africa from the Nile Valley

The following is based on the “Peopling of Africa from the Nile Valley”, chapter nine of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):  

Diop, based on what was known in the 1950s, says that most people in Africa came from the Nile Valley, particularly in and near the country of Sudan.

Today we use genetic studies to work out ancient migrations. In Diop’s day that was not possible.

Diop based his ideas on two things:

1. The old stories that people in Africa told about where they came from
2. The names of peoples and gods that keep reappearing across Africa

Most of the old stories follow this pattern:

1. They start out at the Great Water.
2. Cross through a land of short men.
3. Point back towards a region in or near Sudan as their starting point.

The Egyptians and Nubians say they came from the south, the West Africans from the east and the Bantus say they came from the north.

So the Great Water appears to be the Nile, not the ocean. And the short men are apparently the Pygmies, who still live in the middle of Africa and who were more widespread thousands of years ago.

The pattern of names shows the same. For example:

• There is a tribe that calls itself the Nyoro in Sudan and also one by that name far to the west in Mali.
• The names Goula, Goule, Goulaye and Gilaye appear both along the Nile and again in West Africa.
• There are people who call themselves Serer, Sere or Sara in Senegal, Central Africa and Chad. In those same places there are stone monuments that look like big penises. There are more such monuments to the east in a line that goes all the way to Ethiopia.

Diop believes the Serer built the megaliths as they slowly moved west across Africa.

Megaliths in Tondidarou, Mali

One scholar, Dr Joseph Maes, disagrees:

Anyone familiar with Black psychology can state almost categorically that these works which require a considerable amount of effort, without any immediate apparent usefulness, without any relationship to the natural functions of eating and copulating which alone interest the black man, have not been executed by the black race.

This leads to Diop making an important point for his book as a whole:

This attitude, typical of the Western world when we are concerned, shows how absolutely necessary it is for us to dig out our own past, a task that no one people can do for another, because of passions, national pride, and racial prejudice resulting from an education distorted from the ground up.

Although Maes got most of his facts right, his racism affected how he made sense of them. Diop concludes:

The magnitude of the doctor’s errors … indicates how necessary it is for us to interpret our own culture, instead of persisting in seeing it only through Western eyes.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Sudan
• human migrations
• reading while white: history and news

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Black People: The Republican User’s Guide

“Black People: The Republican User’s Guide” (2009, 3rd edition) has, so far as I know, never been written, but it is not hard to guess some of what would be in it:

Introduction:

The purpose of the Republican Party is to pass laws that favour the rich and block those that do them harm. This is done mainly by:

1. Keeping taxes low
2. Slowing change in society

To achieve this requires the votes of millions of Americans on election day who will be harmed by such policies. Fortunately, most voters are white racists. Take advantage of that:

Chapter 1: Divide and conquer:

The main trick is to get Americans to think race is more important than class so that they vote against their class interests.

The only thing that most voters have in common with the rich is a white skin colour. Use that to make them feel like they are on the same side as the rich. Strengthen that feeling by telling them that they too can be rich one day (even though most never will).

This divides the working- and middle-class vote, weakening it as a serious threat to Republican policy.

Chapter 2: At least I’m not black:

Paint black people as completely screwed up: poverty, drugs, crime, broken homes, bad manners, low morals, etc. Since most whites already look down on blacks and since most know so few of them, this will be easy.

You want them to feel that no matter how bad things get, “at least I’m not black”.  This allows them to accept things the way they are and not demand policies that would hurt the rich.

Chapter 3: Racialize social problems:

Crime, gun violence, drugs, poverty, failing schools, absent fathers and all the other ills of American society must either be blamed on blacks or be seen as mainly affecting blacks. That way little will be done about them, keeping taxes low.

Chapter 4: Black pathologies:

Blacks must be blamed for their own troubles.

This is extremely important. It goes beyond excusing government inaction and keeping taxes low: Blacks are the single biggest threat to keeping American society the way it is, as shown by the civil war and the civil rights movement.

Therefore black leaders must be killed, imprisoned, driven out of the country or made to look laughable.

Chapter 5: Rented Negroes:

Right-wing think tanks and news organizations should hire articulate, well-dressed blacks who are willing to:

1. Make white people feel glad that at least they are not black.
2. Racialize social problems.
3. Push the idea of black pathologies.

A black face makes these much more believable and harder to argue against.

Chapter 6: Fear of a black president:

If the president is black paint him as a enemy who is out to destroy the country. Even if you have to destroy the country to do it.

Appendix:

Here put all those twisted numbers and misleading charts from right-wing think tank “studies”.

I leave “Black People: The White Liberal User’s Guide” as an exercise for the reader.

– Abagond, 2011.

Update (August 5th 2015): I did “Black People: The White Liberal User’s Guide” as a post.

See also:

• other user’s guides
  • Asians: The Republican User’s Guide
  • Black People: The White Liberal User’s Guide
• Republican
• Southern Strategy
• Rented Negroes
• black pathology
• How Jesus became a Republican – Republicans also use religion, not just race, to get people to vote against their class interests
• How racism helps and hurts white people
• Fred Hampton

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Diop: Arguments Against a Negro Origin

The following is based on “Arguments Against a Negro Origin”, chapter eight of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974): 

Reasons why Ancient Egypt could not have sprung from black Africa:

1. Blacks are backwards and incapable of high civilization on their own.
2. Mummies had straight hair.
3. Egyptians painted themselves dark red, not black, in pictures.
4. Blacks were slaves in ancient times.
5. The Stela of Philae calls the people south of Egypt “blacks”.

Take each in turn:

1. Blacks are backwards and incapable of high civilization on their own.

A picture of “true African attire” from stormfront.org

West Africa was arguably more advanced than Western Europe in the 1300s. The accounts of Arabs in the 1300s and the first Portuguese to arrive there in the 1400s make that clear.

Further, Ibn Batuta, travelling through West Africa in the 1350s, said the roads were completely safe – no one tried to rob him – and that “the Negroes are of all peoples those who most abhor injustice.”

It was Europe’s advantage in ships and guns after 1500 that changed all that, allowing it to:

dominate the continent and to falsify the Negro’s personality. That is how things still stand and that is what has caused the subsequent alteration of history concerning the origin of Egyptian civilization.

It also made possible the slave trade, which both destroyed civilization in Africa and made it necessary for whites to see blacks as immoral half-animals.

2. Mummies have straight hair.

Picture of a mummy with “good hair” from race realist Mathilda’s Anthropology Blog

At least the mummies museums like to show have straight hair. So do some blacks. But from Herodotus’s description and the sort of hair styles Egyptian women are pictured wearing, it is clear that most did not have fine, straight hair like white people.

3. Egyptians painted themselves dark red, not black, in pictures.

A dark red master beating his dark red slave. Slavery in ancient times was not based on colour.

Dark red is within the skin colour range of black Africa, not of white Europe or Asia. Even Europeans understood that – that is until the 1800s when:

it was recognized with amazement that Egypt was the mother of all civilization. Then eyesight suddenly improved and it was possible to distinguish, on the frescoes where everyone had previously recognized Negroes, evidences of a “white race with red skin”, a “white race with dark red skin”, a “white race with black skin.” But they never distinguished, as Egyptians, a white race with white skin.

4. Blacks were slaves in ancient times.

This is currently the #1 picture on Google Images for “slaves in Ancient Egypt”. Not only does this picture fit American ideas of race and slavery, it has been changed to fit them even better. Compare especially the head overseer:

Some blacks were slaves. Yet some of the oldest pictures in Egypt show dark-skinned Egyptians taking whites as slaves.

5. The Stela of Philae calls the people south of Egypt “blacks”.

The Stela of Philae

The Stela of Philae was a stone marker at the southern limits of Egypt. The Egyptian written on it calls people to the south Nahasi, southerners – not “blacks” as latter-day European mistranslation would have it. Herodotus was mistranslated the same way, some putting “blacks” where he said Ethiopians, giving readers the false idea that Herodotus saw Ethiopians as black and therefore different from Egyptians. The Egyptians themselves only used “black” (khem) to mean themselves or their country.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ibn Batuta
• Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name

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Diop: Arguments for a Negro Origin

The following is based on “Arguments for a Negro Origin”, chapter seven of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):  

Diop says there are two main reasons to believe that Ancient Egypt sprang from black Africa:

1. It is what the Egyptians themselves and all ancient writers believed.
2. Ancient Egyptian culture had more in common with African cultures than with European ones.

Diop, the Egyptians and the ancient writers all say that the Egyptians either came from the south or were close cousins to those who lived there.

That south has been called different things by different people:

• Nubia (Diop),
• Ethiopia (Herodotus),
• Kush (the Bible), etc.

They all mean the same place. In fact, archaeologists were able to find its capital based on the writings of Herodotus and Diodorus of Sicily: Meroe.

Meroe is along the Nile in what we now call northern Sudan, not far from present-day Ethiopia. It was found to have 80 pyramids.

The ruins of Meroe

In Diop’s model the Egyptians came down river from Nubia. When Egypt fell under foreign rule from -500 onwards, Nubia became the centre of African civilization. In time it spread westward across the grasslands south of the Sahara, leading to the West African civilizations of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, etc.

In the white colonialist model of history, all civilization in Africa is due to light-skinned outsiders: Thus Nubia was civilized by the Libyans, of all people, and West Africa by the Arabs.

Ancient Egypt had a culture much more like that of black Africa than Europe. It had things like circumcision, matriarchy and totemism, which are common in Africa but rare in Europe.

By matriarchy Diop means property and leadership passing through the mother’s side of the family rather than the father’s. Even something like queens, therefore, were way more common in Africa than in Europe in ancient times.

Or take circumcision: Muslims and Jews practise it outside of Africa but it does not fit into any broader picture of the world. In Africa it does: both boys and girls had part of their genitals cut off to make them more clearly male and female, unlike the gods. The Jewish (and therefore Muslim) practice seems to come from Africa by way of Egypt.

In religion the Egyptians had many of the same gods as the Nubians and painted them black. Some of the stories of the gods take place in Nubia. All that would be rather odd if their religion came from Asia or Europe.

As to language, Diop noticed that even his native West African language of Wolof has certain features in common with Ancient Egyptian that cannot be accounted for by mere chance. For example, most of the pronouns are the same, the passive voice is formed by u or w and some words are a letter off from the same words in Egyptian: lad/nad (to ask), funa/fula (regular), lah/nah (protect, hide), etc.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt
• Mali Empire

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Diop: Egyptian Race Seen by Anthropologists

The following is based on “Egyptian Race Seen by Anthropologists”, chapter six of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

Diop says there is no proof from from science, from physical anthropologists who measure skulls, that Egypt was mainly white at the time civilization arose there some 5,000 years ago.

The schoolbooks of his time, back the early 1950s, said that Egypt was a white civilization. They said it with such authority that one would naturally suppose that it must be backed by science. But it was nothing like that. It was just wishful thinking – which millions of schoolchildren have dutifully learned as fact.

This is how the minds of so many generations have been warped… It is an intellectual swindle.

Thus Diop.

If you look through the scientific literature there was no proof that Egypt was mostly white. That for two reasons:

• First, it is hard to clearly tell race from measuring skulls. For example, one way of measuring skulls showed that Egypt was about a fourth black. But that same way of measuring skulls would also show that England was 30% black and that Black Africa was only 29% black!
• Second, of the studies on skulls that have been carried out, none showed that Egypt was mostly white when civilization arose there. Instead they tend to show that a fourth to a third were clearly black while most other people were mixed with black.

Science has never been able to find a white Egypt. Instead it keeps finding the skulls of people who seem to be black from the “wrong” periods.

Some have made up for this lack of fact with half-baked reasoning. Like that the the Sahara has cut off blacks from the rest of mankind so there is no way they could have given civilization to the world – completely overlooking the fact that it is the Nile itself that is the main way across the Sahara!

Or even worse, they start twisting the meanings of words. Diop:

Numerous authors circumvent the difficulty by speaking of Whites with red skin or Whites with black skin. This does not seem incongruous to them for, as soon as a race has created a civilization, there can be no more possibility of its being Black.

For example, one book on geography written for 13-year-old French schoolchildren said this:

A Black is distinguished less by the color of his skin (for there are Whites with black skin) than by his features: thick lips, flat nose, etc.

Another book speaks of “Whites with brown or red skin (Egyptians)”.

Diop concludes:

Only by similar definitions has one been able to whiten the Egyptian race, and this is the clearest proof of its blackness.

Up to this point of the book Diop has been tearing down the idea that Ancient Egypt was somehow a white civilization. For the rest of the book he will try to show that it was black, looking at the arguments both for and against.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality

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Diop: An Asian Origin?

The following is based on “An Asian Origin?”, chapter five of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

Diop, writing in the early 1950s, said that Egyptian civilization did not come from Asia:

1. There is no solid proof of any advanced civilization in Asia old enough to account for the rise of Egyptian civilization.
2. Ancient writers regarded Egyptian civilization as much older than anything in Asia. They saw Mesopotamian civilization as coming from Africa.
3. Astronomical calculations put the rise of Mesopotamia in the -2500s. That is 600 years after Egypt.

Yet in Diop’s time it was widely believed that Egypt and Mesopotamia arose at the same time. Why?  Georges Contenau, a French archaeologist at the Louvre, put it this way:

It is difficult to explain how Egyptian civilization, which Egyptologists, in the most moderate estimates, start around 3100 BC, could have preceded Mesopotamian history by 600 years.

Inotherwords, the Asian origin was assumed rather than proved.

Millions were spent in trying to find the birth of civilization in Asia. Ancient remains in tombs were called “kings” when they may have been merely town headmen or even human sacrifices. Nothing was found that even begins to approach the scale of what Egypt had at the time – like, say, pyramids.

And if by “Asian origin” one means white, it becomes even more improbable: before -1500 the people in the region stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to India were largely black or part black. They were not nearly as light-skinned or white looking as they are today. The region had not yet gone through thousands of years of white-skinned barbarians coming down from the north in wave after wave.

Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Elam and Indus were all black or part-black civilizations. You see it in their pictures and their skulls. You see it in the way the Greeks and Jews compare them or tie them to Ethiopians or Africans – which seems improbable to us today but apparently it did not seem so at the time.

The Bible, for example, says:

And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan… And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth…  And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

Which sees the people of Egypt (Mizraim), Phoenicia (Canaan), Sudan (Cush) and Mesopotamia (Shinar) as being peopled by the sons of Ham (Ham means “black”), not by the sons of Shem (Semites) like the Jews themselves. Notice that it is the sons of Ham who founded the cities, like Babel – at a time when the Jews were still shepherds.

The Semites as we know them today, the Jews and Arabs, were created from a mix of civilized dark-skinned people from Africa and barbarian white-skinned West Eurasians. It is like what took place in India but instead of people being separated into lighter and darker-skinned castes, they became thoroughly mixed over time.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• human migrations
• Negritos
• How black are the Jews?

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Theophilus London: Flying Overseas

Remarks:

This song came out in June 2011. As far as I know it has not charted. It features Solange Knowles and Devonte Hynes. The woman you see in the video is not Solange, though she is the woman you hear singing.

Lyrics:

Mr. Taxi Man
It’s been along time, I’ll be back again
The birds and the bees be attracting them
The pretty little flowers on the racks a’blend
Fulfilled with meaning, let’s sip the Riesling
I’m thinking about white to match the season
Let’s visit the gardens, the rivered parks
I’ll bring it to your eyes, delivered hearts

Do u remember me
Do u remember me
Ms. Hilary
Do u remember me

I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all
I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all

When I’m overseas your love just come over me
Attacking me viciously in a sweet way that’s loving to me
Gifts and diamond rings,a car, that’s nothing to me
You send a picture, a mail package, that’s something to me
Have a cup of my tea
All the suckers should leave
Baby, I’m no sucker I’m free
Age is numbers to me
You send a picture, I send a picture that’s comforting me
A star gets lonely at night
Only if moments are bright
We just can’t get enough of us
This is our night
The moon is saying somehting to us
At all times bright
Her eyes said it all, lips are the softest
Let’s go in the wind and get driven by the forces
Let’s lay in the wind and get driven by the forces

Do u remember me
Do u remember me
Ms. Hilary
Do u remember me

I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all
I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all

I ache for you, this heart of mine
Don’t be afraid to crack a smile my dear
Ohh she said to me what a tragedy
Live happily in life throughout the years

I ache for you, this heart of mine
Don’t be afraid to crack a smile my dear
Ohh he said to me what a tragedy
Live hapilly in life throughout the years

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Super Size Me

“Super Size Me” (2004) is a film about overeating in America by independent New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. For one month everything he ate or drank came from McDonald’s. Everything.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner. And snacks. Even the water he drank. He ate everything on the McDonald’s menu at least once.

He also made sure he got no more exercise than most Americans – which as a New Yorker was hard to do. Most New Yorkers do not have cars and wind up walking 8 km a day, twice as much as the average American. He made up for this by going on the road to the fattest city in the land: Houston, Texas.

One other rule: Whenever a McDonald’s employee asked whether he wanted to “super size” his order, he had to say yes. He was asked nine times.

He had doctors check him out at the beginning, middle and end. He wrote down everything he ate and drank and had a nutritionist review it regularly and give him  advice.

In just one month he gained 24.5 pounds (11.1 kg), more than a tenth of his body weight. He gained most of it in the first 11 days. Even worse, by the end his liver was like that of a drunk. The doctors were shocked. They did not expect that at all. On top of that he doubled his chances of a heart attack and his sex drive dropped.

He threw up after he ate his first super-sized meal but soon he found he was eating twice as much as his body weight required. He got hooked on the stuff: he felt wonderful when he was eating it, but felt tired and terrible when he was not. Cue Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” and pictures of Ronald McDonald.

More troubling than any of that was his part on what children eat:

The food industry says that it merely provides the food and drink that people freely choose to buy, that it is up to parents and schools to inform children about healthy eating.

If it were only that simple.

First, Spurlock showed how terrible most school lunches are. It was not a matter of cost: he showed a school that provided healthy lunches at low cost. No, it was because the companies which provide the lunches, like Sodexho, block any meaningful change. They give schools a hard time just for wanting to get rid of soft drinks.

Even worse:

He showed young schoolchildren pictures of three famous people:

Half of them got George Washington, none of them got Jesus Christ (!!!) but every single one got Ronald McDonald. McDonald’s is better than any school or any church at getting its message across.

McDonald’s cries “personal responsibility” but what of their responsibility? Is it just to the shareholders and the bottom line?

Throughout the film Spurlock shows pictures of evil-looking Ronald McDonalds.

After his month of McDonald’s food, his girlfriend, a vegetarian cook, took over. It took him 14 months to lose all the weight he had gained.

See also:

• IMDb.com: Super Size Me
• YouTube: Curtis Mayfield: Pusherman
• high fructose corn syrup
• sugar

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My bookcases

My books have been sitting in boxes and stacks on the floor. But now I have some bookcases – some I bought, some were given to me by kind souls, some are coming in orders I could not cancel. So now, for the first time in since forever, I will soon have more bookshelves than books to fill them with.

My mother says I do not “need” bookshelves and then said something about Diogenes. When I talked about the more advanced subject of matching bookcases, she asked if I wanted to be in Better Homes & Gardens. She is something of a bohemian. (When my wife first met her and saw her cheap shoes, she was surprised at how good her English was.)

I tried to make her understand that without bookcases all my books are in boxes and in stacks on the floor, that it takes up way too much room and makes it hard to find anything. With a bookcase they take up way less floor space, you can see all your books at once and can pick out what you want without creating a mess. There is a reason they invented bookcases. It was not just for looks.

As you might suspect, I once wrote about what kind of library I would have if money were no object. It would be in the mountains, round with a dome on top. Tall windows. Between the windows would be the bookcases. On the floor is a huge Persian carpet with a world map from the 1600s. To find a book, you walk to the part of the world it came from on the carpet and then walk towards the shelves straight in front of you on the wall.

I know that greater minds than mine, like those who run the Library of Congress, have come up with better ways of arranging books, but I think my way will work well enough for those of us with fewer than 5,000 books. Which is like almost everyone.

In addition, my way of doing it has one huge advantage: it will show the holes in my collection. Which are probably vast. Probably like 80% of my books are American and only 5% tops are from Asia – and even that would mostly be Bibles.

Well, I do not have the money to build a library in the mountains, but now I do have enough shelves, for once, where stuff like Arrangement matters. So, like in good computer engineering, you think about what you would truly want and then scale that back to the possible.

Therefore I will apply my map idea. It will go something like this:

• upper left; North America
• lower left: South America
• upper middle: Europe
• lower middle: Africa
• right: Asia and the Pacific

North America South America

Europe Africa

Asia & Pacific

Another way I might do it is as a simple timeline going by copyright or date of composition. In the upper left would be the Bible and Homer and all that, in the lower right, my computer books.

See also:

• The Abagond Library
• world population
• Diogenes

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Diop: Origination in the Delta?

The following is based on “Origination in the Delta?”, chapter four of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

Diop argues that Egyptian civilization did not first appear in the Nile Delta.

Some scholars, interested in proving that Egypt got its civilization from light-skinned outsiders, have argued that it began in the Delta. After all, if civilization came from Asia, North Africa, Europe or over the Mediterranean Sea, then it would appear first in the Delta and then spread up the Nile to Upper Egypt.

Diop says there are no hard facts to support this. True, the Delta is far wetter so less comes down to us there from ancient times, yet even wood is able to last there for up to 4,000 years. So there should be at least some hard facts in its favour. Instead it is a theory without any hard facts to support it.

If the facts are simply missing due to wetness or bad luck, then the history of Upper Egypt should not make complete sense on its own. But it does. Civilization arises there step by step. Its archaeological record goes back over 9,000 years without any break that a Delta origin of civilization would help us to understand.

The pharaohs mostly ruled from Thebes in Upper Egypt. When they ruled from Memphis near the Delta, it was for military reasons. And even then when the pharaoh died, they sent his body back to Upper Egypt to be buried.

Upper Egypt, particularly in and near Thebes, was the centre of Egyptian religion. The worship of Osiris was centred there. The oldest books have the gods coming from Upper Egypt or further south, never from the Delta. The first fight between Set and Horus took place in Nubia to the south.

All this makes sense if, as the ancients believed, Egyptians came from Ethiopia. Or if Egyptian civilization simply started in Upper Egypt. But if the gods came from the Delta, as some maintain, it would make little sense.

Other reasons that run counter to a Delta origin of Egyptian civilization:

• Egypt has always been mainly a land power, not a sea power. Which would be odd if it was born in the Delta, right near the Mediterranean Sea.
• The Delta became liveable and Memphis even possible due to advanced public works upriver in Upper Egypt.
• The Delta was subject to war and plague far more than Upper Egypt, making it a less favourable place for civilization to start.
• Some argue that the Egyptian calendar started in Memphis because that is where the Sun and Sirius seem to rise together. Yet that same calendar’s oldest known date is 4236 BC, a thousand years before the founding of Memphis, back when the place where Memphis was to be built still stood under water.

In short, a Delta origin, instead of making better sense of what we know about Egypt, makes it more of a mystery.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt

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Diop: Modern Falsification of History

The following is based on “Modern Falsification of History”, chapter three of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

In ancient times it was widely believed that Egyptians came from the Ethiopians, but in the 1800s many European scholars began to distance Egypt from black Africa, from “Africa proper”. They looked to Asia or even North Africa for the seeds of Egyptian civilization.  The black people found in Ancient Egypt were seen as slaves in a white civilization.

One of the more desperate attempts to do this was to say that Egyptian civilization came from the Libyans to the west. Libyans were light-skinned and possibly came from Europe. But the Egyptians regarded them as savages. Herodotus too:

Their women wear on each leg a ring made of bronze, they let their hair grow long, and when they catch vermin on their person, bite it and throw it away.

The Libyans did in fact take over and rule Egypt for a while, but that was thousands of years after the rise of Egyptian civilization. The same goes for all the light-skinned rulers of Egypt – the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks. In fact, their settling in Egypt is proof not that Egypt was white, but that it used to be much blacker than it is today.

As it turns out Egyptians painted pictures of the different people of the known world and even gave each a different skin colour, putting them in this order:

I could not find any photographs showing the four Egyptian divisions of mankind, but I did find some coloured drawings, which I put here in the order given by Diop.

1. dark red or copper: Egyptians
2. black: Africans
3. tan or yellow: Asians
4. white: Europeans

Whites were  not only last, they were the only ones pictured as savages (as most were back then some 3,500 years ago).

European scholars jumped on this to show that the Egyptians did not regard themselves as black. Yet, as one of these very same scholars pointed out elsewhere, copper is part of the natural skin colour range of black Africa.

Three photographs showing tomb paintings of foreigners in the time of Ramses III (-1100s)

The Egyptians naturally saw themselves as being different and apart from everyone else. But they also saw themselves as being closest, in appearance and civilization, to “Africa proper” – and farthest from whites!

It was not just skin colour either, but even their features:

• nose short and fleshy
• mouth stretched a bit too far
• thick lips
• large eyes opened wide

and that in the words of a scholar who tried to prove the Egyptians were not black!

For comparison here is how Egyptians pictured white people (in the words of Champollion):

a white skin of the most delicate shade, a nose straight or slightly arched, blue eyes, blond or reddish beard, tall stature and very slender, clad in a hairy ox-skin, a veritable savage, tattooed on various parts of his body.

The Egyptians also painted their gods black. Isis, for example, always has the skin colour of a Nubian. If Egypt was a white civilization with black slaves then why the black gods? Most people paint gods in their own image, not that of their slaves.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt
• How black was Ancient Egypt?

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Norman Rockwell: The Problem We All Live With

Norman Rockwell, "The Problem We All Live With" (1964) - click to enlarge

“The Problem We All Live With” (1964) is arguably the best Norman Rockwell painting ever. It shows Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl, walking to school – with four guards. It is 1960 in New Orleans. It is the first time a black child is going to an all-white grade school in the American South.

John Steinbeck was there. He wrote about it in “Travels with Charley in Search of America” (1962):

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school.

But Ruby Bridges was not the main attraction:

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school.

When the white man and the white child arrived:

A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear.

No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?

White women shouting not at Ruby Bridges but at Elizabeth Eckford three years earlier when the high schools in the South desegregated

The painting is about racism: Rockwell calls it “The Problem We All Live With”. Yet racism remains faceless. We do not see the faces of the white women shouting indelicate things. And neither Steinbeck nor the newspapers nor the television stations would let us know what they were.

While both Steinbeck and Rockwell clearly condemn racism, it is the racism of open hatred, the Klan-and-n-word sort of racism. Rockwell even has “KKK” and “nigger” written on the wall. Untouched is the racism common back north where they lived, the racism that created white flight, bad schools and high crime rates.

All the same, for Rockwell this picture was a huge step. It was like Nixon going to China or Walter Cronkite condemning the Vietnam War: Rockwell was so famous for painting whitewashed pictures of Apple-pie America, almost to the point of parody, that it made this picture that much more powerful. He even painted it in a more true-to-life style, yet it is still clearly Rockwellian.

The cracked American flag you can make from of her schoolbook and the running tomato strains

The picture, currently in 2011, hangs in the White House, just outside President Obama’s office.

President Obama views "The Problem We All Live With" with Ruby Bridges.

See also:

• Elizabeth Eckford – who went through the same thing as Ruby Bridges when high schools in the South desegregated three years before. Not painted by Norman Rockwell.
• Apple-pie America
• white flight
• Jim Crow racism
• colour-blind racism
• Twilight Zone: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder – which first appeared on television three days before the scene in the painting took place

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Kindle books on race

I was asked what books I have on race on my Kindle. Here are some of them, listed alphabetically by author’s last name. No, Amazon is not paying me. Please note that having a book on your Kindle is not the same thing as having read it! If only life were that simple. Anyway, these look good and I do not yet regret having bought them. If you have any recommendations, good or bad, about these or others please let me know!

Click on the picture or title to see the book’s Kindle page on Amazon.

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – I have only read bits of this so far, but they were pretty mind-blowing bits! My post on mass incarceration was based mainly on Alexander.

Karen Brodkin: How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America – a social history of the whiteness of Jewish Americans and how it affected their success. This will become a post in time.

Sarah Burns: The Central Park Five – about the five black and Latino boys who were falsely accused and imprisoned for the rape of the Central Park Jogger in New York in 1989. Burns is white and it shows, but she seems thorough and honest.

Tom Burrell: Brainwashed – about internalized racism among blacks in America. My post Why are black and beautiful still contradictions? was based on one of his chapters. I will probably do some others.

Ellis Cose: The End of Anger – Cose’s case that racism is pretty much dead for blacks growing up now in America. I would have never bought a book like this from John McWhorter, but Cose seems like an honest mind.

Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People – the intellectual and (to a degree) social history of what “white” means in America. My posts on the white beauty ideal as science and Caucasians came mostly from this book.

Thomas M. Shapiro: The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality – how being black and middle-class is not quite the same thing as being white and middle-class. Stuff on schools, housing and the wealth gap.

Thomas J. Sugrue: The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit – how racism helped to make Detroit into a mess.

Mary C Waters: Black Identites: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities – how race in America affects West Indians and their children.

Frank Wu: Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White – about racism against Asian Americans. Excellent.

Howard Zinn: Race – Stuff Zinn wrote about race and the civil rights movement put into one book. What a great idea!

I also have Kindle books by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Staceyann Chin, Michael Eric Dyson, Heidi Durrow, bell hooks, June Jordan, Carter G. Woodson, Richard Wright and others where racism is pretty much an unavoidable subject although they did not set out to write just about that.

See also:

• Kindle

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Judy Mowatt: Let’s Dance

Remarks:

Judy Mowatt was a backing singer for Bob Marley. I do not know what it is about her songs but I just like them for some reason. Like this one, which I have played to death. Maybe it is her use of horns or her style of hopefulness.

Lyrics:

Sweet music gives me good vibration
Feel it, anywhere in creation
And even if you’re down and out
Uh, when you hear your favorite song
You wanna jump and shout

And dance
Because the rhythm is right
Yes, dance
Rock it the way you like

Let’s dance
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yeah
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

Everyone was on the dancin’ floor
When the deejay say
Harlem, pull up, operator
The crowd ball lot more

Bongo Harry
Makin’ all kind of skankin’ move
The people saw it, oh, my gosh
They started to rock and groove

And dance
Because the rhythm is right
Yes, dance
You can rock it the way you like

Let’s dance, come on now, now
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yeah
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

Ah, come dance, let’s dance
Mmm, mmm, mmm, yeah

Everyone was on the dancin’ floor
When the deejay say
Harlem, operator, operator
Once more

Jane and Harry
Doin’ the latest dancin’ move
They look so neat, rhythm real sweet
Rock now to this beat

And dance

Let’s dance, oh, my gosh
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yes
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

(Let’s dance)
Makes you wanna jump, be free lately
(Let’s dance)
Ah, come dance, let’s dance

(Let’s dance, bubble little, bubble little)
Rock it the way you like
(Let’s dance, bubble little, bubble little)
Rock it till broad daylight

(Let’s dance)

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