Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Monday, July 25, 2016
AMERICAN RACIAL CONSTRUCTS
"Whites" is an American-made reductionist construction for Western European emigrants. "Blacks" is the same for "Moor" or "African." Englishmen like Shakespeare had a very high regard for Moors in his 17th century plays, "Othello" and "Titus Andronicus." As did Renaissance-era Italians, have respect for the Moors, whose Hindu-Arabic mathematics they copied, replacing cumbersome Roman numerals, which were brought to them from Africa by Fibonacci of Pisa. In like manner the Christian Religion of Rome and Greece and Assyria, came from Alexandria, Egypt, and from the Maghreb, though Plotinus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, and many African sages, before being appropriated across and around the Mediterranean Sea to Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, Antioch, and elsewhere. Similarly, and even earlier, the Greeks in the pre-Christian era learned all they knew from the black Egyptian priests as recorded by Homer, Plato, Herodotus. Black-engineered obelisks even now stand in Washington, Paris, Berlin, Rome, elsewhere. In short, it is inaccurate and untrue to say that "we whites have never respected black lives." White lives are mutations of black lives, genetically, culturally, philosophically, politically, pedagogically, aesthetically, religiously. Unfortunately, this truth is unknown to many. If anything, "whites" have respected black lives too much prompting distortions!