(Part 3) Top products from r/blackladies

That's so cool! I'm glad you know so much already about your family. Some things I'd wonder about (and might answer through talking to relatives or reading books):

• The Creole experience -- there's lots of stuff about this, of course.
  
• The free black experience in St. Louis. Everything I know about this comes from a museum exhibit, but it seemed pretty interesting.
  
• Did your Creole relatives move from Louisiana to St. Louis? If so, when? What was going on (in both states) that might have prompted that?
  
• Was your maternal grandfather in the military before it desegregated, and if so what was that like? What was the end of Jim Crow like generally for your relatives? (I think either your parents or your grandparents would have gone through school desegregation?)
  
• Is either side of your family religious? If so, which denomination(s) do they belong to? What's it like being black in that denomination? If not, why not, and what's their black agnostic/atheist experience like?
  
• Your parents' experiences--you say they were raised around white people, but they both married black. Where did they meet, and how? Did/do they have any particular feelings about interracial dating/marriage? On your mom's side, what was her military brat experience like?
  
• Did you have any relatives who passed? (I do!) What were the circumstances? How does the family talk about them? Are there people who could have passed and chose not to?
  
  I don't know if you've read it, but I would suggest the book "Our Kind of People"--it's flawed in many ways, and my family was never an upper-class black family, but I found a lot of resonances to my own family in it, and from your description of your family, I think you may too. Another suggestion would be "The Warmth of Other Suns", and particularly the experiences of Robert Foster, a Creole doctor who moved from Louisiana to California in the 1950s. (I'm not sure if your family is readers, but see if you can get your parents to read it; I suspect they'd really enjoy it, and it would open some good conversations.) Finally, keep an eye out for "Black Elephants in the Room", which is being released in October and is about the particular experiences of black Republicans.

Women of Color Study Bible - KJV

African Heritage Study Bible - KJV

They're both King James Versions, sorry. But they are very good, beautiful pictures and fascinating footnotes. I have both.

yes i totally agree. and to piggy back on the bootstrap ideology, when you really look at the past 60 years the majority of white America has gotten to where they are today because of government programs like the GI bill, getting special privileges with FHA loans, and better funding for schools. they didn't pull themselves up by their boot straps they benefited from white affirmative action

a lot of those types who claim the only thing holding black americans back are black americans like to point out how they worked so hard for what they have, but in reality it was passed down to them by their parents whom largely benefited from gov assistance.

I actually decided to enter the quant track in my grad program because of this! ("This" being the way in which policy professionals misuse statistical analysis to confirm their preconceived notions of black inferiority.)

If you're interested in reading more about this, you might enjoy Weapons of Math Destruction and Algorithms of Oppression.

i don't think a thing like that exists tbh. i'd probably own it if it did b/c i'm into the intersection of poc faith & art, especially apostolic & mystical traditions

there are two women of color study bibles:

Aspire: The New Women of Color Study Bible

Sisters in Faith Holy Bible


the second was put together by ppl who did biblical art projects in the past.

both are protestant bibles.

As am I. Every time a remotely queer topic comes up, they get hordes of Hoteps and Ankheads trying to spit some myths about how "Africa never had homosexuality" and "it's a white invention."

Thankfully there are more than enough knowledgeable people that are willing to share information about the subject.

EDIT

>Please tell me who says that, cause this is the first time I've heard that story.

Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X both said it.


Master W.D. Fard was half Black and Half White. He was made in this way to enable him to be accepted by the Black people in America, and to lead them, while at the same time he was enabled to move undiscovered among the White people, so that he could understand and judge the enemy of the Blacks. (emphasis mine). taken from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

And select quotes (because it's late and I need to go to sleep and I'm not the fastest typist) from page 60 of the book An Original Man: The Life And Times of Elijah Muhammad

Proceeding with the narrative, the Black man's messiah, Wallace D. Fard (later Fard Muhammad), was born on February 26, 1877, in the Holy City of Mecca in line with the Nation's prophecy.

Interestingly, his father, Alphonso, was an ebony-colored man of the Tribe of Shabazz, and his mother, Baby Geee, was "a Caucasian lady, a devil." Fard's father met his mother in the hills of Asia where she lived as other Whites lived, semi-civilized and content with a wicked existence. (emphasis mine)

Since Fard's father knew scripture and was aware that his future son would be destined to explore the world to find a lost portion of the Tribe of Shabazz, he believed that it would be best to have a male offspring whose skin color would allow him "to deal with both [White and Black] peoples justly and righteously.

I encourage everyone to read At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire. Blew my mind.

Might I recommend David Anthony Durham? He made his mark as an author of historical fiction (did a fictional biography of Hannibal called Pride of Carthage that I also enjoyed), but his most recent/famous work is an epic fantasy trilogy called Acacia - it's somewhat in the vein of Game of Thrones, but a) it's actually DONE, b) most of the main characters are POC and c) it has some fairly topical social commentary

My intro African American studies class (at Berkeley) focused a lot on Black feminism, which I enjoyed quite a bit. We read these books in that class, the latter which taught me that Black women killed slave owners!

https://www.amazon.com/Transcending-Talented-Tenth-American-Intellectuals/dp/0415917638

https://www.amazon.com/When-Where-Enter-Impact-America/dp/0688146503

bell hooks?
http://www.amazon.com/We-Real-Cool-Black-Masculinity/dp/0415969271

Ancient History


Modern African History

Post Independence

EDIT: Don't quite know what ankh-like means..UrbanDictionary and Wikipedia weren't helpful. Apologies in advance if these books are ankh-like.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (post-apocalyptic)

When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe. In a night of fire and death Lauren Olamina, a minister's young daughter, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith.

>It's probably where you were raised

No, it's literally the textbook definition of the term.

>Carol Lynn Martin, Richard Fabes (2008). Discovering Child Development. Cengage Learning. p. 19. ISBN 1111808112. Retrieved 25 October 2014. ..."most (but not all) Americans of African descent are grouped racially as Black; however, the term African American refers to an ethnic group, most often to people whose ancestors experienced slavery in the United States (Soberon, 1996). Thus, not all Blacks in the United States are African-American (for example, some are from Haiti and others are from the Caribbean)."

And

>Don C. Locke, Deryl F. Bailey (2013). Increasing Multicultural Understanding. SAGE Publications. p. 106. ISBN 1483314219. Retrieved October 23, 2014. African American refers to descendants of enslaved Black people who are from the United States. The reason we use an entire continent (Africa) instead of a country (e.g., Irish American) is because slave masters purposefully obliterated tribal ancestry, language, and family units in order to destroy the spirit of the people they enslaved, thereby making it impossible for their descendants to trace their history prior to being born into slavery.

We're black, that's the common racial grouping. Living in America your nationality is American. For anyone who is an African immigrant their ethnic grouping would be clear (Nigerian, Ghanaian, Ethiopian etc). For those from the Caribbean they will have the same historical story as African-Americans but identify with their new Caribbean ethnic identity. That leaves African-American as the sole unique way to identify as a black, American descending from American slaves from Africa.