I am still trying to wrap my head around this Raven Symone thing. As of now, I dont get it. So everyone is allowed to pronounce their label as woman, black, gay etc but no one is allowed to not want these labels? One MUST never deviate from what the thumb rule says? And so does this mean every African filmmaker who has ever denied the label African filmmaker in preference to simply filmmaker is a naive, confused, self-hating person? Funny this happened at a time when I just came across a kickstarter project in which the director, who is non American talks about how having lived in other parts of the world before coming to film school in LA, he was completely shocked at how much one cant really express their opinions in this country. Things that people talked about freely in London and Germany where he lived and worked as a journalist before are no go zones in the USA. My thoughts exactly! One is only free to express their opinion IF and ONLY IF those opinions fit within mainstream accepted opinions. WOW! This political correctness is suffocating! Its interesting that there are all these analyses force picking apart how Raven contradicted herself and but even these analyst contradict themselves. Someone argued so anti-Raven by asserting that White people are not called White Americans because of White Supremacy that takes White as the norm and the rest as the other. So African-American, Indian-American, Mexican-Americans are the results of announcing otherness. So I am thinking, then why participate in othering yourself by fighting for these labels? Then she said some crap about how Raven should have at least owned who she is. What IS this own it crap that people here talk about too much? Whose decree is it that people MUST own IT? I am going to say this at the risk of being misunderstood. As an African who has been struggling so much to connect with African-Americans, I feel like Raven speaks to me. I am always asking, why cant I fully connect with the Africaness in African-Americans? Sooner or later all my efforts come down to yes we share skin color but reality is my Black American friends are really Americans. AND DONT GET ME WRONG, I have some amazing African-American friends who have been beyond supportive and loving to me but I find my friendships work better when I really always try to remember that my Black American friends as wonderful as they are, are really Americans SO I wont just appear at their doors unannounced as I would appear at doors in Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania... I wont use anything without first asking and I wont ask too often... and .... anyways, let me stop there before I begin getting bullets like Raven. But we truly live in confusing times!
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 06:09:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015