re Re: MDDM Gershom's non-Intervention

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<Could i ask what book or publication is this quote from?>>

Her comments were made in an interview with a  web magazine, Rastafari Today.

She said:  '"The Americas wouldn't be what they are without the African 
presence from the beginning. The wealth of the Americas and the western 
world--all the Peri-Atlantic world, was created by Africans.  According to 
Joseph Ferrie an economic historian, more than 75% of the commodities that 
fueled the commercial and the industrial revolution in the Atlantic 
world--therefore setting up the current balance of power, was produced by 
Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Africans came to the Americas 
to work, and they worked! They were forced to work from kin to kin. So to 
even suggest that Africans didn't build the wealth of the Americas makes no 
sense."

She then makes this astonishing claim:  "Plus, almost everybody in the 
Americas was African for the majority of the modern history of the Americas 
until 1820." 

She is asked:  "But, what should this knowledge do for these Africans in the 
Americas now, and what should this knowledge do for them in the future?"

She says:  "Well, the European culture in the Americas is preserved in 
museums, everybody goes to these museums to learn about being proud about who 
they are. So, we have a right to be there too, we have a right to have all 
the benefits [as Americans]. But there is more, concretely, one of the issues 
right now is reparation. People who didn't get anything in any kind of way 
produced seventy-five percent of the commodities produced that fueled the 
industrial revolution. These people were worked to death."
 
So in two sentences she moves from fabulated history to the political agenda 
of Afrocentrism--that black Americans are robbed of their rights by these 
supposed miswritten histories and, from there, to the reparation issue.  (It 
is not her position on the reparation issue I'm objecting to, although I 
don't agree with it, rather the linking of it to specious historicism.)  

Most of the rest of the interview deals with pan-Africanism and the "African 
Diaspora" in the present day.   

She does add this, of significant historical interest:  "Having a sense of 
Africans being the first on the planet, and thinking about what Africa has 
given to the world, the first contributions was [sic] people! That's pretty 
great."

Yes it is.