Black History: Black History Tumblrs and Reclaiming Egyptian History
As you know, it’s Black History Month. And, as you might have already seen, I’ve been posting/reblogging/retweeting a lot of Black History stuff. I’ve also started some black history movie discussion, with some more coming soon. (If you’d like to read some more of my black history movie stuff, please click here to read my whole expansive essay on In the Heat of the Night, A Raisin in the Sun and how both show the black man at different points in the 1960s).
However, there’s still plenty of black history to disseminate to the public and Buzzfeed has made my life a lot easier by compiling a list of some great black history tumblrs. Quite a few of them I follow, like medievalPOC (which also focuses on POC throughout history in general, not just black people). But there were also several that I got hipped to from this article.
Secondly, I’m taking some time to address something that’s always annoyed me when it came to the reality of black history and how the American history books teach black history (I’m singling out America because this is where I’m from; I don’t know how other country’s history books represent black history).
In general, I’ve found that the Western World tries really hard to brainwash us into thinking that ancient Egyptian culture (and modern Egyptian culture, to be honest) isn’t part of black history when, in fact, it is. Of course, we all aren’t descendants of Egyptian pharaohs and queens–a lot of us descend from other parts of Africa. But, it’s always been taught to me that Egypt wasn’t a part of “black” Africa. It was always treated as a separate entity–not quite the Middle East but not quite Africa, either. (Egypt is actually a big player in both the Middle East and Africa.)
It’s like that part of Africa was the part the writers of history books, some of them white, wanted to take and claim as their own because it’s cool, but didn’t want to recognize that they thought that black people were, in fact cool. Proof of this “claiming” is that the next-door, the darker-skinned Kingdom of Kush (present-day Sudan) had a similar history to Egypt and was in bed with Egypt on a lot of political, social and business transactions, including political marriages, trades, etc. But the Kingdom of Kush often gets shut out for the talk about Egypt, I think because of their skin color. However, the Egypt that’s talked about isn’t Egypt as it existed–it’s generally the Egypt that has Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.
That leads me to what really frustrates me about how quite a lot of people don’t recognize ancient Egypt as a part of black history. Ancient Egypt is generally whitewashed in Western society. Because ancient Egypt is seen as “noble” by scholars and entertainment alike, somehow “noble” gets conflated to “white.” That’s not true at all, and it’s annoying. I like Katy Perry, but the idea that ancient Egypt is a Public Domain time period that can be easily whitewashed is how she gets to don Egyptian garb and a grill in her “Dark Horse” music video. I’m assuming Juicy J, a black rapper, will be a part of the music video; if that’s the case, then it’s highly ironic and problematic.
E! calls Perry out for mostly hilarious reasons, but they are touching on the point I’m making; Perry is taking tons of historical icons and objects and, in her own candy-coated way, stripping them of their heritage. It’s cultural appropriation. I’m not saying she’s a bad person. I’m just saying she’s misguided and no one is telling her that taking cultural symbols and history and turning them into a rave might make some people a little irritated. I mean, you can see from her unfortunate remarks to GQ about geisha that no one is informing her about actual geisha history.
In short, don’t try to take another culture that isn’t your own. Sure, I’m not Egyptian–I’m not even African. But I’m part of the black diaspora, therefore I feel like I have license to be concerned about how part of my diaspora’s history is treated.
