Sidibe:

The fissures are no surprise.  The difference between the two
cultures are so great that we might as well be talking about
two different races.  The immigrants just want to work and
have good, safe lives.  The "Afro-Americans" are obsessed
with finding a common history because they have no present or
future.  Instead of a culture of hard work like the immigrants
have, they've developed a culture of dependency begging for
"reparations" even though the majority couldn't tell you in
what centuries slavery took place, or even in what century
the civil war was fought over the issue.  (Too much crack
will do that to your brain!)

They are jealous of the Asians and Mexicans who come to the
US and are successful -- dispelling their myth of a still-
racist system in the country.  Now the African immigrants
will be the targets of their frustration.

Mod


--- "A.B. Sidibe" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> The following article deals with the real and
> perceived fissures in relations between Africans and
> African Americans. I shudder to think that given our
> collective histories of pain and suffering, the chasm
> could be as wide as the story details.
>
> Enjoy.
>
> BY MICHELLE BOORSTEIN
> ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
> NEW YORK - The poster on the wall at Louise's diner
> says, "Black is Black," but the people and the food
> here tell a more complicated story.
> Louise's sits in the heart of a neighborhood called
> Little Senegal, in central Harlem. Most of the faces
> you see along Little Senegal's wide boulevards and on
> the stoops of its brownstone homes are black -
> Africans and Americans both. As in any heavily
> immigrant neigh-borhood, culture here is a fusion:
> African-run restaurants offer dishes spiced gently for
> black Americans; groceries sell yam flakes and
> hamburgers; videos are available in English, French
> and the Senegalese language of Wolof.
> But members of the two com-munities say they live
> largely disconnected lives, praying, shopping and
> socializing among their own, sometimes harboring harsh
> stereotypes of one another.
> The separation is painful to many black Americans, who
> long for their lost historical roots. They rallied
> here in 1999 to protest the police killing of a West
> African immigrant, and they increasingly push for
> slavery reparations. They adopt Africa's hairstyles
> and adapt its music and wear T-shirts like one that
> calls the faraway conti-nent "Home of the Original
> Black People."
> "We're not as bonded as we should be," says Butch
> Williams, a 51-year-old steelworker, over a plate of
> eggs and grits at Louise's. The connection to Africa
> is "one of THE ongoing questions for black Americans,"
> he says. "You look around and you say, 'What tribe am
> I from?' You can't help but wonder."
> The disconnect has no such meaning to many African
> immi-grants, who often come to this country to make
> money and then return home. They say don't
> nec-essarily see life in America as black vs. white.
> "You go on with your life and them with theirs," says
> Adam Fofana, who came here from the Ivory Coast eight
> years ago and runs a restaurant called Fatou - down
> the street from Louise's.
> Still, Fatou offers food that Fo-fana hopes will bring
> all blacks in Little Senegal together: West African
> and Caribbean fare and an all-American beer,
> Budweiser. So far, the clientele is strictly West
> African.
> Talk about the inter-group dynamics has grown in the
> past dec-ade with the dramatic swell of African
> immigrants to New York City neighborhoods, including
> Harlem. (The number of immigrants to New York from
> Ghana alone increased 220 percent from the mid to late
> 1990s; from Nigeria, 380 percent. Figures for all
> nation-alities are not available.)
> A new French film called "Little Senegal" is about a
> Senegalese man who comes to Harlem and the profound
> rift he finds there. And in the next few months,
> museums in New York and Philadelphia will hold
> programs exploring the topic.
> "Africans want to make money (in the United States)
> and go home. African-Americans want them to play their
> citizenship role and have solidarity as black people.
> They have two different agendas," said Manthia
> Diawara, a Malian filmmaker who heads the Africana
> Studies Department at New York University and has
> written extensively about black culture.
> The divide was highlighted for the world two years
> ago, when four white New York City police officers
> shot Amadou Diallo, an un-armed immigrant from Guinea,
> 41 times. Black Americans took to the streets to
> protest what they saw as a racist attack, and were
> shocked to find their fervor largely unmatched by
> their African neighbors.
> Yet Africans who immigrate here say they don't
> necessarily feel closer to black Americans than to
> anyone else. In fact, they often have their own set of
> negative stereotypes.
> "My father told me not to be friends with black people
> in America," said Cheick Sissoko, a 27-year-old dancer
> and drummer who came from Ivory Coast five years ago
> and now lives in lower Manhattan. "What we see on TV
> is so bad - guns and everything. Then I come and I
> realize it's true."
> Fofana, the restaurant owner, says black Americans
> think they're above the sort of gritty work immigrants
> must do to establish themselves in a new country.
> For black Americans who ache from that lost
> connection, such sentiments can sting.
> At Djoniba, the downtown Man-hattan dance center where
> Sissoko works, dancers of all colors and backgrounds
> take classes ranging from the style of the Mandingo
> tribe, in West Africa, to Congolese, Haitian and
> hip-hop. The only actual Africans there are the
> teachers, but students wearing traditional African
> fabrics and others in Lycra bicycle unitards mingle
> alongside posters advertising vacations in Africa.
> "Come home!" one says.
> Some of the black American dancers say they resent
> that the African teachers don't feel a special
> connection to them, don't recognize that there is a
> reason they are doing African dance rather than
> kickboxing or Roller-blading.
> "There's not a sense of cultural solidarity between
> African-Americans and Africans, and we are always
> looking for that connection," said Tracy Austin, a
> 45-year-old black corporate lawyer who lives in Harlem
> and has been in-volved with the Senegalese community
> here for many years. "I think a lot of
> African-Americans are responding to that lack of
> solidarity, that sense that there is a lack of
> race-consciousness among Africans, which we have very
> deeply."
> According to John Arthur, a University of Minnesota
> sociologist and anthropologist and Ghana native who
> has researched African migration to the United States,
> part of the reason for the gap is that a key stretch
> of the bridge is missing. The slave trade is not a
> regular part of the curriculum in many schools in
> Africa, and Arthur be-lieves that this is because
> Africans would prefer not to face their role in the
> industry.
> As a result, he says, "they don't understand that they
> do have a connection."
> While it is common for immi-grants in general to
> insist that they will return to their native country,
> it is more so among Africans, says Arthur, author of a
> book on the subject called "Invisible Sojourners."
> Mabel Haddock, head of a Harlem-based group that
> promotes films about blacks, says black Americans'
> longing for Africa is like other romanticized feelings
> people have for places. Many African films, she says,
> explore the longing of people for their hometowns
> after they migrate to large cities.
> "I think some people have this rather exotic vision of
> what Africa is," said Haddock, head of the National
> Black Programming Consortium, "that if you go there
> you'll find something better than here that's better
> for your spiritual self."
> Waly Ndiaye, a 49-year-old translator from Senegal who
> lives in Little Senegal, says he thinks black
> Americans who focus on their history in Africa and on
> slavery should think about the future.
> "I think people need to forget and move on. No matter
> how hard it was, there are a lot of opportuni-ties,"
> he said. But in a reminder of the depth of the
> connection, Ndiaye adds that he and his African
> friends can tell what part of the continent black
> Americans were originally from by their look - and
> their smell.
> Ndiaye said he was brought to tears by "Little
> Senegal."
> The film tells the story of Alloune, a widower who
> runs tours at Goree Island, once a slave export center
> off the coast of West Africa. Upon retirement, he
> travels to the United States in search of his
> ancestors who were brought here as slaves.
> Among its characters: a fat, money-obsessed black
> American who refers to an African mechanic as "a big
> ape"; an African immigrant who whips his girlfriend, a
> pregnant African-American teen-ager, and an African
> who says "we're too black" for black Americans.
> Depending on one's view-point, "Little Senegal" is
> jammed with simplistic caricatures - or truths.
> To some, the film's African characters are idealized -
> wise, educated, family oriented and proud, while its
> black Americans are rootless, materialistic, crude
> about topics like sex and love and cold about topics
> like parenting and community.
> Others say it was evenhanded and note that an African
> character loathed American blacks even while admitting
> he had taken no interest in getting to know them - an
> insular attitude black Americans in Little Senegal say
> is dead-on.
> What exactly prompted Ndiaye's tears shows how complex
> the issue is. He was moved both by the notion of an
> African coming to America to find his roots - that the
> two communities DO share roots - and by the fact that
> Al-loune did not try to bring the Americans he met
> back to Africa, home to Africa.
> For now, the relationship re-mains part history and
> part myth, distant and close.
> While Fofana hangs drawings of slain American black
> nationalist leader Malcolm X on the walls of Fatou, a
> map of Africa is up at Louise's.
> "Simply because our skins are black doesn't mean we
> have any-thing in common," said Williams, the
> steelworker eating breakfast. "But we do."
>
>
>
>
>
>
=== message truncated ===


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