Comments on naijablog: Keeping Austin Weird

@ last anonymous. Many thanks for identifying your...

2010-10-03T22:35:10.425+01:00

@ last anonymous. Many thanks for identifying yourself as an "African female". You unfortunately fall into the stereotype of the African who refuses to acknowledge the reality of racism/white supremacy in the States. You are simply continuing a long tradition of driving a needless wedge between African experience in the US and much longer-term African-American realities, which is summarised in the disparaging 'akata' label Nigerians often use for African-Americans. So much for racial solidarity.

I do not cast myself as some kind of white hero. I simply went to Austin, and picked up on a dissonant undercurrent to the celebration of the city as a space of difference, and tried to write about it.

That said, assuming you are Nigerian, you only need to look closely in your own backyard to see similar levels of social divide in Nigeria that do their best to ruin lives and opportunities. The Osu 'tradition' in Igboland is the most obvious one to raise. No amount of being a 'proud African female' strutting your stuff on the world stage can take away from the ongoing damage this pernicious tradition of creating outcasts within does.

Its easy for Nigerians to snob African-Americans for being victims of their own drama; its not so easy when the various forms of master-slave formations that continue in Nigeria are brought out into the open...

My response to your article is "So what?"...

2010-10-03T18:28:49.318+01:00

My response to your article is "So what?".

As a African female, I find it amusing that white liberals, of which you obviously are one, like to think that they are taking up the struggles of the so called 'black oppressed'. I bet you'll find that Nigerians do not obsess about race half as much as you seem to.Why do you obsess about it quite so much? Newsflash, black people don't need 'saving' anymore. They can do it themselves. So what if there aren't lots of black people living in Austin? And we are to infer what? People live where they want to live. There are plenty of examples of black people, Africans or otherwise, who are professional, articulate, educated and probably far better in life than you are and I somehow think that they don't spend their life worrying about inequalities....they just get on with it. Maybe you can learn something from that and start living in the 21st Century.

Thank you.

2010-09-18T15:33:00.167+01:00

Thank you.

Austin, although liberal, is still a marginally So...

2010-09-16T05:36:17.585+01:00

Austin, although liberal, is still a marginally Southern city. San Antonio, 80 miles to the southwest, has a very different history as far as ethnic relations are concerned. In San Antonio, a black face really is quite rare, and the predominate ethnic divide is between Hispanics (the majority) and non-Hispanic whites. Anglo culture is definitely the elite culture, but the old Anglo elites have, over the course of the past 100 years, become increasingly open to people of Hispanic background, provided they adopt the cultural norms of the Anglo elite. 40 years ago, one might here talk of 'good, high class, Americanized Mexicans'. The cultural chauvinism is now generally subtler, but something of that attitude remains.