By Bashir Muhammad Akinyele
Let me first begin my lecture with giving thanks to the Creator of the heavens and the earth. A Creator that is called by many ancient names in this world, such as Yahweh, God, Allah, Dios, and Olodumare. But the oldest name for the Creator in human history is Amen-Ra. This word Amen-Ra for the Creator of the heavens and the earth comes from the Afrikan Nile Valley Civilization called ancient Kemet-known to the world as Egypt. Amen-Ra comes the world’s first writing system called the Medu Neter. Europeans and Arabs call it Hieroglyphics. Amen-Ra means the hidden one, the unseen one, the prime mover of the universe and all living things. That might be too deep for some people, but this is Black History Month. The world, and Black people, must know our contributions to all human civilizations and religions. And we as Black people have contributed greatly to all human societies and all faith traditions in the earth. Afrikan faith traditions were the first
By Erica Wright
The Birmingham TimesÂ
Honoring Black History Month may look and feel different this year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic but there are still plenty of ways to safely celebrate the contributions of Black people.
Hereâs are some Birmingham-area BHM events.Â
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
Each year the BCRI educates and celebrates the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This year, the Black History Month 2021 theme is âBlack Family: Representation, Identity and Diversityâ, exploring the African diaspora and the spread of Black families across the United States.Â
The BCRI has a schedule of events planned this month and is hosting free education programs to K-12 students including:
Africa‘s primordial role in the inception and sophistication of the human race has been superbly documented for so many decades; sometimes out of genuine anthropological and biological curiosity and other times, because of racism.
We have been told that the first ancestors of the human race were formed on the continent. So were the earliest attempts at human self-preservation and community made in the east and south of the continent more than one million years ago. The cradle of human civilization as it is called, Africa’s meaning to the general human story is not in debate, largely.
On the other hand, however, what the name of the continent means and how we came to call it ‘Africa’ are two of the least-raised and answered questions about the mother continent. Frankly, toponomastics, the research into the meaning of place-names, is not the most popular branch of the historical sciences except when a place-name is so out of the common that it begs our curiosity.
A Black Man on Why He Rejects Black Culture
Lipton Matthews, American Renaissance, January 24, 2021
Most people become libertarian or conservative late in life. But even as a young child, I objected to the notion of welfare and group identity politics. I became a Rothbardian libertarian. But my apparently strange sentiments proved to be a bother to the perceived guardians of black culture. As a result, random strangers made it their duty to remind me that my interests were incompatible with their jaundiced concept of blackness. These attacks might have hurt most children, but I’ve never needed validation from other people. More than anything, I was annoyed by the lack of reasoning employed by my detractors. From a young age, I realized that black people expressed a pathological form of collectivism.
,
Olivette Otele
offers a new history that celebrates the lives of African Europeans through tracing a long African European heritage, drawing connections across time and space and debunking persistent myths. This is a thrilling and informative read, writes
Michelle M. Wright
, and will prove an excellent introduction for both scholars and lay readers who are relatively new to exploring the histories of this ancient, diverse and growing presence.
African Europeans: An Untold History.
Olivette Otele. Hurst Publishers. 2020.
Professor Olivette Otele’s
African Europeans: An Untold History joins a rather rarified collection of books on Blackness in Europe. One of the earliest I know of, Guyanese-born Professor Ivan Van Sertima’s 1985