Inoculation against mis-orientation

At the heart of the problem is our fractured sense of cultural identity. Many of us see ourselves as Black, unmoored from any kind of ancestral foundation.

Afro-Brazilians emphasize their ancestral inheritance from the Kongo, Yorùbá, and to a lesser extent Gbe-speaking peoples. Haitians note their connection to Kongo and, again, Gbe-speaking peoples. Even in this country, there were times where our connections to Kongo, Igbo, and Mande-speaking peoples were quite salient.

I think that such a sense of ancestral identity is quite valuable as a means of anchoring oneself. It enables us to see ourselves as (A) Africans/Blacks in the US, (B) whose culture and traditions rests upon the foundation of many African ethnicities, (C) which are themselves emergent from a continuum of African historicity stretching back millennia. Such a grounding should be sufficient to inoculate us against the kind of cultural and historical mis-orientaiton which is ever-fashionable amongst some of us.