On Apr 1, 3:21=A0pm, GatherNoMoss <saints2...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Mar 31, 11:45=A0am, "Frank Arthur" <A...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Can you imagine the lifelong resentment that are programmed into many
> > Black people because despite every assurance, we are valued as second-
> > class citizens.
>
> =A0If I were in a country like that....I'd move out.
>
> =A0See, that's the thing....for all black's endless *****ing, none of
> them leave !!
>
> =A0I'm left with only one conclusion.......it's not nearly as bad as
> blacks say.
I'm an old white guy, can't speak for black people. But this post is
at least partly wrong.
Some prominent African Americans HAVE left the country for other
places.
Three examples I can think of immediately include the novelist
Richard Wright, author of "Native Son" and several other critically
acclaimed novels; W.E.B. DuBois, general all-around intellectual and
founder of the NAACP, who I believe died in revolutionary Ghana; and
Josephine Baker, a black burlesque star who was performing in Paris in
the 1920s and 1930s and I believe survived there, even through the
Nazi occupation.
Another African-American emigre, one who has a pretty bad reputation,
is Charles Taylor, who became a strong man in Liberia and has recently
been tried for promoting genocide and war crimes there.
The Jamaican-born political agitator Marcus Garvey also gained a big
following in the US in the 1920s with his "Back to Africa" movement,
which I believe the US government cracked down on as a supposed threat
to public order, with Garvey eventually being arrested and jailed on
some trumped-up charge or another.
Another very prominent African-American who fled this country in the
late 1800s was the famous boxer Jack Johnson, the subject of the movie
"Great White Hope," who got in hot water in the United States because
of his attraction to white women and their attraction to him.
He was arrested under the Mann Act for supposedly trans****ting a white
woman across state lines for "immoral" purposes -- well, he did, but
she went quite willingly. The movie ****trays the two of them moving
to Europe together, although the relation****p eventually turned bad
and she died, whereupon Johnson made a deal with the political
authorities that allowed him to return to the US.
I'm not sure about the prominent writer James Baldwin, but I had the
impression that he spent a long time in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s,
largely because he found France a hell of a lot less racist towards
black people than America was at the time. Similarly with writer
Chester Himes, I think, the author of "Cotton Comes to Harlem" and
other mysteries set in Harlem.
Also, at least one young African American woman who I knew in an
academic setting in the 1990s, a high achiever, upwardly mobile
intellectual, now lives in Berlin and says she loves it there; doesn't
seem to have any wish to return to the US.
This isn't exactly a flood of refugees, I admit. But it's just wrong
to say that African-Americans are so satisfied with life in the US
that almost no one leaves. Some people do leave. And some black
intellectuals have written about the experience of wanting to leave,
but then experiencing life in Europe or Africa and discovering that
they felt so "American" in those settings that they didn't fit in, and
decided to return home.
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