Using Immigrants to Shame America Blacks
JANUARY 30, 2018
by ISHMAEL REED
I wasn’t surprised that some of our leading “thought leaders” didn’t know that Nigerians are among the most highly educated immigrants. I wasn’t. I visited Nigeria in 1999 and met a number of intellectuals, scholars, and writers. Upon my return, I published two anthologies that included 41 Nigerian writers, selected and edited by Nigerian writer Toyin Adewale-Gabriel. Yet during a discussion of President Trump’s describing African countries as “shitholes,” ignoring the fact that some African countries have a higher GDP than the United States, his critics demonstrated that they’d succumbed to the same stereotypes as Trump. One CNN reporter even referred to Africa as a country.
The late Cyprian Ekwensi, one of Nigeria’s leading writers, told me that he got most of his news about the African continent from the BBC. Indeed, unlike on American media, one can find African artists, intellectuals and politicians and business people appearing on that network.
If Donald Trump and his fans consider African countries as “shitholes” that’s how they’re shown in the American media and schools, which is why some of the fiercest racial brawls occur on high school and college campuses. Trump voters, who are delighted by their leader’s dig at Haiti and African countries, might be surprised to learn that Chinese universities offer courses in African and African American culture. I visited one where over sixty professors have been assigned to the study of African American literature. China and the United States are competing for African minds. The dozens of Chinese scholars whom I met on two trips to China are familiar with African-American and Haitian writers whose books have never been reviewed by the American media.
I’ve also visited Haiti. I published a book by the late Dr. Louis P. Mars, the distinguished Haitian psychiatrist. The book, The Crisis of Possession in VooDoo, was translated from the French by the late film-maker, Kathleen Collins.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/30/using-immigrants-to-shame-america-blacks/
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