http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/social/4447976#r8091156

this isnt a personal attack against antpocalypsenow, he's a good guy, but it really gets on my tits when people do this. "africa". it implies yeah, black people, they all look the same, fuck the fact that africa is a massively diverse continent in terms of the people (a green-eyed, blond berber and a dark skinned, black-haired bantu, both africans, nothing alike) and a very diverse land, ranging from rainforests to desert to savannah plains to temperate zones. nobody does this to other continents. people are stringent in their differentiation between new zealenders and australians (rightly so) but are okay to lump africans into one homogeneous group. people that do this probably don't mean harm but it is ignorant, and it just reinforces the (way) more extreme views that point to africa being that one place full of poor, malnourished, aids ridden blacks that roll with lions and elephants and whatever else is in disney's lion king, and nothing more. and that is sad, because it is so, so much more.

also, another thing that bothers me with western perspectives on africa is how white slavery is downplayed in history, and white people are always portrayed as the evil slavers rather than the victims. obviously, there is absolutely nothing to condone about slavery, but it's always taught to children, as a part of the world's history. when i was a kid, it did make me feel small knowing that africans where enslaved by white people. it made me wonder things like why did it only happen to africans? what's wrong with us? i wouldn't have felt that way if we were taught about the other side of the coin. books like this: http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963 why is it forgotten?

what a professor in the us said: “One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

idk this is pretty heavy for a monday afternoon but it;d be interesting to hear some thoughts