Hey guys! Long time, no post, I know, but I've been busy conquering Europe. Sorry! Really though, I haven't even been keeping up with my journal. I am slack. Really I've just been saving up to talk about a specific event.
Philippe, one of my teachers, who is pretty down as far as Europeans go (I've mentioned this before), invited me to as a special guest to one of his classes. It's an English class on American history, and right now they're talking about "The African-American Experience" (hence the title of this entry). As I am probably the only African-American who has ever been through Louvain-la-Neuve, he asked me to come help him out with the class.
Have I ever mentioned how awesome being the only Black chick for miles (exaggeration) is when it makes me a hot intellectual commodity? Oh? I haven't? Well it's awesome. I should patent myself.
Anyway, this was a series of 2 classes, and the first one was last Friday at 8:30 AM. I know. Already off to a bad start, right? We talked about slavery mostly, and segregation. We made it all the way up to the 1950s, and stopped right at the Civil Rights movement. We talked about Negro spirituals, songs that were sang in the field, the Black church, house slaves vs. field slaves; we even got into the colorism a little bit (colorism is just a fancy word for valuing one complexion over another), and Thomas Jefferson and all his illegitimate slave babies. The reference to TJ cracked me up; for some reason I find him really hilarious, and it didn't help that Philippe already knew why I was laughing.
THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT JIM CROW LAWS ARE IN EUROPE. When no one knew what Jim Crow laws were, I kind of bugged on the inside. Then Philippe and I taught them, and now Europe is a more educated place. On day 2, we talked about the Civil Rights movement all the way up to Obama. They wanted to know my stance on Obama, the healthcare proposal, and the tea party. When we talked about certain things, I got to tell fun family stories. Here's an example: when we got to the part in the I Have A Dream speech where it says, to be brief, that Black people are living on an impoverished island in a sea of prosperity, I told the story about Sick Granddaddy where he put his own gas tank in the yard when no one in Clinton would sell him any. We talked about passing for white, and why the blues was called the Devil's music, and The Great Migration.
Philippe asked me how I managed not to hate white people (really, he did) considering all the dirty stuff that went down between my people and, well, them, and I just shrugged, and told him that no one I knew had ever enslaved anyone, or taken their rights, or lynched anyone, etc. (I did, however, also mention that there are certain movies that I cannot watch because they make me hate all white people for at least a week. Mississippi Burning is one of them) He also asked me if, growing up, I was afraid of white people, to which I again answered no. I wasn't raised like that. And what's there to be afraid of, anyway? Have you met me lately? 2 words: ill-tempered hoodlum. 4 more words: prone to violent outbursts. That answers that, simple and plain.
I talked to two guys Friday after the class, because one asked me how I felt about Obama's relationship with the Middle East and Africa, and how he always seems to have encouraging/positive words for them. He compared Obama's messages to the region to Bush's fear mongering, and I said, "It's easy to create that fear--we don't learn about Africa or the Middle East in school, and the region has been demonized to us." (don't play like it's not true) They both sort of gave me the "...you're joking." face (I'm not kidding; they both went completely flat), to which I said, "Twelve years of public school and I've never learned about Africa."
That is not entirely true. As a child, I learned that Africa is where slaves come from, and in 10th grade we spent a week on the 5 great kingdoms of Africa.
Long story short, they couldn't believe it. They didn't understand how the educational system could skip an entire continent--2, really, because all I know about Asia is the silk road went to China and World War II. I don't get it either.
Truthfully, I agreed to come to the class to see how a Belgian viewed my history, and I was impressed. He knows his stuff, that Philippe, even though I think me being there made him a little nervous. It made me feel important that he even asked me to come, and I felt even better when one of the girls said to me that she thought that it was really cool that I came to speak to the class. I like to feel appreciated.
All in all, it was worth getting up at 8 AM on a Friday morning for.
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