As a person who identities herself as Afro-Caribbean-American, I am proud to be of the African diaspora. However, I only learned to be proud of that a few years ago. One of the disadvantages of Western education as I remember growing up is that classes never went into depth about the cultures of Africa and the diaspora. I and other people of African descent were basically told indirectly that the pinnacle of culture was Western European cultures. Our cultures were not worth learning that much about, even though aspects OF our cultures helped to form modern Western cultures as we know them now.
It was not until I reached college that I began to learn more about the cultures of Africa and the diaspora. The more I learned, the more I felt angry and deprived. All I have been told about is about slavery and colonialism. I know it’s a painful past that we must learn, but we also must deal with that it happened and we cannot go back. The part that bothers me is the continuous denigration of our cultures, and thus we are not taught about them in school. We are still forced to learn from a primarily Eurocentric perspective.
(via thecouscousqueen)
