Name It and Claim It – Part 5
March 8, 2020
Review
Finding Our Story in the Jewish Story
A History of the Word Black
Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values. No other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact. As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of black before the sixteenth century included, ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul. . . . Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister. . . . Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.’ Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion. Embedded in the concept of blackness was its direct opposite—whiteness. No other colors so clearly implied opposition. . . .White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil” (Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, Oxford UP, 1974, p.6).
Building A Real Wakanda
Askia Muhammad, King of the West African Kingdom
of Songhay, 1493-1529
When Askia Muhammad, a Muslim, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1497. . . .he and his followers conversed with doctors, mathematicians, scientists, and scholars, and they learned much about how to improve the administration of the government, how to codify the laws of Songhay, how to foster industry and trade, and how to raise the intellectual level of the country. . . .Traders from Europe and Asia visited the markets of Gao, which was the political center of Songhay and home of its royal dynasty, and Timbuktu, which was an important place of learning. . . .It was in education that Askia Muhammad made his most significant reforms. Not only Timbuktu, but also Gao, Walata, and Jenne became intellectual centers where the most learned scholars of West Africa concentrated. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a distinctly Sudanese literature was emerging. Timbuktu’s University of Sankore offered studies in grammar, geography, law, literature and surgery” (John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom, A History of African Americans, 9th Edition, 2011. p. 16)
Dr. Joshua D. Smith, Ph.D., 2020