Tweet
<span style="font-weight: bold">Cornel West also lives two months out of each year in Africa. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, specifically. His wife, Elleni Gebre Amlak, whom he met while teaching at Yale, happens to come from a prominent Ethiopian family.</span>
West says 2,500 people attended their wedding in Addis Ababa. For the Coptic ceremony, West was given an honorary Amharic name: <span style="font-weight: bold">Ficre Selassie, “Spirit of Love</span>.”
“The link between people of African descent here and Ethiopians in my case, but Africans in general, is very important to me,” he says. “For me, it is very different than the imaginary notions of Africa that you often get among Afrocentric folks. Because many – not all, but many – have much more romantic, idealized conceptions of Africa.
“Whereas when I go back home – my second home in Addis Ababa – you’re dealing with just actual human beings. Who do have a rich culture, who do have a grand civilization, but also are involved in tremendous struggles. Against tyrants, against corrupt leadership, against soil erosion, against the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank and a whole host of other forces that impinge upon the life chances of African brothers and sisters on the continent.”
What Prof. West has seen in <span style="font-weight: bold">Ethiopia seems to confirm his analysis of race in America. There, “you have a people never been colonized by Europeans,” he says. “Which means they’ve never had white-supremacist tricks played on their minds. Which means that they’ve never doubted their humanity.
“Which means they’re tremendously self-confident. They just assume that they’re not just human but they’re great, they’re capable of anything.</span>
“<span style="font-weight: bold">For we Africans who have had white-supremacist tricks played on our minds, we got to deal with self-love and self-respect and self-affirmation,”</span> West says softly. “Those are fundamental issues in our lives. Because it’s hard to love oneself in a white-supremacist society. It’s hard to trust one another. But they don’t have those kinds of battles.
“So when I go back home to Addis Ababa, I think, ‘Dang, this is the way black people could conceive of themselves if Europeans had left us alone.’ ”
http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/ ... -pt-2.html
<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kPaf9gqBIx8"></param> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kPaf9gqBIx8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"> </embed></object>