[Juliette Ochieng's Baldilocks Blog] Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we consider the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread in this hemisphere, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.
Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were brought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: The Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery and the extension of legal citizenship to former slaves, Americans of African descent were confined under a societal barrier. A few managed to break through the barrier, but the clear majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.
But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as an insulated tribe within a nation and they harkened back to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded. |