The last black cargo zora neale hurston5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() To open his last verse, he pleads with black children to look to the distant past for inspiration: “ we came to this country / We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys.” Incomplete and romanticized readings of history have resulted in a fanatical, monolithic image of Africa, or worse, a dismissal of the rest of the continent as a backwards land that colonizers rightfully raided. ![]() Consider Nas’s 2003 song “ I Can” (his highest-charting single to date), which was widely lauded for its uplifting message. Precolonial black history is often reduced to a troubling binary: Africans as a uniformly subservient arm of the triangular trade and Africa through the lens of monarchies like ancient Egypt and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. ![]()
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