I Am NOT Black, You are NOT White.

Came across this spoken word video by Prince EA.

Talks about how the world has force fed us all these labels and that race was invented in the 15th century, to divide people from each other.

Worth the listen if you got time.

I am not Black
I mean, that’s what the world calls me, but it’s not... me
I didn't come out of my mother's womb saying, “Hey everybody, I'm... Black.”
No, I was taught to be black
And you were taught to call me that
Along with whatever you call yourself
It’s just a.... label

See, from birth the world force feeds us these.... labels
And eventually we all swallow them
We digest and accept the labels, never ever doubting them
But there's one problem:
Labels are not you and labels are not me
Labels are just ...labels
But who we truly are is not... skin... deep
See, when I drive my car, no one would ever confuse the car for.... me
Well, when I drive my ....body, why do you confuse me for my... body?
It's.... my ....body....get it? Not me

Let me break it down
See, our bodies are just cars that we operate and drive around
The dealership will call society decided to label mine the "black edition,"
Yours the "Irish" or "White edition"
And with no money down, 0% APR, and no test drive
We were forced to own these cars for the rest of our lives
Forgive me, but I fail to see the logic or pride
In defining myself or judging another by the cars we drive
Because who we truly are is found inside

Listen, I’m not here to tell you how science has concluded that genetically we’re all mixed
And race in the human species doesn't exist
Or how every historian knows that race was invented in the 15th century
To divide people from each other and it has worked perfectly...
No.... I'm not here to lecture
I just want to ask one question
Who would you be if the world never gave you a label?
Never gave you a box to check
Would you be White? Black? Mexican?
Asian? Native American? Middle Eastern? Indian?
No. We would be one; we would be together
No longer living in the error
Of calling human beings Black people or White people
These labels that will forever blind us from seeing a person for who they are
But instead seeing them through the judgmental, prejudicial, artificial filters of who we THINK they are
And when you let an artificial label define yourself
Then, my friend, you have chosen smallness over greatness and minimized your.... self
Confined and divided your .....self from others
And it is an undeniable fact that
When there is division, there will be conflict
And conflict starts wars
There-fore every war has started over labels
It's always us... versus them
So the answer to war, racism, sexism, and every other -ism
Is so simple that every politician has missed it
It’s the labels...
We must rip them off
Isn't it funny how no baby is born racist
Yet, every baby cries when they hear the cries of another
No matter the gender, culture or color
Proving that deep down, we were meant to connect and care for each other
That is our mission, and that it's not my opinion
That is the truth in a world that has sold us fiction
Please listen, labels only distort our vision
Which is why half of those watching this will dismiss it
Or feel resistance and conflicted
But, just remember...
So did the cater-pillar
Before it broke through its shell and became the magnificent butterfly
Well, these labels are our shells and we must do the same thing
So we can finally spread our wings
Human beings were not meant to be slapped with labels like groceries at supermarkets
DNA cannot be regulated by the FDA
We were meant to be free
And only until you remove them all
And stop living and thinking so small
Will we be free to see ourselves and each other for who we....TRULY.... are

From one of my posts:
And race. This freakin made-up crap. Made up by governments that do not want the people to get together. Face it , there is only ONE RACE - That is the human race. And we are losing that one...

With this thread you just sealed the deal...Thanks

Depending on the time of year I'm tanned pink.

Kumbuyah.


2nd.

watch lights fade from every room, where red is gray and yellow's white, and you decide which is right.

You are me and I am you and we are all together. choo choo ka chew

a reply to: Lysergic

Reminds me of one lesson from Medical School at one from Catholic grade school.

1. Cut the skin of any living man, woman or child? We bleed red. Each of us.

2. Nationalities, physical features, dialects, religions etc...denotes us all as not different, just as the blood is red.
That we are not a variety of individual races...in as much as we are all part of the singular one: The Human Race.

Thanks Lyseric for the reminder.....MS

originally posted by: ChesterJohn
watch lights fade from every room, where red is gray and yellow's white, and you decide which is right.

You are me and I am you and we are all together. choo choo ks chew

..and which is the illusion....dang skippy

Saw the vid some days ago, and while I agree with the basic premise ,it's not the color I find objectionable it's the conclusion and assumptions that one makes Neg or Pos about shades of the human family, a black cat is a cat a white cat is a cat , all came from the same littler .

My wife says I am Pink Salmon. I tell her she is definitely black. She then says God undercooked me, she was perfectly cooked.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

I am lobster pink

Let me put things into perspective. It does not matter what your race is because accepted science states that human beings have at least been around for 200,000 years by mitochondrial DNA tests. However i know the human race is much older than this.

African populations and the evolution of human mitochondrial DNA

Regardless of how any racists view it. The last iceage ended 12,500 years ago.

Ice ages

There have been many ice ages during the last 2.6 million years but when people talk about the Ice Age, they are often referring to the most recent glacial period, which peaked about 21,000 years ago and ended about 11,500 years ago.

The last Ice Age created the great lakes in America. As well as several other large bodies of water across the globe. The ice age formed the Grand Canyon.

Humans have existed through these occurrences at least 4-5 times within the last 100.000 years alone. Humans to my belief are millions of years old.

Where people think they are from does not matter. Because regardless of the exact geographical location we spawned from. We simply cannot know. The geography of the planet has shifted to many times to track something like that. We can guess the last know location that is physically possible to examine. We can look at anomaly that can't be conclusively proven or dis-proven such as million year old human foot prints embedded in rock inside caves ect

But my point is, Even black people are not from Africa. That might be the last location we can trace sure. But neither do we know where white people are from, or Asians, First nations and indigenous tribes on islands who are also natives since we are all native to the land we call home.

The poles have shifted as well many times, So the equator changes. Forcing people to migrate. Race does not matter because at one point humanity was at a technological level to where we are right now but has been constantly reset by world wide cataclysms. It took us only 12,000 years to come this far from hiding in caves from utter destruction, to the formation of tribes and civilizations, risen and fallen through those millennia. What everything thinks they know about human and their Origin isn't conclusive. It is extremely likely that prior to the ice age humanity was a globalized civilization. Looking at the trend of our advancements in tool construction and utilization. To think we just came around the bend would be frankly naive considering what humans are capable of. It took us 100 year after discovering how to utilize electricity to create computers, rockets that can go to space. Before then people had gun powder sure. But they never thought in 1870 that in 100 years man would reach the moon within that time period.

Racism is most certainly a cultural influence. It is discrimination that must be taught. And comparing the negroid and Caucasus groups against each other is just as much discrimination as it is comparing it against other cultures. Civilizations and societies themselves breed discrimination in order to create separation for survival of what they believe to be Unique thoughts and aspects of life. People like to be different because people strive for individuality in some form, either its the logos you choose to wear on your clothing, the brands you buy as a consumer. Or the recreational and hobby activity that we do. The average human will want to fit in to society but wants to remain distinct from others. It's pretty much natural as a human to have discrimination because societies create them for the survival of the society. Assimilation is a real thing. Civilizations constantly swallow one another throughout history. If a society says something is bad, the children tend to believe it. As long as multiple societies exist. Discrimination will exist. If everyone was taught to think the same things. Then it wouldn't exist. But people will always break away and form exclusive societies. The only way to stop such things is if every single person on this planet was monitored and persecuted for wrong doings.

We might see that with the new world order.

a reply to: AnuTyr

While I have problems with parts of your post regarding pole shifting causing civilizations to pack it in and migrate elsewhere, it is worth noting that the guy that coined the terms Caucasians etc, Blumenbach was no racist he believed even back then that while people differed in phenotype they were not subspecies of each other and championed anti slavery causes.

Blumenbach’s central question, one of great interest at the time and still rarely discussed in science, was whether contemporary humans comprised one or more species.4 Plurality of human species (polygeny) was the popular view in the 18th century. Blumenbach emphasised the unity of humanity, however. He saw gradations among humans, but no distinct species or
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
subspecies.

That video is perfect. It is the truth. We shouldn't need a video to give us that message, it should be the reality of every human being, something we just know without it having to be said.

As far as cats go, even cats get judged by their color. We stereotype orange cats as stray toms, calico cats as more aloof, long-haired, Persian and siamese as being more regal, and black cats as unlucky.

No one judges me by the color of my eyes, why? Because it is as irrelevant as skin color.

a reply to: Lysergic
Definitely applaud worthy.

Like the story of David and Goliath, most huge problems can be solved with small and simple solutions.

We can move mountains together if we just get out of our own way, and stop thinking about what we need to do, and just do it.

a reply to: Lysergic

The video was a bit too artistic and loving for my taste. What they refer to as 'labels'; I completely agree. I've always called them definitions.

However, races are different and only PC ignorance can deny that. Bone density, brain size, IQ, muscle mass, etc. Not that having one or the other is intrinsically greater than another, but that we should accept diversity among races and praise the positive attributes that each person has instead of ignoring it.

a reply to: ghostrager

However, races are different and only PC ignorance can deny that.

Ghostrager a scientific fact is not being P.C yes people are different some are tall like Swedes or Wa-Tutsi others are diminutive like the Ba-twi , there is variations on every continent even within supposedly related groups, and intelligence is related to factors in culture, environment and even nutrition ex, why is there a stereotype that urbanites of whatever stripe are more intelligent than their rural counter parts, but drop your average urbanite in the middle of a farm without training and watch him starve, likewise drop your average westerner or any city folk in the middle of Khoisan country and watch them die without assistance from problems that even a 5yrs old Khoisan would know how to solve.

a reply to: ghostrager
Those are genetic traits that result when people in a specific region breed without the introduction of new genetic material from people from other regions. If we were different races, we would not be genetically compatible.

BTW IQ is not a trait of certain people belonging to different regions. IQ is influenced by nutrition and environment. Very little of it is hereditary.

a reply to: ghostrager

However, races are different and only PC ignorance can deny that. Bone density, brain size, IQ, muscle mass, etc. Not that having one or the other is intrinsically greater than another, but that we should accept diversity among races and praise the positive attributes that each person has instead of ignoring it.

I think you are making the mistake of taking characteristics, that due to interbreeding with people with the same characteristics, to be a race to itself.

If you breed a male and female buffalo that is tall, white, with no horns, and brown eyes, you will get a large number of tall white buffaloes, with no horns, and brown eyes. However, not every buffalo will have those exact same characteristics. If you take the buffaloes with the odd characteristics and bred them to their like characteristics, you will get a large number of cows that share the same oddity.

It is the same with people. We all started out pretty much the same. As time went on, the ones that were different if not killed for their high strangeness, they were not likely embraced, and the odd ones sought out those that look the most like them, breeding characteristics that enlarged their group.

So it isn't about being PC. We are the same. We are just born with the characteristics that we inherited from our parents. Children adopt the behaviors and cultural norms from their family or community, color has nothing to do with it.

a reply to: Spider879

Race does not determine IQ. However, race plays a dominant role in brain size which impacts IQ. Larger brains tend to equate to higher IQ's. Take aboriginals for instance. They have the lowest volume of brain matter and their IQ correlates. This happens across the board with all races and is further proven when studying people that are mixed race.

Regarding your example of placing an individual in a circumstance that is not their norm; IQ isn't a measure of knowledge. Placing an "urbanite" on a farm and watching them fumble around is futile to measuring IQ. Watching that "urbanite" adapt by solving new found problems is a measure.

originally posted by: ghostrager
a reply to: Lysergic

The video was a bit too artistic and loving for my taste. What they refer to as 'labels'; I completely agree. I've always called them definitions.

However, races are different and only PC ignorance can deny that. Bone density, brain size, IQ, muscle mass, etc. Not that having one or the other is intrinsically greater than another, but that we should accept diversity among races and praise the positive attributes that each person has instead of ignoring it.

So bone density, brain size, IQ, muscle mass, etc. would be exactly the same between two "white" guys, or "black" guys for that matter, right? cause its "race" related, right?

There will be no difference if you compare two "white" countries with each other? not even a difference between two small towns, or anything, cause it has nothing to do with the environment, what you eat, what you learn, how you live and where you live, right? Its the race that determines those things, right?

Just want to be sure i understand what you´re saying here