Alicia Keys

MaaRhyeaahfanboi says:

Ouch! the Wife (she’s claiming it should always be capitalized) just saw this site’s right-hand margin’s Recent Comments column. Was displeased it was phrased “M- on Mariah Carey” n “M- on Rihanna”. Claims that’s half my rationale for commenting. And that that’s why I’m phobic of doing comments for male celebs.
-Which is Not true. I just use an assumed name for those. Weird ones. {MaaRhyeaahfanboi is actually a Welsh name. “Been in the family for generations” as they say. Which saying that my w -Wife says will get me trounced by the first Welshman I meet who really is named that. }
Uhoh. Here she comes again. Hmmm…. How to make this Recent Comment look more platonicer…
Alicia Keyes – er, Keys (coulda sworn there was a 2nd E) has a richly resonant voice and a sweetly pretty and expressive face and figure.

Yeah. As an older American { I’ve typed ‘Amerind’ what twice? today… good grief! When did I get sooo old? Oh: it’s u young people getting younger. stop that } it still seems sorta odd to me to see African Americans actually enumerating their mixed ethnic heritage.
But that’s just cause I’m ooold. Things change. Even some things for the better.
A century ago, America was in the Age of the Hyphenated (-)American. At least for caucasians. It was Irish-American, Russian-American, Italian-American. With the hyphen denoting a love/ hate hope/ pessimism about immigration.
Could any of these non Anglo Saxon (the only non-obligatorially – hyphenated) people completely and truly adapt, to someday be so fully American that everyone would forget their hyphens? Or would there be ever (hyphen) increasing dissention, chaos, and anarchy, with these hyphenates (let alone Hispanics, Asians, Amerinds, Africans) leading to a ‘spoilage’ of an ethnically- Jungianly inherited True Americanism?
We’ve survived a hundred years now. With these hyphenates and their descendants ( and the Hispanics’ n Asians’ n Amerinds’ n Africans’) not only being/becoming good Americans, but often !@#$ Great Ones besides. Whole lotta hard working honest folks midst all of them. [Congressional ] Medal of Honor winners, Noble Prizers, Poet Laureattes. Even Croi de Guerre winners, for goodness sakes.
So if Any of em wanna backtrack and start enumerating any and all of the ancestors who all -put -together made them Them, well, bully for Them.
Bully for us, too, for having Them.
And African Americans’ pride in their heritage? Which is hopefully their reason for remembering and recounting it. We should be proud of their pride in doing so, instead of being weirded out by it.
Every minority in America can make a claim for Most Persecuted / Denigrated / Dehumanized by America At Large. Depending on the judge’s criteria, all are right. Smallpox blankets handed out to Amerinds. Laws against teaching their own children their own language. Internment camps for Japanese Americans ( with simultaneous draft!). Immigration quota laws which slammed the door (not on entrance into the U.S. , but ) on actual citizenship for non- Northern Europeans in 1905. Not owning land except through your husband or son or father. Still (to this day ! ) paying full taxes and full Social Security, yet being unable to leave any Survivors Benefits to one’s spouse of 37 years just because s/he’s of the same sex. Being unable to marry late in life, because it would mean the government slashing your benefits….
High on this list goes Being Someone Else’s Property, In Perpetuity. Bloody @#$$*. First generationers losing their entire world. Dumped in a foreign land where some @!#$ thought it was funny to rename him Moses because (contrary to the Biblical one) he was to be the first of an entire line of slaves. With only a 50/50 chance of surviving the ocean crossing, only another 50/50 chance surviving the 1st 4 years as a slave. Illegal for him to learn to read. And Always the looming reality of his family’s dissolution at the whim (!) of others.
And as for Hyphenation, African Americans didn’t even get that (dubious) ‘favor’ accorded them in the Hyphenated American* *Age. Because so few Anglo Saxon Americans had any hope at all that anyone so different could ever be ‘really’ American. Let alone President.
1920s Chicago newspaper editor H. L. Mencken (himself German – American )was probably the first ever to use anything like a hyphenate (a ‘silent’, invisible one) for African Americans. Afro American. Right alongside all the other hyphenate children in his childhood neighborhood.– How much of his editorial was earnest, how much hyperbolic sarcasm, how much pure @#$!%^## (since African American writers of the time joined everyone else in seeing ‘African’ as a dirty word, to be distanced from at all costs), I’ve been puzzling over for twenty years.
Even as I’ve read /designed sf, studied American and world History, and been an amateur follower of paleontology. The last of which will tell you, We’re all children of Africa, traced far- back- enough.
Just with all sorts of detours along the way.

*Technical British term. Haven’t found a U.S. equivalent yet.
**Hereafter hyphenated as “H-A”