discrimination against Africans

The original question was: "Why is it the world dicriminates and thinks nothing about Africans and I'm not talking African Americans, europeans ect. I'm talking born bred Africans and the continent itself?"

Whenever I come across something interesting that I have no clue about, I look it up. Part of the answer may be in the search itself. Google was quick to assume that, though I wrote Discrimination against Africans, I meant against African-Americans. When I finally reached results closer to what I was looking for, I got "discrimination against whites in South Africa" and a decades old essay on discrimination against Africans in the U.S.S.R. I wasn't going to go through all 1,780,000 supposed hits that Google had come up with, especially since by page 10, the sites were alternating between discrimination against African-Americans and "reversed" descrimination against whites. The one page that seemed to be a jackpot turned out to actually be about racism against people of African descent living in diaspora; basically, they'd stretched to something covering all blacks out of Africa (so they could include people such as blacks in the U.K. and Canada who are otherwise excluded by the term African-American), but the continent itself was not part of the focus.

If one looked at the question from that web search alone, the answer would be, "Because that huge continent beneath Europe and the Middle East doesn't exist." It seems like it was there for the diaspora, but is now of no consequence.

Ask.com yielded better results. Although it started off with discrimination against whites in South Africa folled by African-Americans, it then stayed on topic until page three (21-30 out of 141,800 hits) until it started to give me any discrimination (against women, against fat people, one curious site I'll eventually return to because it has a UK web address and appears to call for the end of US discrimination against people of European descent).

Of all the hits, none gave a direct answer, but one may give a hint in the form of denial. The author, a native of Shanghai, was questioned by a woman who had heard "about how Asians, blacks, etc. are discriminated in China." The author responded with an explanation that when most Chinese think of foreigners, it's the blond haired, blue eyed variety "but there is definitely no discrimination against black people or other Asian people."

Good to hear! The sarcastic part of me wanted to write back and ask about the anti-African protests that had started in Nanjing and spread to cities such as Shanghai in the 1989, but even I with my limited education on the subject could see that was possibly more economic than racist. Possibly. But I don't want to get off track by focusing on Chinese to African relations. Fortunately, the author brings up colorism.

The link sited goes nowhere, but the quote he took was: "'White' northern Chinese have for centuries looked down upon 'black' darker skinned Chinese as lesser, undesirable people." Going on, the author explains that this is completely untrue--at least he's never experienced such a thing. Fortunately, this page is in Blog format, so a foreign English teacher was able to write back and say that she sees this sort of thing among her students all the time.

Colorism is a young enough word that it hasn't made it into most dictionaries yet, though you can find it in some online encyclopedias. It denotes discrimination, not based on race, but on the shade of one's skin with "white" being the ideal. The concept, if not the word, has long been discussed among African-Americans, but the issue seems to be world wide.

That, I think, is a huge part of where discrimination toward Africans comes in. If white is the ideal, what does that mean for the darkest members of the human race? Now add that to the idea from Google that Africa doesn't exist. Now, I didn't mean that literally, of course! But when I think of Africa, I think of Nelson Mandela. I think of diamonds (which make billions of dollars for the Dutch and other Europeans, not the Africans). I think of the beautiful and brilliant science teacher I had from Nigeria my senior year in high school. And then I think of famine and war.

In fact, thinking of famine in Africa makes me think of war because when I was a young miliary wife, my then husband was deployed to give aid in Somalia. The Marines dropped shipments of medical supplies and food and then had to hope that villiagers got them before the war lords did. They couldn't make that happen because all there were supposed to do was give the aid, not invade the country.

What it seems like, from the outside looking in, is that European colonizers took over the continent, used what they could before they left, and Africa hasn't managed to recover. Rather than banding together and taking their place on the world stage, a few who hold power seem intent on subjugating everyone else. There must be areas without war, but mostly when Africa is in the news, it's about ethnic violence or death through disease. If there are wonderful things as well as the horrors, we're not hearing about them.

These are all factors in discriminaton against Africans and the continent itself. But the world is changing. Humanity is growing up. And I believe that when the nations of Afric have shaken off the problems from colonialism and the goverments are more secure, the countries more economically stable, they'll find a greater respect abroad.