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A lot of people know me as the mod of Laissez's Fair and one of the few black posters there. We recently had a sort of off-the-cuff funny thread about posting on the internet while being black and it spurred some real discussion which I didn't feel would be dealt justice by Laissez Fair's sort of ironic and stupid attitude towards everything because a lot of people just use it as an excuse to be 'ironically racist' for comedic effect. That is how things run in LF and I'm not going to complain about not being taken seriously there but I thought that people might like to hear a story about my life, growing up as an African immigrant/refugee and my life in America and what it's like to be the first and only black mod on SA which was actually a pretty big deal not really Obama level but maybe on par with Michael Steele  I was born in Southern Sudan and my people are Dinka, which is just one of the many ethnic groups in the area, but one of the most politically powerful and numerous. If you're unaware, Sudan is a colonial construct of a nation which threw together groups like the Muslim Arabs in the north, the Muslim Fur in the west and about 12 million black Christians and animists in the south, and the whole country has basically been the Arabs trying to keep the country tied together since then because the south at least has a lot of oil and water resources. My people have been some of the leaders of the conflict against the Arabs and hence we've been the target of massacres. if you've heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan they are from this same group. It's hard for me because I know that I escaped the worst of all that and I lost members of my family, so I feel a lot of guilt for having pretty much gotten off easy. When I go and visit a white friend's family or something and they trot out that loving Lost Boys of Sudan documentary like, "Oh, won't this be fun to watch. It's about your people John, was this what happened to you?" So I sit down and watch it and it haunts me and I have to think about the fact that I don't even know what happened to my mother and at the end they turn it off and yawn and maybe have some ice cream before bed but boy what a sad story huh? This is one of the things that I think most white people really don't get because you don't have this sort of hardship in your history, and it makes black people pretty upset. When I was 8 or so (I don't actually know my birthdate or my exact age) I was taken by a missionary with the Episcopalian church to the United States and given to a foster family who I think of as my family, call mom and dad etc. And yeah he does look a lot like Kurt Vonnegut. I really love them very much and they've never treated me any differently than their biological children except for one point in my mid-teens when I became conscious of the fact that they introduced me as their black adopted son and I got pretty upset about it and they agreed that it sounded a bit insensitive and have just introduced me as their adopted son ever since.  I don't remember my old family very well and I don't remember much of the Dinka language. I came here with a few other children but they ended up being sent to other states and I don't remember ever having met another Dinka until I was older. On the one hand I am glad I was able to come here but on the other I feel as though a lot of my language and culture was stolen from me by my white family, because it later turned out that there was a Dinka family in our town and that my parents actively kept me away from them because they wanted me to fit in and not cling to another culture, though they claimed this was because they thought I would be very unhappy if I couldn't assimilate completely. So for the most part I grew up fairly normal and did the school thing. I am extremely gifted and was one of the top students in all of my classes which I know that a lot of white students resented in a way that they never would have felt about say, Asian students. I had a brief flirtation with Afro-American culture and got into hip-hop and started dressing like a thug but it really wasn't who I was and not growing up in a town with a large black population I never really got called out for 'acting white' so after that little rebellious flirtation with gangster culture in high school I started dressing in Eddie Bauer and a lot of Polo shirts and khakis which is pretty much where I am at now. The mission that brought me over kept track of my family as best they could and they actually ended up in northwest Kenya, having been driven from Sudan into Ethiopia, then out of Ethiopia. My mother may be dead or she may have returned to Sudan, we're not really certain, but in 2004 I was given a graduation present of a trip to Kenya to visit my father and brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts along with a bunch of cousins I have never met, all those who had travelled together to the Kakuma area where they were living. Here's a few pictures that I think are pretty interesting, one thing that struck me is I thought it would be a lot worse than it was... things looked pretty orderly actually, Africans are naturally very proud of their homes. Leaving Dulles on my way to Nairobi  My sister Bor who was very excited to see me  My sister Bor again in the center, and on the right is my father Deng Deng  Whoops this isn't Bor it's my aunt Awa, taking care of some of the kids  My father Deng Deng again, it was very hard for me because I could only speak a few words of Dinka and we couldn't really communicate, and he is mostly blind. He has aged more than I could imagine and seeing him like this was probably the worst part of the trip, but life is hard out here.  The Deng household, this is the traditional Dinka structure with the conical roof  This is the unlucky cow that was killed in celebration of my trip!  Here is me and a bunch of my nieces/nephews  And here they all are dressed up in honor of my visit, I cried a little at this point  Partying until it's almost dark! There is not a lot of wood for fires and no electric lights so people pretty much quit when it gets dark  Saturday was market day, even for a refugee camp it was amazing how much stuff was for sale here, I pictured it being nothing but misery and degradation  African 7-11  On the other hand this was where they got all of their water so that pretty much sucked  On Sunday morning literally -everyone- gets together for church  This was actually a pretty bad part of the trip and my father stormed out of church  The minister of the local church wanted me to stand up before the whole congregation and tell people how blessed I was and how God had smiled on me and how lucky I was. There was only one problem though, I'm an atheist. He spoke English and had attended some sort of theological training program in the U.S., here's a picture of him with his family (note on the left that is his wife, not his daughter) and I swear he looked like some kind of black Puritan.  In any case I told him that I couldn't say all of that because I don't believe in God and that I honestly thought that it was ridiculous that these people spent so much of what little money they had paying him to pray for sky juju and building and maintaining the church which was the largest building in town and the only one made out of brick.  He told me that I would be dishonoring my father if I did not give blessings and thanks to the Lord for the wonderful life I had received but I just sort of shrugged and said that my father would have to deal with it because I was not going to say something I knew to be untrue. If he cared so much about the people why didn't he spend his time and effort helping them to create a collective seed distribution system that would allow people to be self-sufficient in food even if one farmer had a bad crop, or to create a clean water network which could have easily been had for probably 1/10th the cost of the church, or any of a host of other things. He had no answer and I ended up telling a bunch of my family about being an atheist and how there was no God and no afterlife and that this life was it so they shouldn't just be praying for things to get better, they had to actually try to make them better. None of them had ever heard of Marx or theories of socialism, which is pretty funny because the traditional African village was heavily collectivized and non-hierarchical, with strong networks of social support that to most socialists would seem like a paradise. I tried to tell them how they could organize things better and how the minister was taking advantage of them and stealing from their production but I really had no idea how things were getting through to them because of the language differences, and the fact that so many of the concepts I was trying to impart to them had no analogue in their language in the first place. I tried to explain that collective ownership of the means of production was best for everyone and that only when they overthrew the old systems of exploitation could they be free, and how the petty ethnic and religious rivalries which made living in the area somewhat dangerous were all created just to keep people apart, and I think the thing I said which got through to them the most was that anytime anyone told them something they should ask, "Who does this benefit?" So when the minister wants money to build a new church, who does it benefit, him or the people? This is little Deng, Bor's son. He is 3 1/2 years old and very cute  We stopped at the shores of Lake Victoria on the way back to Nairobi  And this is Thon and Malith saying farewell to me at the airport  It was nice for me to reconnect with my roots and I realize that I was really lucky to have this because most African-Americans will never get this chance, they don't know who their people are, could never visit Africa and feel the same sense of connection that I did. I have kept in contact with Bor and I hope that she and little Deng will be able to come and visit me, and I am even trying to figure out some way to bring them over so that they can live here in the U.S., sponsor them or something but I have just moved out on my own and my apartment is pretty small and I use the second bedroom as a computer room. I don't have a lot of time anyway to take care of people, especially now that I am a mod in case you don't realize it's a lot of work and the last thing I need is people accusing me of being lazy. One interesting thing I heard from her lately however is that the minister and his family were all killed by the people in the town and I think that some of the stuff I said may have had something to do with it because Bor mentioned that they smashed up the church and were selling the bricks to have enough money to dig a new deep well so that everyone can have clean water. Other than my trip to Kenya my life probably isn't that much different from anyone else on SA's. I go to work and post and probably watch all the same TV shows and movies and anime, listen to the same music and care about the same stuff. I am actually thinking of doing a flash movie about my life experiences and my return to visit my family sort of like Waltz with Bashir, documentary style, so if anyone is interested in that I will keep you updated on that project as it keeps going, it might actually be SomethingAwful's next big film production. I guess if anyone has any questions about being a black mod on SA or what it's like to be black in general I guess you can ask them. Just to head off one question I don't care about 'the n-word' and I think that people who pay too much attention to it give it more power than it needs and it's pretty hypocritical to say that we can say it but white people can't. Fall Sick and Die fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Feb 13, 2009 |
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Feb 13, 2009 22:11
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It's not a joke it's just a part of my life
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Feb 13, 2009 22:17
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Free Headcrab posted:Great read, thanks for sharing. Did things eventually smooth over with your father? Yeah we had a pretty tender goodbye even though I don't think he really understood what the whole conflict was about. I don't know what it is like for him to lose so much of his family, he had 13 children by three wives over the course of his life but only 5 of them were there with him at the camp. He lost his wife (my mother) and 8 children, well only 7 now really since I am not just the one who disappeared off to America anymore.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:21
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Most of my other pictures are just of random family members and the village so I didn't think they'd be that interesting to people but if people really want to see them I can post them.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:25
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Cato posted:Awesome trip, thank you for posting. I was only staying a few days and I only drank bottled water, which sucked because I went to the trouble of buying a bunch of water purification tablets that I never had to use. As for being a communist I have never hidden my Marxist leanings and socialism has done more for Africa than capitalism ever will. Socialists were the ones who fought to free Africa from colonialism, both in Africa and European socialists who knew that the exploitation of colonies was wrong.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:37
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Kabuu posted:That was a pretty neat read, the pictures are charming. Where did the children get those robes to dress in for your arrival? I honestly don't know I never thought to ask where they got them, I assume at market. And in response to someone's earlier comment I think it's just a girls vs boys thing, guys don't wear traditional print like the women do, probably because they don't make it and like other people have mentioned it's just much easier to get normal western clothes.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:45
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Wake_N_Bake posted:I hope the irony of somebody from the West coming to poor Africa to tell them exactly how they're doing everything wrong is not lost on you. Honestly I don't like the patronizing way that you're talking to me, I grew up with these people and I know the problems they have better than you do. Overzealous religion, the promotion of cash crop agriculture, the destruction of domestic industrial production all to feed the IMF and the World Bank paying interest on loans whose principal was repaid years ago, restructuring of the economies of these countries in line with neoliberal economic agenda, the destruction of national social safety nets, the creation of food instability, pollution, privatization of water, destruction of communal lands. Why don't you educate yourself on the problems of Africa before speaking to me on your high horse because atheism, a firm scientific education and communism would do a lot more to help Africa than anything you have ever done.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:49
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Mr.48 posted:Pretty cool trip, wish I could do the whole reconnecting with roots thing. Question: Is it a traditional thing for all the women in that are to shave their head or is there some other reason? I honestly don't know what the specific reason behind it is I just know all Dinka women do it, no one keeps long hair there so I'd guess it's just a style/tradition, there is probably no good reason for it. Mr.48 posted:Forgot to ask: Seeing as how the church your family belongs to isnt Catholic, whats their view on using condoms? Hopefully they're not averse to their use with HIV lurking around every corner. The Kenyan government actively encourages the people in the camps to use condoms because it means less children and less health problems but people still don't like to use them just because they don't see the point and a lot of who a man is can be tied up to how many children he has
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Feb 13, 2009 22:55
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Abraham posted:Thanks for sharing FSAD. Do you want to go back in the future at some point? Are you still in contact with your family there at all? The whole family is talking about moving back to the Sudan. There is a referendum in 2011 as to whether the whole of South Sudan should become completely independent and most people don't think the Arabs will let the south go even though they're obligated to do so because that is where everything worthwhile in the country is, water, oil, etc. Everyone's lives are kind of on hold waiting to see what will happen in 2011 but I would like to see the area I grew up in again rather than a valley full of refugees.
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Feb 13, 2009 22:58
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DearMrSkepparkrans posted:It's amazing how much nutrition changes the way we look. Due to their malnourishment and your good nourishment, you barely even look to be the same ethnicity. Did this ever come up while you were there? Were you recognized as a Dinka or did people automatically assume you were from the west? I have been working out a lot lately I used to be more of a beanpole but no one ever questioned whether I was a Dinka and it's kind of weird you would think they would, as if Africans who live in a refugee camp have never seen someone with proper nourishment?
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Feb 13, 2009 23:02
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Ration posted:You say that you remember all of these things, at eight, and you cannot remember the majority of their dialect? I'm just baffled at the irony of the situation. Can you imagine the limited vocabulary you have at 8 years old, then going a decade without hearing it once, not even on TV, the radio, anything, then I am going to just start conversing in it again?
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Feb 13, 2009 23:04
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Crate! posted:Just two quick questions for you. They were a foster family who had ties to the Episcopal church but they weren't missionaries, just people with an open heart. As for the water cans I never really thought about it, they just filled them up and took them back, I never asked if there was a system to it.
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Feb 13, 2009 23:09
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Tweek posted:If you don't know exactly how old you are, how was it decided when you got your driver's license, the ability to buy cigarettes, and the ability to buy alcohol? They knew basically how old I was in terms of years and I was given a birthday that just happened to be the day I arrived in the U.S. so I could be anywhere from a few months older to a few months younger than my actual birthday, but they've just gone off of that birthday since then.
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Feb 13, 2009 23:11
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Chamber 9 posted:FSAD what are some of your favorite bands. Do you have a last.fm? I mostly listen to British stuff, post punk, new wave, Britpop. I mean I don't listen to Ladysmith Black Mambazo all day or something if that is what you're wondering.
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Feb 13, 2009 23:18
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BrainDance posted:I don't think it's trolling if he has a point. No offense, but while I'm sure Fish Steer a Dhow knows a good deal about Africa, and what Africa needs, he went to a camp full of easily exploitable people who have probably gotten far less than a legitimate education, and poured onto them the "wisdom of Marx" and "pshh you're just praying to a skygod!" First of all it's indisputable. There is no God. So the fact that these people were spending their time, money and resources to prop up a man in comparative luxury and comfort just so that he could hand down to them a series of regulations based around a 3000 year old Middle Eastern culture of goatherds is a travesty, it's an absolute disgrace in the 21st century. Africa doesn't need religion to solve its problems, it needs irreligion and reason and science. It needs people coming together to work for the common good as African and Afro-American titans like Nelson Mandela (Communist), Kwame Nkrumah (Socialist), W.E.B. Du Bois (Communist), Julius Nyerere (Communist) and basically every other worthwhile African leader of the past 100 years. Religion is a poison that infects Africa and all of the effort wasted among Westerners to gather the most converts in Africa before the coming religious war between Christianity and Islam like Starcraft players gathering resources before a Zerg rush just makes me physically sick because it's just another form of exploitation.
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Feb 13, 2009 23:27
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DearMrSkepparkrans posted:I have yet to meet a Marxist who isn't in a constant state of raging against the machine, no matter what machine is presented to him. From the looks of it, FSaD would rage against a lawnmower.  P.S. I look nothing like that dude above except that we are both black and male
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Feb 13, 2009 23:40
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sh1fty posted:FSAD, why have you refused to answer any questions about your feelings on the priest and how you possibly invoked to his death? If you want my honest feelings I am glad that they got rid of him and while I might not specifically approve of them killing him or his family that is just part of life in that part of the world. Honestly I am pleasantly surprised that they took it to the extent that they did because it means that they weren't just rejecting the religion itself but that they recognize that they were being actively exploited by this man and his family and hopefully they will not allow themselves to be put into such a situation again.
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Feb 13, 2009 23:43
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The government in Southern Sudan is very very decentralized, like down to the village level. They don't really have things analogous to states as far as I know because things are too tied up with ethnicity and the like. There's basically the Sudanese govt which has no power over the south, then the South Sudanese government which has a little power, then the local government that is represented by a headman in your village. But communication is bad and though some people travel back and forth most of the refugees came from very different places, and it's not just Sudanese there, but Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans, as if those names mean much because it's a patchwork of different ethnicities and they all keep to themselves. As for the people who think I am cold because I don't put my sister up. Number one the visa paperwork is long and expensive. Number 2 it's not just her but her son, her husband, his other children. Number 3 for every person who complains that I am not doing enough for my family there will be 10 who see, "Oh one African moves into the neighborhood then all of a sudden there are ten living in a tiny apartment." and treating us like some warren of invaders. I am an American and my sister is not. If I can help her to get a better life I will try to do so but I have 12 brothers and sisters and half brothers/sisters who would also want to come. Believe me it's not like they didn't ask when I was there but I explained to them they could do a lot more to help themselves here than in America.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:01
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cranberry juice posted:Why were you the only one of your siblings chosen by the missionaries and taken to America? I was the youngest, my closest sibling was my brother who was 17, unfortunately he either didn't make it or went back to Sudan at some point so believe me I wish he could have come.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:02
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Pastey posted:Sorry, but that did shock me. You met this man face to face, talked with him, but you're still glad? I'm sorry but I don't have some sort of belief in the absolute sanctity of human life, it's something you lose when half of your family disappears as they're driven out of their homes due to ethnic strife. Some people are good and they deserve to live and some people are bad and if they aren't able to reform they should be killed.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:04
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Digeridude posted:Okay, this is probably going to sound insensitive to some very PC people here, but I have a serious question: Honestly it's probably just because I have some weight on me due to working out, here are a few pictures from when I was younger and had less weight to me and I look more 'African' or 'starved' This one is several years old, from homecoming...  This one is maybe a year after that at Virginia Beach 
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Feb 14, 2009 00:09
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BrainDance posted:I gotta let you know something I've learned about life I fully admit that I can be wrong. Do you think that the priest would have ever admitted he was wrong? Do you think he might have ever admitted to those people that God might not exist and that they were wasting 1/7th of their week there, doing maintenance on the building for free, spending money to buy bibles and paying for the clothes and food for his family? What scientific, rational argument could people have made with him to convince him that he was entirely wrong. I don't even know the exact circumstances surrounding his death, just that the people of the village killed him and they were using the Church bricks to buy a new well for everyone's use. If I was there I might have suggested they turn it into a communal space rather than destroy it but on the other hand tearing down a religious building like that can have a lot of symbolic power, destroying the old faith and building a new world with it.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:14
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Abraham posted:Don't beat yourself up too much. You've obviously done a lot for your family, and their tribe as well - enlightenment provides so much more opportunity than a visa or citizenship. I believe it was Thoreau who suggested we take care of our problems at home, before seeking to escape them? Most of the problem with violence is actually inter-ethnic conflict in the camp itself. People had weapons but they didn't walk around with them, the Dinka keep pretty much to themselves and the fact that they are so far from home means they don't have a lot of enemies in the area. For the Turkana and other groups who actually live in the region who come into conflict with Ethiopians and Ugandans and others, I have heard the people who actually live in the region live worse than the refugees and they raid the camps sometimes. That is another reason why it is so important to teach these people about socialism and socialist theory, to see how the idea of human beings 'owning' land is ludicrous and that if they weren't being set against each other for petty ethnic rivalries that benefit only those in charge they could actually affect some change in their lives.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:19
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These people are very poor and have very little to offer. They care very much about each other but also in a different way from what Americans are used to. For instance my father Deng Deng doesn't really show affection the way you would imagine, if he did that would be... just strange for the Dinka. A man doesn't cry, he doesn't show much emotion at all. It amuses me the stereotype of blacks as overly emotional and unable to control themselves because among my people the rule is that you are very stoic all the time and never betray your emotions. They don't really have a lot to teach us except that we're all humans and it's hard to impart the view to strangers that they aren't stupid caricatures of human beings, they have their own thoughts and feelings and opinions. More interesting to me is the vein of really serious racism I have seen here in GBS among people who seriously think they know better how people should affect change in their lives than people who are actually living these lives, though I suspect some of them simply think it's cool to troll a mod and just disagree with him for no reason and I have even gotten several blatantly racist AIM messages during this with people calling me racist epithets and suggesting that the only reason I was made a mod in the first place is because I am black and that I should go back to Africa
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Feb 14, 2009 00:32
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gigabitnokie posted:Okay, I've seen photos from Dulles and Virginia Beach. Out of curiosity, where did you grow up? (I'm a Northern VA resident and sorry if I missed this already) I hope you don't mind but just for my safety I'm not going to talk about where I live or grew up.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:34
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EllisD posted:FSAD sorry for the slight derail but did you ever get into these guys as a wee lad? They're from Oakland a predominately gangster community Yeah I listen to every black musician who has ever recorded music as a white person what do you think of this album?
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Feb 14, 2009 00:47
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Civil posted:He's not a GBS mod. And what's racist about calling someone a pile of poo poo? I think a lot of us disagree with his views of humanity. It's strong language, but pretty much par for the course on SA when someone says stuff you consider vile and inhumane. I don't mind people confronting me and saying they disagree with my political or religious beliefs all I ask is that it not be couched in racist terms.
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Feb 14, 2009 00:48
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Civil posted:Did you think "pile of poo poo" was a racist term? I do now, it's less about the term and more about how you say it
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Feb 14, 2009 00:57
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thehandtruck posted:Very cool, thanks for sharing. Here are some questions:
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Feb 14, 2009 01:05
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That is my adoptive parent's pbase account this only corroborates my story as being true sorry to say to all you doubters and racists.
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Feb 15, 2009 04:53
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Dr. Waffles posted:That's a really great story about how you were able to revisit your origins and have respect and love for the people and the culture. I feel directly responsible, they never would have taken an objective look at him and his manipulation and exploitation of the village if not for what I had said to them. I opened a door for them and I'm glad they went through it. I am actually thinking of getting a donation thread running to buy them some books that will actually be a lot more useful to them than the Bible, does anyone know of a Simple English translation of the Communist Manifesto or the collective writings of Mao? There are almost no books printed in Dinka sadly.
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Feb 15, 2009 06:21
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