₦airaland Forum

Well I don't know how to answer you on this your questiom

Pataki: Any example to buttress your opinion?

Good points.. @sage

The point I stated is that prosperity without culture is brutish and akin to barbarism

Pataki: Sorry, but what exactly is your point? How is heritage and prosperity mixed up?

Nice points @pataki on heritage and prosperity but i think its mixed up

Culture is a way of doing things and gives a sense of identity to a peoples be it in their language or food and dressing

Having a way of doing things gives meaning to that prosperity

The clay pots and carvings of yore are used in determining how the romans or nok lived

They cant be divorced from each other

Please lets not bring tribalism into this thread oooo

[quote author=Efemena_xy]He has not o!

I dey help am catch that 'sneaky, two-timing' madam...

@OP: If that one nor do you, I fit give you more handy tips, so you fit put the final nail on the coffin...[/quote]His exact words/...

Also,drawing frm sombody's advice here(NL),I reminded her of our no-opposite-sex-friendship.She became unwilling to continue the discussion,she said she wish we just "laugh it off".
Well,just as another person adviced here,i decided to just let the sleeping dog continue its sleep,knowing she can easily get provoked,though i feel this is just sweeping the dirt under the capet.

The wife has chosen her happiness over true marital peace and he wants to play along
I hope she does not regret her stand

Liked!!

Ujujoan: It's not a competition between civilization and culture. You can still be civilized without abandoning your heritage.

Nigerians and their follow follow syndrom tire me no be small.

The day we learn to be proud of our heritage is the day other parts of the world will start taking us seriously.

Haba.. This one na ed snowden runz

He said he has swept the matter away

All is well

Nebulae: Huh, finally.

How long will the incomplete Amoeba last?
#WeJustDeyLook

team #SiddonLook
team #confuzed.com

haha

continued...

Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.‬

I existed right there on the fringe of ugly, ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.”

“Black people don’t really know how to swim,” my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re from Trinidad,” she said.

“The black children don’t like to read very much,” I overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles.

I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The yardstick to which other minorities were measured. If I could finish high school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves “niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The others must simply be problem kids.

I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.

In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.

Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed education system.

I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too.

I have found freedom by leaving the land of the free.


Tiffanie Drayton is a freelance writer and graduate of The New School University. She hopes to one day return to an equal and racially tolerant America.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/16/goodbye_to_my_american_dream/

an article from THE ROOT

[size=18pt]Goodbye to my American dream [/size]

On the day of college graduation, I told my friends and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood.

“I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I loved and believed in did not love me back.

Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her, because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day, they might have nannies of their own.

That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white. Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii, North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City, private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,” one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two people who were disturbed.

For a long time I survived by covering myself in the labels I’d accumulated over the years. I plastered each one to my body with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone. Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian, fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind them; they were my only shields.

bettymafy: I will go with UJUPAT. . .

JUJUKI

Nice one,,.. buti believe culture is key
Even the whites that are easily maligned have their culture and are proud of it

I feel its a form of being ashamed of our own thing

Sweeping under the carpet solves nothing for all the dirts will start creeping up when beneath the carpet can't hold them anymore.

Roaches will start creeping out too

@Pataki.. Let me ask you a question if you may answer

Do you think the coming generation will be as inbred in your culture as you were
If you think YES, then maybe my fears were misplaced

toshmann: That's America for you!
More Americans have died from gun violence in Chicago than in Afghanistan.

Yankee... the land of gun-dependence

@camer... its still a nice place
Do your thing and succeed...

Pataki: Care to mention some of the issues we are having? In this day of modernization and globalization, we might as well throw away all what westernization and development has given to us and go back to the archaic era you so much value. How many agbadas do you have? Do you even know how to use a dane gun? Where is your fila ajaleti? Why are you ashamed of riding your great grandfather's village bicycle, rather you opt for the latest Toyota in town? Why are you living in the city sef?

I believe we have thrown away most of the values of the old days
The fact that modernisation is here requires evolution and not revolution
The Asian countries i mentioned still have their temples, write in calligraphy and speak their language

No one says we should go back to the archaic era but the facts still remains, Afrika is losing its culture...
you may not like it

Ujujoan: True . . .

In our days (i can't believe I just said that ) things were quite different. Now modernization have taken over . . . I shudder to think of what will become of the future generation if we continue in this path~

Yet we did not get the best as a lot of us could not speak the dialect or even knew how the old people lived

That is why we have issues,.. even China and Japan are keeping to their culture while we have thrown ours away

All our young women are ashamed of their natural hair...

yellowpawpaw: Oga biola,which one be dis na? Who said we don't hv culture?

We have a hybrid culture and as Uju has rightly pointed, who still knows of the atilogwu dancers, the ikenga, the benue dancers, all those things that were unique to each culture

How many people still speak the dialects to their kids...

That is why someone can wake up and say they dont give a hoot abt mothers-in-law that it is me and my husband
That is why there is no sense of balance amongour kids... no understanding that there is a world outside the West, Lekki or Abuja
Some cannot even cook or make native delicacies...


Abegii...

This is one thing i love the Ibos for,,, their attachment to their kin and the annual visits...
Its almost dead in the South West...

Gaggi: Sorry to digress, is dis the same op that complained of a dirty hubby? Perhaps, the dirty nature of oga don make u see am finish.

hahaha
apostle of discord

Too much gun deaths in the US

A madt country

Using the most recent CDC estimates for yearly deaths by guns in the United States, it is likely that as of today, 7/24/2013, roughly 19,084 people have died from guns in the United States since the Newtown shootings. Compare that number to the number of deaths reported in the news in our interactive below, and you can see how undertold the story of gun violence in America actually is.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html

it is the height of ignorance to think gani was just anti abacha..

i really dont know why tosh is still discussing with you, a closet racist///
terming struggle against segregation/apartheid jobless

i laff in dracula

i also dont understand

the reason why we have no culture is because people have abandoned the roots

More weird ish going on

Has obito prevailed or the juubi

I thought bijuus were mindless

Phew.. Nice analysis

Dreamers

Wenger is just taking y'all for a ride

Very straight forward issue but it seems there is a perverse delight at twisting the knife because the OP is a (in) fanous figure of sorts

This is a normal marital issue that can and has happened in a lot of our homesteads

@OP I get you perfectly
The same water and moskito na hin chop you for pikin
Nothing do you.. You even are a mother today

But fathers are irrational and logic does not carry water where there kids especially daughters are concerned

Step down and broach the issue later
if hubby allows again, take all cautions

We all learn everyday

The jazz wey dey village no dey city

Abegiii

Wow the propanganda machine is here

Where is it that yorubas practiced child marriage

@OP whomever you are, You are a closet perverted peadophile

And this matter is righteous and should be supported 100 percent

#Occupy #NoChildBride

This is a human rights issue that affects our daughters, leads to increased healthcare costs with fistulas, reduced educational and job opportunities for girl children with consequent increase in beggars and almajiris to join the teeming hordes of bokomic haram

Whether dem born me today or last millenium na today naija roads don bad

Abegiii

Bensonite: Don't be lazy, is comprehension a problem to you? I mentioned 1993 i guess you were not born then