I just looked up the definition of black in almost every dictionary that I looked up and even Wikipedia had explanations that were shocking. I could not believe my eyes. You have all go check it out for yourselves and let me know if there is a dictionary that has something different because what I found was:- Black Mail, Black Propaganda, Black Sheep, Black Ball, Black List, Black Hearted all with very negative descriptions and the list goes on and on and on. According to the American heritage dictionary black means being of the colour black, without light, racial group having brown to black skin especially one of African origin, African American, soiled as from soot or dirty, evil, wicked; black deeds, depressing gloomy angry and sullen, to lose consciousness or memory temporarily…….. Do I need say more this is the 21st century? And yes we have black leaders, educators, scholars, writers who even use these dictionaries but still accept words that degrade their own people definitions that are sincerely unacceptable .2009.. but I guess we have to stay positive and keep at it pushing our leaders to demand that we are represented in a more honest and respectful way. Peace
The meaning of the word BLACK
March 6, 2009 at 5:57 pm (Our world)
Tags: africans, black, consciousness, education, writing
‘Integration Programs in Europe’
March 6, 2009 at 10:02 am (Our world)
Tags: citizenship, culture, intergration, migrants
The programs are very interesting and are usually run by the locals and they mostly teach you how to ‘integrate’ most of the programs I have seen or read about ar more or less about showing you how to live in a certain society and tell you what is politically correct what not, how to ‘behave’ basically what to do and what not to do. In Germany for example if you want to get the citizenship you have to take some test and only when you pass this test can you get the German citizenship. However they have even shown German citizens who cannot answer most of the questions that migrants are expected to answer. What is see lacking is the cross-cultural understanding programs because a one sided program is not integration it is simply assimilation call it what you want but it is basically telling migrants that wait a minute we are going to tell you how to behave like us. I have heard a lot of Europeans say that if they don’t force migrants to integrate and learn their language and culture that their culture will die, but if we did a little bit deeper and research where those cultures came from we see a blend of cultures within many European countries for example in Austria they have the coffee culture which was actually brought by the Turkish, the goulash I believe has a Hungarian influence and so on so forth so the so called culture that they are clinging to were broadly influenced by migrants. I think integration should be about understanding the ‘other’ and not fear of loss or the ‘other’. That’s my take on the so called integration programs but hey if you want citizenship from a European country then you got to study for the test and then the rest is history but it still makes me wonder whether the Europeans are happy with people studying for their citizenship and then go back to their regular lives which might have very little to do with the countries culture. Integration with no strings attached is the way to go.
