Aria Speaks

My finance face.

alexandraerin:

dancetransylvania:

blonde-on-a-mission:

thisiswhiteculture:

floacist:

People really don’t believe Ancient Egyptians were ethnically African?

Perri: It’s sad but true, so many people don’t believe it. :(

Yup and if you ask the average American they will automatically say The Middle East…

…

but…

how—

Look at their lips!

This man up there favors my great great granddaddy (I’m of African descent, just so you all know)

EYES, NOSE—LIPS AGAIN.

I MEAN.

OMG. SERIOUSLY.

LIKE.

IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD TO GRASP.

White denial.

Remember, around the time white people became obsessed with Egypt and began romanticizing its history, they still were allowed to openly hate POC. They refuse to believe that so much power, grace, and beauty could come from people they despised(read: were jealous of).

It’s all just a superiority complex to mask their innate insecurity. It’s why they happily lump Egypt in with the Middle East and completely erase Black Egypt from the picture and instead focus on Arab Egypt.

It’s also why they have taken to dividing Africa into North Africa and “Sub-Saharan Africa” as if everything that is not of the “exotic desert” is inferior and savage.

Taxonomy and classism are just a few of white people’s favorite things to do to make themselves feel like they run shit.

The term “middle east” didn’t even exist before the 1960s.

incase you crackers didn’t know

Egypt is in Africa

therefore

Egyptians are African

Africans were not sub Saharan Negroids.

Africa is a continent not a race.

king tut’s DNA was tested. he was almost 100% white. so was Cleopatra. they were not white. i bet you believe that the pyramids were built by slaves, don’t you?

Science will just be over in the corner, alternately laughing at you and sobbing into its drink.

Identifying race (a social construct) from genetic material is either really complicated or not entirely possible, depending on how you look at it. Either way, the idea of someone’s DNA being “100% white” is completely fallacious.

Genetic testing has linked mitochondrial DNA found in Tutankhamen’s remains to groups prevalent in Europe today, but mitochondrial DNA only shows one line of ancestry when every generation back you go, the number of ancestors you have doubles. Trying to judge someone’s race from their mtDNA is like trying to judge their whole ethnicity by their last name.

For instance, my ethnic background is almost entirely Scots-Irish, but because I only have the last name of my father, who only has the last name of his father, who only has the last name of his father (and so on), my last name is German. There’s almost no German in my background at all, but due to sheer chance and the rules we use for inheriting last names, there it is.

The same thing applies to mtDNA: it’s always inherited according to certain rules, and you only get it on one side.

The other thing about those European genetic markers is that we don’t know that they originated in Europe, we just know that they’re there today. Especially given that they’re found in western Europe, it’s more likely they spread from the Mediterranean to there rather than the other way around, whether they originated in Greece or Africa or (most likely) a mixture of the two.

Extensive genetic testing has been done on the remains of Tutankhamen’s body, and genetic markers have been found that tie him to the central African plains, as well. The bottom line is that in a center of trade and culture like Egypt, you’d have to expect to see genetic material  from all over. And that definitely includes sub-Saharan Africa, which had fewer travel barriers between it and Egypt than Europe did.

Or do you think your racist beliefs went back in time and created a forcefield or genetic firewall? 

As for Cleopatra: where exactly do you think they got her DNA from? There’s no tomb, there’s no body. Cleopatra VII (the one we just call “Cleopatra”, the famous one) vanished without a trace.

The idea that DNA tests have proven she’s “100% white” are 100% a racist fantasy. We know her father was ethnically Greek… mostly… but the Ptolemies had been in Egypt for a long time by that point, and while the rule was inbreeding, there had been exceptions all along the way. Cleopatra’s mother is believed to have possibly been from sub-Saharan Africa, or else the child of a mother who was. At least one of Cleopatra’s sisters (possibly half, we don’t know) had strong African features.

If nothing else, the uncertainty about the lineage on the female side illustrates how porous the lines between the Greek Ptolemies and their African subjects were.

But at any rate, there’s something ridiculous and desperate of white supremacists pointing to the Ptolemies as “proof” that the ancient Egyptians that history lionizes were white. You’re picking a family that we know didn’t originate* in Egypt to prove that Egypt was ethnically not African?

*Although, again, saying that a family originated or didn’t originate somewhere is misleading. If a Greek Ptolemy had a child with someone from Africa, half that child’s ancestors would be African, but if the child were acknowledged as a Ptolemy, history would pretend the child’s ancestry had “originated” in Macedonia.

(Source: thehereticpharaoh)

blackraincloud:

dmwalking:

soulbrotherv2:

African Students Who Invented Anti-Malaria Soap, Awarded $25,000

AFRICANGLOBE – Two African students have created a malaria-repellant soap using local herbs, and have won, consequently, a $25,000 Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) award.

The GSVC is the only international competition of Social Business Plans, dedicated to students, young graduates, and entrepreneurs with high social and/or environmental startups.

Moctar Dembélé who hails from Burkina Faso and Gérard Niyondiko, from Burundi, are the first non American born/citizen, to win the Global Social Venture Competition. [Read more.]

I’m happy for them.  I really am. But if they’re not getting a cut of the millions that will likely be made off their invention, I’ll be ready to set some things on fire.  

Twenty five fucking thousand???? FUCK that shit. I’ma need them kids to be millionaires

yesterday.

(via alexandraerin)