A New Afrikan Republic in the New World

November 8, 2007 6:55 PM

The Republic of New Afrika - Location: The United States. [last link video]
posted by Atreides (10 comments total)

Interesting. I always wanted to do a post about the Nation of Gods and Earths, with special focus on their enormous contribution to modern music, but I am just so damned lazy. Also, not sure if anyone here would actually be interested.
posted by milarepa at 7:35 PM on November 8, 2007

It's amazing to me that the distribution of of African Americans in the map in the wikipedia link is basically the same as it was during slavery. Hell, you can even see the cotton expansion to the west after the Louisiana Purchase in that map. Amazing, but I guess not surprising.
posted by 517 at 8:37 PM on November 8, 2007

Yeah, cuz that's ever going to happen.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:19 PM on November 8, 2007

That wikipedia distribution map is really cool looking, but it's amazingly misleading. It doesn't really tell you much of anything, since it's density of african americans per square mile; why they didn't do percentage afro-american per census tract is beyond me.

I mean, a white population map per square mile would look very similar--higher population density on the eastern seaboard and the big cities, lower in Montana, etc.

Using the same census data, they could have put together a much more meaningful map which mapped african-americans as a percentage of overall population in each census tract. That would have shown a much more even and thus less interesting looking distribution though.

But I guess from a black nationalist perspective, you just ignore the white people (and Asians, Latinos, and Indians); what matters for establishing a New-Afrikan homeland is where the black people are. And yeah, I guess a lot of them are in the Old South still. Bummer for them, in my experience.
posted by jackbrown at 10:20 PM on November 8, 2007

Actually, if you click on the image in the wikipedia page you get a list of maps which includes one of the percentage of African-Americans per census tract. It looks quite similar, and not much more even or uninteresting than the one featured.
posted by dreadpiratesully at 11:02 PM on November 8, 2007

thanks, dreadpiratesully. That's a very revealing and interesting link; you're right that the maps look remarkably similar. I retire my point, although I think the logic was not flawed.

In your link, I am interested to note that there are large tracts of the West (low density rural counties) with no reported black population at all. I guess it's not entirely surprising, but just look at South Dakota...
posted by jackbrown at 11:16 PM on November 8, 2007

So basically, it's "the South shall rise again," only this time with black people in charge.

Humm. Yeah, good luck with that.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:37 PM on November 8, 2007

Kadin2048, Is that any diffrent from the other "the South shall rise again" folks? You know we "white" sotherners often have "a touch of the tar brush".
posted by jeffburdges at 1:50 AM on November 9, 2007

Thanks for the post, if only because now I know who Marcus Garvey was. There's some dialog on an Orb track where one Marcus Garvey is looking for Haile Selassie. I knew who Selassie was, but not Marcus Garvey. Now, what's up with that Babylon Anteen part?
posted by Goofyy at 5:56 AM on November 9, 2007

Yeah, because this worked so godddamn well in 1980s Philadelphia.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:23 AM on November 9, 2007