Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1466 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Tue 21 Jun 2005 20:59 Post subject: Outraged black activists protest King Tut whitewashed
Quote:
Outraged black activists protest that King Tut has been whitewashed
(AFP)
16 June 2005
LOS ANGELES - US black activists demanded Wednesday that a bust of Tutankhamun be removed from a landmark exhibition of artefacts from the Egyptian boy king’s tomb because the statue portrays him as white.
The bust that activists object to is a central part of ”Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the first US exhibition of relics from king Tut’s tomb in nearly 30 years, which opens here Thursday amid Hollywood fanfare.
The face of the legendary pharaoh, who died around 3,300 years ago at the age of just 19, was reconstructed earlier this year through images collected through Cat Scans of his mummy, found near Luxor in Egypt in 1922.
But Legrand Clegg, a historian and prosecutor of the Los Angeles area city of Compton, is demanding that the bust of King Tut be removed from the show because its rendition of his face is a ”distortion of reality.”
“They have depicted King Tut as white, but the ancient Egyptians were black people,” he told AFP.
We do not need modern scientists to reconstruct the bust and tell us what to see. Do not deprive black children of their heritage,” Legrand said in an appeal to organisers to remove the likeness from display.
Clegg said the protest would take the form of a peaceful picket outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where the 27-month three-city tour of the United States is poised to open.
The action comes after Los Angeles city officials declined to intervene with exhibition organisers to remove the bust.
“There is no evidence that King Tut was white,” Clegg told city officials at a public meeting last week. “Egypt is on the continent of Africa.”
Clegg maintains that the inhabitants of ancient Egypt were descended from the black Nubian people that inhabited that country and neighbouring Ethiopia.
He said his group would protest as long as there was a ”suppression of black history,” that he said was “conspiratorial” and “has to stop.”
Organisers of the exhibit billed it as a “blockbuster” display that will leave its mark on the worlds of archaeology and the American public.
Clegg said his drive was supported in his quest to have the bust removed by the Compton branch of the powerful National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The show, which boasts 130 funerary objects some of which have rarely or never travelled out of Egypt before, opens its doors 26 years after the last US display of artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb ended in 1976.
As I said in another thread, these types of people think that "Blackness" and One Drop are universal schools of thought. These types of people think the Egyptians saw themselves as "black people" like it is known in the modern sense. This is very ignorant thinking. West Africans do not claim a link to the Egyptians, so who could Black Americans when the overwhelmingly majority of their ancestors are West African, not Nubian, which is as far from West Africa as New York is from California, approximately, perhaps even further. These people (like Clegg) are very insecure.
This was from an UAE English language paper. Not sure how long the link will be good for.
Posted: Sat 25 Jun 2005 10:03 Post subject: King Tut: He's my favorite...er human being.
But how is this that different from Eurocentrists who say that Egyptians were "white"? Isn't it more likely that Tut was some shade of brown? When Moses left Egypt didn't he take with him a black woman as his bride? Didn't Moses' male relatives make their way to southern Africa to create the Lemba? (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/familylemba.html).
One of my favorite Mexican restaraunts has a picture of two Aztec lovers, a man and women, embracing while wearing headress and other Aztec attire. Of course, the Aztecs are white/mestizo looking and not at all reflective of the copper/brown-skinned Amerindians who were the indigenous people during the height of the Aztec Empire. Why is that? Maybe the same reason why Jesus, a Jewish man from 2000 years ago, is portrayed as fair skinned, blond and blue-eyed.
Egypt was at the crossroads of the world; therefore, people came and went leaving their genes. The pictures the ancient Egyptians left show people of different shades from dark brown to fair complexion.
I don't think this guy is talking so much about modern American (ODR) perceptions of races as much as perception of a pan African people (quite dismissive of cultures) and focused phenotype in the same way that the history in America is taught from elementary through highschool from a European perspective, that triumphant view of Europeans rising from the ashes of Rome to build the Great European Dominated World Civilization.
How can history books say that Columbus discovered America, the Native Americans discovered America 20,000 years ago when they crossed from Asia. Why isn't Columbus reviled as the murderous thug responsible for the deaths of hundres of Taino/Carib natives of Hispaniola who died because of Columbus lust for gold (if the natives didn't bring back sufficient quanties of gold, Columbus would have a limb cut off.). Why don't we learn of the Trail of Tears in terms of it being a "crime against humanity"?
History is told mostly by the winners, the conquerors, who shape it to fit their view. Of course, if Tut is white, why don't Americans consider Iraqis white?
Posted: Sat 25 Jun 2005 11:07 Post subject: Re: King Tut: He's my favorite...er human being.
triguy wrote:
But how is this that different from Eurocentrists who say that Egyptians were "white"?
Please provide a source. What "Eurocentrists" say this? Where do they say it? The factual reality is that ancient Egyptians (like modern Egyptians) lacked a color line.
triguy wrote:
...the history in America is taught from elementary through highschool from a European perspective, that triumphant view of Europeans rising from the ashes of Rome to build the Great European Dominated World Civilization.
The factual reality is that European culture did conquer the world.
The thesis of this post is that because some people in the distant past once conquered other people and lorded it over them, it is okay to use extortion today in an attempt to falsify verifiable facts. This position is morally untenable and intellectually dishonest.
Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1466 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Mon 27 Jun 2005 16:40 Post subject: Re: King Tut: He's my favorite...er human being.
triguy wrote:
But how is this that different from Eurocentrists who say that Egyptians were "white"? Isn't it more likely that Tut was some shade of brown? When Moses left Egypt didn't he take with him a black woman as his bride? Didn't Moses' male relatives make their way to southern Africa to create the Lemba? (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/familylemba.html).
I never read anything from a Eurocentric perspective that insinuated that the Egyptians were white. I think it's absurd to depict Egyptians as European Caucasians as is sometimes done. My objective was to expose that some in the Black American community think that their perception of what is black and blackness is universal and has always been. This is not true as they soon find out to much disappointment.
triguy wrote:
One of my favorite Mexican restaraunts has a picture of two Aztec lovers, a man and women, embracing while wearing headress and other Aztec attire. Of course, the Aztecs are white/mestizo looking and not at all reflective of the copper/brown-skinned Amerindians who were the indigenous people during the height of the Aztec Empire. Why is that? Maybe the same reason why Jesus, a Jewish man from 2000 years ago, is portrayed as fair skinned, blond and blue-eyed.
I bet that picture of the Aztecs was drawn by a Mexican mestizo. That withstanding, I agree with your point about Jesus, who most likely looked like a brown skinned dark haired Palestinian.
triguy wrote:
Egypt was at the crossroads of the world; therefore, people came and went leaving their genes. The pictures the ancient Egyptians left show people of different shades from dark brown to fair complexion.
I agree completely. Then why do American Afrocentrics assert that the Egyptians were just black people and use the Egyptians as examples of Black history?? Particularly when sub Saharan West Africans make no ancestral connections?
triguy wrote:
How can history books say that Columbus discovered America, the Native Americans discovered America 20,000 years ago when they crossed from Asia. Why isn't Columbus reviled as the murderous thug responsible for the deaths of hundres of Taino/Carib natives of Hispaniola who died because of Columbus lust for gold (if the natives didn't bring back sufficient quanties of gold, Columbus would have a limb cut off.). Why don't we learn of the Trail of Tears in terms of it being a "crime against humanity"?
Well I honestly think Columbus is getting a bad rap here. I am not saying you have insinuated this, but many leftists try to compare Columbus to Hitler. Such a comparison is a historical fallacy and intellectually dishonest. This is why what Columbus did is a monumental occurrance in World history. This discovery resulted IMO the biggest migration of people in the history of the world. From the late 1400's until the mid 1900's when immigration to the US started to wane. People from Europe, Africa, and to a lesser extent Asia populated North and South America. For better or worse, the world we know today is the end result. The reason why the so called "Viking discovery" is not the event as was Columbus is because it really did nothing to change the demographics. Yes I agree the indigenous populations suffered which is not a good end result. But this has happened frequently in the course of world history when indigenous people suffered at the hands of the invading forces, on all inhabited continents. This is what you call, "human nature", unfortunately.
triguy wrote:
History is told mostly by the winners, the conquerors, who shape it to fit their view. Of course, if Tut is white, why don't Americans consider Iraqis white?
Yes that is correct, the winners get to write the history. But the "losers" are now revising history in the name of political correctness, which is not a good thing, because it teaches a lie rather than a fact.
But who ever insinuated that Tut was white?? I did not in any way, shape or form make the assertion that Tut was white in my comments. What I did say was that it was rather misleading to consider Tut black because the people who do so are using an exclusively American defintion of what constitutes "blacks", and no such defintion or perception existed 3000 years ago. That does not say that Tut then must have been white, though I know many who only think in black and white terms would think so.
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