Cocks Man

A slave name is the personal name given by others to an enslaved person, or a name inherited from enslaved ancestors. The modern use of the term applies mostly to African Americans and West Indians who are descended from enslaved Africans who retain their name given to their ancestors by the enslavers.

Changing from a slave name to a name embodying an African identity became common after emancipation in the 1960s by those in the African diaspora in the Americas seeking a reconnection to their African cultural roots

A number of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans have changed their names out of the belief that the names they were given at birth were slave names. An individual’s name change often coincides with a religious conversion (Muhammad Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay, Malcolm X from Malcolm Little, and Louis Farrakhan changed his from Louis Eugene Walcott, for example) or involvement with the black nationalist movement (e.g., Amiri Baraka and Assata Shakur).

Some organizations encourage African-Americans to abandon their slave names. The Nation of Islam is perhaps the best-known of them. In his book, Message to the Blackman in America, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad writes often of slave names. Some of his comments include:

“You must remember that slave-names will keep you a slave in the eyes of the civilized world today. You have seen, and recently, that Africa and Asia will not honor you or give you any respect as long as you are called by the white man’s name.”

“You are still called by your slave-masters’ names. By rights, by international rights, you belong to the white man of America. He knows that. You have never gotten out of the shackles of slavery. You are still in them.”

The black nationalist US Organization also advocates for African-Americans to change their slave names

Assata Olugbala Shakur (born JoAnne Deborah Byron; July 16, 1947, sometimes referred to by her married surname Chesimard) is a former member of the Black Liberation Army, who was convicted of the first-degree murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Shakur was also the target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, a counterintelligence program directed towards Black Liberation groups and activists

Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams; January 10, 1947 – May 2, 2016) was an American activist and businesswoman who was the mother of American rapper and actor Tupac Shakur.

Chaka Adunne Aduffe Yemoja Hodarhi Karifi Khan.  Yvette Marie Stevens (born March 23, 1953), better known by her stage name Chaka Khan, is an American singer, songwriter and musician. Her career has spanned nearly five decades, beginning in the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the funk band Rufus. Khan received public attention for her vocals and image. Known as the Queen of Funk,Khan was the first R&B artist to have a crossover hit featuring a rapper, with “I Feel for You” in 1984. Khan has won ten Grammys and has sold an estimated 70 million records worldwide.

Mutulu Shakur (born Jeral Wayne Williams; August 8, 1950) is an American activist and former member of the Black Liberation Army, sentenced to sixty years in prison for his alleged involvement in a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck in which a guard and two police officers were killed. Shakur was politically active as a teen with the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and later the black separatist movement the Republic of New Afrika. He was stepfather to the late rap artist Tupac Shakur.

Sekou Odinga (born Nathanial Burns) is an American activist who was imprisoned for actions with the Black Liberation Army in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, Sekou joined the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), founded by Malcolm X. After Malcolm’s death the OAAU was not going in the direction he wanted and in 1967 he was looking at the Black Panther Party. In early 1968 he helped build the Bronx Black Panther Party. On January 17, 1969 two Panthers had been killed by members of Organization Us (a rival Black Nationalist group) and a fellow New York Panther who was in police custody was brutally beaten. Sekou was informed that police were searching for him in connection with a police shooting. At that point, Sekou joined the black underground with the Black Liberation Army.

Yafeu Akiyele Fula (October 9, 1977 – November 10, 1996), better known by his stage name Yaki Kadafi, was an American rapper, and a founder and member of the rap groups Outlawz and Dramacydal. Kadafi’s parents, Yaasmyn Fula and Sekou Odinga, were both members of the Black Panther Party. Fula and Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, were close friends, and Kadafi and Tupac were friends until their deaths in 1996.

Louis Farrakhan Sr. ( born Louis Eugene Walcott; May 11, 1933), formerly known as Louis X, is an American minister who is the leader of the religious group Nation of Islam (NOI), which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a black nationalist group. Previously, he served as the minister of mosques in Boston and Harlem and had been appointed National Representative of the Nation of Islam by former NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. 

Sundiata Acoli (born January 14, 1937, as Clark Edward Squire) is a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1974 for murdering a New Jersey state trooper

Prince.  Abdul-Rahman ibn Ibrahima Sori (Arabic: عبد الرحمن ابن ابراهيم سوري‎) (1762–1829) was a Fula nobleman and Amir (commander or governor) who was captured in the Fouta Jallon region of Guinea, West Africa, and sold to slave traders in the United States in 1788.[1] Upon discovering his noble lineage, his owner Thomas Foster began referring to him as “Prince”,[2] a title he kept until his final days. After spending 40 years in slavery, he was freed in 1828 by order of U.S. President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay, after the Sultan of Morocco requested his release.

Omowale or Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement. He is best known for his controversial advocacy for the rights of blacks; some consider him a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans, while others accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, he spent his teenage years living in a series of foster homes following his father’s death and his mother’s hospitalization. Little engaged in several illicit activities, and was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison in 1946 for larceny and breaking and entering. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) and changed his name to Malcolm X because, he later wrote, Little was the name that “the white slavemaster … had imposed upon [his] paternal forebears”. After being paroled in 1952, he quickly became one of the organization’s most influential leaders.

Expressing many regrets about his time with them, which he had come to regard as largely wasted, he instead embraced Sunni Islam. Malcolm X then began to advocate for racial integration and disavowed racism after completing Hajj, whereby he also became known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz

Tupac Amaru Shakur; born Lesane Parish Crooks, June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper and actor.He is considered by many to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Much of Shakur’s work has been noted for addressing contemporary social issues that plagued inner cities, and he is considered a symbol of resistance and activism against inequality

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr.; April 16, 1947) is an American retired professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), a record 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA selection, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team member. A member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, Abdul-Jabbar twice was voted NBA Finals MVP. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. NBA coach Pat Riley and players Isiah Thomas and Julius Erving have called him the greatest basketball player of all time

Muhammad Ali (/ɑːˈliː/; born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.;January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer, activist, and philanthropist. Nicknamed “The Greatest,” he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century and as one of the greatest boxers of all time.

Kwame Ture (/ˈkwɑːmeɪ ˈtʊəreɪ/; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael, June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a prominent American socialist organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending Howard University. He eventually developed the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later serving as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and lastly as a leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone

                    THE MYTH OF THE WHITE RACE!

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years

By the 18th century, “white” had become well established as a racial term at a time when slavery of African-Americans was widespread.David R. Roediger has argued that the construction of the “white race” in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves.The process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to “any alien, being a free white person”. In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people.

By 1923, courts had vindicated a “common-knowledge” standard, concluding that “scientific evidence” was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a “performance-based” standard, relating to religious practices, culture, education, intermarriage and a community’s role in the United States

WHITE IS A SOCIAL POLITICAL CLASS SYSTEM, WHITE WAS BUILT ON BEING AS BRITISH AND CHRISTIAN AS POSSIBLE. WHITE MEANS HAVING SPECIAL RIGHTS.

WHITE IS A TOOL BY WHICH LABORERS WERE DIVIDED

WHITE SUPERIORITY  TO NON WHITES

WHITE CONNECTED EUROPEAN LABORERS(COMMONERS) TO THE BRITISH ELITE(SIMILAR TO HOW RURAL EUROPEAN FEEL CONNECTED TO DONALD TRUMP)

WHITE WAS CENTER OF PATRIARCHAL POWER

The 2000 U.S. census states that racial categories “generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country. They do not conform to any biological, anthropological or genetic criteria.

“It defines “white people” as “people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.The Federal Bureau of Investigation uses the same definition  

Jacqueline Battalora argues that the first laws banning all marriage between European and Africans, enacted in Virginia and Maryland, were a response by the planter elite to the problems they were facing due to the socio-economic dynamics of the plantation system in the Southern colonies. The bans in Virginia and Maryland were established at a time when slavery was not yet fully institutionalized. At the time, most forced laborers on the plantations were indentured servants, and they were mostly European. Some historians have suggested that the at-the-time unprecedented laws banning “interracial” marriage were originally invented by planters as a divide-and-rule tactic after the uprising of European and African indentured servants in cases such as Bacon’s Rebellion. According to this theory, the ban on interracial marriage was issued to split up the ethnically mixed, increasingly “mixed-race” labor force into “whites,” who were given their freedom, and “blacks,” who were later treated as slaves rather than as indentured servants. By outlawing “interracial” marriage, it became possible to keep these two new groups separated and prevent a new rebellion.

The official racial status of Mexican Americans has varied throughout American history. From 1850 to 1920, the U.S. Census form did not distinguish between whites and Mexican Americans. In 1930, the U.S. Census form asked for “color or race,” and census enumerators were instructed to write W for white and Mex for Mexican.In 1940 and 1950, the census reverted its decision and made Mexicans be classified as white again and thus the instructions were to “Report white (W) for Mexicans unless they were definitely of full Indigenous Indian or other non-white races (such as African or Asian).”

During periods in U.S. history when racial intermarriage wasn’t legally acknowledged, and when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were uniformly allotted white status, they were legally allowed to intermarry with what today are termed non-Hispanic whites, unlike African and Asians. They were allowed to acquire U.S. citizenship upon arrival; served in all-white units during World War II; could vote and hold elected office in places such as Texas, especially San Antonio; ran the state politics and constituted most of the elite of New Mexico since colonial times; and went to segregated white schools in Central Texas and Los Angeles. Additionally, Asians were barred from marrying Mexican Americans because Mexicans were legally white

In Oklahoma, state laws identified Native Americans as legally white during Jim Crow-era segregation.

In the late 19th and 20th century, many saw Native Americans as people without a future, who should be assimilated into a larger American culture. Tribal membership was frequently defined according to so-called blood quantum standards (proven through a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood), so that people of mostly white ancestry and more distant Native ancestry were denied any formal ties with their ancestral tribe. This led to the classification of increasing numbers of people of distant indigenous ancestry as white. This trend has been reversed in census figures of recent decades, which show increasing self-identification among mixed-race people as ethnically/culturally Native American.However, according to the 2000 census, you must know the tribe and maintain contact with that tribal community: “American Indian and Alaska Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.”

The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted naturalized American citizenship to whites.However, United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 confirmed citizenship by birth in the US regardless of race. As a result, in the early 20th century many new arrivals with origins in the Far East petitioned the courts to be legally classified as white, resulting in the existence of many United States Supreme Court rulings on their “whiteness”. In 1922, the court case Takao Ozawa v. United States deemed that Japanese are part of the Mongoloid race, and thus non-white.

In Jim Crow era Mississippi, however, Chinese American children were allowed to attend white-only schools and universities, rather than attend black-only schools, and some of their parents became members of the infamous Mississippi “White Citizens’ Council” who enforced policies of racial segregation.

Although in an opposite turn in other parts of the United States, in 1927, The Supreme Court finds that states possess the right to define a Chinese student as non-white for the purpose of segregating public schools in the case of Lum v. Rice.  As the Jim crow era lasted between 1876 and 1965 this effectively placed Lum v. Rice within that same time period.

The Census Bureau includes the “original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East” among white people.Under pressure from advocacy groups, the Census Bureau announced in 2014 that it would consider establishing a new, MENA ethnic category for populations from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab world, separate from the “white” category. If approved by the Census Bureau, the category would also require approval by Congress.

The courts ruled Middle Easterners as not white in the following cases: In re Halladjian (1909), Ex parte Shahid (1913), Ex Parte Dow (1914), In re Dow (1914), and In re Ahmed Hassan (1942). The courts ruled Arabs, Syrians, Middle Easterners, or Armenians to be white in the following cases: In re Najour (1909), In re Mudarri (1910), In re Ellis (1910), Dow v. United States (1915), United States v. Cartozian, and Ex Parte Mohriez (1944).

From 1909 to 1944, members of Arab American communities in the United States sought naturalized citizenship through an official recognition as white.During this period, the courts were inconsistent in defining Arabs as white granting some eligibility for citizenship, while denying others.Therefore, in the first half of the twentieth century, many Arabs were naturalized as “white American” citizens, while others were deported as “non-white aliens.”

One of the earliest cases includes the case of police officer George Shishim. Born in Zahle, Lebanon, Shishim immigrated to the United States in 1894 becoming a police officer in Venice, CA. According to Gualtieri (2009), Shishim’s “legal battle to prove his whiteness began after he arrested the son of a prominent lawyer for disturbing the peace.“The man arrested argued that because Shishim was not white, and thus ineligible for citizenship, that his arrest was invalid. Shishim’s attorney’s, with support from the Syrian-Lebanese and Arab communities, argued Arabs shared Caucasian ancestry and are thus white. Judge Frank Hutton, who presided over the case, cited legal precedent ruling that the term “white person” included Syrians.[53] Despite this ruling, neither U.S. immigration authorities nor courts across the country consistently defined Arabs as whites, and many Arabs continued to be deported through the 1940s.

Among the most important cases was Dow v. United States (1915) in which Syrian George Dow was determined to be of the “Caucasian” race and thus eligible for citizenship. In 1914, Judge Smith denied George Dow citizenship twice ruling that Syrians were not white and thus ineligible for citizenship. Dow appealed these decisions and in Dow v. United States (1915), the United States Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decisions, defined Syrians as white, and affirmed Dow’s right to naturalization.However, this decision did not apply to North Africans or non-Levantine Arabs, and some courts claimed that only Syrians (and not other Arab persons) were white. The situation was resolved in 1943, when all Arabs and North Africans were deemed white by the federal government. Ex Parte Mohriez (1944) and the 1977 OMB Directive 15 include Middle Eastern and North African in the definition of white.

Another 1909 immigration and naturalization case found that Armenians were white and thus eligible for citizenship. A U.S. Circuit Court judge in Boston, ruling on a citizenship application by four Armenians, overruled government objections and found that West Asians were so mixed with Europeans that it was impossible to tell whether they were white or should be excluded as part of the “yellow race”. In making the ruling, the judge also noted that the government had already made no objection to Jews. The judge ruled that “if aboriginal people of Asia are excluded it is hard to find a loophole for the admission of Hebrews.”

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the racial classification of Jews in the United States was not settled, with many nativists describing them as “Mongoloid” and “Asiatic.” The United States Bureau of Immigration had classified Jews as “Slavonic” during the 19th century, but the Dillingham Commission contended that linguistic and physical criteria, including the “Jew’s nose”, classified Jews further down the Caucasian pecking order, as Semites. A 1909 Census Bureau ruling to classify Syrians as “Mongolians”, thus non-white and ineligible for citizenship, caused American Jewish leaders to fear that Jews would soon be denaturalized as well.

In 2013, more than 90% of U.S. Jews described themselves as white.However, the racial status of Jews has continued to engender debate, with some commentators arguing that all Jews are non-white.

South Asian Americans constitute a broad group of ethnic groups and racial classification of each of these groups has varied over the years.

The classification of Indian Americans has varied over the years and across institutions. Originally, neither the U.S. courts nor the census bureau categorized Indians as a race because there were only negligible numbers of Indian immigrants in the United States. Various court judgements instead deemed Indians to be “white” or “not white” for the purposes of law.

Unlike Indian Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Nepalese Americans have always been classified as “Asian”. Before 1975, both groups were classified as “other Asian”. In 1975, they were given their own separate categories within the broader Asian American category.

In 1909, Bhicaji Balsara became the first Indian to gain U.S. citizenship, as a Zoroastrian Parsi he was ruled to be “the purest of Aryan type” and “as distinct from Hindus as are the English who dwell in India”. Almost thirty years later, the same Circuit Court to accept Balsara ruled that Rustom Dadabhoy Wadia, another Parsi also from Bombay was not white and thefore not eligible to receive U.S. citizenship.

In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of Indian descent were not ‘white’ men, and thus not eligible to citizenship. The court conceded that, while Thind was a high caste Hindu born in the northern Punjab region and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Aryan race, he was not ‘white’ since the word Aryan “has to do with linguistic and not at all with physical characteristics” and since “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences” between Indians and white Americans.[71] Associate Justice George Sutherland wrote that Indians “cannot be properly assigned to any of the enumerated grand racial divisions.:

The U.S. Census Bureau has over the years changed its own classification of Indians. In 1930 and 1940, Indian Americans were classified as “Hindu” by “Race”, and in 1950 and 1960, they were categorized as Other Race, and in 1970, they were deemed white. Since 1980, Indians and other South Asians have been classified according to self-reporting,with many selecting “Asian Indian” to differentiate themselves from peoples of “American Indian” or Native American background.

The earliest Finnish immigrants into the U.S. were colonialists who were Swedes in the legal sense and perhaps spoke Swedish. They settled in the Swedish colony, and were supposed to have assimilated into the British culture quickly.

 More recent Finns were on several occasions “racially” discriminated against and not seen as white, but “Asian”. The reasons for this were the arguments and theories about the Finns originally being of Mongolian instead of native European origin due to the Finnish language belonging to the Uralic and not the Indo-European language family.

On January 4, 1908, a trial was held in Minnesota about whether John Svan and several other Finnish immigrants would become naturalized United States citizens or not, as the process only was for “whites” and “blacks” in general, and district prosecutor John Sweet was of the opinion that Finnish immigrants were Mongols. The judge, William A. Cant, later concluded that the Finnish people may have been Mongolian from the beginning, but that the climate they lived in for a long time, and historical Finnish immigration and assimilation of Germanic tribes (Teutons)—which he considered modern “pure Finns” indistinguishable from—had made the Finnish population one of the whitest people in Europe. If the Finns had Mongol ancestry, it was distant and diluted. John Svan and the others were made naturalized U.S. citizens, and from that day on, the law forbade treating Finnish immigrants and Americans of Finnish descent as not white.

In the beginning of the 20th century, there was a lot resentment from the local American population towards the Finnish settlers because they were seen as having very different customs, and were slow in learning English. Another reason was that many of them had come from the “red” side of Finland, and thus held socialist political views

Beginning in the 1840s, negative assessments of the “Irish character” became more and more racialized. Irish people were considered brutish and (like blacks) were often compared to simians. The “Celtic physiognomy” was described as being marked by an “upturned nose [and] the black tint of the skin.

In certain parts of the South during the Jim Crow era, Italians "occupied a racial middle ground within the otherwise unforgiving, binary caste system of white-over-black.” Though Italians were viewed as white for purposes of naturalization and voting, their social standing was that they represented a “problem at best.” Their racial status was impacted by their appearance and that they did not “act” white, engaging in manual labor ordinarily reserved for blacks. The trial of nineteen Italian immigrants for the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy in 1890, which ended in the lynching of eleven of them by a white vigilante group, sparked debate in the press over Italians supposed racial characteristics. Italians continued to occupy a “middle ground in the racial order” through the 1920s.

However, “color challenges were never sustained or systematic” when it came to Italians, who were “largely accepted as white by the widest variety of people and institutions” throughout the U.S. Even in the South, such as Louisiana, any attempts to disenfranchise them “failed miserably”

“If I eva mek it in loiife (mek it in loiife)

You a guh be living like royalty”

This video is so wonderful.