Afrofuturism Week 1 post

Hegel’s excerpt starts almost immediately with a harsh criticism of Africans. “The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this kind of character.” Hegel makes his prejudice clear right away, juxtaposing black people with other humans, but noting a clear difference in the way he perceives Africans and humans as a whole. By saying that Negroes are untamed – and using that as a slight against their humanity – he is just exposing his thinking that in order to be at a point of equality with other people, black people need to be controlled, presumably by a [white] majority. Throughout the text, Hegel’s language and just the overall tone in which he describes Negroes/Africans reveals that he sees them as a different entity of people, an outcast group that is taking up space in his preferred society. He accuses them of hypocrisy for selling their own children into slavery in Africa even though “their own people” are being enslaved in the Americas by Europeans. Hegel reads like someone who is on the outside looking in to a topic in which he speculates in the absence of knowledge.

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