A Girl Like Me

I agree with the girl at 5:47. There is an unexplainable 'missing' part from my life, and this is possibly because I have no clue of exactly where I came from, whereas most of my friends can pinpoint where they came from and/or get genealogy tests to figure out this information. I have nothing.

White girls want to be darker skinned too. I raised one and when she was ten years old she told me that she wished that she was "mixed". You have to look at both ends of the spectrum. That also goes for the "baby test" which has no control groups and the ones shown appear to be led. Don't get me wrong, the young lady did well for a High School level documentary and you can't do much in seven minutes. I hope she doesn't take the "Michael Moore approach" in her next film.

The last child interviewed was blaming slavery on the fact that she has no heritage. Does she think whites in America today know exactly where there ancestors came from? Somebody needs to tell her that white people have such a mixed linage in America that we have no idea where we came from either. If she wants a "country of origin" in Africa then she needs to do what the white people do and that is to "pick your favorite".
No one alive today had anything to do with slavery in America.

There is a difference between having ancestors who chose to come to this country because it gave them freedom vs. ancestors who were forced into this country to be slaves. As a white American, I have to be careful to not forget that. Doing so is the equivalent of denying the ramifications of the Holocaust on Jews. It's false and ultimately unproductive.

I still have to disagree from a personal perspective. History that is not part of my time or existence is merely academic. They are interesting stories but I am not going to get emotional about the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Holocaust of the Jews, the Battle of Hastings, the Spanish American War or even slavery in America. None of these events had anything to do with me. I did not "choose" to come to this country. I just "appeared here" one day from my perspective.

It is curious how many people like to use "history" as an excuse for their own personal failures.

i just watched a docu on the racism in the Inian Culture. As a white American this was eyeopening. My boss is Indian and clearly has race issues w/in his own culture that I wish I understood..

as a child, I recall wanting hair like the black girls in my class, the beads the braids, the styles!!! All I had was a plain dumb ponytail. When I was about 10, I thought,darker brown the skin, the more powerful the person, or stronger. Its funny how as a child you come to certain conclusions. Once a very light skinned girl told me I wasnt allowed to play w/her & her black barbies Oh, I was hurt &offended I threw all my white barbies away because of her...Children are so impressionable.

@ Miss Ziegler, I often wonder the same thing @ are we as black people cursed...But then I contemplate on how The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade remains one of the worse institutions in history, as the after effects still remain to date. Why are some able to heal and get beyond what was done to us and our ancestors and others not? I pray God that we are able to heal as a race and be good to ourselves the way so many other races are.

Why am I not surprised? Sometimes I tend to think that the black race has been cursed in the far past or something. What went wrong with our people? I am not african american but I am african and what pains me the most while watching this documentary is that some Africans are way more brainwashed than some african americans. We have the same issues in the African community, if not worse. It i disgusting!