Filmmaker Dash Harris is the brainchild behind the ‘Negro’ docu-series which examines, through a series of interviews, what it means to be black and Latino within the Americas. Dash Harris is blurring the color lines and shedding a much needed light on the experiences of peoples of African descent around the world. Her docu-series Negro explores the interplay between race, color, and self-identification among Latinos in the Americas. By delving into the history of Afro-Latinos and giving them a platform to share their stories, Harris questions the structures that are in place to label people and attempts to shatter them.
Black and Afro-Latinxs have been doing their own organizing for generations, but in this current iteration, have shown extreme solidarity with U.S. Black people because it is our struggle as well – Dash Harris
Negro exposes the racism present in Latin American, challenges the lack of information that many people posses about blackness, as it pertains to countries outside of the United States, and directly challenges the idea that “beauty” and “white” are interchangeable concepts. Ultimately, by interviewing people of African descent in many different countries, including Panama and the Dominican Republic, Harris is able to get a large view of the identity crisis that Afro-Latinos deal with.
Our society has made it easy to categorize people broadly without understanding the history and roots of different ancestries. It’s become common to assume that how “black” you are is directly related to the amount of melanin in your skin. Instead of educating ourselves about our history and how complex and beautiful it is, we group people together and assume that we all have the same backgrounds. Conversely, while our differences have separated us and created a color complex between us, our similarities have commonly been forgotten. Most, if not all, of us are of African descent, whether we know it or not. As it was beautifully stated in Negro, if we get to a place where we see ourselves in each other, some of the hate will be dismissed.
Over time I started to doubt Christianity, because of the actions of others. I was judging God because of the sins of man. How foolish was I to think like this? I never completely walked away, but I was trying to merge all of my beliefs into one unified religion for myself. I was taking the good of everything and using them to find God…but was I really finding God?
Aug. 15, 2018 | Felix Contreras — Some folks around the NPR Music office said they felt an almost spiritual connection to Erykah Badu during her visit to the Tiny Desk. And that was before she and her band even played a single note. It came from the waft of earthly scents that followed in her wake, to the flowing dreads and clothes that hung on her like robes.
But the panoramic song “Green Eyes” is the centerpiece of Badu’s Tiny Desk performance. It’s wide-ranging in scope and musical arrangement and brilliantly executed by the jazz and hip-hop musicians in her backing band. The story of heartbreak is striking enough, but her interpretation showcases her formidable vocal skills. By the time it was over, we were all just as emotionally and spiritually spent as she was from the experience.
As early as the Middle Ages, “Moors were commonly viewed as being mostly black or very swarthy, and hence the word is often used for negro,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Author and historian Chancellor Williams said “the original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were black Africans.” The 16th century English playwright William Shakespeare used the word Moor as a synonym for African. His contemporary Christopher Marlowe also used African and Moor interchangeably. Arab writers further buttress the black identity of the Moors. The powerful Moorish Emperor Yusuf ben-Tachfin is described by an Arab chronicler as “a brown man with wooly hair.” Black soldiers, specifically identified as Moors, were actively recruited by Rome, and served in Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. St. Maurice, patron saint of medieval Europe, was only one of many black soldiers and officers under the employ of the Roman Empire. Although generations of Spanish rulers have tried to expunge this era from the historical record, recent archeology and scholarship now shed fresh light on the Moors who flourished in Al-Andalus for more than 700 years – from 711 AD until 1492. The Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art, and agriculture helped propel Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.
The Moors brought enormous learning to Spain that over centuries would percolate through the rest of Europe. The intellectual achievements of the Moors in Spain had a lasting effect; education was universal in Moorish Spain, while in Christian Europe, 99 percent of the population was illiterate, and even kings could neither read nor write. At a time when Europe had only two universities, the Moors had seventeen, located in Almeria, Cordova, Granada, Juen, Malaga, Seville, and Toledo. In the 10th and 11th centuries, public libraries in Europe were non-existent, while Moorish Spain could boast of more than 70, including one in Cordova that housed hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Universities in Paris and Oxford were established after visits by scholars to Moorish Spain. It was this system of education, taken to Europe by the Moors, that seeded the European Renaissance and brought the continent out of the 1,000 years of intellectual and physical gloom of the Middle Ages.
Cuisine
In the 10th Century, Cordoba was not just the capital of Al Andalus (Moorish Spain) but also one of the most important cities in the world, rivaling Baghdad and Constantinople. It boasted a population of 500,000 (200,000 more than now) and had street lighting, fifty hospitals with running water, three hundred public baths, five hundred mosques and seventy libraries – one of which held over 500,000 books. The Moorish achievement in hydraulic engineering was outstanding. They constructed an aqueduct, that conveyed water from the mountains to the city through lead pipes. All of this, at a time when London had a largely illiterate population of around 20,000 and had forgotten the technical advances of the Romans some 600 hundred years before. Paved and lighted streets did not appear in London or Paris for hundreds of years later.
Under the Moors, Spain was introduced to new food crops such as rice, hard wheat, cotton, oranges, lemons, sugar and cotton. More importantly, along with these foodstuffs came an intimate knowledge of irrigation and cultivation of crops. The Moors also taught the Europeans how to store grain for up to 100 years and built underground grain silos.
Here are some photos I took in New Orleans. I forgot to add them with the others. My fiancé also took a few photos, I will post those at the bottom. She did pretty good. She is finally starting to trust her camera. Photography is very frustrating when you can’t grab that perfect picture when you want it. You have to figure out which lenses are the best for the look you are trying to capture, and when is the best time of day to shoot. There are so many things that can affect the photos you create. I like to capture people smiling. I like to see them happy. I don’t really need a weird pose, just be normal. It doesn’t even have to be the best image quality, some people may disagree but I like the memories and if it comes out crazy looking who cares. Do what makes you happy.
UH OH, it’s Fat Tuesday and we are here down in New Orleans for the ZULU parade. The crowd is going fucking crazy for coconuts and beads. The bands are playing loud and the kids are out here excited to catch anything that comes off of each float that passes by. I noticed that everybody made sure all of the kids received something, no matter how big or small, They all got a gift. The culture down here is so rich and beautiful. I can see myself moving here one day. The only thing that scares me are the floods and from what I saw in Spike Lee’s documentary on hurricane Katrina…I’ll keep my ass up north where its dry. Anyway, I took some photos to share with you all. I took my handy Canon 80D with me and I put that work in. ENJOY!!!
Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed tells the extraordinary life story of Vertus Hardiman. It is a highly moving and vivid motion picture about the triumph of the human spirit. Additionally, the documentary exemplifies how the lives of two individuals were changed forever through an incredible friendship. After singing next to each other in a church choir for over twenty years, Vertus finally reveals to Wilbert a tragic and horrific secret he was forced to conceal under a wig for seventy years. This sparked a journey of the heart, which occurred while unmasking Vertus’ lifelong suffering. Human experimentation was a known reality throughout the early to mid-twentieth century in the United States. Often, people were used as human guinea pigs during these practices without their knowledge or consent.
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