Charlamagne, You Keep It Real? Then Keep It Real About This.

Disclosure: True News is a Bagley Enterprises platform. This is an opinion piece by Len Bagley, founder of True News and Deputy Chief Minister of PAAN Ministries. The arguments are his.

@cthagod, you keep it real? Then keep it real about this. Rap, soul food and barbecue are Black American. And the Asiatic "Native American" exists only in a 1590 theory and an 1854 court case. The records are in the DNA series. Why haven't you said a word?

The Breakfast Club sat down Nataanii Means and ANTOINEX to talk Indigenous Peoples' Day, "Native misconceptions" and hip-hop. Charlamagne tha God, a Black American who built a career on Black American culture, handed the biggest morning platform in the culture to that conversation. That is not solidarity. That is platforming a rewrite.

Rap has an address

Hip-hop was born in the Bronx in the 1970s among Black American youth, with Caribbean-born figures like DJ Kool Herc working inside that same Black urban world. The parties, the breaks, the MCs, the records, the language, the attitude came from Black American creators. Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, the Furious Five, the Cold Crush and the generation after them were not borrowing someone else's form. They built it. The global industry that still runs on that form runs on Black American invention.

Anyone can pick up a mic. But "Indigenous rap," sold as its own tradition, is culture theft, the same way K-pop took Black American music, dance and style, repackaged it and sold it back to the world without the people who made it. It has gone so far that you now see Native American acts working crip walking into their performances, a dance that came out of Black Los Angeles. When a group takes the music, the dance and the slang of the continuous Black American population, that is not representation. That is wearing someone else's culture. It has to stop.

Using a major Black American platform to frame the conversation as if the form is being reclaimed or originated outside the people who created it makes it worse. Charlamagne is not confused about where the music came from. He profits from the audience that music built. Letting that narrative pass without the hard clarification on air is a choice.

While we're here: soul food

Soul food is a Black American cuisine. It was developed on this land by the continuous population under the conditions of the South: slavery, emancipation, sharecropping, the Great Migration. The name itself was claimed in the 1960s as a Black American cultural marker. Collards, smothered meats, cornbread, baked mac and cheese in that tradition, the combinations and the techniques are American, made by Black people here.

Native American foodways exist. Cuisines of the African continent exist. Neither one is soul food. When anyone claims soul food as simply "African," or inserts another group as its source, they erase the specific people who turned limited ingredients into a named American tradition.

And barbecue

American barbecue is the same story. The Southern pit, the whole hog, the long slow fire, the sauce traditions and the craft of running a pit all night were worked and passed down by Black American hands on this soil. The barbecue joint, the church cookout and the family reunion grill are Black American institutions. Barbecue is not a floating "people of color" invention, and it is not on loan from anywhere else. It belongs to the continuous Black American population that built it.

Now the part you haven't touched

Charlamagne, you built your name on keeping it real. So keep it real about this.

True News has put a documented record in front of the public in the DNA series, and it is not opinion. It is traced to the historical record, not only in the United States but in the records of the colonial powers themselves.

The Asiatic "Native American" identity does not exist outside of a theory and a court case. Not one eyewitness in the contact record of the Caribbean, the Southeast, the Eastern Woodlands, the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf, the Mississippi, Mexico, the Southwest or the California coast describes these people as Asian, Asiatic, Mongolian or yellow. The Europeans knew what an Asian looked like. They had Marco Polo's Tartar, and Tatar servants lived in Italian cities through the 1400s. Verrazzano, a Florentine, looked at the people of the Carolina coast and compared them to Ethiopians. Jonathan Carver, in 1778, wrote that their skin was "of a reddish or copper colour."

The Asian origin enters the record as theory. A Jesuit, José de Acosta, argued for a land route from Asia in 1590. Racial science carried it forward. Then in 1854, in People v. Hall, the California Supreme Court ruled that "Indian" meant "the whole of the Mongolian race," on account of "the supposed common origin." The court admitted science "may have shown" that "the Aborigines are a distinct type," and ruled it "would not in any degree, alter the meaning of the term." That is the foundation: a theory, and a court that was told it might be wrong and wrote it into law anyway.

The people the colonial record describes were dark people, in the range of color you can see in Black American families today, from the lightest, nearly white-passing, to the darkest. There is no Asiatic phenotype in that record. And the record of what happened next is just as documented: Virginia's 1705 code put "negroes, mulattoes, and Indians" together; the 1924 Racial Integrity Act forced every birth into "White" or "Colored"; the 1940 census told enumerators to return a person of mixed Indian and Negro blood as Negro. The aboriginal and indigenous lineages of the continuous population were reclassified, step by dated step, into a category named for another continent.

So here is the question. You keep it real. You've had Elizabeth Warren on about her ancestry claim. You just gave the hour to Indigenous identity and hip-hop. With this much documented fact on the table, why haven't you said a word about it? We are not speaking from a place of ignorance. These are the records. The culture you profit from deserves a host who will read them on air.

The invitation stands

Charlamagne, the mic is open both ways. Put the full record on air: the music, the food, the barbecue, and the DNA series. We will bring the documents.

Read the DNA series: truenews.bagleyenterprises.net (link)

The full record in one place: truenews.bagleyenterprises.net (link)

Related papers (Academia.edu, Len Bagley): The Resolution Gap; Separating the African from American.

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/996