From Biqilan Network, with Dwayne Wong (Omowale) as the guest
Demystifying African diaspora origin myths
This is Biqilan Network’s video, and Dwayne is their guest. Watch it on their channel, where the comments are. This page is our summary of it.
Biqilan Network posted this Lunch and Learn interview, in which Dr. Bakari K. Lumumba, director of the MLK Center at Sacramento State University, asks the Pan-African historian Dwayne Wong (Omowale) about African diasporan origin myths: claims that Black Americans are actually Moors, Hebrew Israelites, the Nation of Islam’s Asiatic Black men descended from a figure named Shabazz, or Indigenous Americans who were never enslaved.
Dwayne traces the myths to internalized inferiority and a lack of African history education, and explains how to weigh primary sources against secondary ones and colonial bias. He says no enslaved person’s narrative claims Moor or Indigenous American identity, that Hebrew Israelite belief grew from a spiritual, not literal, connection to the Bible’s Hebrews, and that African loanwords survive in Gullah Geechee and Caribbean Creole while Hebrew ones do not. As evidence that the slave trade happened, they cite the wrecks of slave ships, the ships’ logs of their human cargo, Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.
