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That's some deep expository shit you unleashed on us, w.c. edwards. Very articulate and informative. Certain references I could relate to. From childhood, my son has always been a fan of comic books, always fancied himself a comic book artist. He is now middle aged and still immersed in his affinity for this genre. Somewhere along his life's journey, he found religion and now has established his own small publishing company called Kingdom Comics, the banner under which he and a dedicated staff produce a biblical comic book series featuring superheroes on missions to stave off the apocalyptic forces of evil. Their demograph includes the incarcerated population that the prison ministries of churches focus on. There 's not a whole lot of profit to be realizied in this endeavor, but it is making inroads among the inmates languising behind bars, black males who have always been fodder for reading matter. This situation has the potential for a positive impact. Graphic novels and comic books can serve to enrich and stimulate the idle minds of these young black men wasting away in jails. Your theory about the motivation of escapist sci-fi and fantasy fiction was interesting. Conspiciously absent was no reference to the "Game of Thrones" phenomenon that is currently enthralling a large audience. This HBO series based on the books by the same name regularly frustrates its fans by killing off main characters. Its gratuitious sex and violence, however, might be construed as escapism. Recently a friend of mind was telling me that her late mother who would've been over a 100 years were she alive had said that she was descended from a segment of Blacks who came to America but rather than being from West Africa were Moors with an entirely different history. And no sooner had she mentioned this than another person I knew said the same thing about her forefathers. Who knew? Othello and his love for a white woman set a precedent for his countrymen transplanted in America. As someone who dabbles in writing, occasionally self-publishing a chick lit book here, a family saga book there, a paranormal tale elsewhere, I never expected fame or fortune or did I get it. But writers write. Readers read. If you're lucky you find your niche in the literary world.

Thanks for posting those C-Span links, I should've done that. You have a great website. I checked out those links. Great stuff. Great historical works. As to why I think I'm not culturally black or rather ethnically black is a whole complicated family history. Maybe a result of social isolation. We're not from this country originally. My family would be considered mixed race. As a young man I watched Gil Noble for many years. I think Herb Boyd might've appeared on BAI, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, I'm not unfamiliar with a lot of this history. Even though I had differences of opinion and politics with say someone like the late Elombe Brath, I'm not a Pan-Africanist, I listened to his show AfriKaleidoscope and even shows like Emanations. But famous or infamous BAI and race is a whole other topic. I don't like race identity because it is an imposition of racism. Racism gave us this selfconsciousness. I didn't choose to see myself in these terms. Yet I agree with Dr. Ben, Clark and Sertima about Ancient Egypt. I even believe there is evidence that the Sumerians were originally also in appearance another black race. Like with the ancient Egyptians whites are unwilling to see the truth, so “blackheaded” is a mistranslation of first blacks or chief blacks or black face or black skin. If the Sumerians were dark haired, they would've called themselves the black haired or dark haired, but there is enough leeway in translation that white scholars interpret “head” in terms of the skull rather than the terms of “first” or “chief” two possible terms for the word head. I couldn't get a leading Near East scholar to verify my research on this, to check out what I was seeing, I used an online dictionary so it's not proven or peer reviewed and debated. And I'm not a Sumerian scholar just an amateur. We also have the Dravidians as well. Even the question of black Asiatics. Yet my view of race and identity might be weird given my interest in proving the Sumerians were blacks of some sort. If only blackness, the skin, could actually unify Africans. It couldn't. It can't. Not there or here it seems. With its corrupt rulers or leaders, I don't see much unity in Africa even based on race. Nigeria is a perfect example of the failure of race in our sensibility if not religions. Hitler's Germany, with its complex racial science, is another example--other whites destroyed the Third Reich—the master race. So I don't believe in race, though I cannot deny what others want to see in me or what I'm made to see from the racist point of view. A white racist once said to me, "you can't see what I'm looking at". I don't know what he thought he saw and I'm glad I couldn't see it. I guess I looked like a mongrel. Maybe it was as disgusting and as horrible as Lovecraft's The Horror of Red Hook. The only thing I have in common with Lovecraft is a sickly, bookish childhood and an interest in writing as a result of becoming a captive of my imagination, too. I'm a liberal. He'd be considered conservative, right wing or liberterain or maybe just crazy. His writing is fascinating, I must admit, like certain forms of madness. Once down here, many years ago, a white man spoke to me in Spanish and I said I'm not Hispanic and I asked what were you saying to me. He had said I had whiteboy eyes. I think the strength of European culture resides in its intellectualism rather than its racism. That is whiteness is essentially intellectual prowess. Black intellectuals are essentially white too in their reasoning. When they say in the ghetto you talk white, you talk like an intellectual. And greed seems to infect all races of mankind. African Americans to a certain degree are already European in mindset given the amount of intellectual thinking and discourse on race questions we do. The tools of the language we speak. I suspect to be truly black is to be pagan, before Christianity and Islam. Blackness is a search for our lost paganism. The Afrocentrics have the right approach in some respects, though I have issues with them and find racial identity problematic in anycase.