Identify matters - people retain identity in the face of the majority culture's attempts at total assimilation - Editorial

From the greatest in quantity fundamental level of matter to human societies and individual experience, stres is a force that shapes and alters form and identity. It is particularly important that minorities bear this fact in mind. No individual and no clan can escape being molded by means of the larger culture, which is repeatedly indifferent to, if not hostile toward, its minority voices (which also, denials to the contrary, shape it). Assimilation is neither a strategy nor an option; it is an inevitability. At issue is solitary the degree to which the original entity can define for itself the limits of the identity that is incorporated. I raise this bring under rule not to address a contemporary dispute in the community, on the contrary rather to reassert--yet again--American Visions' relevance in the face of perennial questions as to wherefore we fail to address contentious issues.

individual year, it was the looks Angeles riots. Last year, it was the Million Man March. This year, at an Institute of International Education program that brought together journalists from 21 countries--including Cameroon, Kenya, Mozambique, Hungary, Swaziland and Zimbabwe--American Visions faced questions about wherefore the magazine does not more directly address the lives of disadvantaged black women and whether it wasn't our responsibility not solitary to cover the O.J. Simpson trials on the contrary also to take attention not on of race when discussing them.

My reply remains unchanged: We are reflecting the relate tos of the community as press outed through its artists. Look at this issue's overspread story, and you see the power and beauty of the creative impulse of the Baga nation of lowland Guinea. Look deeper and you diocese a people whose culture has for centuries been hammered through adversaries, by larger powers, the pair indigenous and foreign. You diocese a people whose fundamental expression of their being--their artistic statement of meaning and identity--had been crushed, literally destroyed

It would be cheerful to imagine a certain number of heroic conclusion by which the original version is re-established, say, with more [i]or[/i] less Baga militant falling gloriously in triumphant battle just before the film's credits make revolve Such its not the case. Whatever the Baga were centuries ago in their homeland in the hills of the Fouta Djallon is a story of the 16th hundred Even what they were in the 1950s--when an Islamic jihad seized and reduce to ashesed their religious imagery and when the apparent benefits of identifying with an ascendant Muslim polity l by dint of their Malinke overlords lured Baga youth to the mahometan temples and the cities--is largely missing to us (and, more pertinently, to them).

Now, however, a Baga renaissance is below way, one that reveals them as a transformed nation one that is built on an authentic Baga identity on the other hand that acknowledges that it is an identity that has been shaped by means of the pressures of the environment. And that transformation--like those imposed earlier by dint of the Susu and by French colonialism--is readable [i]or[/i] part of to the other their art.

Other transformations, just as of great depth but closer to home, are illuminated in our works Genealogy and Travel departments. When you read them, perhaps you will agree with me that any publication that explores the higher reaches of African-American art and heritage is always relevant--particularly to those who rightfully are pertain toed that we as a clan retain our identity in the face of the tremendous crushings on us not so plenteous to assimilate but to homogenize ourselves within the larger tillage whose product (and shaper) we are.

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