By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ——Bio and Archives--September 9, 2016
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“Black America has always imagined Africa like the adopted child imagines the birthparent. The dream is that Africa holds a truth for us. Keith Richburg marches through that dream and finds that he was an American all along.”Richburg went to Africa as a journalist in 1991-1994 and reported on “the famine and anarchy in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, the Liberian ‘wackiest, ruthless, and uncivil war,’ and the failing state of Zaire.” (p. 134) He wanted to identify with Africa but instead, as Newsweek wrote, he bitterly repudiated Afrocentrism. “As a black American returning to the land of his ancestors, he filters all he sees through the prism of his racial identity. Instead of empathy he feels only a deepening sense of estrangement.” Richburg wrote, “I was thankful to have been born in America, where even for a black man, a descendant of slaves, anything and everything was possible.” Returning to Africa in 2006, Richburg found Somalia “as depressing as when I first visited there in 1991.” When he reported on Zimbabwe in his book, it “had growth rates, high literacy, and the ability to feed itself.” But the 2006 Zimbabwe was an abysmal place. Mugabe had destroyed the middle class, ruining the formerly prosperous African country, causing half of its 12 million citizens to be dependent on international food aid. Inflation was running at “200 million percent,” epidemics flared up, and there was no water, sanitation, health care, and schools, the basics offered by a properly functioning society. Having watched the “… dead float down a river in Tanzania,” having come close to being killed in Somalia and ignored by American soldiers driving by who could have saved him from a dangerous situation when he waved his press credentials and passport, scared in the realization that they only saw a man who looked like a potential Somali murderer, Richburg thanks God today that he is an American. As a black man in Somalia, he “was constantly at risk.” (pp. 84-85) Richburg watched his journalist friends die at the hands of warlords in Somalia, victims of the very population they tried to help when they brought the plight of Somalis on camera, for the world to see. Hopes were quickly dashed, he said, that “Africa might become the testing ground for the New World Order.” South Africa’s “racial groupthink” helped him realize that everyone was defined and categorized according to the color of their skin. Although growing up as a “black kid in a white country,” he avoided being defined by the color of his skin and believed Martin Luther King’s vision of a man being defined by the content of his character. Richburg avoided the label “black reporter,” he preferred “good reporter.” Yet he found out that various African dictators suggested that, “as a black reporter, I was supposed to report more favorably on them.” (p. 195) He wrote in foreword that, seeing “a black man, the son of a Kenyan exchange student and a white woman from Kansas, as president of the United States and the most powerful person in the world, I feel that, whatever the cynics said, the faith I put in this country has been more than vindicated.” Out of America ends on an upbeat note. People may think of Richburg as an Africa hater, racist, or even a “self-hating man who has forgotten his African roots.” Can we forget something we never really knew in the first place? He is grateful to have been born a black man in America. … “Everything I am today – my culture and attitudes, my sensibilities, loves, and desires – derives from that one simple and irrefutable truth.” At the end of the day, we are not hyphenated, we are all Americans. The people of Baton Rouge have shown the world a united American front of brotherhood, courage, and dignity.
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Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism”, “Liberty on Life Support” and “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” “Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later” are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.