Thread by @michaelharriot

All I wanna say about the Kwame Brown thing is that he ain’t talking “country.”

A (probably) short thread.

First, you gotta remember that all accents come from somewhere. The Minnesota accent is just Nordic. Boston’s accent is Irish.

And that accent you hear from Kwame is Geechie/Gullah. But to understand it, you gotta understand how Black folks built this country.

Not figuratively

I mean literally.

Now, if you read those bullshit history books in school that the GOP was afraid of, they didn’t tell you that welfare & govt handouts built America.

See, Jamestown was basically a failure.

Those idiot colonizers seriously thought that jewels would be growing from trees when they got here. Plus, they arrived during one of the worst droughts in history.

And to top it off, they didn’t know how to do shit.

Remember, these weren’t explorers. The Virginia Company was a private enterprises and the people were “investors.” They were rich folks. And when they got here, they didn’t know how to plant shit, so they starved

First, the Powhatan helped them out, but the white boys got greedy

You know how it is when “those people” get on welfare. They start thinking they deserve it. So when the Powhatan stopped, the white folks had to eat their pets, their horses, their belts and, eventually, each other

But they called the natives “savages!”

nationalgeographic.com/science/articl…

Everything was falling apart & no one wanted to come here & work Until they came up with a plan. If you paid for an indentured servants to come over and work, you could get 50 acres of free land. If you bought over a family of 4, you could get 200 acres.

It worked!

Jamestown’s labor shortage was over because of The so-called “headrights”

In 1638, George Menefie came up with a way to finesse the system. What if he used enslaved Africans to claim headrights? After all, you don’t have let your human property go free, EVER!

Menefie did it and received a “patent” for 3,000 acres. One thousand one hundred fifty of those acres, Menefie claimed for “the Negroes I brought out of England with me.”

A year later, Menefie earned another 3,000 acres for importing fifteen more Africans.

It was always govt handouts!

In 1662, they changed the game. Va. passed a law that said, not only was slavery forever, but your children inherited it!

The next year England granted 8 Lord Proprietors the right to start the Carolina territories. But nobody came!

SC was different. It was hot. The soil was swampy. People came & tried & left.
They tried to lure people with Headrights but even poor white folks were like “nah”

So they had an idea. A bunch of wealthy Englishmen were already in Barbados, so they lured them here with headrights. But the Carolina Constity had an extra incentive article 110:

“Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves,”

In 1672 Morris Matthews was granted a few hundred acres overlooking the Ashley River, a few miles outside England’s first pre-planned city in the American colonies, Charles Towne at Albemarle Point

But Morris couldn’t do shit with the land so he sold it to Thomas and Ann Drayton

The Draytons had rcitrus farms in Barbados and they were gonna do the same in SC. And Carolina was so desperate for colonizers that they let the Draytons claim headrights on slaves that were in BARBADOS!

Welfare queens!

Anyway, the Draytons get the land, but their Caribbean slaves couldn’t grow citrus there. They bring some from Africa. They couldn’t The white folks were starving again!

But curiously the Black folks were fine.

They had been growing rice!

It turns out, there’s only 3 places in the world with soil made for large scale rice operations -Asia, the West Coast of Africa and the Ga-SC coast.

They RAIDED the African “rice coast” and created America’s first edible cash crop.

Now there are 3 basic rice operations in Africa, according to the terrain. A lot of people think White folks went to Africa and got the biggest slaves they could find.

Nah, bruh, there were no slaves in Africa.

They went and STOLE ENGINEERS who knew how to build levees, & dams required for SC soil. They got horticulturalists. They got toolmakers. And the crazy part was this:

It was the WOMEN who knew how to do it.

Now remember, the WHITE FOLKS DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS! They didn’t just steal the Africans’ labor, they used their intellectual property to build their generational wealth.

Growing rice is hard AF. It requires flooding fields and working in brackish water with mosquitos

Have you ever seen SC mosquitos? They’re like baby Bald Eagles! Not to mention the summer climate.

The life expectancy on most rice plantations was 19 years old. The birthrate on a rice plantation was 1/3rd of normal rate.

I don’t know if you knew this, but most slaveowners aren’t hard workers. They’re lazy and they live off handouts.

So not only couldn’t they do the work, they WOULDN’T do the work. One forced labor camp (y’all call them plantations) owner said:

“I would as soon stand fifty feet from the best Kentucky rifleman and be shot at by the hour, as to spend my night on a plantation in summer.”

So unlike most places, on rice plantations, white folks pretty much stayed out of the way.

What does all this have to do with the way Kwame Brown talks?

Well, all of these black people from different cultures in the Carribean, Africa and some English-speaking countries had to find a way to communicate with each other.

So they blended their languages, their religion, their traditions into a brand new Afro-Caribbean-Carolina/Ga. culture called the Gullah or the Geechie (Now, my folks are from the SC low country so we always said “Geechie.”

anyway…

By the Revolution, “Carolina Gold” made Charleston the 4th largest city in the US. The residents had the highest per capita income in the colonies.

In the 5 years before the revolution, Charleston imported more Africans THAN THE REST OF AMERICA COMBINED

So what you’re hearing is the remnants of tAfricans from the Caribbean colonies, and the Baga, the Fula, the Kissi, the Kpelle, the Limba, the Mandinka, the Mende, and the Wolof of West Africa.

What you’re hearing is a language you use when you bring your own “tote” bag to the farmer’s market, (a derivation of the Kikongo word tota or “pick up.”) Or when you call someone a “goober” you’re using a Kimbundu word for peanut, N’guba.

You’re hearing a tool of survival and resistance that allowed the enslaved to communicate with their fellow captives in right in front of those buckaroos (From buckrah, the Gullah word for “white man,” which is from “Nbakara,” an ibibio word for a white man)

You’re hearing one of the few non-indigenous languages created in the history of the world.

But what it ain’t…

Is “country.”