It took black people almost two months, but they finally realise they're a meme.

That doesn't irritate me, it depresses me. There's plenty of Muslims in West Africa, and have been for a thousand years. And while the majority of African slaves weren't Muslim, many were; especially the ones the Portuguese captured/purchased. So on the surface, I see where they get the idea, even if it's not 100% accurate.

The problem is that the biggest "Muslim" movement among black Americans was/is the Nation of Islam, which isn't remotely Muslim. I know, the Yakub thing makes for a great meme, but come on. That's not Islam. And while their membership is fairly negligible today, I would hazard a guess that the majority of black Americans who converted to Islam were, at one point or another, associated with the group or one of its offshoots. I mean, they were everywhere in the 1960s, and heavily involved with the civil rights movement.

It pissed my mother off to no end, since while she wasn't religious, her maternal grandparents were Mourides. My grandmother had already rejected that repressive bullshit when she married my non-Muslim grandfather, so there was no way my mother was gonna have anything to do with a knockoff Islam in America. And my father, like many people who were actually born in Africa, just hated pan-Africanism in general.

But most black Americans hardly know anything about Africa, so they just latch onto whatever has an "African aesthetic", regardless of authenticity. It's a shame, really. They live in the greatest country in the world, and they spend their whole lives trying to pretend they're more connected to somewhere they've never set foot.