Selassie I is any colour he wants to be, yesterday he was Black, today maybe he is White, tomorrow Chinese. What can you do about it ? Selassie I is not who you say he is. He just is. HAYL~
You do realize that this is EXACTLY what the Idren have been stuggling against since this topic surfaced. It's this kind of internalized racism that allows a man described as a copper color with wooly hair to become blond haired and blue eyed. Regaurdless of the fact that he was a Hebrew. This kind of blatant disregaurd for the darker peoples of the world is probably the foundation for Israel's campain to dominate the Middle East.
Throughout history colors have been incredibly symbolic for many cultures around the world, especially indiginous cultures. For instance Budda comes in a variety of colors each one having a special meaning and representing a diffrent temperment. The Kemetans, who are notourious for having an alterative meaning to everything, also used color to convey meanings and each god had a specific color. The Native peoples of North America attribute quite a bit of meaning to color as well. And this is just off the top of my head bredren.
Rastafari also use colors to convey messages, hence the fact that we proudly display our ice, gold and green. In fact, lets take a moment to decode these colors, shall we. Firstly it is worth mentioning that these are the colors of the Ethiopian flag (as well as quite a few other African countries). Now, red is for the blood of the martyrs, green is for the vegitation of Africa, and gold is for the wealth of Africa. Black is also an important color as it represents the people of Africa, and although it is not one of the prominent three it is our neutral color (not brown as some may say). And as black is not actually a color but rather the abscence of color it is the only neutral "color" in existance. White is what you get when you mix all the colors together, assuming that you deal with the light spectrum rather than the backwards spectrum that is what the eyes percieve (this is science not theory).
Now I have said all of that to make this point: Removing the meanings of colors from any culture is at the least gentrification (Gentrification refers to the physical, social, economic, and cultural phenomenon whereby working-class or inner-city neighborhoods are converted into more affluent communities, resulting in increased property values and the outflow of poorer residents) and at most genocide (Genocide is defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) article 2 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: "Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.").
I leave you to decide the importance of acknowledging the God of the Rasta movement as a Black man.
And as a side note, remeber the holocaust.
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