Isn't the Eddie Murphy thing a Michael Jackson video? Probably Egyptians should be upset about that too.
My son likes a jazz inflected group called Sons of Kemet. I didn't know what Kemet was until reading the link, but I like the band. This tune is a nice sample.
It's a little strange to have a contemporary music exhibit at a Museum of Antiquities, but I guess you gotta get people in the door somehow.
Speaking of Middle Easterners and racism, currently there's a somewhat strange soccer controversy where a dark-skinned Qatari (Yusuf Abdurisag, not sure what his ethnic background is) allegedly said something very racist during a soccer match to a light-skinned Samoan Kiwi (Michael Boxall), and the New Zealanders quit the match in protest. Of course it's not the most important part of this, but everyone on Reddit is like "Wait, what's something you can say that's racist against Samoans? and why would a Qatari know any racist slurs against Samoans?" (No one seems to know the answer, but presumably it's something not specific to Samoans at all, like calling him a monkey.) (There was also a separate abandoned game where the Ireland U21's walked out on the Kuwaitis over another racist incident. So anyway, yeah, lots of racism by middle easterners in the news this week.)
I like to think U21 is a U2 cover band.
I'm a big fan of Sons of Kemet. Also of the various side projects of most of the members and former members together or apart. Pretty much everything Shabaka Hutchings, Seb Rochford,* Theon Cross, and Tom Skinner have done is pretty great.
* who, bizarrely, also appears on an Adele album.
If you really want to piss off a Samoan, call him a Tongan.
Is a Tongan going to feel complimented if you call him a Samoan?
The exhibition sounds really interesting - I didn't know there was much Egyptian influence on African diaspora music. You only ever hear about the West African influence.
Prince, however, merits a hard stare for this:
One of the examples presented is the Prince song entitled Muse 2 the Pharaoh. It begins: "If she could be a Muse to the Pharaoh / then one day she might be Queen."
Put down the mythology textbook and back away slowly, Prince.
As does Nas for this:
Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went / He was so shocked at the mountains with Black faces / Shot up they nose to impose what basically / Still goes on today, you see
What the fuck, Nas. Alexander the Great shot the nose off the Sphinx, did he? With his cannon?
It's one of these things that's anomalous now that Trump has unified white and Latin conspiracy theorists on the left and right, but there's a huge tradition of conspiracy theory thinking in Black American culture around Afrocentric history and Ancient Egypt. See also everything about The Nation of Islam.
IVE GOT A SECRET BUT ITS ONE THATS HARD TO KEEP
I WANT TO TELL THE WORLD
THAT SPECIAL SAMOAN IS MY GIRL
SHE WANTS TO BE MY SPECIAL SAMOAN TOO
10: I think we should remain open to the idea that white people were created in a lab by an evil scientist. Teach the controversy.
For real, at a thirty-year distance since I knew anything, I only remember two words in Samoan that were "really don't say this -- you'd be starting something that could plausibly get violent" and they weren't category slurs, they were body-part obscenities (both weird choices by US standards, but obscenity is pretty arbitrary). I bet whatever they guy said was more "whatever Qataris say about disfavored groups in Qatar" than something particular about Samoans.
I only remember two words in Samoan that were "really don't say this -- you'd be starting something that could plausibly get violent"
"Spam's shite."
Abdurisag is not a Qatari name. My guess is he's a naturalized Somali. He also alleges racist taunts directed at him by the other team FWIW.
Abdurisag himself was born in Doha, but he's of Somali extraction.
https://hilltopfc.co.uk/making-our-mark-the-past-present-and-future-of-somalis-in-football/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusuf_Abdurisag
The OP is interesting. The discourse on Afrocentrism and Ancient Egypt in the US, at least, rarely seems to be touch on how modern Egyptians feel but there seems to be a parallel discourse there.
Maybe the Egyptian Antiquities Service just needs to remember that Amr ibn al-As lived closer in time to today than Ramesses II did to Amr ibn al-As.
6, 7: the whole project of ranking Polynesians is complicated by the fact that they're pretty much all bigger than you.
Speak for yourself.
So are Scandinavians, but you can easily rank them (Icelanders, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians).
Interesting lecture on statue defacement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj_0yT6TcoU
(Nas does indeed have it wrong. Good song though!)
Any self-respecting Finn knows they're not Scandinavian. (Nordic, but not Scandinavian.)
Since when are there self-respecting Finns?
That's actual Finns, not the Finnish-Americans at the bottom of the PNW Scandihoovian pecking order as I learned it as an impressionable young lad.
No other Nordic immigrants had to prove they were white in court.