Between Blackness: Black But African in America…Especially in a Time of Revolution
By: N. K. A. Prempeh
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Black, Africans Abroad, Police Brutality, Revolution

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

In February of 2019, I all but told my girlfriend that I feared for my life. I’d stayed behind while she went into the grocery store because it seemed I was coming down with something. After about 30 or so minutes I began to panic. A young lady wearing her blonde hair in a ponytail peeked inside the car as I reclined and doubled her steps, driving off in haste. Minutes later, a middle-aged white woman, making her way to her car parked to the left of the one I was in, made it a point to look at me more than once, as if to make sure that one of us wasn’t in the wrong place. On the surface, these encounters brief as they were, seemed inconsequential. But when an old white man glared at me after parking his car where the lady in the ponytail’s car had been, I knew it was time to leave. I texted my girlfriend, asking her if she was done. “I am getting nervous now.” My text read.

About a week before our trip to the grocery store, a Taco Bell employee had called the police saying, that a man was slumped over in his car. Twenty-year old San Francisco native, William McCoy had been sleeping in his car, and according to several news reports was in possession of a handgun. The six California police officers arriving on the scene, startling McCoy awake and apparently fearing for their own safety, fired multiple rounds into his car, killing him. A lawyer for the family who saw the bullet riddled body counted about 25 gunshot wounds.

When I texted my girlfriend that February afternoon, it was in plain language doubling as code that I knew she’d understand. In the graduate program where we met, we had fellow students call Public Safety or police on us at least twice. Both times we had walked to the car late at night. We’ve been pulled over, followed by the police and separately dealt with multiple instances of microaggression and overt racism. But in spite of our shared experiences of Black oppression and marginalization, we had to scale barriers of mutual suspicion inherited from our particular Black experiences when we first met. A cousin of hers had said to her, “you have to be careful of those Africans,” a statement eerily parroted by my father in reverse: “Be careful of those African Americans.”

Pervasive within African and African American communities are misconceptions of each other based on misinformation, half-truths, and generalization leading to all sorts of suspicion. However uninformed and misplaced such sentiments generally are, they are more a consequence of complex and parallel systems of oppression such as colonization, slavery, and other iterations of white supremacy than meaningless mutual malice. The brand of oppression which generationally socializes Black people within the diaspora has a specific impact on how Africans and African Americans for example, acknowledge and relate to white supremacy.

A friend recently moved to the city of Orange in California for school, unaware of its history as a sundown town (partly manifested today by its overwhelmingly white population). Isolated and typecast as many international students are, this friend has since their arrival felt and continues to feel, by their own admission, more readily their isolation rather than the probable historical currents that make said isolation possible. Even in the face of constant microaggression and sometimes thinly veiled racism they admit their oblivion. Americans, Black and white alike, often perceive this oblivion as a kind of luxury.

Reflecting on this dynamic between Africans and Americans in a 2011 Guardian article, Cornell professor of English and Africana Studies, Mukoma wa Ngugi, writes of what he calls the African Foreigner Privilege, the idea that “in the United States, being African can get you into places being black and African American will not.” A privilege that according to Dr. Ngugi gives Africans the luxury of experiencing “a patronizing but helpful racism, as opposed to the hostile, threatened and defensive kind that African Americans grow up with.” Contained in the same article is an anecdote about former UN Secretary General, Ghana’s Kofi Annan in which the diplomat then an international student managed to get a haircut in the Jim Crow South after insisting that he was an “African” and not “a nigger.” Building on this anecdote, Dr. Ngugi goes on to cite Nelson Mandela, arguing that while it may have been impossible to overcome apartheid without the help of African Americans, it appears African Americans cannot count on the same energy, so to speak, from Africans where their own struggles against racism in America are concerned.

Yet, there is more than enough documented evidence of the scope and commitment of support that African countries and groups organized on the continent offered toward helping Black South Africa uproot apartheid. There is equally enough evidence of the myriad ways African independence struggle informed, and indeed was connected to the civil rights movement as attested to by luminaries like Dr. King.

Whether as a cushion, a shield or anything in between and beyond, a buffer — the role the existence of Africans (read Black immigrants) in America is often reduced to — for all intents and purposes exists to absorb shocks. And these shocks are not always in the form of “helpful racism.” I doubt that Amadou Diallo’s last thoughts were that he was encountering helpful racism as New York Police Officers fired 41 shots at him. Abner Louima likely does not think being tortured and sodomized with a broomstick by unrepentant officers amounts to helpful racism either.

For me as an individual, the more Americans thrust upon me a blackness that I may have wrestled with in different contextual ways than an African American might have, the further my already split identity is forced to crack along closely connected but loosely related oppressive lines. It means that when a white police officer, hands on his trigger, asks to see my hands while I fumble in my bag for my ID, my girlfriend visibly terrified behind the wheel, I have the same instinctual fear as a Black man born and raised in America. I do not attempt to persuade anyone like Kofi Annan allegedly did, that I am an African and not a nigger. Because I know whiteness wherever it encounters me, whether in the tropics of Africa or the chilly nights of America, will most likely consider me first to be erasable than human. I know. It is this knowledge that is on one hand the foundation of my solidarity and on the other an accusatory evidence of my presumed abandonment of my own homeland’s struggle with bigotry and the legacy of oppression.

Admittedly, growing up in Ghana meant that factors such as class, religion, and ethnic affiliations were more explicitly pronounced in my immediate understanding of what determined my station in life. But this incomplete understanding of the oppressive roots and fruits of my blackness is not an accident. The same overarching machinery that creates an African ignorance of African American oppressive experiences is the same one that creates an African American ignorance of Africa and African people — white supremacy and its anti-blackness. This is why while there is a legitimate argument to be made over African Americans disrespecting African culture by perpetuating a lazy Hollywood African accent for example, or some other form of social (and economic) dismissiveness that reproduces negative stereotypes of Africans, I am measured in my eagerness to bash such ignorance.

Part of the diabolic brilliance of colonization in Africa was the ways in which the colonized had their identities upended by means both explicit and implicit, so that in attempting to remedy the legacy of colonization it would be easier to focus on those aspects such as class that seem more plainly exposed, whereas the primary impetus of oppression, undeniably racial in nature, would be harder to expose and therefore address. And so while Kwame Nkrumah and other champions of African independence knew that self-determination was less about economic freedom and more about a holistic reclamation of identity, the emphasis on racial intolerance waned overtime. Hunger and general economic hardship were easier to see and feel affected by than the system of racial oppression that set the tone for such hardships in the first place. So even as America burns, there are those on the African continent wondering what any of it has got to do with them. Some with good intentions ask that Ghanaians and other Africans take the proverbial log from their eyes before attending to the speck in America’s eye. The naivety of such calls only demonstrates how deeply rooted the insidious reach of white supremacy is. So much so that whole nations still grapple with the internalized oppression bequeathed to them by the anti-blackness of colonialism. There are those who say that it would be the embrace of a victimhood mentality to blame universal Black struggle on historic oppression. But it goes without saying, that the historically oppressed, wherever they may be, are victims of systemic abuse, plain and implicit.

And so when Africans and other Black immigrants leave home, they do so in search of that which they believe would fill the void that makes them feel like fractions as opposed to whole human beings. The tragedy isn’t that they do not feel whole and therefore leave home. The tragedy is that they often leave without realizing why they have a need to pursue wholeness in the first place. They may arrive in America chasing the power of agency, with their blackness not necessarily at the fore of their consciousness, until the inescapable whiteness of America makes them more than aware of their blackness. For me, that shock was for a while enduring. Because Black immigrant ignorance is no luxury or privilege, it holds no immunizing power against the violence of racism. If anything, it more swiftly expedites the demise of our Black lives. For instance, a Black immigrant’s ignorance of the fact that unlike their home country simply making eye contact with the police or waving at them could very well become adequate warrant for the police to harass or worse snuff out their life, is depressingly telling. There is no such thing as benevolent brutality in such an encounter. To the whitescape, black is black, and if a Black African immigrant is slow or unwilling to acknowledge this, it is more of a testament to the depths of their oppression and the reach of white supremacy than it is some immigrant privilege.

Black immigrants in America, especially those of previous generations, may respond to the overt racial realities of the land by falling into general silences and dispositions that sometimes align them with whiteness and the power it represents, mostly as a form of survival and self-preservation; a way to escape the powerlessness that defined the lives they left behind and still often defines the lives they now strive for. They are the surviving witnesses of bloody revolutions that failed to deliver on the promise of a better life. Their hesitancy toward solidarity is complicated, for as much as it is admittedly harmful, it is in their eyes a necessary model of self-preservation. So while it would seem that all Africans have to offer African Americans is the ignorance fueled apathy of the current generation and the self-preserving silence of the older generation, such a picture is an incomplete one.

As protests across America shake the country awake from its conveniently imposed slumber and blindness to anti-black racism, the chorus of the fed up is composed of Black people born in America and those from the African continent and the Diaspora beyond the United States. Black Lives Matter co-founder, Opal Tometi, whose parents are Nigerian, was prior to the BLM Movement heavily engaged (and still is) as a transnational feminist and anti-racist activist fighting for Black immigrant justice. Other Black groups and individuals born in Africa and living in America, including international students like myself, wage the daily war of opposing anti-black racism wherever they encounter it. My friend who recently moved to California led chants at a protest in Orange County’s historic Old Towne. Many more have contributed through monetary and other means.

In response to writing about being Black in America, a Ghanaian friend remarked “You have joined them.” In other words I have lent my voice to African American struggle at the expense of my own. Another friend punctuated a conversation about staying vigilant in America with the question: “And then what?” Their point was that vigilance would not save them from being hunted and mistreated, it would only compound the misery they’d known in another form in their home country. They seemed to be responding to Baldwin — “ to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you” — posing the question: “What use is my rage if it only further vilifies me?” The struggle is complex. But Black in America means that you are vilified anyway, so why not use the rage as a megaphone? As with many things, this is easier said than done, and this may be why while many Black Africans carry solidarity, it is begrudging not because they do not care what happens to Black Americans, but because nobody is eager to invite double oppression, first as a ward of colonization, and then as a ward of slavery. I offer no absolution here. But to oversimplify this reality would be self-righteous and disingenuous.

Black ignorance is not the same as white ignorance. The costs may not be the same. Their functions are not the same. And the histories they are connected to are not either. Where one flows from the bloody and the implicit perpetuation of abusive power, the other flows from the marginalization that the former engenders and maintains. Misinformation of Black people about their own histories — whether through inherited colonial educational systems in Africa or revisionist policies in America — is not a coincidence. The kind of unlearning required to come to terms with the internalized oppression such miseducation produces can feel like an extra burden for those who may be tired of surviving in ways that are often not as documented and explicit as the case may be in America.

I may never know what it means to grow up being called nigger in all its pejorative might, but it does not mean that African oppression — so deep that whole generations lack the self-awareness to fully comprehend the weight of their blackness — is any less valid, nor do my particular African sensibilities inoculate me against the violence of racism in America and elsewhere. As Garnette Cardogan says in Walking While Black I too have “had to cobble together my own rules of engagement.” And because the comparison of suffering, or oppression Olympics as more poetic people would call it, is a most useless form of salve, I do not hasten to say to my African American friends that they do not know what it means to be Black or to be born again as Black in America, that is, to be both African and Black in a land that profited (and still profits) from both colonization and slavery. Instead, I weep for the slain and mourn with the bereaved, for it is my brother who is slain and I who am bereaved; I chant with the enraged and I fight with the fed up, for I am enraged and fed up. This is not because all Black people are the same or “one people” in a nonsensical kumbaya fantasy. But rather because with our rich complexity we are and ought to be united against the evil of white supremacy and anti-black racism. The fight is with those who seek to oppress blackness and black lives, regardless of how it is expressed. Black Lives Matter. A luta continua.