Between African and Black
I have never identified as Black.
I identify as African. Kenyan. Kikuyu. A woman shaped by geography, language, and lineage. ‘Black’ has always felt external, something inherited through global politics and not something I could claim through personal history.
This became obvious to me during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance in 2025.
For days afterward, I watched the internet blow up in analysis. Think pieces. Threads. Reactions from Africans in the diaspora calling it a cultural reset. ‘A moment for Black people everywhere.’
I found myself curious as to why.
Why was this performance more than entertainment? And why did I feel both connected to it and outside of it?
I struggle with the term “Black” largely because of its origin. A label born out of a dark past, where identities were stripped from people who were enslaved and dispersed. A category that reduced entire civilizations to skin color. It erased languages, spiritual systems, ethnic distinctions, and flattened difference into a single word.
Black.
Never mind your clan, your cosmology, your music, your architecture, or your gods. You became Black because someone else needed you to be.
So I’ve felt resistance to it.
But watching Kendrick’s performance, I began to understand something I had not allowed myself to before: Blackness in the diaspora is no longer only a racial descriptor. It is a political and cultural identity forged under pressure. It is what has remained when everything else has been taken.
In that sense, Blackness may not be about origin but survival.
I began thinking about Beyoncé’s last two projects, Renaissance and Cowboy Carter. I have loved Beyoncé for most of my life, but these albums felt different. They felt archival.
Renaissance honored ballroom culture, a space shaped by Black and Latino LGBTQ+ communities who created a sanctuary in a society that rejected them. Ballroom was refuge and reinvention. A culture that emerged from exclusion.
Similarly, Cowboy Carter traced Black roots in country music, resurrecting figures like Linda Martell and challenging the myth that certain American genres were ever purely ‘white.’ It was as much about genre experimentation as it was about restoring memory. It was about insisting: We were here too.
Art, in this context, becomes an archive. Music becomes evidence.
And I realized something unsettling.
While I resist the term Black because it was imposed, many in the diaspora have transformed it into something authored. Something built through centuries of shared resistance.
Blackness in America was constructed in response to erasure. It became solidarity where tribe was lost, culture where lineage was severed, and strength because survival demanded it.
I cannot claim that same formation.
My identity was never stripped through transatlantic slavery.
Yes, colonialism was deeply damaging to Africans. Languages were undermined, spiritual systems attacked, and histories rewritten. But we were disrupted in place. Our lineages remained geographically rooted, even as they were reshaped.
So when diaspora communities speak of Black pride, of Black excellence, of Black survival as a singular force, I witness it with respect, but also with distance.
Yet, migration is blurring lines.
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There is a noticeable return of Black Americans and Caribbeans relocating to Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. Seeking reconnection and something ancestral.
I feel both warmth and friction in that movement.
My people.
Shaped by 400+ years of difference, oppression, resistance, and triumph, returning to a continent that continued without them.
We are connected by bloodlines interrupted. But we are divided by experience.
They inherited a racial identity forged in displacement. I inherited an ethnic identity shaped in place.
So where do we meet?
Perhaps in memory.
Music, fashion, and art: these are not just aesthetics. They are vessels. They carry what official history tried to bury. The chitlin’ circuit. The underground ballrooms. The first Black country singers who were footnotes instead of headliners.
These cultural moments, Kendrick at the Super Bowl and Beyoncé reconstructing archives, are not random spectacles but public memory work.
And maybe that is why they matter so deeply to the diaspora. Because when your history has been fragmented, visibility is not vanity, it is repair.
Still, I hesitate to say, ‘we.’
When I say ‘we,’ who do I mean?
Africans on the continent? Black Americans? The global Black body politic?
I do not know.
What I do know is this: Blackness, as expressed in the diaspora, carries the weight of survival in a way my Africanness does not. My identity is not primarily organized around resistance to racial oppression. Theirs often is.
And yet, I cannot deny that Blackness was constructed from African bodies. From African memory. From stolen African lineage.
Perhaps I am not Black in the diasporic sense.
But I am implicated in its origin.
Maybe the discomfort I feel is not rejection but humility. A recognition that I stand adjacent to a history that is both mine and not mine.
I do not identify as Black.
But I am watching Blackness perform itself globally, through halftime stages, through dance floors, through country ballads rewritten.
And I am learning that what was once imposed has become, for many, intentional.
Perhaps the divide I feel is not a wall, but a seam.
A place where difference and connection coexist.
I am African.
They are Black.
And somewhere in the tension between those two words is a shared inheritance still being negotiated.
