Hello World! Not all Black Experiences Were Created Equal…Right?
“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.”
Artfully stated by Ifemelu, the protagonist of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Many of my fellow Gen Zers, thanks to pre-college English teachers, have seen Adichie’s viral TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story. Watching that talk did exactly what my seventh grade English teacher hoped it would — it changed my life. The “single story” perpetuated by media and literature that Adichie talks about, the one that causes people to generalize and make assumptions about groups of people they don’t know much about, seemed very prevalent in my town when it came to people who looked like me.
If I had ten seconds to describe my existence from the perspective of my classmates growing up, it would be with one all-encompassing word — confusing.
For context, I am Black, but I am also a woman, and since my junior year of high school, a hijabi. I am what my friends jokingly call a triple threat. The synopsis of Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis. For more context, I grew up in a very suburban, very white town, where I was probably the first black person, let alone Muslim, let alone hijabi, most of my peers had ever seen.
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The day I realized I was never going to be seen the same way as my white friends was in the seventh grade (clearly, an eventful year). Some boy in my social studies class had said, very simply, “You’re so dark.” A man of many words.
He barely knew who I was, and I didn’t know him either. I realized that while in my eyes he was just another kid in a school full of kids who looked just like him, to his untrained eye, I was That One Black Girl. Before that silly little core memory, I had heard it all, but I hadn’t fully grasped that before anyone cared to get to know who I was, at least where I lived, the first thing they would notice was my skin; I didn’t really have the choice to not draw attention to myself. To say the least, it drastically affected how they interacted with me.
My family and I spent this past summer in the West African country of Mauritania, our country of origin, for the first time in ten years. Between greeting the waves of relatives who came to visit, shopping and sightseeing here and there, and working up the nerve to order shawarma from the local restaurant in my very American-sounding French, I spent most of my free time reading.
Americanah, the first book I picked up last summer, inspired this very blog and strangely, fit perfectly into the context of my life that summer. It follows Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who immigrates to America for a better college education, and begins the learning curve of being a black person in the U.S. In the novel, she ruminates on the fact that she did not consider herself black until she came to America. This is the exact phenomenon my parents and relatives explained to me when I asked them if they had felt the same way.
When you are a black person from a country of black people, you don’t really have to acknowledge that aspect of your being. If everyone is black, why does it matter that you are too? No one points it out. You exist in a vacuum. It isn’t until you are no longer surrounded by people who look just like you, until you are a fish out of water, that you realize it is an identifying factor — a mark of difference. As soon as a Black African immigrant steps foot on American soil, they become their skin color, whether they realize it or not, just as African Americans have been for centuries.
Using anecdotes from my own life, I want to explore universal black experiences, and unique aspects of my life as a second generation African kid navigating Blackness in this country. Black people contain multitudes!
