Don’t Forget You’re Black

In America, if you forget that you’re black someone is always there to remind you.

The first time I heard an African say that he did not know he was black until he had lived in America, I shook my head in pity.

“Hmmm, another African who is not proud of the darkness of their skin,” I thought.

But I had gotten it wrong. Very wrong.

I didn’t know this at the time but that person, a Kenyan native, had expressed what many African immigrants in America would vehemently agree with.

Sure. This person knows the hue of their skin, this person knows that their nose has more rounded angles than…Caucasians (I don’t like using that word, but the alternatives are just as inaccurate…) And yes, this person knows that their hair is kinky, nappy, tightly coiled, coarse, whatever you wanna call it. It ain’t the hair worn by the fair-skinned kind of folks in America who will tell you ‘oh, you speak good English for an African.’

Don’t play dumb, you’re black. Oh, you didn’t know? Well, you are. Welcome to U.S.A. Be safe and don’t do anything crazy.

Because in America, if you forget that you’re black, someone is always there to remind you. Sitting in the passenger seat next to my father as we drive into our new neighborhood, I heard, “Stay in your lane, NIGGERRRRR!” and looked over to see a lanky white guy in denim overalls sticking his head out the car window and glaring at my father. “NIGGERRRR!” The word bounced in my head and with each thud of it, my mind cringed. My father had shaken his head and chuckled. A noble gesture of one who is sure of himself. (An African-American person is more likely to have had a more expressive reaction that my father did. The word is more sensitive to African-Americans.) My dad would probably still chuckle today if someone were to call him a nigger. They reminded President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign trail. Said he wasn’t a “real American,” called him a straight up nigger in some places. Please, even Jesse Jackson said it. I still hear reporters on television referring to President Barack Obama as, “Mr. Obama.” I still read news articles in which he is referred to as “Mr. Obama.” I don’t get it. Nevermind, I do get it. I almost forgot that Obama has a black father. Thanks for the reminder, journalists. Ya’ll are doing ya’lls job, I guess. Reporting, right?

Do you also want to remind me that the one-drop rule still applies, too?

I almost forgot that I was black one day. I guess I had forgotten to put the label on that morning before I left the house. I went to a restaurant with friends, one of those Chinese ones that serve food so greasy, food so junky, so yummy that you just wanna shoot yourself after eating it. I almost never got a chance to eat the stuff because we were ignored by the restaurant staff. So my friends and I led ourselves through the foyer (the goldfish in the fish tank looked like they were being well taken care of) and then we selected a table. And then we called a waiter to tend to us. And then we called the waiter to take our drink order. And then we looked for the waiter because it seems she had been swallowed into a black hole in outer space. Oh, wait, no she was with the group of white people who had just arrived. She relieved them of their winter coats. (My own coat had more room on the seat that I did.) Our waiter led the other party to a table. And she took their drink orders. She brought out the drink orders faster than you can say, “waiter,” but we had said waiter, my friends and I, we had said waiter plenty of times. Because we hadn’t gotten our drinks, the ones we ordered long before the party of melanin-less, blue, brown, green-eyes, maybe even purple eyed people came in. Waiter! We haven’t got our drinks! I only asked for room temperature water with a slice of lemon at the side. You’re lucky I didn’t ask you for an organic lemon because then you may have had to go to Whole Foods Market to buy it and we all know that’s not gonna happen.

I’m black. My friends are black. Caramel, mohagony, creamy brown, chocolate, chestnut, it don’t matter. We’s black. So we got our food after everyone else in the restaurant had eaten to their stomach’s content and had put on their coats and had gone home and had wished they had never eaten another helping of general tso’s chicken because the monosodium glutamate (MSG) in the sauce makes their ears twitch and possibly even flap.

I bet they had a good time, because my friends and I, we almost didn’t. We didn’t even concentrate on the lackluster service of our waiter. All she gave us was attitude. Attitude for what? Because you don’t think we’re gonna leave an adequate tip? What’s the terseness for? Don’t jump, he didn’t say, “he’s gonna kill you.” He just asked you what type of salt is used in the white sauce.

I remembered that night. I remembered that I was black.

This famous 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live, by Norman Rockwell has become an iconic image of the civil rights movement. It depicts Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl, on her way in to an all-white public school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 during the process of racial desegregation. Because of threats and violence against her, she is escorted by four U.S. Deputy Marshals.

I was raised in America and I traveled here and there, with the exception of the west coast, I think I’ve covered the major areas: Midwest, Northeast, South. I’ve even been through Appalachia. Appalachian America is a country within a country. In Appalachia, racism is believed to be worse, perhaps because Appalachians themselves, have it bad.

Like many in Appalachia, this girl lives in poverty

They’ve been dubbed “America’s forgotten people” since the early 20^th century. And yes, my blackness shone and glittered in defiance, surrounded by blondies and brunettes everywhere from the local Wal-Mart to the church to the honky tonk where I took my first attempt at clogging. (Clogging is folk dance accompanied by bluegrass music and it involves slapping your feet on the ground, it’s akin to Irish traditional dancing.)

Life in America can be harsh and the identification, the labeling, the branding of black people is everywhere.  CNN’s “Black in America” series reinforces that black is real, so the Nigerian guy who professed to me that he is not black, that he is just a darker shade of the range of human skin tones can maintain that perspective because he has never lived in America. But of course, he doesn’t know this.

America is a land where black people are still on the defensive, still out to prove their worth and the value of their history. So they dispel any claims that the Egypt’s pyramids may have actually been built by the ancient Greeks or that Queen Cleopatra was not black. They name their daughters Nefertiti, Naya, Ashanti. And there sons Askia, Jabu and Babatunde. They emphasize the influence of black Moors on contemporary Spanish culture. They assert that Buddha, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, was black– didn’t you see his lips? They promote the school of thought that Africa-originated indigenes in present-day Central and South America created the famous ancient stone sculptures that we know today. They’ll look you up and down if you date “outside of your kind” and betrayed the people. They’ll argue with you for 45 minutes about the assassination of Malcolm X, that even though a brother pulled the trigger, the evil plot was schemed by white people in power. (“The Man,” “the system.”) The White House and the city of Washington D.C. was built by black slaves, they assert with pride. They are desperate to declare their place in the history of the United States of America and I get it. I get the defensive attitude and the fear of being ignored, because sure, to a large extent public school teachers don’t delve into the contributions of African-Americans. The textbooks include 3 or 5 or a whopping 7 pages about the achievements of African-Americans in history and it’s the same names, the ones who have been approved to discuss: Martin Luther King, Jr. Mae Jemison, Carter G. Woodson, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Mahalia Jackson, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall…

In gatherings of 3 or 100 or 2000, they call the names of murdered African-Americans whose killers were never tried, never convicted. And then there’s the Emmett Till tragedy…

Eyes on the Prize: Emmett Till…The Emmett Till Story…Timeline of the murder of Emmett Till…Justice delayed but not denied.

The notorious murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 still elicits strong emotion among Americans. Emmett, a Chicagoan, was visiting his family in Mississippi. Before leaving Chicago, Emmett’s mother has warned him about the South, that racism is strong there. Emmett left for Mississippi. At a grocery store, Emmett had whistled in affection at a white woman. A few days later, Emmett was abducted, abused and murdered by white men. His decomposed corpse, discovered in the Tallahatchie River, was so mutilated that police could only identify it by Emmett’s ring. In Chicago, Till’s mother makes the decision to conduct an open-casket funeral to let the world see what has happened to her son.

I’ve got a friend who had never heard of the black national anthem, that is “Lift Every Voice And Sing.” And when she told me this, I couldn’t stop staring at her. What? You don’t know about ringing with the harmonies of liberty and singing a song full of hope that the present has brought us? No comprehende?

But I remembered.

That she’s Nigerian and Nigerians in America often don’t know much about black American history. The only reason why I know some is because I grew up in a somewhat black-conscious household and my sisters and I are strongly sympathetic to the African-American cause. Then, I remembered that she attends a predominantly white and Hispanic high school, so that’s why she “talks like a white girl.” Yes, there is such a thing. Let’s not deny it. Just listen to a speaker on any American radio station and in 5 seconds (it only takes me 2.5 actually) you’ll be able to tell if that speaker is black or white.

Then I remembered, that her parents may have been the kind who prefers that their kids either play with fellow African immigrants and white Americans, never befriend the African-Americans. “My parents are ok with my white friends, not the black ones,” a Nigerian girl living in Atlanta told me one day.

A Senegalese friend of mine told me that her father had kicked her out the house when he learned that she had African-American friends during her high school years. Even myself, I was told not to be friends with the “black Americans,” in my high school.Well, then who was I supposed to talk to? Lithonia High School’s student population was 99.9% African-American.

“Black Americans are afrocentric,” one West African guy told me with a scowl on his face. He spit out the word “afrocentric” as if it were poisoning his tongue.  Africans in the U.S. and back home often describe “black Americans” as racist. In their minds, policies like affirmative action sound like nonsense.

And African-Americans should stop crying about the past. But they don’t understand.

But they don’t understand. Africans often come to the U.S. and begin formulating negative opinions of African-Americans, favoring to call them “Black Americans,” perhaps to disassociate their dark-skinned fellows from Africa. They say they don’t go to school, they live on welfare and subsidized handouts, they are killing themselves in gang violence, and all the guys are in jail.

There is truth in all of these stereotypes, to an extent, from the perspective of an average African (especially a Nigerian, or a Ghanaian, or an Ethiopian or an Egyptian because in these societies, university education is so highly valued) immigrant in the U.S. Remember, Nigerians were rated in the 2006 American Community Survey (along with several independent Houston-area surveys) as being the most educated immigrants in the U.S. So you’re likely to find one living in Texas with a Master’s degree at 24 years old, wondering why her African-American neighbors did not complete the Bachelor of Science program, opting instead to work full-time.

“If I can come to this country as an African immigrant and become successful, then why can’t African-Americans do the same? They’ve been in this country for centuries yet look at them. They have failed.”

A Ph.D.-holding relative of mine would ask this question a lot. I’ve heard it repeated throughout discussions among Africans living in the U.S.

Africans often come to America and they become lawyers, medical doctors, university professors, home owners and they look back

Inmates at the state prison in San Quentin, California. June 2012.

at people who have the same skin as they do, who don English names (or self-contrived ones like Shontayveus), and they see the gap between them and they wonder why? Why? There are nearly 1 million African-Americans in prison. The percentage of African-American college graduates is still below 50 percent. It seems like every young African-American guy you talk these days says he wants to be a rapper or an athlete. (Read this article: “Purposeful Parents: The Child Who Wants to Be a Rapper or Athlete- How To Support the Dream and Not Kill It.) The ones who says he wants to be a civil engineer might as well have fallen from the 5^th dimension…or at least grew up around a lot of white folk.

“If I can come to this country as an African immigrant and become successful, then why can’t African-Americans do the same? They’ve been in this country for centuries yet look at them. They have failed.”

Look my fellow Africans: It’s not that simple! So you came here and bagged four academic degrees and you own your home. I’m proud of you, but let’s understand that Africans living in America don’t have nearly as much baggage as the average African-American does! Don’t you know about baggage?

“One day all them bags gone get in your way,” sister Erykah Badu preached that message straight to the bone.

Don’t you understand?

“If I can come to this country as an African immigrant and become successful, then why can’t African-Americans do the same? They’ve been in this country for centuries yet look at them. They have failed.”

They’ve been here for at least 400 years (the earliest ships of Africans arrived as itemized cargo in America around the turn of 16^th century according to historians) enough time to get something going for them, you say, but also enough time to crush the esteem and ambitions and dignity of  generations of people. These people ran through woods with vicious dogs at their heels. More dogs jumped into their oppressed realities during the Civil Rights movement, attacking them during marches and rallies.

Police in Birmingham, Alabama release dogs on African-American street protesters

They sat at the counters of public restaurants with spit dripping down their faces and swarms of white Americans yelling curses at their backs. Their families were ripped apart and children grew up without knowing their father’s name. Black women were raped, sexualized and dehumanized. And this continued not for 5 years, not 20 nor 100. It went on until the 1970s and continued in the ‘80s in other forms, need I mention the crack cocaine epidemic? It’s still going on, need I mention institutionalized racism? Black-on-black violence? The gangster rap hype. The prosperity rap age. Video vixens. The fact that black men keep disappointing black women, they don’t marry them, they don’t want to “deal with them.” The 25-year-old single mother of 4 children and 4 baby daddies, with sisters and aunties and friends with a similar story. “He said he was gonna marry me.”

Talk about a people in pain. I mean, a crisis is unfolding, some of it self-inflicted yeah but it’s all part of the disease. There is so much progress to be made and wrongs to right. African-Americans have taken their place in the seat of “being black,” and too many of them just haven’t gotten up.

Sit down, NIGGERRRRRR! Just go get yourself a big booty hoe.

Here is the point when I want to stop writing and I want to cry. But I cannot, because my words must make a point.

African people, you’ve got to understand this. Don’t come to America and start looking down on African-Americans until you know their struggle. You have seen black presidents and heads of state come and go in your native country (though a bunch of them were either despots or tormented idealists), but you at least had a black president. And you had a parliament or a national assembly dominated by blacks and your bosses are black and the senior political reporter on your T.V. screen back home was black.

That’s not the case in America. It’s simply not the case.

In your home, back in Africa, you were not black. You maybe didn’t even know you were black. You were just a human. Or actually, you were probably, Wolof or Ewe or Tswana or Yoruba or Luhya. But nonetheless you were a human.

In America, black is black. It’s compounded, and concentrated, emphasized and regurgitated, rearranged, relabeled (nigger, negro, colored, African-American, black, Afro-American), forced upon you whether you want it or not.

In America, there is a “black” way to do everything and if you don’t do it that way you’re a weirdo. There are constraints and socially-constructed boxes to squeeze into. I will make the claim that independence and freedom of expression is often suppressed in African-American culture. I stand by that claim. One is taught to live a certain way, aspire to go to a certain university (Historically Black College and Universities are abbreviated as HBCUs) and work in a certain career. Strays are quickly kicked to the side, only to be celebrated later, that’s the story of Barack Obama. You dress the “black way” and you date certain people and you watch movies with Gabrielle Union and Denzel and Bruce Willis and Nia Long. Not the ones with Adrien Brody, Dianne West and Anne Hathaway. Generalizations, indeed, but they hold true for millions.

In real life, African-Americans teenagers who don’t follow America’s code of “blackness” are often isolated among their “kind,” sitting at lunch tables by themselves or with non-black students who pressure them to be the black spokesperson. The totem black guy. We’ve seen him before. In high school, in the audition room in Hollywood, on the university campus, at the bar in the 5-star hotel. He may have embraced his blackness, but he didn’t let it blind him.

I fear that so many African-Americans hold their color card so close to their eyes that they can’t see anything else.

All they see is black and lest they forget, the color of the card is shoved back into their faces.

By Chika Oduah