Why Do You Call Yourself Black And African?

A little over a year ago I received an email with the subject line "Ok I wonder why you call yourself ‘black' and ‘African'" from a self-described longtime New African reader.  Even if subsequent emails have been less direct in their articulation of the same underlying sentiment, they all point in a similar direction: some people are confused about my racial background and about the way I racially identify myself.  Their need to seek clarification suggests that being able to label me is important to the way in which they understand the content of my columns.     

I was perplexed at first by this seemingly sudden preoccupation with my race.  After all I'd been writing for New African for several years and never had anyone raise the subject before. It then occurred to me that these racial enquiries started happening almost immediately after my picture began running with my column.  Obviously there was a disconnect in the minds of some readers between my appearance and my writing, especially when I refer to myself as both Black and African, and use the collective "we" to talk about the past, present, and future of Black people worldwide.   

Indeed, the fact that I claim my place in the global African world annoyed one reader so much that he asked, "Why do you keep on writing ‘we'?" Just in case he hadn't already made his point clear he added, "You are not black in my eyes. You look much more Italian or Spanish. I can assure you, if you go to Africa you will be called ‘white'." I always find it amusing that people seem to forget the proximity of southern Spain and Italy to Africa.  There is a reason after all that Spaniards and Italians from the south look a lot like North Africans - centuries of exchange between the two regions certainly wasn't limited to material goods.  

Ironically, however, the reader was partially right.  I am ¼ Italian, but I don't look anything like my blond hair and blue eyed Italian paternal grandmother who came from Turin in the far north of the country.  Nor do I look anything like my paternal Irish grandfather.  The reader wasn't off the mark either when he guessed I might be Spanish.  My mom is part Spanish. She is also Taíno Indian and African, most likely of Yoruba ancestry, as were many of the enslaved Africans who worked the sugar plantations on the island of Puerto Rico where my mom was born.  So there you have it: Taíno, Spanish, Northern Italian, Irish, and yes, African too.   Why, you might ask, if I am so thoroughly mixed race do I identify as Black and African? 

Let me begin by providing the context necessary to understand the particularly unique way in which Black is defined in the United States, where I was born and raised. Black, as a legal-cum-racial category, was historically constructed in the broadest possible way in order to expand the number of people who could be enslaved and to limit the legal right of racially mixed people to claim their freedom.  Known as the "one drop rule", the idea that a person with even the slightest trace of African ancestry is Black has long outlived slavery in America.  What was once a legal construction became a socially constructed category that has and continues to encompass a broad range of very phenotypically diverse Black people.  While the racial landscape of the U.S. is home to Black people of all hues, hair textures, body shapes and sizes, and facial features, we do not all experience our blackness in the same way - far from it. Phenotype, class, gender, and geography all play major roles in shaping our individual experiences as Black people in America. Hierarchies based on skin tone, alone, have been at the root of painful divisions within the black community, and are often the basis for preferential treatment within the dominant white society. It has not been lost on African-Americans that if Barack Obama was the complexion of his father he would likely not be our president today.  

If blackness in America has been defined broadly enough to claim me as one of its own, that still leaves the question of why I claim my blackness. I could call myself mixed race or even Latina/Hispanic.  I certainly recognize that I am multi-racial, but I don't feel a common bond with mixed people simply because we have parents of different racial backgrounds. Equally, I've always been unnerved by the categories Latino and Hispanic to describe people from the Spanish Caribbean and parts of Latin America that are heavily populated by people of African descent precisely because they erase/e-race our ties to Africa. The categories Black and Latino/Hispanic are often defined as mutually exclusive on identification forms in the U.S., such that one is instructed to check "Black" provided they are "not of Hispanic origin" and to check "Hispanic - regardless of race"!  Since when has anything in America ever been regardless of race? As history has too often demonstrated this is a calculated attempt to create divisions between black people based on language and country of origin. 

Beyond the historical and political, however, are the biographical details of my life that help to explain why I, a person that could choose to be almost anything, at the age of 13 firmly declared "I am Black and proud of it!" I was born and raised for the first eight years of my life on a commune called Synanon in California. Synanon was the founding model for the therapeutic community and in its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s was hugely successful in getting drug addicts clean. My parents met and married there in a 1972 mass wedding of 70 couples, many of who were interracial. They were following in the footsteps of Synanon's founder, Chuck Dederich, a white man who married Betty Coleman, a strong, beautiful Black woman whose death from cancer in 1977 was the beginning of the end of Synanon, which finally folded in the mid 1990s.  My early years were thus spent in an enclosed environment where people from all walks of life lived and worked together.  

In 1981 we left Synanon and I quickly became aware of how racially segregated the outside world was.  The real turning point, however, was in 1986 when we moved to Orange County California, a predominantly white and very conservative area. By that time I was already deeply concerned with issues of social justice and racial equality, a fact that marked me as different from my peers, as did my unruly kinky hair and deep olive skin.  One day on the school bus home an aspiring skinhead turned around in his seat and yelled "NIGGER" at me. I stood up and yelled back "I'm not a nigger. I'm Black and proud of it!" When we arrived at my stop with a pounding heart I made my way to his seat and hit him before making a mad dash off the bus. I was given a demerit. He wasn't punished at all.  

It wasn't being called a "Nigger" that made me realize I was Black, but it crystallized in my thirteen-year-old mind the price one pays for being Black and the absolute necessity of embracing, affirming, and declaring one's Blackness in the face of both the overt and subtle forms of racism that we regularly encounter. Yet, to reduce my blackness to an act of anti-racism would efface the primary role that the Black community has played in my understanding of myself. Home is where we see ourselves reflected in the faces, voices, and experiences of others. Home, for me, has always been in the Black community. No embrace has been stronger. 

On 15 August 1993, my twentieth birthday to be exact, I landed in Accra, Ghana for the first time and quickly realized that I was "white" in the eyes of the vast majority of Ghanaians I met.  While I knew I wouldn't be met with a chorus line of "welcome back our long lost daughter," I hadn't expected it to be nearly impossible to convince people of my blackness. And so I resigned myself to being "white"...I stopped explaining and started listening and through those conversations I learned more about race in America during my first year in Ghana than I had growing up in the belly of the beast.  What I took away from that experience was the ability to let go of how others see me. For sure it didn't take going to Ghana to be mistaken for a white person...that happens here in America, but once you assert yourself as Black, people more or less recognize you as such. In Ghana I could argue until I was blue in the face and fail completely to alter my putative "whiteness."  

Making the journey to Ghana only to have the very reason I was there denied might seem like a cruel irony, but it freed me to inhabit my racially ambiguous body in a way that lets others see me through their own eyes. So before I answer the question of why I call myself Black and an African, let me say that I have no desire to prove my blackness or to legitimize the views that I express in my columns through recourse to blood quantum disclosures. 

Black is the name I call home. Black is the name that called me home. I call myself an African because I am a Pan-Africanist and like the generation that came before me I recognize Africa as our collective home. I also realize, as did they, that the greatest obstacle in the way of Black people worldwide is the divisions between us.  Far from advocating a narrow Black nationalism, Nkrumah and Nasser envisioned a Pan-Africanism that encompassed all of Africa's children at home and abroad. We still have a lot of work to do.

First published in New African May 2009