Black Immigrants Continued



Black Immigrants Continued

This post is a follow-up to my first blog post and the inspiration for this blog, Black Immigrants, which can be read by clicking the link. 

"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. So what if you weren't Black in your own country? You're in America now." - Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. 

Attempting to strip identities away from Africans, Afro-Caribbean people, Afro-Latinx people, etc. is anti-Blackness: no one should police the identities of another group of people. I have run into the view that Black cannot equal African, Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, etc. enough that it is a pattern. The Black race has as much variance and complexity as any other and to deny this is dehumanizing and anti-Black. The U.S. narrative conflates Blackness with being African-American and erases Black immigrants by simultaneously failing to include them in the immigration narrative. This phenomenon is related to U.S. imperialism and erasure of Black countries and populations around the world. The denial of the existence of Black immigrants is tied to their disruption of the U.S.'s construction of the Black race which is based on the local ethnic group African-Americans. This has the unfortunate effect of pitting these two marginalized groups against each other.

I have had people tell me I am not really Black or to act more Black or otherwise police my identity and Blackness. It is almost always non-Black people that do this. More than anything this tells me that the construction of the Black race in the U.S. does not account for the Blackness of people from Black countries outside of the U.S. One of my friends is also from an East African country and she is undocumented. When she tries to organize around immigration on the East Coast she receives push back because she is Black; she is told that she doesn't belong there. I recently experienced something similar as an organizer in Los Angeles. It occurred to me that immigration is framed as an issue that does not affect Black people and Black issues are framed solely as African-American. This inspired me to speak up and create a platform for dialogue starting with this blog.

A current example of this is the Muslim ban implemented by the Trump administration: 3/7 of the countries on the original ban and 3/6 of the current ones are African countries. The original ban included Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Iraq has since been removed from the ban. However, the media reported the Muslim ban as an "Arab" issue. This effectively erased the Black African Muslim countries and people affected by the ban including Sudan, Somalia and the native Afro-Arabs of Libya, a north African country. This is an ongoing issue in the representation of Muslims in the U.S.: Black Muslims like Somalis and Sudanese are classified as Arab just because they are Muslim. This is a symptom of the erasure of Black immigrants, countries and populations around the world and the U.S. media's conflation of the Muslim religion with Arab identity.  U.S. erasure of Black immigrants results in this group being ignored on the ground and denied resources provided to other immigrants. 

Around this time, it also occurred to me that the U.S. erases Indigenous/Native people in a similar fashion: they are not part of the immigration narrative (and rightly so), but they are also not part of any narrative. This results in the belief that Native/Indigenous people no longer exist and the deprioritization of their issues in people of color/organizing spaces. The U.S. media never shows the lives of the Indigenous/Native people living within its borders. Due to systemic racism, many Natives live on impoverished reservations and are isolated from the general population. The news I have heard about reservations are dire: high levels of poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence. A recent article I read stated that there is a disproportionate lack of affordable housing on Native reservations and this is causing health problems resulting from overcrowding and other effects. A video I recently watched stated that 1/3 Native women are raped in their lifetime and 86% of sexual crimes against them are committed by non-Native men. However, due to structural racism, policies and media silence some people are unaware that Native Americans still exist. I believe that communities of color are better together and working to counter anti-Blackness and Indigenous and Black immigrant erasure will benefit us all at the end of the day.





Hyphenated Ethiopian third culture kid. Twitter: @moonchereka

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