ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 05
You know, it’s funny: It wasn’t until I left America that people started considering me unquestionably American.
Thanks to the combination of my name and skin color (Twix bar exact match), I’ve been used to giving explanations and validation of my belonging in my home country since I was young. I was Black and American, in that order.
That all changed when I left. In Denmark—also during stints in the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and South Africa—I was American first, Black second. When people spoke to me, they heard an American speaking. No one commented on me being articulate in English. I was more often identified as the American friend than the Black friend. It seems I only had to leave the country to taste the ideal that had been paraded in front of me all my life: that to be a citizen of America is to be regarded as a contributor to and representative of American culture. That all people can be American, and Americans can be all people. In the U.S., this ideal lives perpetually just around the corner of the next decade. Overseas, I found myself living it for the first time. The shift was a bit jarring. I didn’t know what to do with it—the ease of being accepted and recognized as the American I am.
It was a contrast that was difficult to acclimate to in the Obama years, but reached true cognitive dissonance in the Trump ones. In Europe, I was asked to explain the cause of his election, the reasoning behind his travel ban or the economic priorities of the American midwest. I was asked to explain these things as an American. Meanwhile, back home, my Americanness was on trial. My name is cause for pause at the U.S. border, too many vowels to be trustworthy. It carries in it the legacies of the Luo people of Kenya, my father’s tribe and his homeland—now dubbed a “shithole country.” Yet my European counterparts saw me as a direct line to the American psyche. If this is what you are, tell me how this works. A fair amount of mental gymnastics was necessary for me to steer my way through their expectations while honoring my own truth. They recognized me as an American, which ushered in an unexpected personal victory. If America is the land of dreams, it felt as if my reverie was finally becoming three-dimensional—at the same time it was clearer than ever that this country would never choose me as its poster girl. I felt grateful and gaslit at the same time. I was American, finally, but not American enough to relay what America is.
While I am Black and I am American, I don’t feel like a Black American or an African American. I am, as I saw on some random guy’s Instagram bio circa 2017: Halfrican American. Though the term has been bopping around the digital ether for a while, it was my first encounter and the term felt right. The most succinct summary of my ethnic identity. My realities in America were unlike those of many other Blacks. My name tells a story very different than that of a Shawn Carter or a Michael Jordan; an Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin or a Latasha Harlins. The power and beauty in my name is rooted in its origin. The power and beauty in theirs is rooted in its resilience—in its persistent defiance in continuing to exist. The way I navigate this country with my heritage is naturally different from other Black Americans.
I know what it means to be a Black person in America. I wear the mask. I’ve been taught—directly and indirectly—to maneuver with the fear and vulnerability necessary in the most innocent of interactions. I know the wellspring of safety that comes from a deep belly laugh shared between brown faces, the care that emanates from the first harmonized notes of Solange’s A Seat at the Table. I, however, don’t know what it means to carry the legacy of America on my shoulders, to hear the echoes of slavery as I take an afternoon walk. Other people might think I do, given my Twix bar hue, but I don’t. I remember learning about the dark corners of U.S. history as a child and thinking to myself this is such a horrible thing to happen to these people and looking up only to find my young classmates’ eyes on me, their minds clearly concluding this is such a horrible thing to happen to you.
The Black population in America has a peculiar disposition: there are those whose lineage goes as deep as the United States itself. Then there are those, like mine, whose lineage mostly coincides with the liberation of a colonized African or Caribbean country between the 1950s and -80s. Most other immigrant groups (Eurocentric included), have a timeframe they can trace the immigration onset of a certain peoples to. For Black Americans, it’s layered. We’re a minority group that doesn’t automatically have a shared history; there’s a fissure, however slight, somewhere down the line.
I think this is why being recognized as an American was such a relief to me. Danish strangers and random barstool company gave me a truth I never claimed on my own. My calculations as to my place and role within society were rendered useless in my day-to-day Copenhagen life. There was no need to add the qualifiers I was so accustomed to. I was American and, in the foreign understanding, that already encapsulated my color, mixed heritage and heavily-voweled name. They had faith in that American ideal we try to tell ourselves of cultural birthright.
Where are you from? I’m from California but my father is from Kenya.
Okay, so you’re American? Yes, yes I guess I am.
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This is the fifth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.