As protests continue in Ferguson, Missouri, however calmly now, I have found myself increasingly disappointed in the silence of my fellow African immigrant communities. There has not been the coordinated outrage I saw for Ethiopian domestic workers experiencing abuse in Saudi Arabiaor Eritrean migrants in Israel. Instead, there have been too many dismissals of African-American pain, veiled attempts at insinuating these kinds of things only happen to those kinds of blacks.
Too many black immigrants believe ourselves removed from the threat of police violence, saved somehow by the allure of our accents or the false safety of our refusal to openly question American racism.
My father, a dark-skinned man with hair so tightly curled my aunt once joked he didn’t need an umbrella in the rain, immigrated from Ethiopia in the early 1980s to escape political turmoil, and acquired US citizenship in time to vote in the 2000 election. He does not see the police as an enemy; he often waves to them. He does not see my fear of paramilitary civic servants as legitimate.
And he is not alone in his sentiments. Buoyed by racist perceptions of Africans and West Indians as more hard-working than our African-American counterparts, black immigrants often actively distance ourselves from issues like police brutality, which we too often believe to be relevant only for native-born black people. The divide is neither new nor altogether surprising. Black immigrants often cling to ethnic ties, resisting the American categories of race that lump us into a monolithic designation that we too often feel is inauthentic.
But in a nation with such an entrenched history of white supremacy, we are black, and we are targets. Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was not asked about his native language before officers emptied 41 bullets into his body. When Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was brutalized by NYPD officers, none of them paused to inquire if he was the “right” kind of black to be torturing. Our international flavor of respectability politics will not save us from the sin of our skin.
The unwillingness of my fellow Africans to stand in solidarity with African Americans is about more than just a desire to remain in touch with our heritage – or even a failure to believe in global blackness as an authentic marker of identity. I have overheard relatives lament the “sensitivity” of “lazy” African Americans who “look for racism everywhere”, blissfully unaware of the ways in which the violent legacy of American slavery informs every facet of black life in America. And while having been socialized in the United States as a black woman will never allow me to condone this form of intra-racial violence, I do understand the internalized racism and heartbreak that fuel it.
There is pain in accepting that the country you thought would save you from your homeland doesn’t want you. There is trauma in realizing that you are not wanted here, that your accent doesn’t make you special, that you are subject to violence based on the color of your skin in a nation that was supposed to be your promised land. We don’t want to believe that our blackness turns the American dream into a nightmare – that our bodies are the monsters.
But we cannot continue to be dishonest with ourselves. We are here, andwe are black. That is both blessing and curse, question and answer. To pretend that we exist outside the consequences of blackness in this country is to do both ourselves and African Americans a profound injustice. It makes us complicit in perpetuating dangerous stereotypes about African Americans – and by extension, all black people.
Dishonesty in identity politics endangers black immigrant youth by failing to prepare them for the extended mental assault that this country’s racism will have on their bodies – and for the physical assaults that could claim their lives more quickly.
Every 28 hours in this country, a black person is killed extrajudicially by police or vigilantes. Black immigrants are deported at numbers that far eclipse other immigrant groups because we are perceived as criminal. These facts do not exist independently of one another. By entering this country, we have woven ourselves into the racial patchwork of a nation that would rather soak its colored threads in blood.
We are here, working jobs and living our lives, only because of the profound sacrifices that black folks in this country have been making since its inhumane inception. We cannot pretend to only have inherited its riches; we cannot turn our backs on the kinfolk who made our existence here possible just because we falsely believe their concerns to not include us. We bear the beauty of blackness – now we must bear its responsibilities.
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