It all started the first day I landed in New York City, fresh out of a country in the Horn of Africa, both unapologetically Black and blissfully oblivious to how as a Black immigrant I would be ‘othered’ by both white and Black Americans.
To all, I was an alien—a legal alien, that is how I am classified on my papers anyway. Nurtured and raised to read and grasp all the struggle books and movies of and about Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Eldridge Cleaver and more, unbeknownst to me, not only had I internalized their fight, struggle and their thirst for justice and liberation, I had made it my calling to fight for the liberation of my people everywhere, who share the same skin color as me.
Black liberty, as the North star I shall follow and pursue.
So, come February 2015, my first Black History Month in the U.S, I celebrated it by focusing on the word Black, a word that holds all of us together, regardless of where we were born. Both the Black diaspora and African Americans—under one umbrella.
After all, I am walking on the soil those who look like me were murdered, tortured and lynched for looking like me. As our struggles are interconnected, so as our culture, our challenges and our history – yes, the history that started not with slavery in ships but that chronicles back to the Kingdom of Kush, the Land of Punt, ancient African Songhai Empire, Axumite Empire, the Mali Empire with cities of Djenné and Timbuktu.
The history of Black people and Blackness.
I spent the month of February wishing everyone I know a “Happy Black History Month” message. I was deliriously focused on Blackness because that is what makes us one and the same in the eyes of white supremacy and systemic racism. I celebrated the headways and sacrifices the Black civil rights movement leaders made for me to be here today, the freedom bought with coins of blood and tear of Black martyrs of the civil rights movements. It was a month I celebrated and honored the achievements of African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history, the history of immigration and how it paved a way for me to be here.
A few blissfully ignorant months into pursuing an ivy league degree, the haze over my eyes cleared. I came to realize what it means to be a Black immigrant girl in the U.S.
I noticed how I was othered by not only white people but Black American folks. I didn’t belong even with folks who shared the same skin color as me. I had become terribly aware of the slur words associated with being a Black immigrant in the U.S. I discerned how I am mocked for my accent. My name proved to be difficult to spell and pronounce. I was told not to appropriate the struggle, the wins and the life of Black Americans which I only knew through books and movies. To those who chose to see and dwell on what separates us instead of what unites us, I was just another immigrant here to steal their jobs and collect on government benefits and my propensity to struggles that are attached to being Black meant nothing to them.
But in the eyes of the system that is deeply structured and rooted in racism and white supremacy, first and foremost, I am Black and thus subject to the same challenges and struggles faced by all Black people, whether they were born in the United States or elsewhere. Black immigrants are more likely to be detained and deported than any other immigrant group; Black migrants are most likely to be detained at significantly higher bonds than migrants of other groups and on average, Black migrants serve the longest length of time in detention and are six times more likely to be placed into solitary confinement solely because the U.S. immigration system is a reflection of the anti-Blackness and racism that runs rampant in the criminal justice system in the U.S and beyond its shores. The mistreatment and expulsions of Haitians and other Black immigrants, refugees, and asylees who are coming to the U.S. seeking safety is still happening.
Our struggles are linked.
If our struggles are linked, so are our liberties. As Black people, we, collectively are victims of discrimination, racism and the mass criminalization and economic disenfranchisement of our communities based on our skin color. What affects one of us, affects all of us and we can’t secure winnings and liberties independent of one another. No one is free unless we are all free of the same system that continues to oppress and marginalize both communities. This is why civil rights movement leaders across the diaspora who came to this country and linked their liberation to that of Black Americans like Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, Miriam Makeba, Shirley Chisholm, Cicely Tyson, Kwame Ture, Chinua Achebe, all understood this and worked toward the uplift of the Black community, Black liberation and freedom. Because they believed that we can never enjoy a system where some of us are free and others are in the bondage of mass incarceration, housing insecurity, deportation, immigration-based criminalization.
For me, true liberation is liberation for all Black communities everywhere. Despite the scheme to create dissimilarities and divide and rule the Black communities everywhere through the slave trade, the scramble for Africa, the divide and rule policy of the colonizers that conjured dissimilarities and capitalized on the man-made divergences; and atrocities and genocide of King Leopold and his likes, the word Africa and/or afro, be it may a prefix or a suffix, connect us all, and our Blackness is our saving grace to stand against the forces and schemes of white supremacy and the legacies of slavery that constantly threaten to destroy us.
Words By: Bethelhem T. Negas, Media Engagement Specialist, UndocuBlack Network
