Living in Costa Rica was the beginning of my journey from the identity that had been artificially crafted for me. For five years, I was never called an African American. I was American. Some might have said, Black American. Mi Negrito, my Nicaraguan girlfriend would affectionately call me. I was an American to Ticos, what Costa Ricans call themselves. Then, while living in Colombia, I really got separation from the label that had defined me most of my life – African American. No longer did I see my race (remember race is a man created artificial designation that has no scientific basis). I saw me, a man. I saw the person Colombians saw – an American.
Let us not forget, were it not for White supremacy African Americans would not exist. Now is that a conundrum, or what! It’s a point of view, however, that has caused me to suffer some backlash. Especially from some African Americans. And I get it. To many, for example, the extension of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s celebration, Negro History Week, into a month-long observance is a victory in a war for recognition that’s been long and hard fought. So, my mantra, Black history is American history did not work for some. When two colleagues gave me a Bible cloaked in Kente cloth the message was clear, only God could turn me around.
For me, attaching African Americans and Black History Month to a lineage beginning with enslavement affirms the country’s white supremist legacy. And doing so, also furthers the very ideologies, created by the dominant class, that define people of African descent as less than others. Thereby marginalizing the African diaspora’s gifts to humanity. Which are truly epic in the breadth of human history.
Who African Americans Are Results From Who African Americans Are Not
The words within Olga Indelia’s essay, “What do people play and feel when they don’t live their own lives,” provides a metaphor that resonates with me. She writes, “Let’s think together about what happens in the inner world of people with a ‘knocked down’ arrow of the internal compass.”
Yes, that’s it, I thought. We’re the world’s knocked down arrows. Our, people labeled as African American, most immediate ancestry actually are of different tribal origins. The progeny of people thrown together by imperialism and capitalistic chaos. The natural progression of our physical, spiritual, and psychological development derailed by kidnapping, enslavement, abuse, subjugation, survival, and oppression. Therefore, we, the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, bonded together by pigmentation and regard, have created a culture out of need, not lineage.
Our roles in U.S. society, and to the extent we allow, the world, are bound to the dominant culture definitions of who we are. What psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung might call a collective unconscious; what sociologist Emile Durkheim calls our collective consciousness; and what Malcolm Gladwell describes as an adaptive unconscious.
Jung believed the collective unconscious serves as a form of psychological inheritance containing “all of the knowledge and experiences that humans share as a species.” Durkheim believed our collective consciousness is where we store shared beliefs, values, and norms binding our communities together (Understanding the Mystery of Collective Consciousness, Meridian University). In Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005, Back Bay Books), Gladwell tells us that our capacity for making judgements rapidly is wired into how our brains see the world.
“To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
Professor Sheema Mason
Ms. Indelia’s writing illuminates what these theories might mean to people whose being in the world resulted from the slave trade. Our consciousness, our knowledge of ourselves, is bound by beliefs, values, and norms given to us, imposed upon us, and customized by us to define our subculture. Though to be clear, many of the cultural artifacts defining that subculture, like soul food, jazz, literature and art, inextricably binds our identities to judgements of that which we are not — white.
“Metaphorically,” Ms. Indelia writes, “living someone else’s life, following generally accepted ideas about happiness, wealth, and success, is the same as choosing, trying on, and wearing clothes tailored to the standards of a certain person. And the shoes are fashionable and beautiful, but not in size and for the (our) feet…the body knows this is not mine, there is no freedom of movement, and she doesn’t fit like a glove, and you have to adapt to her all the time.”
Being a “Knocked Down Arrow”
The race label, African American, justifies a legacy system of regard that clothes me, and those of my “race” in images and imaginings enshrined in institutions that no longer benefit, or reflect, U.S. society. Perhaps the reason why, the 2020 U.S. Census www.census.gov/race-ethnicity-measures saw 33.8 million people, a 276% increase in those who classified themselves as multiracial. Despite this reality, the country shrouds people in identities that divide us into subcultures often with differing rights, roles and responsibilities.
These identity politics motivated legacy systems use race definers, skin color delineations, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, ability and disability, and more to inform the allocation of resources, determine regard and give socio-economic standing. Crime and punishment, education and training, taxation and resource allocation, health care and health disparities, all and more, see varying degrees of bias and application because of the country’s devotion to this way of thinking and being.
Which makes a growing number of people understand, were it not for the artificially constructed racial identities that deconstructs me, those who look like me, and our ancestral lineage there would be no white supremist dogma; no monetary wealth held by descendants of colonization; no ascension to power by those of limited ability.
The results of what I also call deconstructionism clothed enslaved Africans in an existential reality that also institutionalized impediments to emerging African Americans from living their best lives. And though, admittedly, I made the best of the clothes given me, the more I grow the more those clothes don’t fit! And the more time I spend outside of the U.S. the more I know that our being African American is, to use Ms. Indelia’s words, “…following a script written by someone (else) and approved by society.”
Al Fin
A number of years ago, having been in Paris for only a few days, three young men, also about my age, mid-twenties, stopped me on a quite busy street. “Countryman,” they called to me, smiling and ready to give me a hug. They asked when I’d left Ghana and how long I’d been in France. “I’m not from Ghana!” I replied, cautiously curious. I’d never traveled that far from home before. They thought I was lying. “Why are you denying your country?” one of them asked, a bit of irritation in his voice. It took me a few minutes to convince them of my honesty. Still, one said, at our leaving, “If you are indeed telling us the truth, come to Ghana, we’ll take you to the place of your ancestors.” By then I didn’t want to leave them, but had to.
Admittedly, in the absence of identifying with the African American label, and not knowing my own African origins, I take pride in telling our children they are Mandaya, the indigenous tribe of their mother’s Philippine ancestry. Their mother tells me that’s where they get their stubbornness. I bite my tongue.
In fact, the Mandaya are one of the few tribes that successfully resisted colonization. When their “lola,” grandmother, visits she brings stories of Mandaya woman being creators of world renown fabric and bead work. And teaches us all about healing plants and medicinal potions.
She also gives me desire to heed the advice of the young men I met in Paris long ago. Now, however, it’s important to me to not allow our children to believe they come from slaves or that they are African American. They’re American and Filipino. And the contributions of their ancestors to humanity are epic.
To paraphrase a Polish proverb, “It’s no longer my monkey. Not my circus.”