As an African immigrant I can attest to the many experiences people are talking about and I understand the frustrations. Yes I was bullied, yes I was made fun of, and in the same breath, yes I have also perpetuated my own internal anti-blackness towards my own people. Which for me to not acknowledge would be cowardly and not based in the reality of how anti-Blackness functions as a form of self-hate and identity crisis. I have had family members talk down on Black Americans, Caribbeans, and even other African countries and ethnic groups. I have heard from my own people talk down about another group of people who are located in a village barely an hour away from us! We see the traumatic remnants of our separation day in and day out. On the continent, we have lost nearly 15 million of our brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts and uncles, elders and parents and millions of family scattered across the world as a result of the Trans Atlantic slave trade. On the other side, the vast trafficking, enslavement and mass death of our people mirror the colonial violence we face day in and day out. The struggle with our identity is nothing new. We are prideful people. We pride ourselves on our people, our country, our culture, even down to our neighborhoods. And we’re gonna have disagreements but we’ve lost a child in our village. And it’s infuriating that our babies don’t get a chance to grow up. One of my many definitive experiences in life was the murder of Trayvon Martin. At that moment, the understanding of my identity became clear that being African didn’t “othered” me from this global experience rather that the realities of being a Black boy is act of constant survival.

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