On Being American and African Black

by Special Correspondent Nadra Kareem

The first time I saw “Roots” I was in puberty, but since my birth the groundbreaking miniseries has been a running joke among my maternal relatives.

My mother is a black American, raised Baptist in Tennessee. My father is a Muslim from Nigeria. More specifically, for those in the know, he’s Yoruba.

When I was a baby my American relatives, all natives of small-town Tennessee and wholly unfamiliar with Africans, took to holding me up in the air and anointing me Kunta Kinte, like the character in “Roots.” Although the gesture annoyed my mother to no end, her family members found it hilarious.

Africans, you see, are hilarious. If there is one stereotype about Africans that has lingered throughout my life it is this. Perhaps because of this stereotype, before my birth my maternal grandmother envisioned that I would look less like a baby and more like an offensive cartoon character. She warned my mother to expect me to have coal black skin and bright red lips like Little Sambo. In expressing her fears, my grandmother ignored the reality of my father, who is dark-skinned but not especially so. In fact, he is a shade or two lighter than my mother is. Because Africans are an “exotic other,” however, my grandmother adopted a white supremacist gaze in connection to my father.

She’s far from the only black American to adopt that stance in relation to Africans. In Chicago, where my parents met and lived, my mother recalled being approached by a black woman curious to know if I cried in “African.” Now, I was born in the late1970s, before Akon dominated music charts or Hakeem Olajuwon (a fellow Yoruba) dominated basketball courts. Still, it’s somewhat shocking to note that some of the African Americans in my midst then viewed me as an entirely different entity from themselves.

Fortunately, such experiences never gave me a complex about being African growing up. Perhaps this is because my classmates included other blacks from foreign locales—Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti and Panama, among them. Another reason is that my parents divorced when I was just an infant, resulting in me growing up with my maternal relatives and culturally as a black American. There were no markers, such as dress, food or an accent to distinguish me from my classmates. Even my name, which is not Nigerian but Arabic, didn’t seem particularly odd growing up because of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s popularity then. Classmates often linked me to him, nicknaming me Nadra Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, rather than to Africa.

Being a first-generation African seemed like no big deal because I knew that my black American friends were originally from there, too. In middle school, when I encountered a Haitian classmate who angrily denied that her ancestors originated in Africa, I was shocked. I never believed that being from Africa was something to be ashamed of. I had been given reason to believe so, I suppose. I grew up watching the “Gods Must Be Crazy” films, in which Africans are portrayed as lovable buffoons. And during the “We Are the World” craze, I watched bloated Ethiopian children the same age as me, too weak to swat away the flies that swarmed around them. Still, I couldn’t get why anyone would be embarrassed to be African. The first time I saw the scene in “Boyz n the Hood,” in which a lead character disowns Africa and uses the insult African “booty scratcher,” I simply rolled my eyes.

By the time I was 17 or so, I was exposed to another viewpoint about my heritage. Being African was cool, being African American, not so much. People—white people and a few bohemian blacks—wanted me to dress like an African, speak like an African, etc. I was to be a portal to an exotic world. The fact that I have just one African parent and was not raised by him was completely overlooked. In my early 20s, when I read Malcolm X discuss how whites responded to black Africans with an awe they would never extend to black Americans, I could totally relate.

Some argue that whites treat African blacks differently from American blacks because slavery (and therefore guilt) is removed from the equation when dealing with the former group. I’m not convinced this is it, though. When the eyes of whites light up upon learning of my Nigerian heritage, it seems that they are just excited by the fact that I come from a continent with lions and tigers and bears (okay, so no bears). To boot, because many whites mistakenly believe that they have no culture, they take particular pleasure in learning about other cultures—the farther removed, the better. Ironically, I have met young Africans who feel that they have no culture because of the dominance of American popular culture. They feel they must emulate American culture rather than draw on their native cultures for inspiration.

Page 1 of 2 | Next page