Catching up in Crisis

To understand the position of Africans immigrants in the context of racial injustice, one must rst understand the ethnic background of my local church community. e church I attend is predominantly Ghanaian, and the members consist of Ghanaian immigrants and their children—people like me who were born and raised in the U.S. or those who attended a signi cant portion of school in the U.S. One key di erence between people like myself and the older generation in the church is that we do not understand our Blackness in the same way. e older generation of Ghanaians distanced themselves from the African-American community and identity, while the younger generation drew closer and thus see us as more similar rather than di erent from African Americans.

Growing up in my Ghanaian community, the older generations always reinforced in their words and actions that we were not African Americans. Ghanaians in my community ate their jollof rice, listened to their hiplife music, wore their kente cloth, practiced their special funeral customs, and spoke their native language—Twi. While African Americans ate their cornbread and collard greens, listened to their R&B, wore their stylish clothes, practiced their funeral customs, and spoke their slang, or Black English. Ghanaian immigrants had African accents; African Americans did not. And in addition to the di erences in culture and lifestyle, Ghanaians in my community unfortunately associated crime with African Americans and allowed the negative media to really shape their perception of the African-American community. In America, the older Ghanaians in my community adopted the reality that African American is equivalent to Black, and thus never identi ed as Black—except legally. Since Ghanaians in my community did not perceive themselves as African American, growing up I never heard conversations about racial injustice or oppressions because Ghanaians saw that to be an African-American issue. Ghanaians in my community saw themselves as separate from African Americans, even though as Black Americans they were still oppressed by the same racist systems and structures in America as African Americans.

Due to the separation between African and African American that my community enforced, as a child I faced internal tension about my Black identity in America, for I grew up in a Ghanaian household and was socialized into African-American culture by my peers. I did not eat jollof or corn bread, but both. I listened to both Ghanaian music (not as much by choice), and African- American music (I love the sound of R&B). I wore kente cloth to church and dressed in the typical trend at school. I understood Twi, yet also spoke in Black slang at school. Despite the feeling that these two Black identities were mutually exclusive, I was, am and will always be Black in both ways—African and African American. erefore, although at home I never had conversations about racial injustice, I experienced it outside and actively discussed it with my Black friends; as a child of African immigrants, racial injustice is not new to me.

However, for the older generation of Ghanaian immigrants in my community, the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked a light in them: the realization that the African-American struggle is their struggle too. In my own home, I have heard my dad make comments about his di culty as a Black man in American—something I have never heard him vocalize before. I have even seen my own sister, who like me grew up in both African and African-American culture, express pain and passion towards racial injustice, something I have never seen her do before. Also, in my church youth group chats I have seen my leader—a Ghanaian man, a Black man—express his pain and anger towards the senseless killings of Black people in America. I believe that the senseless murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others has not only helped Africans understand that they should care about social injustice, but come to the realization that they have been and are the victims of racial violence and injustice in America too.

It is unfortunate that it has taken a global pandemic and mass protests for Africans to nally see that racial injustice plagues every Black person in America, Africans included. But although a little late to the eld in the ght for racial justice, I am thankful Africans are joining. I hope that African immigrants’ support of the Black Lives Matter movement does not fade with the momentum, but that Africans stand together with African Americans in Black solidarity. My dream is that one day Black people from all over the African diaspora will stand together with and for each other, celebrating our di erences that enrich the diversity of the Black community, rather than function as points of dissension between groups. Because at the end of the day, Africans and African Americans are all Black, and I hope we come to understand that we can be uni ed without being uniform. ■

REBECCA AMONOR is an undergraduate student om Columbus, Ohio, USA, currently studying English and A ican- American Studies at Yale University (’21).