I read another diary explaining a black immigrant's perspective on African Americans. This is not meant as an attack, although the title may imply it is so, but I feel that I have a very unique perspective on the relationship between black immigrants and African Americans. You see, I'm the child of both.
Jump (for my love)...
First, a little background.
My mother grew up the only daughter in a family of six. My father's family was much bigger, and he grew up in a compound where his father held several wives and gave birth to quite a few children.
My mother is the embodiment of African American history. By genealogical calculation, she is 3/8ths Native American, primarily Cherokee, and it expresses itself screaming in her hair, sharp cheekbones, skin tone, and eyes. I never noticed anything telling, but Mexicans seem to have a habit of speaking to her in Spanish when they meet her. Her grandfather (who happens to be gifted with eternal life) resembles Dominic Chianese from the Sopranos, a black man who could have easily passed if he wanted (and once shocked the hell out of my mom's roommate by calling my mom "Little N****"), one of the "Italians" as I first called them when I saw their group picture.
My father is African, but it does not immediately confer some label of "racial purity." I have never seen his father but he was described by my dad as "light-skinned" once off-handedly. My mom alternately called him an "albino," more out of irony than anything else, and said he had "some missionary" in him. I look at my dad now and see it, an abnormal amount of arm hair for an African, a chocolate milk skin tone compared to his Nigerian wife that passed on to his other three children.
I developed my mom's good hair and canted eyes that my father called "Egyptian" even though no one in his family had them. My dad made it a habit of picking out traits that were the unique expression of my American heritage and trying to explain them away as surpressed African phenotypes.
I took for granted that I was what I was, a multiracial package just like every other African American in this country, nothing particularly unique in the design because we all look so different anyway. What was important was who I was and what had become a part of me: blackness. I grew up with Chaka Khan, Prince, Aretha, Morris Day, the diverse blackness of this country -- especially N***** thrown at me from white lips. I was black. I never had to question it.
I was a nerd, but not obsessively so, and as athletic as your "typical African American." For all of the labels of "acting white" I have heard, I only once received it from someone who was black (and even then she was extremely light-skinned). It was mostly white people trying to create a spectrum of perceived blackness. For every white person who called me a n***** there was a white person calling me "not very black."
But you expect that sort of thing from white people growing up in Texas. Where my shock developed was my growing realization that I was different from Africans, that merely claiming Nigerian heritage was enough to have me accepted, but that in turn was enough to reveal all of the ugliness. It was as if simply putting on a mask allowed me to walk into a different culture and observe all of the bigotry and hatred that would be directed RIGHT AT ME in any other situation. Worse, my dad was so wholeheartedly pro-American and accepting of everybody regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion (despite his crazy obsession with donating to Evangelist preachers I later discovered), I never saw it coming.
As an aside, I have to point out that Africans IN Africa have very different opinions of African Americans than I have observed from the "typical black immigrant." They share the hero worship of African Americans with African Americans, they run around in Tupac jerseys as they ran alongside Cassius Clay shouting "Ali Boombayeh!"
I have gotten plenty of offensive comments about my family life from professional Africans, teachers, particularly Nigerians and friends of my dad. The divorce of my parents is seen as inevitable, the years of horrible fighting of my dad and his current wife is completely ignored. African Americans are described as lazy, shiftless, ignorant, and the predominance of Nigerians and other African immigrants in high levels of academia is seen as a natural result of this. Of course, these educational opportunities passed onto their 2nd generation children are further reinforcement of the simple cultural superiority of African immigrants, not of the reinvestment of wealth and educational opportunities within the family. Sometimes I wonder if most of those black Republicans are African immigrants ... although most African immigrants share a hatred of Republicans with African Americans.
You see, the reason African Americans are sensitive about immigrants taking their jobs is because the greatest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action toward blacks in higher education are African immigrants, not the African Americans it is designed for. This is common sense, of course, as many African immigrants benefit from the British education system and many of their visas are educational visas, meaning they are only in this country BECAUSE they are academically stronger than everyone else. (Of course, technical brain drain is the result of this on African communities, but America is the land of opportunity so you gotta go where you gotta go.)
As someone readily accepted into African immigrant culture because of my name and my father, all of my successes are celebrated as the joint contribution of the Nigerian community. One problem: I am only part of that community once or twice a year. I was raised primarily by a mother born in the ghetto who, thanks to affirmative action, went to Notre Dame, then, thanks to her talents, went to the best school in the country and then transferred to a top tier law school.
As a testament to nurture over nature, I too ended up at the best school in the country with no real contribution from my father. Meanwhile, his children had widely varying degrees of academic success. As my oldest half-brother put it:
Thanks a lot. You ruined it for the rest of us.
I look at myself as an African American success, not an African immigrant success. I look at myself as defiance of the idea that African immigrants are somehow better than African Americans. But I also understand that, yes, there is ignorance toward African immigrants from African Americans. I also know that it is comparatively harmless compared to the crap African Americans and African immigrants get from and give to some others (don't get me started on Jews and the Chinese ... do not get an old African immigrant drunk and then talk about money and education).
UPDATE: The black church. I hope this provides a bit of perspective on where Barack stands on Trinity United Church of Christ for those who aren't black or those who are black but were raised completely in the black community and take it for granted.
My mom was religious and superstitious without being devout. We only attended church twice together, and before and after that it was my dad's job to throw me in a suit, throw me in a car, and then drag me into a pew.
My mother's connection to the black community is the beauty shop. My father's connection to the black community was the AME church. And in all instances we are simply black people. I know I implied this earlier in the thread, but I think that it is important to understand that, where you enter the nexus of community you engage it, and when it accepts you you are absorbed into that community.
Many African immigrants discover that their children identify, not simply as Africans, but as African Americans even though they are full-blooded. It is the nature of the black community to absorb and assimilate all of the varying cultures it encounters into itself and reflect them as wholecloth community. It is important to understand that Barack Obama's blackness IS as much the church as it is his community organizing and his wife and child. The church is part of his black identity.
I hope that clears things up.