How black is Condoleezza Rice? What about Tiger Woods? Lenny Kravitz? What about Akon? Are their experiences accurate reflections of the African-American experience (remember, the last of them is actually from Senegal-not America)? The answers to these questions are multi-layered, and all of them are impossible to think about without considering how uniquely hybrid American black culture really is.
The odyssey of America has been profoundly different for black people compared to other ethnic groups in the United States. Taken by force away from Africa, the original ancestors of African-Americans were in bondage for hundreds of years before eventually being emancipated. Of course, this is an experience that reaches across all Africans in America-the Caribbean and South America included. Yet in the United States the social structure present during the time of slavery prevented blacks from truly participating in American culture (there are very notable exceptions-Louisiana for instance, had a burgeoning black middle class in the antebellum South, some of which actually owned slaves themselves). So when freedom finally came to blacks in the United States, many had no memory of the culture, religion, or even language of their forebears.
In the decades following their liberation, African Americans made great progress in creating a sense of “blackness” from the ashes of slavery; a culture from which they could draw pride and strength for themselves and their children. Yet what grew out of this culture has become something of a negative scale to be measured upon. Indeed, in the United States, it would seem that “blackness” is defined by one’s intimacy with struggle-how well a person can relate to someone who grows up without both parents or in drug and crime-ridden neighborhoods. The most visible of black cultural achievements in our time-the growth of hip hop music and culture to become a global phenomenon-occasionally celebrates the violence which often accompanies the struggle of poverty and has itself been associated with misogyny and promoting the use of elicit drugs.
What has followed is an even more disturbing trend, particularly evident among young black people. Many children complain of being labeled as “white” if they put forth the effort to do well in school. It’s tragic that “blackness” has somehow become conflated with academic inadequacy, but it goes much deeper than that. Blackness itself is a group of actions someone performs, a number of assumptions a person has about the world. It even has, as we’ve asserted before, its own language-no one can deny that there is a certain way of talking “black” that people unfamiliar with African-American culture will never be able to learn out of a book. Being “black” is a phenomenon that is sometimes even independent of one’s actual ethnic group: how black is Eminem exactly? Think about it.
Yet we must consider also that the African-American experience is not the only one in the black diaspora (which means the spread of a particular group of people throughout the world). “Blackness”, the way we see it, is certainly not the way people from Africa, for instance, or parts of the Caribbean see it. It becomes difficult, then, to trace what ties we have with other people if we have few cultural similarities. Some African-Americans even complain that Africans in America seem to look down their noses at “black people,” the result of which is a perception of arrogance for Africans and a perception of cultural inadequacy for African-Americans.
The truth may be that what we observe is a phenomenon not unique specifically to black people. The Old World, as it were, has always had a kind of confidence inspired by its long history that is unfamiliar to Americans. Just as a Nigerian may criticize a New Yorker for being unconnected with his past, a Londoner may criticize a Los Angeles-ite for being ignorant of the nuances of the language the latter inherited from the former.
Of course, we say these things all as generalizations to illustrate a point. Regardless of how we construct blackness across cultural or national borders, being mindful of what we call “black” is of utmost importance.