Creating Africa in America. Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
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in Minnesota for almost two decades. An impassioned community advocate, she had also lived for a time in Thailand. She was married to a man who was born in Somalia and had very interesting insights on intercultural issues in African American and African communities.
Sandra had also been involved in a grassroots Black study and community action group called Asili, which in Swahili means root or foundation. Founded in about 1987 and disbanded in 1992, the group explored participants’ African heritage. Although the group was open to both men and women, women seemed to be the most active of the almost one hundred participants. A respected African American university professor and community activist, whom Sandra described as their griot, mentored the group. Asili could be seen as a precursor to several of the African-centered nonprofits that emerged during the mid-1990s.
One technique I used to further elicit insider perspectives on African identity was to explicitly ask some key participants to review and comment on various versions of guides used to facilitate ethnographic and life history interviewing. Sandra, the same participant cited above, went through an early version of an interview guide and changed every lowercase “b” to an uppercase “B” in the term “black.” When I asked her why this was important to her, she said, “Black is more than skin color. It’s a group of people with a spiritual base.”7 Elaine, another CWC participant who described herself as African or African American, depending on the context, explained why she thought that skin color was not the primary indicator of who was “African”:
This country is still divided by skin color. And it’s not just White people. It’s affected us. My father—God rest his soul—was jet black—like Nat King Cole. My mother was light like a Lena Horne. Now my great-grandmother, who raised me, did not want my mother to marry my father because he was dark. We are divided along the color line. We are some of the worst offenders. So, some people say “black” and they say “ugly.” They say “black” and they say “stupid.” “Black” is always seen as denoting something negative. But when I say “Black,” I’m using it as a category for a group of people—not for skin color. Because you can have light skin and still be Black and African … Being African is about the way you think—not just about what you espouse but where you stand and what you do …
So, you know there are people who are mixed—they might have a Black mama and a White daddy but if they think like a African, they can be African; after all they need some way to define their identity. But to me they’re still African even if they don’t accept it … You know, even if they [White society] gives them probationary White status, it’s only for a while and they need to have some place where they are accepted.8
Elaine, who was in her fifties, was a prominent attorney and health care professional who was an executive at a public agency. She was also a leader in several professional African American women’s social clubs.
For Elaine, a person was also “African” by virtue of having African ancestors, not only because of having phenotypical characteristics that may be described as “Black.” According to CWC “African born in America” leadership, along with race, skin color, or bloodline, the second component of who was “African” at the CWC, as indicated above, was “an ancestry that takes you back to the continent of Africa.” In its simplest form, this ancestral theory of African identity maintained that a person was African if she or he had living relatives of African descent or could claim a more remote ancestor who was born in Africa. A person who had some African ancestors will also be thought to have some African blood. If one did not know one’s specific African ancestors, being Black was considered sufficient evidence of a primarily African ancestral origin. In this case, a person may be considered “African” by virtue of ancestry even if she or he did not self-identify as such.
However, it should be noted that from the perspective of the CWC’s key “African born in America” leadership, “if a person of African descent persistently denies or disowns it [his or her African ancestry], a person can lose all connection to her African heritage. So, yes, you can be black in terms of skin color and not be African … Africanness is primarily ancestry and spirituality—skin color is not as important.”9 So, a biracial person, if she or he continually rejected his or her African ancestry, may “become something else—not African.” Sara, who was a CWC African leader, described a counseling session with a very emotionally distressed “biracial” woman which illuminated these notions of embodied Africanness. Sara was a key participant in this study and the official representative of its values, mission, and programs. Born in Mississippi, she had lived in the Twin Cities for twenty-five years where she was a prominent community activist around health issues. The founder of an elders’ network and rites of passage program for African American girls, she was the recipient of local, national, and international recognition for her innovative community programs.
I met with this young woman—about twenty-seven or twenty-eight—who didn’t have a trace of Blackness in her. In the way she talked—the way she talked about her experiences is very different from other Black women. You know, Black women have this way of talking to other Black women. We put our hands on our hips, standing akimbo, look you straight in the eye, and tell you just what you need to know and don’t want to hear. I knew instinctively—although she didn’t say a word about it at first. But I knew that she was very disconnected from her Africanness … Then she revealed that her mother was German and her father was Black. And until that day she had not had an experience with another Black woman. Can you imagine going through your life as a Black woman and not having that experience? Sickness is just this disconnection between the psyche and spirit.10
“Blackness” here had to do with the elder’s interpretation of how the woman presented herself—her style of both verbal and nonverbal communication, not skin color. “Blackness” was the embodied Africanness partially represented through skin color, behaviors, and ways of thinking that demonstrated at least a subconscious and, ideally, a conscious connection and identification with even a partial African ancestry. In a follow-up to this discussion, I asked the elder how she would approach her work with this participant. She explained:
a biracial person is someone of multiracial heritage who needs to reconcile within themselves the multiplicity of parentage. I would work with this person to become spiritually grounded in an African spirituality. I would help them use journaling—writing their own stories—to listen to their own thoughts … In 90 percent of the cases, these people become reconnected. But there are some cases when a person continues to say “I’m not [African]; I’m something else.” The ancestors will not continue to own you if you continue to deny them.11 I know there are some people who think that once a African, always a African. But the disconnection can become so great, where it’s complete. You can just look at them and tell. This complete disconnection, this severing the tie is brutal, and sometimes it’s too late.12
In such a case, persistent denial of the embodied drive towards Africanness would decouple Blackness from African identity. Such a person might be black in the sense of a skin color or some other phenotypical feature, but no longer be Black, that is, possess Blackness or Africanness in the CWC sense of cultural identity. While the CWC’s “African born in America,” leadership made this subtle distinction between acknowledged and accepted “Africanness” and “Blackness,” other “African born in America” participants maintained that a person who is “Black” will always be “African” regardless of whether they accepted it, largely because Africanness was considered indelibly marked on the body through, as the participant quoted above put it, “the vibrations of skin and memory.”
An African ancestry may or may not be immediately evident from a person’s appearance. A biracial person may not necessarily be deemed to look African or black but would be considered “African” once a partial African ancestry was known, for example, a child with an African and a European parent. Another ethnographic example helped to clarify this point. In a meeting of the Health and Wellness Committee13 to plan a special project to devise a community “report card” with indicators of African American health status, there was an exchange about whether the term “people of African descent” was appropriate. Ultimately, the CWC’s key “African” leader decided that the term “people of African heritage”