The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

the tree cannot stand up without its roots.
- Congolese proverb

It ain't where ya from, it's where ya at.
-Rakim

In my early teenage years, when my family would travel to Los Angeles from our home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to spend part of the summer with relatives on my mother's side of the family, my cousin Chris and I would amuse ourselves by hanging out at the mall, going to the movies, or just cruising the streets of Westwood, Venice, or Inglewood in his father's Volkswagen hatchback. Sometimes we'd run into high school friends of his, and Chris always enjoyed introducing me with a mysterious flourish. "This is my cousin Phil," he'd say, and then pause for emphasis. "He's from Africa." We were always amused by the reactions; eyebrows would dart upward in surprise ("Word? For real?") and people would peer closely at me for a better look. When they addressed me, they'd tend to speak in an exaggeratedly loud, slow, and deliberate voice, "Ple-eased to me-eet you," contorting their mouths with each word as though they hoped I could read lips. Chris and I still laugh at how one friend of his who gave us a ride somewhere mimed for me to put on my seat belt, gesturing with her hands and widening her eyes, pronouncing the word carefully, as though addressing an infant: "Se-eat be-elt." Chris and I would usually play along for a while, he pretending to speak to me in Swahili and calling me "N'jawa" (an "African" name of his own invention), and I acting like I had trouble understanding English and speaking with a thickly stereotypical accent ("I yam veri hepi to be in Amerika"), but eventually we'd tire of the game or I'd slip inadvertently, lapsing into American as a song I liked came on the radio: "Yo, turn that up, man, that's my jam." Eyes would narrow with suspicion and fists would perch angrily on hips. "I thought you was from Africa?" they'd accuse. And I'd be obliged to tell the whole story, that yes, I was from Africa, but that I had actually been born a mere few miles away.

Later i my life, when I visited cousins on the other side of my family in Brazzaville, Congo, I was welcomed as "notre frere americain," an American brother finally come to visit his African family. My cousin Richard, a couple of years younger than me and clearly excited to meet me, showed me around the city and forgave me my atrocious French, displaying a few words of his own halting English so I wouldn't feel so bad. I was proudly introduced to his friends as "mon frere Philippe, l'Americain" and spent much of my visit answering questions about life in the United States. It's expensive there, yes? How much does food cost? How much does an apartment cost? How much money do you make? The whites treat black people very badly there, yes? I fielded the iniquiries as best I could over bottles of the local beer, a potent pilsner called N'gok. My fondness for the brew became a bit of a joke among my cousin and his friends because its manufacturers had once promoted it with an odd and strangely appropriate advertising slogan: "N'gok: la biere qui seduit les Americains" (N'gok: the beer that seduces Americans). I heard that joke a few times before I left Brazzaville, and my cousins even presented me with a N'gok-logo print shirt as a parting gift. Of course, my cousins knew that I wasn't entirely "American," that my father, their uncle, was born and raised in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo),and that my brothers and I had partly grown up in Tanzania, where our parents worked as educators. As we toured Brazzaville, I often mentioned that parts of the city reminded me of Dar es Salaam, and we would often compare words in Kikongo and Swahili to check for similarities in meaning( though I could not understand the Kikongo conversations that often surrounded me, I could usually pick out the handful of words that the two Bantu languages share). But my cousins nonetheless chose to identify me primarily with America, the land of my birth and the homeland of my mother, to them a much more exotic and romantically unfamiliar place of origin than Tanzania, a poor African country like Congo.

It can be difficult to define yourself when those around you are so
eager to do it for you. Throughout my life, African Americans have
usually chosen to regard me as an African, while Africans have
tended to see me as an African-American. In establishing my own
sense of self, I have had to plot a middle course.

My father came to the States from Congo on an international student
scholarship, and first saw my mother, a French major, at a French
Club meeting at the western Michigan state college they both
attended. She was impressed with his seriousness and extensive book
knowledge; he appreciated her curiosity about Africa and her
intelligence and ambition. Although an aunt had warned her that
African men beat their wives and practice polygamy, my mother
disregarded her; like many of her peers, she had overcome the fear
and disdain with which many older black Americans regarded Africa.
She saw the continent as a motherland she had never known, and
eagerly educated herself about my father's country and culture.
Though my father was often at a loss for what to make of the African
Americans he met at college, whom he often considered frivolous and
unfocused, he felt that he had enough in common with my mother to
build a sound foundation for the future. My parents were married in
1966, in an inelaborate Western ceremony attended by my mother's
family and assorted friends. They stayed on in Michigan, where my
older brother, Remy, was born later that year. Even though my
mother's family had accepted my father, one of her aunts still
called up anxiously after the baby's birth. "Is he too dark?" they
wanted to know.

I was born in 1971 in Pomona, California, where my parents lived
briefly while my father finished his master's degree. When my
father completed his studies in California, he got a job at Brandeis
University, and we moved to the Boston area, establishing ourselves
in the predominately white, middle-class communites of Waltham and
West Newton, where my younger brothers, Kolo & James, were born. My
early childhood was a fairly typical American suburban existance in
an environment of shady, tree-lined streets, clean, well-tended
public parks, and attractive aluminum-sided family homes with
driveways. My brother and I attended the local public schools
(where we were usually some of the only black kids in the hallways),
we played soccer, baseball, and basketball and rode bikes after
school, and wasted countless hours watching The Brady Bunch &
Gilligan's Island. We hung out with the white kids in our
neighborhood, picked up Boston accents ("Come ovah heah, youse
guys"), shoplifted candy at the local Cumberland Farms, played hooky
and smoked cigarettes in a nearby cemetery, and learned to
appreciate white-boy rock groups like Kiss and Aerosmith. But at
the same time, we were initiated into African American culture of
the 1970's by our mother and friends who lived in Boston's
predominately black communities of Roxbury and Dorchester, while our
father and his nearby relatives provided us with an education on
Africa.

As a kid, I had no reason to feel that the various cultural strands
that colored my life were exceptional. But I did have to find a way
to live with all of them in a way that made sense to me. My
brothers and I absorbed an interest in issues of ethnicity and
culture from our parents and the world around us, and we referred to
diverse cultural cues to construct an identity for ourselves.
Culture was a highly embattled space in our childhood environment,
but as kids we took it all in stride, barely realizing the breadth
and variety of the sources that informed our outlook.

The difference between our American and African heritages were
codified in specific ways, and we learned to understand and
appreciate them early on. Since before I can remember, my parents
usually spoke French to each other and English to my brothers and
me, and while we picked up a few French words here and there, during
my early childhood there was always a sense of linguistic division
in the household. My father spoke English, his 4th language after
Kikongo, French, and Lingala, with a Zairean accent, and when my
brothers and I wanted to sound stern, we would chastise one another
in what we thought was a pretty good approximation of my father's
deep-voiced, accented English. We would also try to repeat French
phrases we heard around the house, but to us the language was
gibberish, even though Remy had allegedly spoken fluent French as a
youngster in Zaire, where my parents lived briefly before I was
born. To complicate matters, my father spoke Kikongo with visiting
Zairean friends and relatives, a language that was unknown to my
brothers and me and barely comprehensible to my mother.

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