Creating Africa in America. Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
was different. When I was coming up, everybody in my neighborhood had something to say about what I was doing. It could have been the town drunk, but if he stopped my mother while he was sober and said, “Mrs. Smith, I saw Jane pulling up her dress and dancing on the curb,” my mother would believe him and I would get in trouble for it. Being African means—but this is not true so much today—being raised in a village. And I think this is something we kept going from Africa, even though we may not be aware of where it comes from.
But there is also an internal piece to being African. It’s got to do with spirituality—what you think and what you believe. It’s the whole way I think about myself. I am extremely cognizant of who and what I am and where I come from—who my ancestors are and the whole Middle Passage.
Now although I think of myself as African, I don’t always call myself “African.” I sometimes use “African American.” When we have to fill out government forms or applications and they give you some options for heritage or identity, you would usually not see “African.” That’s because some people take exception to not seeing “African American” because they want to make a distinction between those that came here involuntarily—“African people born in America” and “African people born in Africa.” You know, also society often defines identity in terms of where you were born—your citizenship … but your ancestry can make you African even if you weren’t born there.18
The CWC’s “African born in America” leadership would explain the above participant’s experience of being raised in a village as an extension of “African intuition.” In the leadership’s construct, Africanness was “intuitive,” felt and experienced in the body, not only through the skin or the blood but also through the heart. As explained by an elder, a very active CWC participant who describes himself as an “African,” born in the Caribbean, the shared components of African culture cannot be explained or reduced through “European” or (by extension) anthropological categories like race, history, or socialization, because they are “spiritual” and understood intuitively. In many contexts, several participants, particularly “Africans born in America,” spoke of the “intelligence of the heart” to refer to a subconscious sense of what are considered core and constant African cultural principles. For example, one ongoing discussion in the African parenting support group focused on helping participants be assertive in various family, work, and community relationships without being offensive. The group facilitator, a CWC “African born in America,” leader advised them to follow the “intelligence of the heart”: “Africans have a kind of sensing to know and predict what is happening. You can strengthen it. It’s an intelligence of the heart, and the CWC can help you develop it. We, as Africans, function almost exclusively at this level of knowing.”19 In another session, when discussing the same topic, the group facilitator explained that the intelligence of the heart was “being in touch with one’s spirit as indicated by good intuition—know it when you feel it and how to interpret and apply it. Intelligence of the heart is speaking the truth—knowing when to say it; how to say it. Don’t give up being African, whatever religion or philosophy you practice, don’t give up being African. Do what you say you are going to do.”20 “Blackness” was a sort of bodily vessel for holding this intelligence of the heart and the African cultural memory that accompanied it.
At a workshop on understanding African culture presented to students—who were primarily European—through a partnership between the CWC and a well-known area medical school, a key CWC “African” elder encouraged them to “remember to focus on relationship building, using your intuition and reading nonverbal behavior when working with African Americans.21 Africans work from this basis. Your instincts will be critical in the healing process because it’s part of our cultural health practices.”22 From the perspective of CWC leaders, particularly participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America,” this intuition—this ancestrally informed and skin-embodied intelligence of the heart—was a distinctive way of knowing what made an individual of some African ancestry, however remote or “mixed,” “African,” regardless of place of birth, nationality, or current country of residence.
While many “Africans born in America” participants regularly referred to the skin as the locus of Africanness, Blackness, or a historical memory of an African past, for many “continental Africans,” that is, African immigrants, Africanness was not primarily retained in the skin or heart, although the skin, and other phenotypical features, could be an external indicator of Africanness. Instead, they made more frequent reference to “the blood” as the defining component of who is African. In the words of a professional Somali woman, Haidia, who worked with the CWC and lived for many years as a teenager and adult in several Middle Eastern countries and the United States:
Your culture, your ethnicity is determined by blood—your blood origin. It’s the natural way of things. Your origins have to do with who your ancestors are. It’s not necessarily geographic because your ancestors stay the same no matter where you are living. But your ancestors tend to be from the place you were born. So, I am Somali first, because that’s who my ancestors are, and African second because Somalia is in Africa. Whether I say I’m Somalian or I’m African depends on who’s asking and how much they know about Africa. If I’m traveling in Europe and talking to someone from there who asks me “What’s your culture?” or “Where are you from?” if it doesn’t even seem that they even know where Somalia is, I might just say something general like, “I’m African.” But if they seem to know something about Africa, I would probably tell that I’m Somali. If they are from Somalia, I would tell them my village. Since my children also have Somali ancestors, they too are Somali even though they live here in America.23
For several continental African CWC participants, a person of African blood or ancestry would need to consciously define himself or herself as African, consistently do certain things, and/or think in a certain way to “keep their culture” and identity. Haidia, cited above, continued:
| HAIDIA | To keep Somali culture alive, you need to tell stories from the old country. Do things like take children for visits back home, speak the language, and maintain your social relationships so the children know who they are. But losing some of Somali culture is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the thing you’re losing from the old and what you take from the new one [American culture]. |
| JCC | What about the people you call African Americans? [I had heard her use this term in other contexts] What do you mean when you say that they are African American? |
| HAIDIA | [Pause] This is a tricky question. African Americans can be Africans because they do have some sort of African ancestry. However, some African Americans don’t want anything to do with Africans or Africa. If they accept their African heritage, then they can be African. If they reject it, then they are not. |
Akin, a Yorùbá immigrant from Nigeria who was a manager at a local nonprofit organization and part of the CWC’s African elders’ council, presented his perspective on African identity in the following discussion:
| JCC | What about people not born in Africa who have African ancestors but also other ancestors, are they African? |
| AKIN | I would consider them African. I consider all African Americans African. |
| JCC | How is that? Why are they African, even though they may have not even visited Africa or have no idea what their original culture was? |
| AKIN |
The part that they don’t know does not mean the fact is not there. That is different between the reality and what we know. And the fact, to me, as far as I know, is that their family tree is from Africa. If they cannot trace—if they are somewhere here and therefore they cannot trace this part, it’s a different issue … [referring to a sketch he made of a family tree to represent his notion of African American heritage]. And, therefore, you think you are an American because you were born in America, but I still consider that person African. So, the part that |