Racism through the lens of African Privilege
“Racism is not mere dislike.
Racism is driven by power, by fear of losing it, and by a grotesque desire for more of it.”
When I think of how to explain the way racism feels to me, I think of a very heavy bag that was packed for me and strapped to my back. It is heavy and I am struggling but I seem to carry it around everywhere. I carry it while I am driving, while I’m laughing loudly with friends in public. I carry it when I am sleeping at home, walking home through a park, going for a run, or when I try to pay for groceries with a cheque. I can’t take it off, I have tried. I have signed petitions, I have marched, I have written songs, and voted people into office that I believe might help. But it is no use. Then I go to the person who handed me the bag, I tell them I am struggling and I need their help taking it off. The person looks me dead in my eyes and says “well you are carrying it, it is on your back and so it is your problem and not mine.”
Racism is not my responsibility as a black person. I did nothing to create it. I do not benefit from it. I don’t own it. And YET I am left with the FULL responsibility of carrying it constantly.
Varied skin tones exist, as Bill Nye so excellently explained here, to protect us from the sun. That is it. That’s the tweet. Biological protection from the sun. Nothing more. Black people live closer to the equator and so we need more melanin than those who live further away from the equator. Point. Blank. Period. It is a wonder to behold how this small almost inconsequential factor in humanity has come to determine who wins and who loses on this planet.
Racism is cruel. But I did not always know the extent of its cruelty. There was even a time I didn’t know it existed.
I have come to realise something I am calling African Privilege. A very, very, very, very, extremely poor cousin of white privilege whose prerequisite is basically having access to location-specific human rights.
I have African privilege because I know what tiny village on the continent I come from. I can probably trace my ancestry all the way to the beginning of time. My understanding of my culture and heritage is intact. The understanding of my language is intact and all of this informs parts of my understanding of myself.
There are countless leaders, CEOs, wealthy and successful people who look just like me, so I do not feel limited because of the colour of my skin. I do not experience racism as intimately in my daily life. It is hardly ever the elephant in the room when I relate with my coworkers, law enforcement, as I raise my daughter, etc. It does not sit with me at the dinner table, it does not accompany me into every conversation, it does not colour the opinions of the people I am surrounded by, and for a black woman in the world today, that is an enormous privilege.
It is this privilege that sheltered me from racism throughout my childhood, so much so that my first racial experience was explained to me as some sort of mental illness. I was 8 years old, I was on holiday in London, I had gone to the park with friends and family and some white boys start yelling profanity at us. My mom and aunties respond by saying “they are racist, they must be mentally unstable” — so, in my mind, racism was like some sort of mental illness that plagued a few. I looked at the white boys’ outbursts the same way you would look at a public schizophrenic episode, with sadness and pity. I thought, how awful it must be for them to see black people and just see us as animals. How sad for them to be so small-minded.
Sometimes my naivety is something I am ashamed of but it would be dishonest not to admit my deep appreciation for it. On one end it was very ignorant and dangerous to grow up oblivious to racism. But I am also thankful that I am one of the few black people on the planet that can say they never internalized racism as a child.
I lived in England for 5 years from age 16–21. I saw micro-aggressions like when my economics teacher said I wouldn’t get a job and one of my classmates would have to employ me. I thought he was being snippy like teachers get when you’re not performing to the standard. Or when I picked my 5 universities and my teachers suggested I was aiming too high, I thought they meant my grades weren’t good enough but then I realized no one else was being told they were aiming too high so I pressed on and got into all 5 universities.
Without context, racism and its cousins can go unchecked. I had a very diluted idea of what could be considered racist. I thought it was using certain words or being outwardly vile and cruel. I was not fluent in the nuances and microaggressions. Racism in the UK can be so subtle and sly that you will miss it if you blink. I find myself going over 10-year-old conversations and shivers run down my spine. My African privilege never made me question anything, until 2012. Everything changed for me in 2012.
I was 20 years old at university, Trayvon Martin had just died.
I remember hearing pieces of the story at the beginning but never really immersing myself in the fullness. The conversation grew bigger and louder and so I started eavesdropping, listening, clicking links, watching videos. And my world shattered. I couldn’t believe it. A young boy goes to the store wearing a hoodie and does not make it back home alive — why? Because he was black and the person on neighborhood watch saw him as a threat and felt the best way forward was for him to lose his life.
It was a HUGE culture shock, one that I will never recover from. I wish I could articulate the feeling — imagine realizing the weight of racism. The helplessness, the hopelessness, the anger, the fear. Why? What did he do? Why was death the only solution? Then one day I found a video of his mother speaking about the loss of her son and the earth slipped away. I felt the weight of her loss on my back, my neck, and my shoulders. I don’t even think I ever made a conscious decision to carry it with her. I didn’t have to be convinced. She was me after all. A black woman in the world. She was my mom, my aunt, my cousin. She didn’t go looking for this. It could have been anyone. I linked arms with her in spirit. Whatever petition she needed me to sign, I signed, and when she spoke I shared her voice to my small platform. I did everything I could to help from the other, other side of the pond. She didn’t know me, and it didn’t matter, we had no shared experiences and that didn’t matter either.
Things started to get very dark when there was hesitation to arrest the killer, people were actually…dare I say, justifying this murder. It felt like there was a parasite eating my brain, I must have fallen that day, the day I realized the true face of racism in the world. My African privilege had severely toned down racism for me. I come from a family of strong black men and women that have wielded their power, spoken boldly against big and small injustices so this level of helplessness was foreign. I grew up hearing stories about my great-grandfather Theophilus Oyeti, a respected educator who once slapped a white man for trying to humiliate another black man in his presence. So seeing the full face of racism brought me to my knees.
Something broke with Sandra Bland, it was a different hurt. Maybe because she reminded me of myself. She was a young, beautiful, outspoken black woman with natural hair in fun twists. The eternal optimist, full of life and love for her family. She had just gotten a job that week, I believe. Her dreams were just starting to come true. They arrested her for a broken taillight. They killed her and took photos of her body for the mugshot. They killed her, dressed her up in the uniform, laid her flat on the floor, and took a mugshot, then went on to tell us she committed suicide. We were left on social media to ‘spot the difference’ between her face when she was alive and this mugshot of her dead body. The hair that fell against gravity – a telltale sign that she was laying on the ground, her eyes sunken and lifeless. To this day no one knows what really happened to Sandra Bland. I went on her page after the incident and listened to her voice comfort and empower me against the very evil that cost her, her life.
The black lives matter movement was a safe haven of like minds, people who acknowledge the evil and are fighting for justice in the world — but then the all lives matter movement started and the Tomi Lahrens’ of the world came out of their holes and donned the full regalia of their beliefs and danced the dance, the mockery dance. A dance that might have been easier to bear if it was not trampling on the blood and graves of innocent men and women — black men and black women.
Where is the kindness? The basic human decency. Even as I write this, I have goosebumps. Who taught you to hate like this? What did they tell you to justify your hatred? What broke in your spirit and soul that made way for this darkness to stay? To consume you? And what is the end goal?
Then it happened again with Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, and it continues to, till this day. And with each name, each person, each hashtag, each ‘Say his Name’ ‘Say her name’ the beast seems to grow stronger and stronger. Each new death feels like a new level of hopelessness I had never even known I needed to have a capacity to bear. America had a black president and it seemed to even make things worse. Senseless killings and shootings, white boys shooting up black churches and schools. Then I realized, this is nothing new, social media was just as a microphone to amplify the silent scream or racial injustice to the world.
We are in the middle of a global pandemic, people are already living in fear — fear of death, of losing their jobs, of losing opportunities, of losing careers, of losing businesses, of losing experiences but racism takes no days off. Racism does not retire even in a global pandemic. Black, Asian, Hispanic people in America do not get the luxury of worrying JUST about the virus. And for some who have said “what is it to you, you’re African” I do not have to be from a place to feel this pain, I am human. These deaths are of human beings, human beings who look like me. Human beings who do not. We do not need a special anointing to feel.
Sidebar: One beautiful thing that will always remain beautiful to me no matter how many times I experience it is the oneness of the black spirit. We are a very broken and polarised race so our oneness is not something I expect to experience as often as I do. Every time I do experience it it’s like a deep joy within me that just feels way too touchy to explain, so I just savour it quietly.
I meet black Americans, Jamaicans, and Black Brits who have never set foot in Africa and yet they are my people. I see them on TV and it is a beautiful how the African spirit cannot be broken regardless of what it has endured. Even after years of being removed from the continent, it remains.
Even down to the food. Collard greens are derrived from African vegetable soups. I went to find the recipe for collard greens once because I was curious and I saw ham hocks and I was overwhelmed with emotion. Imagine the anguish of trying and trying to find something that tastes like home. Recipe after recipe, trying to recreate something that was stolen. Jambalaya is derrived from Jollof rice and Gumbo, from Okra Soup.
It is 2021, and in what is seeming like the new normal, the year starts upside down. I watched as White Males marched through the Capitol, they crawled over fences, they pushed through restricted areas. They waved their flags, they danced on seats of power and America had come face to face with the monster they created. Like a spoilt, overfed over-indulged kid that was hearing the word ‘NO’ for the first time, white America threw the most incredible historical tantrum. But what was even more shocking for black people globally was watching the way the American police handled the situation. Look I have no witty gimmicks here. I was beside myself with shock. America showed its ass. The body language, the tone of their voices, all that was left was for the police to high-5 and pat the terrorists on the back like toddlers returning to class from recess, as they terrorized the Capitol.
Breonna Taylor was in bed in her home when she was killed. George Floyd was murdered for allegedly using a bad cheque. The cheque was real, he died. We watched a man die under another man for a petty crime only to watch white men commit treason and all of a sudden the same police found their manners.
The white man who killed the 6 Asian women at their place of work was said to have had a bad day. A bad day? When I have a bad day I go for a walk. I take a long bath. I don’t kill 6 people. And for the police to be comfortable with sharing that to the public is just jaw dropping to say the least
It’s been really difficult watching the world react to Meghan Markle.
Let’s strip it down to the basics. A pregnant woman was mentally tormented by occurrences beyond her control, so much so that her only way out was to take her life and the life of her unborn child. Said woman has found the strength to speak out about her trauma. She is pregnant again, which is a miracle given the fact that she has had a miscarriage in the past possibly as a result of this same emotional trauma, and yet the parties responsible for putting her in that space continue to shift blame.
We have watched journalists try and shift blame, Piers Morgan has stormed off the ITV set, Sharon Osbourne is crying and yelling at Sheryl to explain racism to her. Sheryl wants to scream her head off but knows to keep her cool. She knows through years of racial conditioning, that she does not get the same pass as Sharon for being emotional about something she has every right to be emotional about. So she calmly explains.
Meghan said multiple times “I regret that I believed them when they said they would protect me”. This struck a nerve. Black women in the world do not have the privilege of trusting others especially people of other races to protect us. It would have been an entirely different thing if she had made room for the disappointment. She wouldn't have had to endure so much. It is a horrible lesson and a rude reminder that racism takes no days off.
It’s the gaslighting that kills me. It’s cruelty. Imagine this, it’s raining and you are safely indoors, dry and warm, you look out of your window and see someone drenched from the rain, trying to run to shelter or find an umbrella. Granted, you might not want to go out to give the person an umbrella because you don’t want to get wet yourself. But do you then say it is not raining? And that they are drenched because they chose to FIND the water falling from the sky?
I can no longer exist or retreat into the covering my African privilege has provided. I know too much. I now know that some people, not all people, but some people will see me and immediately see a Rolodex of harmful and dangerous stereotypes without giving me space or consideration to exist as myself. These stereotypes have cost people that look like me their freedom and their lives and this knowledge colours and clouds my outlook on life. It decides where I go and what I wear and how I speak depending on where I find myself in the wider world. I am raising my children to be citizens of the world, I must eventually tell them about racism. Their African privilege allows me to stall that conversation until they are much older but it breaks my heart that I will have to break their hearts the way mine has been broken.
Racism will literally have you feeling like you have completely lost your mind. Like you are shouting alone in a soundproof room and everyone else is on the outside watching your face distort and contort with fear, anger, and rage. Their heads cocked to the side with disgust, indifference, and nonchalance on their faces.
My African Privilege may muffle the loud, uncontrollable beast that is racism but I am not eliminated. I see the effects of colonialism on the continent. The ways the western world has refused to take their feet off our necks. I see the new colonial masters of today. They come as professionals now. They know to wear suits and ties. They smile politely and waltz into meetings with very important people. White privilege does WONDERS in Africa. It will quickly remind you of the colonial past whether you experienced it in your lifetime or not. You see white people with the same amount or even less experience as you secure opportunities that seem unattainable and you both silently know why. Why is it that non-Africans enjoy the best of Africa while the Africans stare, longingly almost in disbelief?
My favorite thing to do is people-watch the drivers of white men in my city. They drive more recklessly, more boisterously like they have attained a lofty sense of self as they drive their white bosses. I laugh at the impact of the slave mentality that so many unenlightened Africans possess. But I cry because many of our leaders are stuck in the same slave mentality as these drivers.
