Why the Neo African Americans?

It originated from personal experience. When I was leaving Ghana to come to school in the America, people would ask me why I was coming to America, I would tell them I wanted to become a filmmaker, and they would wish me luck to become the next Steven Spielberg.

When I arrived in the America, people would ask me the same question, I would give them the same answer, and they would wish me luck to become the next Spike Lee. Great filmmakers, both, and I’m sure all the well-wishers wished me, well, well, but the significance of the difference in their respective blessings was not lost to me.

Through this and other experiences, I was forced to start thinking of myself as black. Not that there’s anything wrong with that or I didn’t know that already, but I mean exactly that: think. Having come from an overwhelmingly majority black country, I had only thought of my being black in philosophical terms. Living it as a minority was new to me, and I felt myself getting squeezed in boxes with which I was unfamiliar. For instance, I didn’t know why people in the gym wanted me on their basketball team. Of course, I knew why, but I didn’t know why, given that I would only go on to embarrass myself—and all black people.

By talking to other black immigrants, I realized they were all dealing with the idea of becoming black in America in different ways—the process of becoming black in America is quite different for the Somali in Minnesota, the Trinidadian in Queens, the Afro Cuban in Miami, and the Kenyan student in Iowa.

When I looked at the numbers and saw the steep upward trend in black immigration, especially from Africa, it became more of a macro-level intellectual curiosity for me. West Indian and Afro Latino immigrations have received significant academic, cultural and public policy attention over the decades, but the recent rapid rate of African immigration has the potential to re-focus attention to black immigration in a unique way: African names are distinctly “black.” Whereas a name like Colin Powell or Sammy Sosa in the phone book is not particularly interesting, Adebayo Ogunlesi is! The Ogunlesis and Dioufs and Dlaminis and Tesfamariams and—yes, I’ll say it—Obamas are coming faster than you may realize, and will inevitably raise the question: who is an African American again?

But what really got me off my butt to do this was a Pew Research/NPR poll in November 2007 that sought to capture changing attitudes in black America. I was concerned that such polls about changing black attitudes tend to draw their explanatory power from socio-economic changes along a historical straight line, without adequately capturing the effect, coming from the sides, of this under-the-radar phenomenon of black immigration and how that is transforming the “African American” narrative.

With my shoestring budget, camera equipment, Adobe Premiere, and tons of help from family, friends, scholars and strangers (I can’t thank y’all enough), I hope The Neo African Americans becomes one useful tool for this timely and important conversation.

A can of worms

Are you African American?

The question just fell off my tongue when I was shooting the first interview. A simple enough question…I thought. The complexities of answers, depth of emotions and rawness of passions have surprised me and led me down interesting paths of questions, with even more intriguing answers.

So far we’ve lived with the basis of the term “African American” uncritically examined. Now let’s reconsider it: Is it based on race, ethnicity, looks, citizenship, geography, history, culture or some other criteria? Is a black Caribbean immigrant African American? Is a Moroccan immigrant African American? Is an Indian African immigrant African American?  Even the African Americanness of a black African in America is in question?

We have opened a can of worms, and the conversations so far demonstrate that the can badly needed opening. The goal of The Neo African Americans is to be a tool to open this can in a safe and respectful manner.

A living documentary

The Neo African Americans is a living documentary; it’s never really finished. It’s a conversation—a conversation about how rapid, voluntary immigration from the Caribbean and, especially, Africa is transforming the African American narrative. It’s a conversation about identity, it’s a conversation about America, it’s a conversation about immigration, and for that matter, the global movement of people.

The documentary itself improves with input from screening audiences, so what you see today may be different from what you see a year later, based on suggestions from screenings. After 30 screenings and discussions, I still hear suggestions and perspectives that I hadn’t heard or considered before. At the Schomburg Center screening, for instance, the audience called for more Afro Latino perspective, and that will duly be incorporated in the next iteration of the documentary.

What I have learned

I come to this subject not as an expert or even a filmmaker. I think of myself as a public policy analyst with a camera. This is not a new subject; there are many scholars who have done a great deal of work on this issue, and I have gratefully borrowed from their work. The benefit of exploring this issue through a camera lens is that it captures emotions, reactions and conversations that academic research may not. So after 30 screenings, I have gained some key insights that I hope will inform further research:

that this is the moment for the conversation;

that the weakness of institutional memory among student groups creates a constant reinvention of the wheel among African Diaspora groups

that black people are confused about what to call themselves;

that white people are confused about what to call black people;

that I have left some people more confused than I found them (sorry);

that some people are quick to point out that race is a social construct; yet can’t tolerate people who don’t describe themselves in simple racial terms;

that identity is fluid and context-specific;

that Black is universal. In the year that I’ve been screening this documentary, I have met many people who are not quite at ease being called African American, but all except one person at University of Pennsylvania are comfortable with being called black. Makes one wonder why there appears to be something wrong with calling people “black”; and

that, perhaps most revealingly, people just want to be people. In the informal poll on www.neoafricanamericans.com, there are several options, but the option with the most votes is “A Person.”

On the relationship between “African Americans” and black immigrants

Now, the elephant. This relationship has been described as strained, volatile, formative, cooperative—all true. It would be foolish to close one’s eyes to the differences between black immigration and “native” African Americans in how the two “groups” relate to each other and how they each relate to Americana.  As much as this issue is sometimes unnecessarily sensationalized, there are countless historical and contemporary examples of collaborative projects. The fundamental differences are, in fact, a matter of historical perspective.

Picture a wall.

Historically all black people in America have faced a wall to their achievement of the American dream. Over the centuries, through the sweat and blood many African Americans, windows have gradually been broken in that wall; windows large enough for people to jump through. Nevertheless, there are still huge chunks of wall remaining. Many African Americans still feel a responsibility to break down what remains of the wall. That probably partly explains why, as one student observed at the University of Chicago, many African Americans tend to go into fields such as political science, sociology and African American studies. Some will call that the African American project: TRANSFORMATION.

Enter The Neo African Americans. Most of them come from places so dark and full of walls that when they enter America and they encounter this thing they don’t see a wall; they see windows. In fact, they come here looking for windows, so their main objective in America is to figure out how to jump through those windows. In that regard, they are more immigrant than black. Call it the black immigrant project: EXPLOITATION

It is this dialectic that creates what some see as a tension between black immigrants and African Americans. The key to deepening the relationship is to understand the factors that have shaped the other’s perspective. Whether you see a window or wall depends on the accident of your birth and your socialization? Looking ahead, whether you see a window or wall is also a question of strategy—should black people spend energy breaking down the rest of the wall so everyone can just walk through, or jumping through the windows in such masses that the rest of the walls crumble?

Noteworthy comments and observations

- At Illinois Wesleyan College, an African American student expressed how he wants to stop living his grandfather’s life. No matter how much he tries to convince grandpa how much things have changed, grandpa keeps telling him how to look at everything through a racial lens.

- At another university, the African Students Union (ASU) parted ways with the Black Students Union (BSU) because they felt the BSU’s goals were political, therefore parochial, while the ASU’s was cultural, therefore inclusive.

- In Lewiston, Maine, in response to advocacy for a playground for Somali refugees, the town, apparently by instinct, built them a basketball court—the kids played soccer, not basketball.

-At the New Jersey state museum, a black Southern male shared how he feels closer in culture with African and Caribbean blacks than he does with Northeastern African Americans.

-At one liberal arts college, an administrator realized that many of their black students were not really African American, according to his four-grandparent test.

So what?

First, black immigration introduces diversity of experience and thought to black America. For decades, we black people in America have advocated more diversity in American public life, partly to better represent America and also to bring different perspectives. Well, those principles should still hold true among black people. We usually speak of diversity among the black community in terms of education, class and complexion. We hardly talk about it in terms of voluntary v. involuntary immigration. We need to recognize and embrace the reality that though there are many ties that bind us, there is no universal black experience or expression. With those differences in experience come differences in perspective of America. That’s unity in diversity.

Second, black immigration opens America’s eyes to the diversity among the black community. So you can’t just see a black person and assume you know their American story.

Third, black immigration opens new windows of honest engagement with America. Many black immigrants coming to the America do not bear the same historical scars as many African Americans. That allows for some interracial conversations that are otherwise uncomfortable.  I have conversations with my white friends that would frankly have been very difficult if my forefathers had sat at the back of the bus and been hung from trees.