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.
