At The New Inquiry, Yahdon Israel writes a moving, wrenching personal essay about the experience of “becoming African-American”—that is, being socialized into the system of anti-Black US racism. Here’s an excerpt:
Nigga was major a part of my American curriculum. A nigger was something black people as Kings and Queens of the largest and most beautiful continent—Africa—never were. A nigger was something which only existed because Europeans wanted to possess what didn’t belong to them: the land, the gold, the resources, and bodies of Africa. A nigger was something to be possessed; something to be owned. This is why Europeans took liberty in kidnapping, transporting, buying, selling, renaming, whipping, raping, killing, maiming and castrating niggers: niggers belonged to them. Everything the nigger did was for them; everything the nigger thought was for them. Everything the nigger was—the nigger was for them. This them, of course, was white people. Since this society belonged to them, deciding when to be a nigger was the perennial question for black people in America. The fact that our survival rested on this uncompromising fact is why my mother and father lost sleep trying to keep the world a safe distance from us. They understood this question because they had to answer to it their whole lives and didn’t want us to.
As admirable as it may have been for my parents to protect us from the world, its whiteness, and its incessant need to make niggers of us all; this admiration was swiftly undermined by the fact that we depended on the white world for State “benefits”—Welfare, Section-8, Medicaid, and public schools. No matter how hard my mother and father resisted this truth, it became something I had to confront it. If we were Kings and Queens, why were we on their welfare—instead of them on ours? No amount of Kente cloth had prepared me for these conundrums and each time I left the house I felt stripped, naked. I had been sent into the world alone and it was only a matter of time before I started to think that the white world’s estimation of us was true. My attending public school; my disgust with Africa; my hiding the Shea Butter and Black soap; my stealing my brother’s clothes; my private use of profanity and the word “nigga” was proof of this. I wanted to believe what my parents had taught me about the world—what kid doesn’t? But I couldn’t.
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