What is Blackness?
While the African continent and diaspora are full of various groups of Black/African people, people of African descent still share common struggles and interests.
by Adam Hudson
What does it mean to be “Black”? Who is an “African American” versus, say, a Jamaican or Nigerian? Is it still relevant to refer to people of African descent as “Black,” even if continental Africans don’t refer to themselves as such but, rather, by ethnic group and nationality? Is Pan-Africanism a relevant ideology for people of African descent or, as some would argue, is it pie-in-the-sky gibberish? These questions are pertinent as the African diaspora grows beyond just descendants of enslaved Africans but also includes African immigrants in other parts of the world, such as Great Britain, Spain, and Italy.
It definitely mattered for the 2024 United States presidential election, when incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris ran for president. In 2008, the United States—a country built on the backs of enslaved Africans—elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. This was a major milestone in the country’s history. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected, and his running mate was the first Black and Asian vice president, Kamala Harris. On July 21, 2024, Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris; she became the Democratic Party presidential candidate. Obama and Harris are both held up in American racial politics as Black politicians. Yet, neither of them is a descendant of enslaved Africans in the United States. Obama is mixed-race, with a white American mother and a Kenyan father, and was primarily raised by his mother and white grandparents in Hawaii. Harris is also mixed-race, with an Indian mother, whom she was primarily raised by, and a Jamaican father, both of whom were college professors. Her Jamaican father, Donald Harris, is of African descent.
At a gathering with the National Association of Black Journalists on July 31, 2024, Donald Trump answered questions by Black journalists and, as usual, unapologetically stuck his foot in his mouth. When asked if he agreed with Republicans who accused Vice President Kamala Harris of being a “DEI” hire, Trump questioned Harris’s identity, claiming, “she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went––she became a Black person.”
Trump was roundly criticized for suggesting that Harris suddenly “turned Black.” During the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, when asked about this comment, Trump walked it back, saying, “I couldn’t care less, whatever she wants to be is OK with me,” but falsely said that Harris “put out” that she was not Black and “then I read that she was Black.” Of course, Harris did not magically “turn Black.” She has always been Black by ancestry.
While Kamala Harris is both of Indian and African descent, it does raise the question of who is not just “Black” but, specifically, Black American or African American. For many Black Americans, this question has raised the issue of who is “Black” and deserves to represent Black America beyond just being of African ancestry. While Obama and Harris are held up as advancements in the politics of “representation matters,” the fact remains that the United States has never had a president or vice president whose ancestors were victims of U.S. chattel slavery.
As an African American, a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to North America, I think it’s a good thing for African Americans to close ranks, distinguish ourselves as an ethnic group, and define what that means beyond just skin color. At the same time, I disagree with using ethnic delineation to further sectarianism, tribalism, and hatred against other groups of Black people. While the African continent and diaspora are full of various ethnic groups of Black/African people, each with their own distinct cultures, people of African descent still share common struggles and interests, particularly the struggle against global anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and colonialism.
Blackness remains a relevant identity for all people of African descent who are racially considered Black—both in Africa and in the diaspora—because of the global nature of anti-Blackness.1 This does not mean that such a unifying Black identity must supplant or negate the distinct ethnic and cultural identities of people of African descent, both on the continent and in the diaspora. African Americans constitute our own ethnicity and nation of people within the United States and the African diaspora. While African Americans built the United States and are entitled to political, social, and economic rights in America, we are still an African people, and Africa is our ancestral homeland. Therefore, Pan-Africanism remains relevant for Black America and all people of Black African descent, i.e. Africans who are racialized as Black. Pan-Africanism is deeper than racial and cultural unity among Black African people. It is also a political ideology working towards a larger political goal of liberation for all Black people. Black African people share similar struggles with systemic racism around the world, making Pan-Africanism relevant in the 21st century.
Transatlantic Slave Trade
The transatlantic slave trade was a massive human trafficking and enslavement enterprise unlike any other; comparing it to ancient forms of slavery is historically dishonest. In most civilizations, slavery occurred in the context of war. If one side lost, their people were turned into slaves by the civilization that conquered them. Those slaves, however, could earn their freedom. Slavery was also often used to pay off debt. If a person was in debt, they could get out of it by becoming a slave for a temporary period to “pay off” what they owe. Most importantly, slavery was not based on the idea of “race” until the transatlantic slave trade. Gradually, the transatlantic slave trade became premised on race, specifically in assigning the Black/African race to slave status.
The transatlantic slave trade started with the Portuguese in the mid-to-late 1400s. Portuguese sailors exploring the African coast purchased or captured African slaves and brought them back to Portugal beginning in the 1440s. By the 1480s, the Portuguese were transporting enslaved African labor to their sugar plantations in Cape Verde and the Madeira islands, both of which are located in the Atlantic Ocean off of northern and western African coastlines (Cape Verde off the Mauritanian coast and Madeira off the Moroccan coast).
The transatlantic slave trade was made official in 1518, when King Charles I of Spain authorized Spain to ship enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. The Atlantic slave trade ended once Brazil abolished slavery in 1888—the last country to do so, twenty-three years after the American Civil War. The countries that trafficked Africans during the transatlantic slave trade were Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, France, and Denmark. For over 370 years, from 1501 to 1875, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, over 12.5 million Africans were trafficked and enslaved in the Americas: of that number, around 1.8 million died during the horrendous Middle Passage, the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, which means that over 10.5 million enslaved Africans survived and landed in the Americas. While four percent of those Africans (388,747 people) were sent to North America (which had its own internal slave trade between 1808 and 1865 that boosted its slave population), according to a Slate report based on the aforementioned database, most were sent to Brazil (4.8 million), the Caribbean (4 million), and Spanish Central America (1.3 million). Those enslaved Africans came from over four dozen ethnic groups from Western and Central Africa, starting from the Senegambia region down to Angola. The United States and Western European powers profited immensely from the transatlantic slave trade: from the sugar, cotton, and other profitable cash crops cultivated by enslaved Africans, to the building of infrastructure, to the banks and insurance companies that had financial interests in the slave trade, which contributed to why it lasted for over 370 years.
The Emergence of “Blackness”
As mentioned earlier, the transatlantic slave trade was particularly unique because it based slavery on race. Before Europeans arrived in Africa and started the transatlantic slave trade, Africans in Africa did not immediately think of themselves as collectively “African” or “Black.” Before the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization, Africans did refer to and notice themselves as people with dark to black skin in paintings and artwork, so this is not to say that Africans did not “know” they were Black or people with darker skin. For much of Africa’s history before slavery, there was no collective political or cultural consciousness of “we are all Black, we are all African” among Africans on the continent. Like other parts of the world, Africans identified themselves primarily by their ethnic groups, tribes, and nations, all with different languages and cultural customs based on geographic location.
This is why the argument that “Africans sold Africans into slavery,” a claim intended to take the heat off Europeans for creating and benefitting from the transatlantic slave trade, is misleading. Africans sold rival ethnic groups into slavery. Many of those kidnapped and sold into the Atlantic slave trade were prisoners of wars fought between African ethnic groups who did not see themselves as one people. Europeans sold guns to African ethnic groups (since gunpowder and firearms were foreign to Africans before Europeans arrived), which further instigated and inflamed civil wars on the African continent between different African nations. This further supplied a steady stream of African slaves to meet the demand of European slave masters in the Americas.
Slavery did exist in Africa but it was nowhere near as brutal as slavery in the Americas. Slaves in Africa had rights and they were not brutally treated the way enslaved Africans were in the Americas. The Africans who sold their rivals into slavery for Europeans were unaware of how brutal they would be treated. When they did hear how enslaved Africans were treated in the Americas, Africans were shocked. In addition, in many African societies, slaves were often part of the family and the children of slaves could be integrated into the master’s family. There was also a greater chance for upward mobility for slaves in Africa. Not only did slaves in the Americas lack rights, slavery was: first, based on race (the only place where slavery was based on race and skin color); second, permanent rather than temporary; third, hereditary—slavery was passed down from one generation to the next. Africans in the Americas born to enslaved women inherited the mother’s slave status.
The pan-African consciousness of “Blackness” and collective “African-ness” emerged among enslaved African people in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This was a result of the shared condition of enslavement. Ethnic differences ceased to matter to enslaved Africans who suffered under the toil of European slave masters in North America, Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere throughout the Americas. What brought enslaved Africans together was precisely their shared condition of enslavement in a foreign land by dint of having been identified as Black Africans “suited for this purpose.”
Africans were enslaved because, in the eyes of Europeans, their Blackness made them justifiable targets for enslavement. Europeans were very conscious of skin color, especially as they began the Age of Exploration and encountered darker skinned peoples in the Americas and Africa. Before Europeans encountered Africans, they already had their negative preconceived notions of blackness and darkness. In the European imagination, Blackness was associated with everything negative—death, being soiled, sinister, wickedness; meanwhile, whiteness was associated with purity, virtue, and innocence. Even in the English language and other European languages, the word “black” has negative connotations—heaviness, gloom, hostility, disaster. Europeans also used Christianity, specifically the “curse of Ham,” to justify the enslavement of Africans by arguing that they were naturally predisposed to being slaves because of religion. In addition, European explorers sold the myth to other Europeans that Africa was a “Dark Continent,” a land with no advanced civilization (which was entirely false; African civilizations were just as sophisticated as Europe) and that African people were savages in need of European civilization. As Europeans colonized the Americas and expanded the transatlantic slave trade, they also feared rebellions from Native Americans and Africans. Dr. Gerald Horne points out in The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, as slave populations grew throughout the Americas, Europeans found themselves a minority, especially in the Caribbean islands. As a result, there emerged a growing pan-European “‘white’ identity politics” to maintain slavery and confront the likelihood of slave rebellions. There was also a mutual interest among the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Europeans in enslaving Africans and taking land from Native Americans; that mutual interest transcending ethnic, cultural, and religious differences in Europe. While Europeans were extremely color and race conscious with the people they enslaved, exploited, and slaughtered, they also created their own white racial identity to bring Europeans together in a shared project of settler colonialism.
There were also practical reasons for Europeans to enslave Africans. Africans had valuable skills to be exploited for slavery. They had farming, woodworking, and metal-working skills from the civilizations in Africa. For example, Africans from the Rice Coast—the rice growing region of West Africa stretching from Guinea to the Ivory Coast (including Sierra Leone, where some of my ancestors are from)—were brought to cultivate rice in the Americas, particularly the United States and British Caribbean. In addition to their skills, Africans’ black skin made it easier for them to stick out in the New World. At first, Europeans tried enslaving the indigenous peoples of the Americas. However, they ran into a few problems. The Natives died of diseases brought by Europeans. Furthermore, if Native slaves managed to escape enslavement, it was easy for them to hide because they knew the territory. Africans were foreigners to the Americas who did not know the land, which made it harder for them to hide when running away (although many Africans did successfully run away from slavery). Because their dark skin and African features made them stick out, it was easier for Europeans to identify Africans, kidnap them, and send them back into slavery if they ran away. This marked African-ness and Blackness as synonymous with slavery.
In addition, enslaved Africans had much of their indigenous ethnic heritage ripped from them during slavery, especially their native languages. They were forced, violently, to adopt the languages of their slave masters—English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. They were given names in the language of their slave masters. As a result, when enslaved Africans encountered each other and spoke English, Spanish, or any other European language, what emerged was a shared consciousness of being Black and collectively African. The violent, material conditions made it difficult for enslaved African people to preserve certain aspects of their culture. Specifically, it made it incredibly difficult to preserve direct continuity from the cultures of specific ethnic groups.
That does not mean, however, that enslaved African people and their descendants lost all of their indigenous African culture. Certain West African foods were brought by enslaved African people to North America—rice, okra, black-eyed peas, yams, watermelon—and became part of African American cuisine. Moreover, a lot of African diasporic music is African-derived in its musical characteristics in terms of melodic and rhythmic features. For example, music in Latin America is greatly influenced by African rhythms and polyrhythms from Central African music. Enslaved Africans in Cuba created the conga drum, which is played in much Latin music. The conga is said to have evolved from earlier African drums. As I will explain later in further detail, African American music specifically is also African-derived in its musical characteristics. The African diasporic cultures that emerged in the context of the transatlantic slave trade are an amalgamation of the different African ethnic groups that survived the Middle Passage.
To this day, on the African continent, Africans identify by their ethnicity and country of origin first. When one is in a racially homogenous environment, the urgency to identify as Black first seems ill-fitting. One could also argue that the idea of “Blackness” is American-centric and only applies to the United States. South Africa, because of its history of apartheid, might be one of the exceptions on the African continent where Blackness remains relevant as an identity.
Anti-Black Racism in Latin America and Europe
I would still argue that a unified Black/African identity is relevant for all African and African-descent people, whether in the continent or diaspora. People of Black/African descent face similar patterns of anti-Black racism whether they are in Latin America, Europe, or the United States. This anti-Black racism stems from the centuries-long legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the European colonization of Africa.
African Americans face myriad forms of institutional racism. In the prison system, African Americans are disproportionately overrepresented and are more likely to receive longer sentences. While 13 percent of the U.S. population, Black people make up 33 percent of the prison population and 46 percent of those serving sentences longer than 10 years. In addition, Black people are disproportionately killed by police year after year and are more likely to be unarmed and not threatening anyone when killed. In addition to police violence and mass incarceration, African Americans face racial inequalities in the U.S. economy. The racial wealth gap in the U.S. remains persistent. According to a 2022 Federal Reserve data, median Black wealth in the United States was $44,890, while median wealth for White Americans was $285,000. Black homeownership in the United States lags far behind White Americans. The homeownership rate for White Americans in 2021 was 72.7 percent but 44 percent for Black Americans—the smallest for all racial and ethnic groups (for Latinos, it’s 50.6 percent and Asians have a homeownership rate of 62.8 percent). The problems African Americans face in the United States are very similar to what Black people in other parts of the diaspora face.
In Latin America, the dominant perception is that everyone is mixed-race and that, because of that, the region is a racial democracy with no racial tensions like the United States. The reality is the opposite—racism exists in Latin America and that racism stems from slavery.
Most of the enslaved Africans trafficked to the Americans during the transatlantic slave trade were taken to Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Central and South America and the Caribbean, particularly countries like Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. In North America, the British established a binary racial hierarchy that was based on White versus Black or White versus non-White. This is because the English colonizers brought their families and established permanent settlements in North America.
In South America, it was originally Spanish and Portuguese men—traders, explorers, and conquistadors—who came to the New World. Their main plan was to extract gold and other resources and send the riches back to Spain and Portugal. Since they did not bring their wives and stayed for a long time in the Americas, those men often had sexual relations with Indigenous and enslaved African women—often not consensually, especially if the woman was a slave. As a result, the mixed-race population grew in countries like Mexico and Brazil; there were people who were European/Indigenous, European/African, and some who were mixed with all three. This caused problems for the Spanish Crown. Not only were the children mixed-race but the offspring were not the result of religiously sanctioned marriages, therefore, the children were illegitimate. More importantly, when it came to passing down wealth—land, titles of nobility, etc.—white Spaniards were hesitant to pass down inheritances to people mixed with “impure” blood.
Therefore, the Spanish created a more sophisticated racial caste system that accommodated the reality of race-mixing called the casta system. Spanish-born, pure-blood Spaniards were at the top of the hierarchy and ran the Empire as governors and viceroys; people of Spanish ancestry but born in the New World were next and they often held local managerial positions in the colonies but did not rule; people who were half Spanish and half Indigenous were Mestizos and were in the middle of the class hierarchy; people of half Spanish and half African ancestry were often part of the slave population but, if light enough and adopted European culture, could be part of the white population; at the bottom were the Indigenous people and the enslaved African peoples. Mixed-race people could assimilate into whiteness through intermarriage with Europeans, which was often encouraged. Obviously, their children would have more European blood. While the casta system was specific to the Spanish colonies, the Portuguese had a similar racial caste system in Brazil. In Portuguese and Spanish colonies, the common denominators were the enslavement of Africans and keeping Africans at the bottom of the social, economic, and political hierarchy.
The casta system ended when Latin American countries fought for and won independence from Spain during the Spanish American wars of independence in the early 1800s. However, the casta system has a legacy in South America to this day. Many South American countries, like Brazil and Cuba, instituted national policies to encourage the whitening of their countries’ populations. Called “blanqueamiento,” or “branqueamento” in Brazil, these policies promoted European immigration to increase the white population in their countries in the early 1900s.
Like the United States, Latin America has its own form of systemic racism against Black people. Black and Indigenous people in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Peru “earn 37.8% less than their white-mestizo counterparts,” according tothe Inter-American Development Bank. Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay represent 80 percent of the total Black population in Latin America. This is a result of the overrepresentation of Black people in low-paying jobs. Brazil has similar patterns of police violence against Black people as the United States. Rio de Janeiro has the “the highest number of Afro-Brazilians killed by security agents, with one person killed by the police every four hours” and “Brazil has the third largest incarcerated population in the world, behind China and the US,” according to a survey referenced in Africa Is A County.
Outside of the Americas, anti-Blackness stemming from slavery and colonialism remains an issue in Europe. More Africans are leaving the continent for better lives, jobs, and opportunities in the West—the Americas and Europe. The Black immigrant population in Europe has been growing in recent years. From 1990 to 2020, the African migration doubled to where there are now11 million African migrants living in Europe. However, contrary to far-right fear mongering about nonwhite migrants taking over Europe, most migrants to European Union countries come from Switzerland (in Europe but not an EU member), Australia, Iceland (not part of the EU), Israel, Norway (not part of the EU), the U.S., and Turkey. African migrants in Europe make up less than 15 percent of the migrant population. According to a report by the Africa Europe Foundation, “around 80% of African migrations are driven by the search for better economic prospects” and are “mostly young people, educated, looking for jobs. Almost half of them are women.” The far-right in Europe has weaponized the economic woes in Europe—particularly inflation and rising cost of living—on nonwhite immigrants. In addition, there is disillusionment with Europe’s place in the world and for some Europeans, a growing non-white migrant population hurts their sense of collective identity as white Europeans, leading to a rise of reactionary nationalism. This has led to far-right, neo-Nazi parties gaining power and pushing for anti-immigrant policies in many European countries, such as Austria, Germany, and France.
This became very real last year when British fascist rioters attacked Black and Brown people in the UK in August 2024. Spurred by a false far-right social media claim that an immigrant Muslim stabbed young girls at a summer holiday camp, racist mobs attackedBlack, immigrant, Muslim, and non-white communities in the UK. The actual attacker was neither an immigrant nor Muslim. While some commentators pinned the blame for the riots on online misinformation, others made the point that it was another sign of growing racism and far-right sentiment that’s been growing in the UK and other parts of Europe for recent years. It is not just the economy that is driving this rise of fascism in Europe. Racism in Europe has been going on much longer and is more systemic than this recent rise in far-right European nationalism.
In August 2011, Mark Duggan, an unarmed young Black man, was shot and killed by London police. I studied abroad at Oxford in winter of 2010, while I was a student at Stanford University. I experienced the same instance of a white woman fearfully walking fast past and away from me —stemming from the typical fear of a Black man walking down the street—as I have in the United States. During my time there, I talked to other people of color in the UK and they shared similar stories of racism. When I heard about Duggan’s story, I immediately thought of the many Black people killed by American police—from Oscar Grant to Sean Bell. This was almost a decade before the police killing of George Floyd that sparked global anti-racist protests. Similar to George Floyd, Mark Duggan’s killing sparked protests in London. The protests turned into riots and there were similar arguments about property damage. But many Black Britons spoke on how the riots stemmed from ongoing racism against Black people in the UK that was often brushed under the rug.
Europe also has an issue with systemic racism and racial discrimination against Black people. Racism is not just a United States problem. The European Union’s fundamental rights agency conducted a survey of over 6,700 people of African descent in 13 EU countries—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden—and found that 45 percent experienced racial discrimination. It also found that 30 percent experienced racist harassment, 58 percent experienced racial profiling by the police, 34 percent experienced job discrimination, and that people of African descent are at a higher risk of poverty, especially during rising inflation and cost of living. A report by ENAR, a European anti-racist network, found several patterns of racial discrimination against people of African descent in European housing, finance, and jobs, such as barriers to homeownership and getting bank loans. According to the report, in France,
[t]here are major differences between immigrants of different origins when it comes to leaving social housing. Immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa are much less likely to own their own homes (15% and 9% respectively), compared with 30% of those born in a French overseas department and 43% for immigrants from South-East Asia.
Also in France, the report found that,
[r]egarding bank loans, a testing conducted in 2017 showed that people racialised as sub-Saharan African are discriminated against when enquiring about bank loans. The customer-tester ‘assumed to be of no migratory origin’ had his mortgage application considered, without being at a disadvantage, in twice as many bank branches as the tester assumed to be of sub-Saharan origin. The customer-tester assumed to be of no migratory origin was also offered shorter term loans and at better interests than the other customer tester.
Black diasporans in Europe have different cultures and narratives than African Americans. Some are descendants of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean or Central and South America living in Britain, France, Spain, or other European countries. Many Afro-Caribbeans in Britain come from the Windrush generation. In 1948, the HMT Empire Windrush brought hundreds of Caribbeans to the UK. Afro-Caribbean workers were brought to the UK to rebuild the country after World War II with the promise of permission to stay. Some are recent immigrants from other parts of the diaspora, while many are immigrants from Africa. Despite the cultural differences and whether one is a descendant of enslaved Africans, people of Black African descent in Europe face similar forms of systemic racism and anti-Blackness as African Americans.
The global nature of anti-Black racism is one of the most compelling reasons for a unified Black/African identity. Europe’s racism is shaped by both the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy of colonialism in Africa and other non-European countries.
African American Identity
This brings me to who African Americans are and why we are an African people. The descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the United States beginning in the early 1600s—African Americans or Black Americans—are a distinct group of people. We descend from the several Western and Central African ethnic groups that were taken as slaves to North America; therefore, by ancestry, we are an amalgamation of different African ethnic groups—the Kongo, Mbundu, Igbo, Mende, Temne, Mandinka, Fulani, Akan, and many other ethnicities. In my own case, for example, parts of my ancestry trace back to Sierra Leone and Nigeria and, I’m sure, several other ethnic groups mixed in. In that sense, we are like a new type of African ethnic group—the product of Africans who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. So, we are African, in terms of blood and ancestry, but we are different from an African immigrant in the West coming from, say, Ghana who can identify as Akan or another ethnic group.
African Americans are an actual ethnic group with a distinct cultural heritage that also shaped American history and American culture. At the same time, African Americans are still African beyond just ancestry and blood. What makes African American identity difficult to define is the sheer number of misconceptions about African Americans as a people.
One common misconception is that African Americans have no culture. One can go to social media and other parts of the Internet—such as YouTube and TikTok—and see this argument come up often. Even some African Americans internalize this, while others push back against it. African Americans do have a culture. This argument does come from somewhere, though. YouTube vlogger and commentator Jouelzy made an interesting point in a video where she addressed how African Americans often do not have spaces that are exclusively African American to preserve their culture. In it, she explained why many African American would feel that their culture is less valid. One of the major reasons for this feeling is because African Americans descend from enslaved people; she said, “…there is a wrongly held shame from some of us who believe that we are less than because our ancestors were slaves.” That’s not the only reason. She said that because African Americans do not have a distinctive term that describes their ethnic group—like Kikuyu, Zulu, or Fulani—rather than a hyphenated term or just the word “Black,” there is a feeling among some African Americans that their culture is less authentic. She further said, “There’s definitely this air that because our culture coalesced largely in the 1900s, it is somehow too new to be validated.” These reasons also help explain why not just African Americans but even some non-African Americans look down upon African American culture and do not see it as a valid or authentic culture.
Another common misconception about African American culture is the conflation of African American culture with gang and/or “ghetto” culture. This is an anti-Black argument that’s often parroted by conservatives to argue against legitimate claims of anti-Black oppression. The conservative argument for why Black Americans are behind or at the bottom of a myriad of socioeconomic metrics is because of culture rather than systemic racial oppression. Conservatives are not the only ones who conflate African American culture with criminality; liberals do it, too. In the 1990s, to justify the rise of mass incarceration and “get tough” policies to tackle crime, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton argued that there was a new breed of “superpredators” terrorizing people; the not-so-subtle implication is that those “superpredators” were Black males. That was a dog whistle conflating crime with Black American males. On top of politicians and commentators conflating African American culture with criminality, racial bias in U.S. news media perpetuates the myth of Black criminality. News media will, according to Center for American Progress, report on murder, assault, and theft cases with Black suspects that outpace their actual arrests for these crimes and presenting Black criminals as more dangerous than white criminals. Also, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, “mugshots were used in coverage of 45% of cases involving Black people accused of crimes compared to only 8% of cases involving white defendants.” White-dominated record labels heavily promoted gangster rap music with negative messages and lyrics, while sidelining militant messages.
While African American culture is not treated with respect, it is also, ironically, often mimicked by people who have little to no connection with the African American experience. The music industry’s racism is one example of this. American popular music is, in large part, African American music—blues, jazz, funk, disco, rap, rock, R&B. Beginning with Elvis Presley, the American music industry has a history of using non-Black faces to market and sell Black music. Many rock bands of the 1960s and 70s, such as Led Zeppelin, outright stole music from Black blues and rock musicians, while those Black artists got shut out from the royalties they deserved. Film and TV is another example. Asian American actress, comedian, and rapper Awkwafina rose to fame in large part due to her mimicry of African American mannerisms by adopting a “Blaccent” throughout her career, particularly in characters she played. Awkwafina is not the only one to adopt a Blaccent or cosplay Blackness. Many non-Black actors, creatives, and social media personalities have used a Blaccent or mimicked other aspects of African American culture to advance their careers and seem “cool.” Another example is the appropriation of African American culture on social media. What is often deemed as “Internet slang” or Gen Z slang—words like “slay,” “woke,” “period,” “tea,” “sis”—is, actually, African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Young non-Black kids get exposed to African American culture through social media apps like TikTok and wind up adopting those words in their vernacular. Even well before the advent of social media, words like “cool,” “hip,” or “dope” that originated in African American communities would be adopted by younger white Americans, and later enter the larger American vernacular, through jazz and rap music. While African American culture is looked down upon or not treated as an authentic culture, the irony is that many non-Black people copy it, either intentionally or unintentionally.
What is African American Culture?
African American identity is an ethnic identity with a rich heritage that has much of its roots from Africa but evolved on its own in the United States. Its food, as explained earlier, includes yams, okra, black-eyed peas, and jambalaya. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is its own dialect of English. While treated as “improper” English, AAVE is often where non-Black Americans draw their slang from. Essentially, popular American slang often comes from AAVE. African American culture has an oral tradition that includes the folktale Br’er Rabbit, the myth of John Henry, and the dozens, spoken word poetry, rhyming, which all evolved into modern rap music.
That brings me to African American music, perhaps one of African American culture’s most recognizable cultural outputs. As an African American musician (drummer/percussionist, djembe player), I can lend deeper knowledge on this. A lot of writing about African American music focuses on content—the messages the music conveys—and the actual artists. While very important to discuss, what gets left out in these discussions is form, as in what are its musical characteristics—harmony, melody, rhythm—that give it a distinct sound. While African American music encompasses many genres, as a musical tradition, it has a very unified, fixed, and consistent set of musical characteristics that give it a distinct sound. Those musical characteristics are, primarily, African-derived and can be played on a variety of instruments. African American music’s African-derived musical characteristics—in terms of harmony, melody, and rhythm—are: blue notes, the blues scale (which comes from West African folk music), call-and-response, emphasis on syncopation in rhythm and melody, rhythmic complexity, and polyrhythms (Stewart). Those are the characteristics that give African American music a distinct sound. The main things that are not African-derived in African American music are that the lyrics are sung or rapped in English and the use of modern, Western-manufactured music production technology. In terms of instruments, many instruments are Western, some are African-derived like the banjo, while African-Americans did invent new instruments like the drum kit. At the turn of the twentieth century, Edward “Dee Dee” Chandler, an African American New Orleans marching band drummer, invented the modern drum set by creating a makeshift bass drum pedal—the first one to do so. This freed his hands to play more on the snare drum, while his foot hit the bass drum. After him, more drummers demanded bass drum pedals and manufacturers like Ludwig produced them to meet the demand. This marked the transition from the double drumming (playing snare and bass drum separately with two hands) that drummers did before to playing bass with foot, both hands on snare, which formed the basis of the modern drum kit. Now, any band of any genre, if they need a drummer to play a back beat, that drummer has a drum kit.
How African American music evolved from Western and Central African musical traditions to what it is now, despite the conditions of slavery, speaks to the resilience of African Americans. Music, like any art form, evolves over time, builds off of what came before, and can even endure horrific conditions. Despite the conditions of slavery and efforts by European slave masters to erase the cultures of enslaved Africans, enslaved Africans still wanted to entertain themselves, pour out their feelings, and find some way to endure life under enslavement. During slavery, while African drums were banned in North America, enslaved Africans were able to preserve their African musical traditions in other ways. Enslaved Africans were still able to play string instruments. Those Africans brought the banjo to North America from West Africa. The banjo’s African predecessor is the akonting, a lute instrument from the Senegambia region. It’s not just the instrument itself that’s African but so is the playing style, which emphasizes down-picking. In addition to the banjo, enslaved Africans danced in the ring shout, a ritualistic dance that derived from various forms of African rhythms and dance. This dance is still performed, particularly by the Gullah Geechee. In Congo Square in New Orleans, enslaved Africans were able to openly practice their African drum, rhythm, dance, and spiritual traditions on Sundays. French and Spanish colonial era laws allowed Sundays off from work, including for slaves. Enslaved Africans were only restricted to gathering in Congo Square. European (French, Spanish, English, etc.) and American slave masters feared large gathers of enslaved Africans, hence such harsh restrictions. Those African musical gatherings at Congo Square influenced later New Orleans jazz funerals and marching bands, which gave birth to jazz music.
After slavery ended, this meant formerly enslaved people could more openly participate in American society—even though they faced another century of legalized racial apartheid. The folk string and banjo music enslaved Africans played during slavery gave rise to blues music. Ragtime—syncopated piano and banjo music—was invented by African Americans in the late 1800s and was one of the first forms of American popular dance music. Blues, merged with ragtime, then blended with New Orleans marching band music, which is how jazz was born. After blues and jazz, came rhythm and blues (R&B) and rock-and-roll. Then after those genres came funk and rap/hip-hop. In addition, there’s African American spiritual and religious music, which came from the spirituals sung by enslaved Africans. Those spirituals evolved into Black gospel music. Gospel music blended with R&B to create soul music. There’s also disco and techno music, which were created by African Americans and are part of the African American musical tradition. Today, there are many African American musicians, like Janelle Monae, delving into Afrofuturism, which, as a cultural philosophy, reflects heavily on African Americans’ past, while looking to the future.
In addition to food, art, and music, African Americans have contributed to modernity with a litany of inventions from the stoplight, refrigeration, air conditioning, and cellular technology for cell phones. Therefore, African American culture is a very rich heritage and should not be reduced simply to gangster rap, athletes, and the stereotype of Black gang culture.
The Term “African American”
Another common misconception is the origin of the term “African American” itself. Most people—commentators, laypeople, etc.—incorrectly attribute the use and proliferation of the term to Jesse Jackson. In 1988, Reverend Jesse Jackson encouraged Black people in the United States to stop referring to themselves as “Black” and adopt “African American.” Some Black Americans did so, but if you were to talk to any random Black person in the United States, they would self-identify as “Black” rather than “African American” for a variety of reasons. Some would say this is because Jackson became less relevant with Black America as a leader and came to be seen as just another Civil Rights movement relic, which led to the term becoming less popular with Black people. To some Black Americans’ ears, the term “African American” has a milquetoast and politically correct connotation. It sounds like something a Black person would say to identify themselves in a pretend colorblind corporate boardroom surrounded by white coworkers than when around regular, working-class Black people in Oakland, Baltimore, or Atlanta. Meanwhile, “Black” in the United States has connoted a sense of Black pride and Black power since the 1970s, which is why most Black Americans self-identify as “Black.”
However, the term “African American” dates to 1782, around the time of the American Revolution, and accurately describes the population of descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the United States. In 2015, Fred Shapiro, a legal scholar, researcher at Yale Law School library, and contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, traced the earliest use of the term “African American” to a May 15, 1782 Philadelphia Journal advertisement that read: “Two Sermons, written by the African American; one on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, to be SOLD.” According to the New York Times:
In it, the speaker boasts about the capture of Cornwallis and decries the British assault on “the freedom of the free born sons of America” while nodding toward the fact of “my own complexion.”
“My beloved countrymen, if I may be permitted thus to call you, who am a descendant of the sable race,” one passage begins.
The speaker also addresses fellow “descendants of Africa” who feel loyalty to Britain, asking: “Tell me in plain and simple language, have ye not been disappointed? Have ye reaped what you labored for?”
Even a few years later, in 1788, the term “Africo-American” was used to describe the community of enslaved African people in the United States. A friend to Thomas Jefferson visited America and wrote to him, “We want dancing and raree-shows and ramadans to forget miseries and wretchedness as much as the Africo-americans want the Banjar [banjo] to digest with their Kuskus [couscous] the hardships of their lives, and the unsafe treatments of their Overseers.”
As these historical sources show, there was already a consciousness among the community of enslaved African people in the United States about who they were. As discussed, although some Black Americans may not like to use the term “African American” to describe themselves as an ethnic group, I do not want to get bogged down in individual feelings about the term. I would rather focus on the historical fact that the term dates back to the late 1700s, around the time of the American Revolution.
This brings us to another growing misconception, namely the notion that African Americans are not African. The most charitable and, perhaps, most common expression of this misconception is that African Americans are not African because all our “African-ness” was violently stripped from us by slavery. Therefore, the argument goes, there is nothing truly “African” about African Americans in terms of culture.
The other form of this argument is the one propagated by the so-called Foundational Black American (FBA) crowd and the likes of Tariq Nasheed, the founder of the term. Some self-identified Foundational Black Americans use the term to just identify being Black American as an ethnicity and not denying African ancestry. The official FBA website does define “Foundational Black American” as including the “captives brought to the Western Hemisphere from Africa.”
However, much of the FBA crowd emphasizes distancing African Americans from Africa and the rest of the African diaspora. On the FBA website, it lists another criterion that defines “Foundational Black American,” which is the “Black aboriginal people of North America.” It does not specify what “Black aboriginal” means. The implication is that it could refer to people of mixed African and Native American ancestry, or it could be that Black Americans are, somehow, indigenous to America. The latter has become an oft-repeated narrative in some corners of the Internet. YouTuber Dane Calloway, while not directly affiliated with the FBA movement, spouts ahistorical nonsense posing as African American history. His argument goes beyond denying that African Americans originally came from Africa, arguing that they are, in fact, indigenous to North America, that they should be classified as “American Indians,” and that they were already in North America before slavery happened. His followers will often identify as “copper-colored Native Americans.” Following this rabbit hole long enough unearths people who routinely deny the occurrence of the transatlantic slave trade or who “question” it the same way a Holocaust denier is just “raising questions.”
The idea that African Americans don’t come from Africa and are “indigenous” to the Americas is so historically inaccurate that it is beyond laughable. It is not worth dissecting how wrong this argument is since there’s more than enough physical, historical, and written evidence proving how Africans were trafficked from Western and Central Africa to become enslaved in the Americas. The fact that the likes of Dane Calloway are able to garner an audience and mislead people speaks to how poorly Black history is taught in the public education system and other forms of media.
As for whether African Americans are “culturally” African, one must look at the material history of African American culture rather than the commercial product that commonly passes for African American culture. Do African Americans wear the traditional Western and Central African attire of their ancestors? No. Why? Because of slavery. Do African Americans speak the indigenous African languages of their ancestors? No. However, one could argue that African American Vernacular English has African influences in the way African Americans speak English colloquially with each other.
Black immigrants in the U.S. and Redefining Black America
What further complicates defining Blackness and even defining African American-ness is the fact that the population of Black America is diversifying. Black America is no longer just the population of descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the United States—i.e., African Americans. Black America now also includes Black immigrants from Africa and other parts of the African diaspora.
Black people of immigrant backgrounds are a sizable part of the Black American population. According to Pew Research, as of 2019, 4.6 million Black people in the United States were born outside of the country, which means that Black immigrants constitute nearly 10 percent of the Black American population.
The Black immigrant population grew significantly after 2000. In fact, most Black immigrants to the United States—from the Caribbean, Africa, and other parts of the African diaspora—came to the country after 2000. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2019 American Community Survey, nearly six-in-ten—or 58 percent—of foreign-born Black people in the United States came to the U.S. after 2000. Among the Black immigrant population in the United States, 31 percent came to the U.S. between 2010 and 2019, while 27 percent immigrated to the country between 2000 and 2009. After those that came after 2000, over 40 percent of Black immigrants came to the United States before 2000.
Dr. Janice Gassam Asare, a Cameroonian American professor, Forbes writer, and business consultant, explained the differencesbetween the Black immigrant and African American experiences. She mentions that while African Americans and Black immigrants face similar levels of policing, Black immigrants also have to worry about deportation. Additionally, African immigrants in the U.S., she points out, came through a diversity visa program in the 1990 Immigration Act, which requires that applicants “must either have at least two years of qualifying work experience or a high school diploma.” Furthermore, African immigrants are often more formally educated than those living in the UK, France, Italy, or Portugal.
Therefore, what it means to be Black American—a Black person in America—is no longer just African Americans like myself who descended from enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. Black America also includes Black immigrants and the children of Black immigrants.
A Pan-African Idea of Blackness
Given that all people of African descent suffer at the hands of systematic anti-Blackness globally and African people have distinct ethnic and cultural identities, what should Blackness look like?
The world is looking smaller for people of African descent. As scattered as we are, it is much easier for us to connect than it was for our ancestors. An African American in Oakland can speak to a Sudanese immigrant in the UK or a Senegalese immigrant in Spain instantaneously through social media. It is much easier for people of African descent to communicate with each other in real time, share our experiences, and realize, despite our national differences, that we have a lot of similarities and shared experiences.
There is the shared historical experience of the transatlantic slave trade that binds the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas together. There is also the impact that European colonization of Africa has had on Africa to this day. Most importantly, people of Black African descent face similar forms of anti-Black racism in the African diaspora—police violence, incarceration, racial profiling, being shut out of economic opportunities, racial economic gaps between Blacks and Whites, and racial discrimination. Therefore, Blackness should emphasize shared ancestral ties to Africa, shared histories of the transatlantic slave trade (and other slave trades) and colonization, and shared political interests in a liberated, united Africa—continent and diaspora.
The African Union declared itself to be the Sixth Region but, when it comes to reaching out to the diaspora to make it feel part of Africa, has fallen flat. African organizations like the AU need to reach out to the descendants of enslaved Africans and remind them that they are still Africa and part of Africa’s future.
Education, media, and cultural exchange can promote a stronger revolutionary African national identity. There needs to be a greater push for a more robust teaching of Black/African history—pre-slavery up to the slave trade up to the current problems of Black people—in public schooling. In addition, given the proliferation of social media and how much people get their information from the Internet, a strengthening of independent Black-owned media would help to preserve Black cultural knowledge and combat anti-Black racist propaganda.
Fostering stronger trade, business, and economic ties between Africa and throughout the African diaspora would also do wonders to foster a stronger sense of revolutionary African nationalism. This does not mean that all diasporans should move to Africa en masse and build businesses. What it could look like is building stronger supply chains across Africa and the diaspora. As an African-American djembe player, I can point out that there are many djembe drums that are manufactured by European and non-African companies and sold in the West. Some import their djembe drums from Africa but the businesses are not owned by Africans. Organizing African diasporans who are into African drumming and dance to partner with local African artisans who make African drums and instruments is one way to foster such stronger Pan-African economic ties.
There could also be stronger Pan-African political parties in Africa and the diaspora. In the United States, where I live, there are more Black Americans breaking away from the Democratic Party and two-party systems. The question is how to organize Black politics in America. One thing Black America needs, politically, is a Pan-African agenda in conjunction with an agenda for its domestic interests. A strong Africa could politically defend people of Black African descent in the diaspora if harm is done to them. Pan-African parties in Africa and the diaspora can also coordinate and work together for shared political interests, particularly in ensuring Africa remains a stable home for all Black people.
Kwame Nkrumah once said that “All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” No matter where people of Black African descent live, we still belong to the larger African family. Given the many, similar challenges Black people face, strengthening those family ties will only help us.
Notes
For the purpose of this essay on Blackness, I am focusing on people of indigenous African descent who are racially Black; this does not include the indigenous Amazigh people of North Africa who, while African, are not often considered Black and are also sometimes considered white.