As am I. And I just have to say: you did a pretty awesome job too!

I’ve had lots of people tell me excitedly that they knew someone who was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. A sister or cousin or friend. And when I ask where, in what country?, most people couldn’t say. Just somewhere in Africa. I shutter to think that my own family thought I was just somewhere in Africa even when I had sent home maps circling my town. If it mattered to me, I can only imagine how frustrated Mozambicans or Nigerians or Senegalese feel when people act like they’ve never even heard of their country.

Chimamanda Adichie rocks my socks!

There’s also an odd theme of ‘authenticity’ vs. ‘non-authenticity’ running throughout your comments on this post. Authenticity is, of course, a social construct (just as is ‘ethnicity’), not something which, in and of itself, is ‘real’ in some cases and ‘not real’ in others. All ethnicities are social ‘fabrications’, but that does not make them ‘not real’, it makes them *social realities*.

And there’s certainly nothing ‘superficial’ or ‘not real’ about basing a collective social identity on a shared history of oppression. It’s an extremely common phenomenon.

Similarly just like “blackness” “whiteness” too is an artificial identity that ultimately originates from similar situation as “blackness”, with the difference that “whites” obviously had a different role in the society these fabrications are based on. What interests me is that you defend your “blackness” but still are more than ready to bash “whiteness” as it “masks ethnicity and becomes constructed identity based upon class, and racial privilege”. I agree but same goes for “blackness”, too.

When I lived in Syria for a few months, I watched a lot of BBC World because it was in English and my Arabic was shamefully bad. I distinctly remember seeing the end of a short feature on BBC World about a day in the life of a Southeast Asian family that had moved countries or something. It showed how they coped, how they practiced Islam in their new country, how they were happy together no matter where they were. It was a typical human interest piece, but my jaw dropped when I saw the family praying (Islamically) together and off-handedly mentioning how they were happy practicing Islam in their new country before moving on to talk about the issue at hand. This showed three things:

1.) Islam being practiced casually by a loving family.
2.) That practice being normalized (aka it was just a piece of the family’s identity, not the entirety of it).
3.) That practice being shown as a positive thing without it being sensationalized.

I was raised Muslim in America, I’ve been praying daily since I was in 8th grade, and Islam is something most of my family practices happily but doesn’t make a bit deal about. Yet this human interest piece, which simply showed what I’d been living my entire life, completely shocked me because I’d never seen anything remotely like it on American TV or movies. I suddenly felt…validated? Humanized? I didn’t have a word for it; I teared up and I didn’t know why. And I’d always thought all those Western images of scary Muslim men, battered Muslim women, terrorists, and “othered foreigners” weren’t getting to me, even though everyone in my life knew those stereotypes weren’t true.

“The single story” is such an insidious destructive force, and no matter how strong we think we are, it can still chip away at you. It’s like the difference between having a friend who makes sexist jokes but assures you he’s kidding and a friend who looks at him blankly because HE DOESN’T EVEN GET THE JOKE. We’re so used to the former that the latter blows our minds, even when it shouldn’t because THE LATTER VALIDATES OUR OWN BASIC EXPERIENCES. I’m so glad Chimamanda Adichie articulated this concept so beautifully.

This is a really interesting post and I would hate to see the discussion get started from this first comment.

I am an African-American woman and I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to study African diasporic histories. I can attest that African-American culture is all at once American and global- not at all rootless. My ancestors may have been uprooted from their land, but they made America their own when they became citizen soldiers in the Civil War and all subsequent wars. At the same time, during the Civil Rights Movement, we saw a shift away from African-American Exceptionalism toward a more global understanding of racial, colonial and other forms of oppression. African-Americans are not merely Americans with an “odd” culture…

Much of what we know as “black” music originates from musical forms and linguistic intonations from West and Eastern Africa. It is for more complex than you made it in your comment.

As for “blackness,” that warrants entire books. Blackness could refer to a common shared experience by a group where race, class, social status, etc. intersect. Blackness can also be a constructed and contingent identity that is reactionary to hegemonic structures in society. That’s only 2 possibilities… there are many more.

But you have a valid point with your mention of “white Americans.” When whiteness masks ethnicity and becomes a constructed identity based upon class, and racial privilege… yah