Identity is a fickle concept. I like to think about it as a soup with many ingredients, and I have to say this soup is thick. Some days the Nigerian takes the shine. Other days it’s the American experience that meets people first, before I’ve even said a word. My Blackness and my African identity are both visible the second someone looks at me, but people don’t read them the same way. Being African gets me questions about my last name, whether or not I can “speak African,” or this weird curiosity that feels more like being studied than actually being known. Being Black in America comes with a heavier history attached to it, one that has nothing to do with where I was actually born but gets slapped onto me anyway. Feels like it’s just what happens when people read your body before you’ve said a single word, which is basically the whole argument Alcoff makes about race being something read off the body before a person ever gets to speak for themselves.
Read more: What Am I?It’s never one big dramatic moment either. It’s small stuff that piles up. Getting mistaken for someone else. Getting called “articulate” like that’s shocking. Getting asked where I’m “really” from after I already told someone. None of these are huge on their own, but they stack, and that’s basically the whole point Rankine is making in Citizen, how these little moments build into something bigger just by accumulating over and over. Eventually that stacking becomes part of a regular day instead of something worth noticing. I don’t really have a clean way to wrap this up. Identity isn’t something I explain from the inside. It’s something read off of me before I get a say in it, and I’m still figuring out how I feel about that.
Being African (mom from Sierra Leone) and African American (dad from the US) my mom once told me, “whether you’re Black or African doesn’t matter, its all the same to the cops.” Its a strange experience, even more so when much of these little things being read off your body can are learned in the home. Being told from your own family that “Africa is a filthy dangerous place” and that “Black Americans are loud and violent” is a strange environment to grow up in, because I got to see first hand how divided the diaspora really is while also experiencing these simultaneous prejudices. It makes you wonder why these distict kinds of prejudice needs to exist when both sides aren’t too different in terms of origin. Or if these are just the result of combining two types of racism practiced in two different parts of the world.
This post made me reflect a lot on my own struggles with sense of self. I hate being put in a category based of “what I am”, or in my thought process, as the societal titles that we must either accept or reject. I hate it because it makes me question who I am, if I don’t completely fit within those titles’ guidelines. If I do not completely fit into who society perceives I should be based on that label, is that really who I am.
This hit home for me. The soup image made me think of all the small, daily choices that season who we are to the world. As someone plus-size, I recognize that same piling-up of moments…the way people’s eyes land on my body and make decisions about me before I’ve said a word, the surprise when I don’t fit someone’s script, the extra work of translating myself so others will accept what I already know to be true. What you describe isn’t just identity as description, it’s identity as labor. Those tiny misreading and backhanded compliments stack into a kind of background noise that shapes how we move through rooms, who we trust, and how loudly we claim space.
Reading this piece made me feel seen not because our experiences are the same, but because you named that slow accumulation, the way it reshapes a person over time.
Thank you for writing about something messy and ongoing. It reminded me that identity isn’t a single reveal but a series of negotiations, and that the real work of solidarity is noticing those negotiations and making room for people to speak for themselves. ❤