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 its 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.

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.