In African nations, education was an elevator to status. It required you to put your head down and keep it there in order to ascend. That legacy of colonialism fed an illusion of inclusion, a path where your African exceptionalism, your difference from American-grown Blackness, would guarantee a different outcome. Some believed they would thrive. Unlike them. That meant some African immigrants taste their difference as sweeter, marking them immune to the racism for which they might sometimes blame Black Americans—not simply for challenging or enduring but actually for attracting. The “you” and “them” by African Americans meant sharpened tongues, ugly names—African booty-scratchers—communicating neither desire nor claim to any corner of this continent.
Immigration in the United States today thrives and flounders due to a politics of emotionality. Immigrants are not born of sixteen-year-old mothers with journeys and dreams and futures. Not one of the forty-one shots recognized the love of Amadou’s mother, nor the space of Blackness that he occupied. Not one bullet came wrapped in an Ivy League education. Police encounters do not litigate our peculiar and particular Blacknesses. We—African Americans and immigrants of African nations and of island nations—do that. The back-and-forth between the Blackness born and raised in, shaped by, and rejected in America and that of journeying African immigrants was—and continues to be—a landscape of simmering tensions that sometimes explode. Those tensions serve to separate, when what is necessary now are creative collectives and coalitions. There is no comfort from the emotional litigation of our Blacknesses. Confusion yes. Clarity no. This is what a legacy of untreated trauma looks like. What is required is emotional justice.
We have to reimagine a Blackness that is not marked as singular based on the brutality of bullets and America’s limitations. We must expand it to honor our accents, cultures, and customs as we navigate rocky paths to build creative coalitions and continue to a freedom where our peculiar and particular Blackness can be and breathe.
Amadou’s future was choked out of him with each of the forty-one bullets. His bones are buried where his extended family resides, on his mother’s land, in Hollande Bourou in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea. His blood still stains the streets of the Bronx. He breathed New York City air as an African immigrant. His death taught us that, in the United States, his breath was Black.
2004–2009
HURRICANE KATRINA
Deborah Douglas
On a middle-school field trip to Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake in 1978, a classmate almost made me disappear. We were just up the road from my new home of Covington, a Delta town where Blow Pops were made, thick and swirly vowels rolled off people’s tongues, and a bronze Confederate statue greeted visitors at the square. At eleven years old, I was a Chicago-born Detroiter, new and working to fit in, calibrating my ear to accents without sharp angles and other ways of being. I wondered, for example, why the school instantly segregated by race as soon as the first period bell rang. White kids went to higher-level classes, and Black kids went somewhere else. I don’t know exactly where because, well, I went with the white kids.
On this occasion, I noticed a group of white students from English huddled together when one of them, a short fella I’ll call J., came over. A new friend perhaps? J. proceeded to announce, “Heretell, you think you something.” He said it in a dusty drawl, like suuuuumthin.
I was perplexed. Was that a question or a statement? Was I supposed to answer? Well, I’ve always been told I’m a child of God. My activist Detroit teachers, fresh from the revolution, always told me to raise my hand and speak up, which I did. Maybe I was something, I didn’t know. Who said such a thing, and why would it matter? In my heart, I knew J.’s trouble was he thought I was something. Whatever light of intellect, curiosity, and hope emanated from me and Black girls like me needed to be dispatched. This is what I call “depresencing.” He was chosen to do it because apparently some people are born to be seen and others are meant to recede, useful only to validate white supremacy.
On that fall day at a place born when the river ran backward, this would not be the first time I would be asked to shrink and be a little less…there. The Black women and girls impacted by Hurricane Katrina, which landed near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, know a great deal about a lack of regard that renders their lived experiences invisible.
The idea of Black women and girls being fully present, inhabiting space and exercising their powers of wit, talent, and dexterity, would be a recurring theme. A lexicon has grown to address the tension between who Black women truly are and aspire to be, and the validatory bit part they are repeatedly asked to play, if any at all. Scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” and Moya Bailey’s “misogynoir” provide a level of validation and language that feels good to not feel, well, crazy.
The devastating weather event that was Hurricane Katrina can best be described as what historian Barbara Ransby calls the “gendered nature of the disaster.”
The category-four hurricane made landfall near New Orleans and proceeded to unleash destruction that ravaged the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The levee system that had protected New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne was overwhelmed. About 1.2 million people heeded Mayor Ray Nagin’s order to evacuate. Most of the city flooded.
Many residents didn’t leave because they could not or would not, or they sought shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome. While many possess the privilege of picking up and leaving without much thought, studies show (and folks will tell you) that low-income residents, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled are less likely to evacuate. In New Orleans, impoverished residents didn’t have the money, the cars, or the network to relocate. Their homes and communities bore the brunt of the devastation.
Media reports showed desperate people on rooftops begging to be rescued from their flooded communities. Survivors languished at the Superdome and convention center without food, water, and proper sanitary conditions. Residents were further dispossessed when they were referred to as “refugees” rather than “evacuees,” a point made by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others.
Hurricane Katrina is easily a metaphor for America’s attitude toward Black women: rejected, neglected, and never protected. But Black women’s persistence and their insistence on survival and restoration are a metaphor for their attitude toward America.
FEMA chief Michael Brown is the poster boy for the way established power approached this natural and man-made disaster. When George W. Bush showered him with praise, saying “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” nobody thought like that.
The vacationing Bush embodied this mindset in his own slow response. On his way back to the White House on August 31, he flew over New Orleans, surveying the damage. He didn’t land to take stock of the situation because he said it would draw on law enforcement resources. Failure to engage at a most human level hit a nerve, as New Orleans was a majority-Black city where more than a quarter lived in poverty.