Flavors of Black - Part 1

Duane Rollins -

(Photo by jurien huggins on Unsplash)

Black is not a monolith. In this episode, we talk about the different Flavors of Black in America from the perspective of Duane Rollins, a Native Black (descendant of slaves) and Victor Udoewa, a descent of Nigerian immigrants.

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(Rough) Transcript

Duane Rollins  0:07

Duane Rollins here with Victor has gone on I you say your last name

Victor  0:15

It's a compound word so big like two words together um so Udo first part, and then Ella. So Udo-aye-Wah.

Duane  0:28

I felt like I should have known this at the all this years. But it's bad to know now.

Victor  0:36

I mispronounced My name as a as a as a little kid. So it's all good. Which is funny?

Duane  0:41

Well, we want to really just talk about blackness on particularly like black in America, and the ways that it differs, and how this is often construed with black people being like this model. But it's very much of a rich coalition of a lot of different people come from a lot of different places in the world with different viewpoints. Right? So me myself, I'm a native black. Right? So the way I define that is that I'm a descendant of slaves. And now I can't necessarily recall which country my parents or my lineage comes from. Right. And they do African DNA African ancestry test. And I know that Mossad families from Sierra Leone. Really? Yeah, we're probably the mid day trial. Oh,

Victor  1:30

So interesting. I'm glad they told you the tribe. Because that the thing that is weird for me with those tests is I don't? I don't think so. There's a whole nother thing? I don't ever think about it in terms of countries, when I think of Africa, because because of the history, right, the borders are drawn by comments and stuff. So you have tribes, there are tribes, there are some tribes that are that are wholly contained within borders, roughly. But there's some tribes that are there some in this country, some in that country, that kind of thing. So always think when they, some of my friends tell me, I don't know which one you which, Which one did you do?

Duane  2:07

The African ancestry one.

Victor  2:09

Oh, Africans. So my friends did the ones like, I don't know, 23andme, or ancestry.com, but not African ancestry one, and they'll just get a country name. And so I'm always like, oh, are they? So they're tracing them back to? To, to like colonial periods? Or I couldn't tell how far back that going when there wasn't the boundaries and things like that. So it's interesting. Go ahead. Yes,

Duane  2:33

I know, that's why it was important for me to do African ancestry because they would go back to the tribe. And yeah, it was important for me to know, right, because you know, that traveling is across borders, like, yeah, so yeah, so when I did that, I thought it was illuminating for our whole family to think about, like, what does that actually mean? And now is like one of my missions to like, go back there, kind of meet my ancestors, um, in some way. Reconnect, because there's a bit of a brokenness in a disconnect that happens when you don't know that enough. Yeah. Where your his Yeah, arch with a very, very, very dark period. So that's kind of like my background, you can talk about your background and how you be yourself.

Victor  3:14

Yes, so I, I'm a third culture kid is one of the ways they describe it, or always get the generation wrong. Second generation. So anyway, I'm the second generation to be in the States, but the first generation to be born in the States, depending on how you define it. So my parents came over for college, from Nigeria. So I'm a Nigerian American, I'm a dual citizen, but I'm the first one in my family to be born and grew up in the States. So I know where my parents came from. I'm not fluent in my language, but you know, I know parts of it. I know our foods, I've cooked our foods and our culture, our clothing, things like that. So I'm much more in touch with that I've traveled over and I've, you know, seen my family that's in Nigeria, or in the UK. So it's interesting here you talk, because I have a slightly different desire, which is kind of a newer desire, because I never I never thought about people I'm related to in the black, African American, you know, diaspora. And what and what I mean is that I was reading this book Homegoing, which I think came out by in 2016. By Yeah, I guess anyway, beautiful book. It's every chapter is a different story of a different person, but it's always a descendant. So it's like this mother, then her son, and then the sons daughter, and then it just keeps going. Each chapter is a vignette in the life of a person but it goes generation by generation. So anyway, at the beginning of the book, this woman basically she has to live she's a she's a maid in one house in one village in Ghana. ends up having a child with the the man the head of the household, the man head of the household, there's a fire that burns goes down, she runs away, she starts a new life, and marry someone in another village she has a child with with her new with her husband. So these two children, one from the head of the household and the first village she lived in, and then the one with her husband in the new village. The book follows the descendants as they go down. At some point, this is in the 1700s, one of the lines gets captured into slavery. And they get pulled over to us. And the other line stays in Ghana. And at the very end of the book, The great whatever granddaughter of one line and Gregory Gregory, grandson an online meet because the woman in Nigeria comes in Ghana comes to a PhD in the States. And she has that means, but she never knows that, oh, this person is related to me. If you go back far, that far up enough, right? Because he can't necessarily trace is dead. So I, I had this thought like, Oh, you know, I always thought growing up all the time that you know, I, I know my people I know where we came from, I know new language, all that stuff. And we were not sold into slavery. Never thinking that Oh, some of us might have been sold into slavery. Probably word and I'm not. I'm not connected to that line that came into the US or Brazil or wherever in the Americas. And I there could be people here, I'm related to that. I don't know, especially when I have friends who do some of those tests. And they say, Oh, I'm Nigerian. I was like, Oh, that's interesting. So anyway, I just thought about that email thing. Interesting.

Duane  6:34

It’s actually really cool. Like to think about that in and of itself, because there's like, you know, there's a couple of different distinctions. When I look at Black people in America, one is native black style. There's the immigrants, right? One, once you came by choice, the others who were forced there, and they make their way, right now, what I will say is that I see us all as brothers and sisters, right? And I think we all feel a connection to each other, like, in some way, due to our shared experiences, like in America, but it is a little different perception of how something's happened to us. Right? And what we feel like it's directed at us because we're black network. Versus because we're different, newer, somebody doesn't know it yet. Right? So I remember, like growing up, you know, you think about history of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow. In the fight for civil rights and what we fight for today. There's this notion that like, America, is this inherently like, racist, like place, whereas like, they have like, as a, structurally, they have it out for black people. Right. But as I started to meet more people who were immigrants, they didn't necessarily have that same shared perception at all times. Right? It was the land of the free, where if you worked hard, you did what you were supposed to do. Right, you had an opportunity to achieve whereas as a native bike was like, this burden of always thinking that even if I did everything, right, right, and I work hard, I would never be given like a fair shot, or a fair shake, because there was not a reason to take for me what was more, and I think that's kind of evident with going to college. What you will find is that a lot of times when you go to like, say, like elite University was like, no higher tier schools, when they find when it's other black people, they're usually black, but they're usually an immigrant black. Mm hmm. Much more immigrant blacks, like it, you know, like, elite institutions or top tier like institutions. And it's just it was always interesting having that interaction. I don't know how that was for you when you went to like your schools. And have you noticed that? Or have you seen that similar trend?

Victor  8:49

Yeah, it's a thing. It's funny, too, because I even saw it. I spent two years at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, right. So South Africa, they had a party, a party all the way up through, which is kind of like Jim, think of Jim Crow. Some, in some ways, even worse, but all the way through 1994. So 1994, they finally get independence out of that system. And they elect their first black, South African leader, Nelson Mandela. And over there, they have that where if you go to the university, especially the higher up you go, the blacks, you see, they're not South African blacks, but blacks from other parts of of Africa. Right. It's very, very interesting. You say that, because it's kind of interesting. Yeah. So I mean, I've seen it in this in the States. When I went to school in the States. I went school in Boston. And it that whole idea of black blackness, like you had to do this, I had to decide, do I want to be in the Black Student Organization VSO or BSU? Or whatever the BSA or do I want To be an African Students Association, or whatever it is ASU So, or do I want to do both? Do I have time to do both? Why do I have to choose that kind of thing? So there are definitely people that felt like for whatever reason, the Black Student Union or backson organization didn't speak enough to maybe their sense of identity, what are the issues they want to work on or whatever, but they felt they wanted as, as a foreigner, as an immigrant is coming in to just to university wanted to have that specifically African group. I've seen Afro Caribbean student groups as well. At certain universities, I don't think I've ever seen Afro Look, they probably exist Afro Latino, but I've definitely seen, you know, Hispanic or Latin x groups as well. So it's interesting that even in like our social group clubs, they kind of splinter off. The The other thing I wanted to say about what you said, is the idea of, you know, everyone being brothers or sisters, and I kind of I kind of like I feel it like yes, I think that's true. I've I feel like that and then it's some some ways I don't you reminded me of that movie. Black Panther. I don't know. I don't know if you saw the movie Black Panther. Right. Yeah. So this character killmonger, right. Play by Michael B. Jordan says some real, like, some truth, some real tough, tough stuff. Right? Yeah, about having a sense of a type of panic Pan africanism. of blackness, and that we were over here suffering in the US. And what kinda is over here flourishing? How come you never did anything for us? You need to help us meet rise up. So he was coming from, like, everything he was saying was on point it was it was a real kind of black liberation his perspective. And I thought it was interesting, because like, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I at most, I would say now, but in the past, we just didn't have that sense. And Africa of a shared like, I mean, you the the deepest sense of identity was at the tribe, tribal tribal level. Yeah. So like, you know, someone said to me, the book, I mentioned him going like, Oh, yeah, I really like how she didn't shy away from the complicity of Africans in the African slave trade. And I was like, Okay, yeah, Africans were part of the African slave trade. But to me, what it spoke to more wasn't that they participated in it. But that colonialism, and the slave trade exacerbated tribalism. So yeah, I'm gonna try on my fight with another tribe over land and pot, whatever. And you might have prisoners of war if you fight. But, but now, with these white Europeans coming in and saying, I want to buy some of your prisoners of war, people then started like, I'm just going to do a raid into the next tribe, just to get people that I will trade off or sell to these white Europeans. Like it wasn't about any kind of conflict over land in the it was just like, oh, let me let me make some money. Let me give some advantage. It really exacerbated all of that. But a lot of people don't think about it, because it's like, they're thinking of either a continental identity, or maybe a country based identity where that didn't then exist, it was just a group of like,

I don't know what you call it tribal states, if you could say that. Much more than Oh, we're the same skin color, right? So I think about that I think about I don't know if you've read any of this, but I remember my parents talked about this a lot. I saw some of this, even in the night, when did I go to college in the 90s, late 90s, where there was a conflict sometimes between Africans and African Americans on college campuses. Right. And I don't know, like, I don't even know the source of necessarily, but I think it was a little bit of this. Like, I feel like if the Africans who come over to the US to go to school, are not representative of all socio economic levels of Africans, right? You usually got to be somebody has means got connections got money, you know, so you coming over. And then if you see an African American and you disagree with what they're doing, or you don't think they're taking something seriously enough, and then you say something, and then you argue like, Oh, you think you're too good, and all this kind of weird kind of tension. But it's funny, because I think with with my parents generation, after staying here a number of years since the 70s. Now, we have become, we fall into the same experiences. Yeah. He talks about issues, problems in our communities that African American we have a shared identity here, but I remember college, it was a lot of conflict.

Duane  14:40

like that. It was I've experienced that also from like, you know, black immigrants, like, where they're where they were from Africa, whether you're from the Caribbean, whether you're from Europe or of Latino descent, that was always sometimes like they grew up being told like Watch out for what I'm calling made of Black people. Yeah, right, or their parents looked down upon, yeah, native blacks in some way, and told them that, hey, they're the trouble ones like for, you know, reasons and a lot of like different things. So they've also sometimes saw the stereotypes of black people in America and embedded that in their children. So there was a learning and relearning process, I think that we all went through, right, as we get to know each other, understand different cultures realize that, you know, in Africa, everybody isn't poor. Right? Because that was like a perception that we had, because all we saw was feed the children. So we just thought everybody in Africa was going to have big valleys and flaws, like in the eyes, right. And it was this notion of like, not really understanding and appreciating it, appreciating that, I think when I travel over to Africa, do some work in Kenya, nobody really understood it, like at a different level. Like it was just kind of like a, like I heard about I read about it, but to see in Philly, it was like, oh, like there's a whole way to live, where you don't miss a thing about being black, because everybody's black. Right? It's like, it's not a, that's not a thing, that's not a dividing line in and of itself, right? your tribe, as you say, matters a whole lot more like in that regard. And they would call them like sons and daughters, I remember like to carry to, and really talking about Obama. Yeah. Lupita Yeah. Where they would really say, like, you know, our sister, our son, our daughter, like, and how they are doing big things, like for the tribe for the country. And I think that was something I felt was like, both beautiful. And something that, you know, I feel like we have that as like, you know, native blacks that we do have great pride and goals to achieve. Yeah, but it's, it's not always like shared. And it's not. It wasn't always understood. So, but but I think those are like, some of the differences that you have, it's when I get NATO's in the immigrant class, but then there's a whole other division around religion. Yeah, where people have, and I want to say division, cuz I feel like that means like, they're in conflict with each other. But there's a different way of approaching life or different world views that might come up based on your religion. So I know that there's a difference between like black Catholics and black Baptists. And in the Jehovah Witness in the Pentecostal holiness, like people we think of like the Christian denomination, right? Yeah. But then on the Muslim side, there's a little different too, right? Because you have like, five percenters in a Nation of Islam. Yeah. Which are, again, they are a different approach, right to the Islamic faith. And you have those who immigrate from the Islamic base, and they're from Arab countries. And they have a way of approaching it to Monday, you have like the black Hebrew Israelites. And then you have like the Hutu, right. And that whole, like kind of culture that you see with like, the Creole people, and maybe some of the Gucci, Gullah people, or the Gullah Geechee, right, which is, like, an incredible right to see like that diversity, like, in and of itself, like, just in America. But I know from your experience, you you know, this, too, that diversity is even more prevalent on the continent. Yeah, even more prevalent, when you go to the Caribbean, you think about the different islands, and how they think of themselves and how they think of each other and the differences between them.

Victor  18:22

Yeah, because I guess, you know, there was a lot of evangelism, I guess, you know, the spread of it. And the the process process process, the process of proselytizing, throughout Africa, that spread both Christianity and Islam, throughout the continent, and in other places, as well, like in South America, and not as much in Asia, but it's there. But before they, those things arrived through colonization, and there's a link between, you know, he, he evangelized, and colonization, they were off there often, one motivating the other. There were a lot of like, you know, indigenous religions, just saying, when we talk about First Nations or native Native Americans, we have their own religions and stuff like that. And so even beyond some of those groups you have in some of these countries, I guess they call it syncretism versions, like merges that mix a little bit of the native with maybe is Islamic or Christian understanding, which a lot of the, you know, colonizers or what you call them, missionaries would be upset by like, No, I don't want any part of that in my thing, you know. So there's this whole kind of colonial aspect on the whole religion side that kind of affects it. But what I love about kind of what you talked about is the shared understanding that when I think of in the US, right, because we are talking about us, the fight for liberation, specifically I think with the civil rights movement, but it still continues today, you have the three big groups, I think of just the way I kind of put it together my mind that we're working in a coordinated way in the civil rights movement, where you have NAACP doing stuff. But related to religion, you have a big Christian group, right? With MLK and southernly leadership leadership convention, but you also have a Nation of Islam. So there was a recognition, like, regardless of what the religion is, what I'm seeing today in the way I'm treated doesn't seem to be in line with my my humanity, who I am, as, as a child of God, or my understanding who God is, it didn't fit. So I love that people were trying to approach even if the approaches might have seen different, and I think by the end of by the end of the lives MLK and X were very close, or quote, much closer than they were getting in terms of yet. So it's just kind of interesting to see that, like, Hey, didn't matter where you come from, people see that something right. And you work.

Duane  21:04

So this is a thing when I also want to get to because there's also like the mixed race, like people, yeah, black and white mother or father, you know, black and Asian, black and Latino, etc. And the notion of like, you know, what teachers do they have that allow them to pass in white society, or not pass as to like, how they're treated and or perceived. But to me, what it comes down to is like this, the shared experience of being black in America, is the fight for the recognition of your humanity. Right, because that's what's often been denied to people who, you know, in the broad bucket of black people is like, based on just, you know, the way their features their skin color, like the way they looked, that they were denied that humanity. Right. And I think that's the tie that binds us dead, you know, continues to progress. The thing about the pan africanism. And the notion of like this diaspora is that that's what we're doing all over the world, we just want to, we want our humanity to be recognized, right and protected, as is all other humanity recognized and protected. So that way we can live thrive and grow based on our own merits, right, and not just based on some preconceived notion of who we are based on, you know, race, right, or skin color, which is, you know, a construct in and of itself.

Victor  22:32

Yeah, and one of the things I've loved is that it can be tiring, and I've been there, I've been in that space where you're, you kind of define yourself. Not on purpose, but by the struggle, right? The struggle is the word struggle is who I am. It's all about freedom. But then the question is, well, well, who are you once you're free? Right? Yeah, so I've been really excited in seeing people focus, I think more so now than maybe when I was a kid. But I could be wrong. Just my personal experience, on the joy, the the beauty the gifts of black people, right? What what they bring what they do, not just them, them needing to be free, because I also think, to focus on the gifts and what they bring to the to the American Experience actually might be a pathway to might be a pathway to liberation, as well, when people understand Oh, these are humans, and they are bringing stuff. So anyway, I like to focus on that as well. Because just focusing on the struggle can be draining sometimes.

Duane  23:36

I love that. I think that's like the perfect way to kind of like wrap this part of the conversation up, which is, you know, blackness in America is really that fight for freedom, but is evolving to like, Who are we is when we're free? Yeah. Yeah. And making sure that we have that through lawn, like also, because we aren't getting there. Right. Some might say we are there. I think we were much further than what we were. But, um, and now is really starting to think about as a free people. Like, what does that mean? How do we use our freedom? Right? How do we lock it in and ensure that you know that humanity and human decency and dignity won't be taken from us again? Right, because we have to continue to view ourselves as free people and not just in the fight for freedom. For

Victor  24:25

Yeah, 100%