Most would agree that within the professional community, on college campuses, and in the general population one often finds conflict and cultural misunderstanding between African Americans and Black immigrants. When African Americans go to Africa, they are often put-off by the presence of well-to-do elites in nations with large numbers of obviously poor and disadvantaged people. There is a vertiginous unease in understanding one’s own Black positionality: an underdog in the United States and suddenly elite-proximate in Africa. In such circumstances, it is hard but useful to acknowledge the history of African Americans, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Africans arrive in the United States today, they find that for many African Americans it is important that they agree to be ‘Black’ and to embrace Black identity. For them to insist on identifiying as an African national (Gambian, Ghanaian) is seen as troublesome, annoying, fractious and even disloyal.
In 2015 I published a book that explored the oral histories of over twenty African American families that claimed Malagasy heritage, including my own maternal family (Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Ohio U Press). As I explained in that book and elsewhere, from at least the early nineteenth to the mid- twentieth century, ethnic diversity in the black community was not useful to survival; we have a legacy of the dissolution of ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ identity in response to the pressing need for unity in the face of external violence. Gomez engages this problem in his book Exchanging Our Country Marks (2003) and this text gives us a lot to think about and build upon. It is probable, in my view, that claims of unique origins were looked down upon throughout the first two centuries of the development of African American identity, and sometimes still are. Such discourse was and continues to be seen as a volleying for superiority, or for trying to “be anything but a normal black person,” as the scholar Matory explained in 2015. This is one of the factors that contributes to friction between the historical Black community and Black immigrant communities.
African Americans have always had their elites. Ira Berlin, for example, wrote about the Atlantic Creoles and before that, pondered the existence of the ‘free Negro caste.’ (Journal of Social History (3) 1976). In America, some of the impetus behind close marriage patterns among elite Blacks was undoubtedly colorism; people wanted their children to look a certain way, sometimes with lighter skin and straighter hair that symbolized mixed racial heritage. But there is more to it than that, and I suggest a more nuanced view that takes into account education and culture. These families had little to no material capital. What they did have was social and intellectual capital, and this they conserved and multiplied by marrying each other. Both of these factors can be traced back to the pre-Civil War period when Negro illegitimate children of white elites were sent off on their own to try to make a life as ‘free Negroes,’ and though they rarely received much help from their fathers, the small advantages they had set the stage for their later high visibility in the Negro world.
As a tangential thought, I think it is wrong to think that all African women (as in most of them; every single one) were raped or that sex between white masters and African, or African American women was ubiquitous. On the other hand, since blacks married within their own group, it is normal that by the twentieth century, a majority of African Americans might have ‘white’ genetic heritage. This would result because the minority of blacks with white blood married others who were not mixed, or had mixed Native American heritage. We forget how racially endogamous (marrying within the group) American communities were up to the 1960s, for example, because of institutionalized segregation. I make this point because in a noxious way, claiming all black women were raped is yet another iteration of ascribing and confirming the ubiquitous power of white men. It seems to me that if all white men were that busy having sex with black women, then given the large population of slaves before the Civil War, white men would not have had time to accomplish much else. Such a situation would have been statistically impossible. On the other hand, in spite of the violence that created these relationships, the proximity to the power of white men did create small but important opportunities for some Blacks during and immediately after slavery.
My awareness of how kinship and class played out in my own family and indeed the community around me helped very much in my understanding of West African societies. Without engaging a moralistic approach, I think it’s good for American blacks going to Africa to reflect on how class and kinship networks that they see in relief on the continent exist in other ways among Blacks in the United States. When I visited West Africa I understood these social facts to be a part of the local fabric, and I recognized them. In Liberia, in Mali, in Senegal and in Niger, I recognized the elite and why they married each other. Such networks build and consolidate power. There is no reason or historical evidence to think that Blacks in North America learned these things ‘from white people.’ More likely, when Africans arrived to the New World they recognized practices of class and marriage for consolidation of power among Euro-Americans all too well. Often they were the victims of such power networks. Whether I or anyone else approves of these practices is not the same thing as understanding them as human and fairly common social phenomena. I understand that admitting these things may tarnish our visions of Africa and African American realities, but to understand ourselves and others, we must, as Adam Clayton Powell said, tell it like it is.
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