The Sunday Story: "I didn't know I was Black until I came to this country"

Leah Dinella is an editor on the NPR podcast CodeSwitch, so she spends a lot of time reading reports on demographics. She's always looking for trends that might lead to good conversations, and we know CodeSwitch is full of those good conversations. But one day, something caught her eye. A new finding in a Pew research report for the first time ever. The report noted one in ten Black Americans is an immigrant, and many have settled in the South.

Hi Aisha, how's it going? It's going really well.

So I gotta ask you, you got started on this project. Because of that statistic that one in ten Black Americans are immigrants, why did that statistic surprise you? It surprises me because a lot of times when we talk about the Black experience, we're not necessarily talking about immigrants.

Yeah, I mean, it probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. Because a lot of my friends are Black immigrants. So even though I know a lot of people who fall into that category. Often. When we're talking about Black issues in the U.S, we're not talking about immigrant issues. And a lot of the time when we hear about immigrants. People are not generally referring to black people, they're referring to people from Latin America, people from South Asia, East Asia.

The other thing that surprised you was that the largest share of these immigrants were settling in the south. I'm from the south, raised in Durham, North Carolina, and we all know the South is a very particular region of the U.S. I grew up there, so I can say that. Did you expect a different picture of where these Black immigrants would be settling in the U.S.?

I definitely did. The image that I had of Black immigration was largely kind of centered around New York City. There are huge Black Caribbean populations in New York City. And then, you know, there's obviously also other kind of hubs, like Minneapolis. So yeah, I was surprised to read that about the South.

What is the percentage of Black immigrants that are in the South?

More than 40 of Black immigrants are in the south.

And so you took this nugget of information and you did what great reporters do. Which is, you decided to go deep in and find the layers behind this and the stories behind the numbers. Did you have a central question that you were trying to answer as you started reporting?

Yeah, my big question was, how do Black immigrants kind of define and understand what it means?

What did you feel like the difference was?

I mean, I remember one conversation, really specifically, where one of my friends, who was originally from Kenya, was talking about how. She didn't identify as Black. Because she didn't really feel like she had ownership of that, or she wasn't entitled to claim that. Because the word Blackness is so tied to this history of Black American slavery, Black American resistance, that kind of thing.

Okay, like Jim Crow, all these things, and she's saying, that's not her story.

Exactly. But to me, hearing that, I was kind of like, Well, no one chooses to be black in a certain way. Like Blackness is something that's ascribed to people, and then you make it. We Black people have made it into a culture and an identity. But it's not something that I felt like you could opt out of in the same way or not claim.

Mm-hmm. And so you chose to focus on Black immigrant populations in Tennessee. Now I got to ask you, why Tennessee?

Yeah, I wanted to be in a place that was, I felt, a really good kind of encapsulation of all of the both. All of the caricatures and stereotypes that people think about when they think of what the South is. But also is this place that has all this nuance and all this complication and contradictions. So Tennessee, I think, is really interesting because it's got all the heavy hitters of American racism, right? Like it was a slave state, it's the birthplace of the KKK.

But let's start meeting a few of these people who you talk to. Where should we begin?

So I will start with one person.

That is a beautiful name, it is a great name. So what is her story?

Well, she's truly a jack-of-all-trades in some ways. She's the multicultural affairs manager for the City of Memphis. She's also a belly-dancing instructor, an occasional real estate agent, and she's the author of a children's book called Nubian Mermaid Adventures. She decided she needed to write this book when her daughter was about five years old and in a very deep mermaid phase.

I tried to get her all the mermaid things that I possibly could, and I could not find. Not one children's book with black mermaids in it, not one, you know? So she started wanting this long blonde hair or long red hair, and I was trying to tell her. I said, We're Ethiopians.

So this was obviously before, you know, Halle Bailey and the New Little Mermaid switched up the game. This was before that.

Yes, this was eight years ago.

So what is her backstory? How did she wind up in Memphis?

She came to the U.

And the reason for that was because my parents, friends lived here and there was a war.

She had had what she described as kind of a sheltered childhood. So when she got sent to the U...S. she didn't have a lot of warning, and she didn't really understand why she was having to leave.

I didn't want to leave my friends. My life was perfect as far as I can, you know, remember, and then all I know is it was perfect. Then it wasn't perfect, you know, so I was angry, really.

It was not exactly a smooth arrival. When she got to Memphis, starting high school in a brand new country where she couldn't fully understand English, it was a lot.

My first week in school, I almost got beat up because I didn't know who MLK was. I didn't, you know, because it's unfortunate that we didn't learn Black history back home, you know?

Oh my goodness, the kids there might have felt like you don't know who MLK like. There's no understanding, there's no empathy, right?

I mean, and this is Memphis, too, right? So like this is the city where M.L.K was assassinated. She has no idea what's going on.

So did it eventually get easier for her?

Yeah, it definitely did. It was a learning curve. But when she went to college, so she went to the University of Memphis and she started being really intentional about learning about Black history there.

I purposely took Black history for two semesters.

That's such a different way of looking at it. A Black woman, Black girl, that was always a part of who I am in America. You just know where you are and who you are. But it's different when you come from a place where that is not always the paradigm or that's not always the dynamic.

Yeah, and I mean, something that so many people talked about was that they were coming from places where the salient kind of aspects of their identity, or the ways of differentiating between people was so different. And then to come to a place where they were suddenly going to be categorized by race in this particular way. Just like they had to totally shift how they thought about who they were and who they were connected to, and what the most important parts of their identity would be.

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We're back with the Sunday story I'm Aisha Roscoe. Today we're talking with NPR's Leah Dinella about her reporting on Black immigrants in Tennessee. Well, let's dig into this idea of what it means to be Black in America, especially as an immigrant. What were some other themes that came out when people were talking about their identities and how they related to Blackness?

I spoke to Vanessa Ajay, who at the time was a senior at Vanderbilt University and president of the African Student Union there.

A lot of African, or just like Black immigrants who come to America, not only are they Black, but they're also immigrants. So that adds like the double layer of like oppression onto them.

And one of the things Vanessa said was that, like, because of those different layers of oppression, you know. One of the ways her family dealt with that is that she was kind of encouraged to try to fit into white culture.

This happens in a lot of different communities that are kind of looked at as the other. That this idea that sometimes you have to kind of hide parts of yourself, to try to fit in, or to try to be safe. Did that come up a lot about, you know, people talking about trying to just hide parts of themselves?

Oh, yeah, yeah. And sometimes, as you said, it was like, about being safe or trying to fit in. Sometimes it was just because people felt really isolated. And they were like, if I make this joke or like, make this reference, or, you know, use these phrases or whatever, like, no one is going to understand what I'm talking about.

We were in a pickup truck. They checked their IDs, and then afterwards they pointed at me and my mother and took us out of the truck and ordered the truck to leave.

Oh my goodness.

Eventually, the driver of the truck, they'd been in, kind of negotiated, convinced the people there to let Claude and his mom go. The family eventually wound up resettling in the U...S. in Nashville. But obviously that.

So so, of course, in a situation like that, you are not going to want to talk about what happened to you because people aren't even believing you. And it's re-traumatizing, right?

Exactly, yeah. And then, I mean, on top of that, Claude started very quickly experiencing American-style anti-blackness for the first time.

So you're getting hit after hit, after hit.

Yeah, he told me about this one particularly bad experience also when he was in high school.

I was at a store Kroger grocery store and went to use a payphone. And I know payphones are like an old thing. I mean, nobody knows about payphones anymore, except for the movies, right?

Claude said He started kind of seeing and experiencing this more subtle, kind of backhanded racism, often around some sort of accomplishment or academic achievement.

They would say, Oh, you're different than other Black people, yeah.

I mean, that's really complicated, though. Because you know, this idea of being set apart as different from other Black people, because you're an immigrant. And the idea of being set apart as a positive thing or a compliment. And I, you know, sometimes on social media, you'll kind of have these diaspora wars, you know? There's a tension between Black people born in this country and Black people that come here from other countries. Because Black people who were born in this country will say, well, Africans or other groups may be looking down on Black Americans. Did you get into any of that?

Yeah, I mean, one of the people that I spoke to, a sociologist named Christina Greer, she wrote this book, Black Ethnics, which gets into that a lot. A lot of Black immigrants are in a kind of different category than other immigrants in some ways. Because, whereas for other immigrant groups. Assimilation is one of the ways that you prove that you're American, you kind of fold yourself into society. It has a lot of benefits. But a lot of Black immigrants decide that they will be safer, they will be treated better, and they will have different opportunities if they distinguish themselves from Black Americans. And so one of the things that Christina Greer found, which I thought was fascinating, is that. A lot of Black immigrants keep names that will make them sound un-American. I'm doing air quotes around un-American, but keep names that will distinguish them as immigrants. Keep their accents, wear clothing, or kind of have these signifiers of being from another country, because that's actually protective in a way.

Oh wow, so what you're saying is, if I'm getting this correctly is that? Some Africans in the U.S are making a decision that there is a benefit for them to hold on to. Kind of a little bit of an otherness from Black Americans because anti-black racism is so deeply entrenched in the U.S..

Exactly. And I should be very clear, too, that there are plenty of people who are seeing the racism that Black people experience and deciding, okay, we need to form tight community with other Black people.

And did he learn how to fight after that?

Oh, yeah, and I mean, I think a lot of people had kind of similar or related experiences. Where people were like, Oh, these people don't speak English, so I can say whatever I want to them. And yeah, there were all these instances, some of them really, really subtle, some of them really overt, about people kind of learning what Blackness was by being victims of racism.

If you are racialized as black, you basically just black, no matter I mean, you are black, no matter what you do, right? Like, that's the fact. But it is interesting when you come from a different place of learning, like, or in learning to embrace that.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people I spoke to kind of talked about how. At first they had this idea that if they accepted that they were Black, it kind of meant that they were giving up their nationality, their culture, that that would be the only thing. And then realized that no, Blackness is full of all of these different things. It's not like a choice, it's not an either or.

I was wearing this long red dress that my mom had sewed for me and it's funny. I didn't like it and I was like, Oh, this just fits weird and I don't like it. But then when the fashion show came up, I was like, I really want to do the fashion show.

She started to realize that she could be American and Black and Nigerian and dig into all of those things.

Leah, thank you so much for talking with me today and my last question for you. I know you spoke to so many people about their struggles in this country. But I also know that in every interview, you asked a question, which I absolutely love, and that's what's your favorite thing about being black?

Yeah, this was my favorite part of every conversation, because often, even when we had just spent two hours talking about trauma and racism and all these negative things. People would be like, Oh yeah, I love being black. This is wonderful, like everything about it is great, and so I want you to hear some of my favorite things that people said.

Oh man.

Favorite thing about being black?

I feel like Black people are so beautiful.

I like the way we glow in the sunlight, like us in the summer, especially.

Despite everything that we go through, we've still made our own culture. We created amazing music like blues and jazz, all that came out of the oppression, and we have amazing food.

Black people, we are the most loving, kindhearted people that you will ever meet in your life. I never met a Karen, a black Karen before.

I love that about being Black, the ability to go around the world and be one of the people.

You know, I think of my parents, I think of the church community.

That was cold Switch. Senior Editor Leah Donnella, Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you Aisha. This was really great to talk about. I appreciate the time.

This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our engineer was Josh Newell, our supervising producer is Liana Sindstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at thesundaystory at npr..org.