UFOA—United Families of America: How does that sound?
Here’s another one: Afrimerican.
“Afrimerican” is a word I came up with in the mid-1980s to describe what had really happened to African families after they were subjected to lifelong servitude outside of their native lands on the continent of Africa. They were not wholly African, nor were they wholly American, not all could accurately be described as Black, and, for the most part, nearly none of the Black people who came off the plantations in the mid-1800s had a clue where in Africa any of their earlier ancestors had come from.
I just recently found out that my own more recent diaspora genetic families came from Cameroon and Mali, with Nigeria tucked neatly in between the two smaller components of western Africa. Going back a little farther to my original firstfruit roots, I came from the far East—northern Africa (Mesopotamia) and the lands surrounding India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. I even carry with me the mark of a first name rooted in India.
I can never be convinced that there was no African slave trade to the Americas. I’ve never set foot out of the continental United States in nearly 60 years and yet I can be genetically traced back to places in the far East and in Africa that I’ve never been and neither were my parents, grandparents, or even my great-grandparents. It was those who came before them, involuntarily and without the means to speak any language other than their own.
For what DNA tests are worth, it’s a better shot at who I am and where I came from than what I was told by oral history, which was essentially a lot of nothing.
My family didn’t much concern themselves with the nuances of “beingness.” All they knew was that they were alive in the moment and their only natural instinct was to figure out how to survive in the midst of it.
So deep were the brutal cuts, gashes, and lashes of slavery that even after it was no longer necessary to “just survive,” Black people had become so deeply ingrained in survival mode that it was passed along from one generation to the next, leapfrogged and handed over fists to “just be glad you’re here and don’t worry ’bout nothing else.”
By the time I came along, just being glad I was here wasn’t good enough.
It wasn’t just the sting of being told I couldn’t do something I wanted and longed to do, it was why I was told I couldn’t do it and be it—by Black people; my own family, at that.
“Cuz that’s for White girls. You best learn a trade like being a nurse or a maid or a secretary or a teacher because then you can make a living and be something in life.”
I didn’t voice it at the time, but the last thing in the world I wanted to be was a typical Black female feeling some type of gratitude to a White world that had limitations on what I could do and be and have even after being told I was “free.”
To do what?
My family’s work tradition since 1865 and the early 1900s is one of being house and home cleaners, cooks, maids, bellhops, mill and steelworkers, and military veterans—swearing allegiance to a nation that swore no allegiance to them.
I learned as a child—by the time I was 12, really—that America is, and was, no Black family-friendly nation at all.
I wasn’t having any of that leftover “Black folk job mess” in my life. Nobody was going to force me to cook, clean, or babysit children unless they were my own…
and I certainly wasn’t setting myself up to become some White man’s version of what a Black woman should be all about.
Those who talk about the “Black experience” in novelty America can’t explain it to me.
I wasn’t a slave or a maid or a child-keep, and I wasn’t a stuck up bougie Black woman with a lawyer mother and a doctor for a dad who lived out my life in a Brooklyn brownstone waiting to get grown enough to screw a married White president in the Oval Office. The media world missed out on an entire generation of Black Americans, men and women alike, who came through the transition from 1865 to 1985 without being heavy and slow on the bottom lip and fast and sassy by the mouth.
#YourBlackexperienceaintmyBlackexperience.
***
Husbands separated from wives, slaves not allowed to marry at all, children separated from parents, raped and impregnated daughters, wives and mothers left alone by the original “baby daddies” (White males) to raise biracial children; none of it left a Black family with much to look forward to. It also taught a lot of Black men that abusing and abandoning a Black woman must be an okay thing to do, since White men did it first.
NO, America has never been a Black family-friendly nation by any stretch of the imagination; and while reparations may be a means to an end, the blow that was struck to the soul of this nuclear family who came from a time before anything else existed on the planet will take much longer to heal.
As a believer with and sometimes without hope, I doubt that internalized healing from broken lives, broken families, and broken hearts will come anytime soon. Even post-reparations, I know that money still can’t buy self-love.
That’s going to take a very VERY long time; but…there was an US before the U.S.
0 Comments