"The Monster"

The Root of Xenophobia & Anti-Blackness

Art by Leo Hendrixx

You may not know this, but there’s a growing sentiment among some groups of Black Americans—namely those who refer to themselves as American Descendants of Slaves and Foundational Black Americans— that I and other Black people of Caribbean and/or African origin are not “black,” that we do not identify as Black in our own countries, that we don’t know racism, that we don’t know what it is to be niggas, that the world doesn’t see us as niggas, that we did not know slavery, that we do not know what it is to live under the weight of white supremacy, of colonization, that we come to America to co-opt their culture, disrespect their struggles, and only then do we start claiming to be Black in order to supplant them in some way, steal opportunities that were neither afforded to them as Black Americans, nor us as people incapable of even being second class citizens for we are not citizens at all. They believe that Black Americans are being hindered by the presence of Black immigrants in this country and that Black Americans should disassociate themselves.

I’ve lived in America for 16 years, beating out the first 15 years of my life that I spent in my home country, The Bahamas. In that time, it hasn’t been my lived experience that Black Americans are especially xenophobic. Before maybe 3 years ago, I can’t think of a time I ever heard something as outlandish as discounting the blackness of the entire Black diaspora but now it’s a sentiment expressed to me in droves each and every day. Every day, I am baffled by the train of thought that leads one to conclude that Africans are not “Black” but Black Americans are Black because they descend from slaves… who came from Africa… because Africans and non-American Black people haven’t “lived Black experiences” because a Black experience and one’s blackness are apparently defined by ones proximity to white people… and proximity to white people or ones oppressors is apparently, a uniquely American experience if you let them tell it.

I want to explain to these people that tell me I didn’t consider myself Black until I got to America that the aquamarine in the Bahamian flag represents the water, the yellow represents the sun, and the Black represents the people. I want to explain to the people who tell me we are not Black like Black Americans because their ancestors were enslaved that so were ours, that slavery was not unique to the Americas, that the Caribbean was at the center of the transatlantic slave trade, that slaves who revolted in America would often be sent to plantations in the Caribbean as punishment because of how grueling they were. I want to tell them that America didn’t introduce me to racism—it was growing up on an island being taught to serve white tourists that introduced me, it was being unable to see every inch of the merely 21x7 mile long island I was born to because there were communities and beaches only accessible to white Bahamians and tourists alike, it was seeing white Bahamians choose to procreate within their own families and live on family islands by themselves rather than be in community with Black Bahamians.

I want to draw them the connections between our oppressors and theirs’s so they can connect the dots all the way from Nassau and Long Island in New York to the islands of Nassau and Long Island in The Bahamas. I want to draw them the connection between the Bahamian people and the Gulla Geechee people of the Carolinas, to explain how Bahamians helped found Miami. I find myself clinging to Stokely Carmichael, Shirley Chisolm, Sydney Poitier, Marcus Garvey, and every Caribbean Black person in America’s history that would dispel this defamatory assertion that we have neither cared or been a part of Black American struggles, community, or history; hoping to wear their names like armors to protect me from people who pretend anti-blackness is a hat only worn by Black people born outside of America, instead of a chronic illness the entire Black globe has been forced to live with.

I want to explain myself to these people, then I hear Toni Morrison say, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

When I feel that desperate need to explain myself to Black Americans as though I or them are the problem, I know white supremacy is working, and that’s when I zoom out, not only to get a better look at the board to see the play, but to remind myself that this is white supremacy’s game and even though I know better, if I’m not careful and paying attention, I can easily be a pawn on the board.

Because why ever should I be so frustrated by the rise of xenophobia from some Black Americans when it isn’t so dissimilar from the way Bahamians spoke and thought about Haitians and other Black immigrants like my father when I was a child, or the way Bahamians continue to speak about Haitians and Black immigrants like my father today. And though I distinguished other Black immigrants from Haitians, it’s important I note that Bahamians never did. Everyone was Haitian to Bahamians who wanted to communicate to you that you were undesirable. When I was a child in The Bahamas, to be Haitian was so commonly understood to be a bad thing that it was the primary insult even on my primary school playground, and I probably heard it more times than I ever heard anyone even attempt to pronounce what they called—and continue to call to this day—"that stupid African name my parents give me.”

The disbelief at the audacity to render the nationality of the first Black people to fight for and win their independence an insult, something to be ashamed of, is a feeling that never quite leaves me, although I know I have no business feeling it because there’s nothing unbelievable about the monster or its many heads.

In fact, xenophobia was one of the first heads on the monster that ever turned to look at me. I was born in Nassau, The Bahamas and Nigeria is a country I’ve never known, but to Bahamians, my name and my father was always a barrier preventing me from being a true Bahamian. And then I moved to America where I live in a perpetual state of being othered.

There’s a concept in the law called domicile. Domicile refers to a person’s true permanent home. It’s not necessarily where you live, just your true permanent home. And I think about this often because every day, the monster tells me I don’t have one. In many respects, I’m a stateless person and I always have been.

The most effective thing the monster ever did was teach Black people white supremacy so we’d hate ourselves and each other instead of the monster, that way we could oppress ourselves and each other if the monster wasn’t around. That’s why the textbooks given to me in my Bahamian schools were written by white men to assert white supremacist lies like Bahamians were lazy, that slavery wasn’t “that bad” in The Bahamas, that we hadn’t fought for our independence and had simply been given it because our 700 islands and cays were not valuable to the white men who’d killed and pillaged to get them, that our soil wasn’t valuable. And it’s also why the textbooks in my American schools excluded and continue to exclude Black America’s history altogether.

Some days I want to scream at people who use the monster against me, I want to choke them with information, but what’s the point of trying to force my history down their throats knowing the monster ensured they don’t even know their own, much less how ours intertwine?

The xenophobia throughout the diaspora is rooted in ignorance as much as it’s rooted in repressed anger, jealousy, resentment that we haven’t been able to direct at the monster responsible, so we direct it at each other. The monster told white Americans to recognize European immigrants as white in order to consolidate more power for the white majority, and then the monster turned around and told you to cast out Black immigrants, to see them as a threat to your resources, as both responsible for and indifferent to your plights. The monster is deceiving us as it always has, convincing you to believe that the problem is not the very real monster who can’t find the shame to hide, but other Black people, separated from you by nothing other than oceans and fictional borders created by the monster.

The monster and I go way back. The problem is that familiarity hasn’t made it any easier to beat and I’ve spent 31 years watching that monster travel from country to country, getting stronger get stronger.  And I’m afraid—not of the monster—but of the inability for my people to see a monster that’s been staring each of us in the eyes just like it packed all of us on ships.