Last post, I wrote about the names we use for ourselves in “I Was 2 Inches Short, So I Made Art.” Today I’m taking that question across the ocean.
In Gambia, I’m not Black. I’m American. That’s what people call me, all the time, in the market and on the street. It’s common, not a one-time thing. When someone there says “Black,” they typically mean Jamaican. White Americans are rare in Gambia. The white tourists are heavily European. So “American” has a different meaning there than it does at home. It means me.
Same skin. Different name. That’s the first thing to understand about Blackness as a global construct. A construct is a category people build and then treat as fact. This one changes with the room and the border.
Across the continent, many people see themselves first as part of a tribe. For them, the unit that matters is the tribe. The people I’ve dealt with will back a tribesman who’s doing wrong, and they’ll do it knowing he’s wrong, because he’s a tribesman. Color doesn’t outrank that.
Then you have Morocco and Egypt, where many people don’t consider themselves part of Africa at all. The United States helped write that story. Until 2024, federal race standards counted people from the Middle East and North Africa in the White racial category. The 2024 revision created a separate Middle Eastern or North African category. Egypt and Morocco sit on the African continent, and our own government sorted them as white. The history underneath is layered. The Arab expansion of the 7th century brought real Middle Eastern ancestry into North Africa, and genetic studies bear that out. The story about how and why is an entire post in itself.
Now, business. Whenever business is being done, I run into the same wall. Many Continental Africans don’t trust African Americans. They rely on stereotypes, mostly a false rapper lifestyle, and they feel we’re all ego and brashness. Colonialism taught them that white people are the real business people. We’re not considered serious.
That’s a roadblock. It was built from a picture of us that most of us never lived.
Here’s what I know about roadblocks. Going around one doesn’t guarantee you get anywhere. Sometimes the detour costs more than the wall. Sometimes the work is standing in front of it, naming it, and making the other person say out loud why it’s there.
And we’re about to share a lot more space. In 2019, about 1 in 10 Black people in the US were born in another country. About 4 in 10 of those immigrants were born in Africa.
In Gambia, I’m American. At home, I’m Black. In a business meeting on either side of the ocean, I’m still waiting to be called serious.
Whatever you call yourself, take this with you. People of African descent all over the world are treated differently, and we engage with others differently. Travel shows you how different. How we blend into community with one another, or whether we do at all, is the great question. If and when people of African descent gather as one community, in power, in resources, and in ingenuity, Wakanda becomes a reality. Enslavement and colonialism have done their best to stop that. We have to rise above them and see each other clearly, as family. We’re just not there yet.
What name have you been called when you crossed a border, and did it fit? Tell me in the comments.
