In my household no one wore dashikis or dreadlocks. No one threw off their “slave” name in order to adopt African names. As an African-American child raised in intellectual circles in Detroit, it wasn’t that we weren’t proud to be black; we just simply accepted our racial and ethnic identity as fact and lived pragmatically in its reality. My mother’s family is well-traveled and ‘high-falutin’, bridging that gap between Pentecostal African-American culture and Jack and Jill memberships. Before she married, my mother took her fluency in French and her diplomas and revolutionized the Church of God In Christ’s missions department by launching mission trips to Haiti and Liberia.
My father emigrated to the United States from a farm in Old Harbor, Jamaica in 1972 to enroll in seminary in cold and lonely Deerfield, Illinois, later finding himself as the first black junior chaplain at All Souls’ church in cold and rainy London, a substitute schoolteacher in New York City, and as youth pastor in New Jersey. When my parents married in 1984, my dad had just been commissioned to build a church in Bermuda. I was born in Bermuda a few months thereafter.
My parents later settled in Detroit and dedicated their lives to their kids and to their community–my Dad as a minister, and then a theology professor and volunteer soccer coach, and my mom as a high school French teacher. They dismissed, scornfully at times, what they saw as futile and vain attempts by their contemporaries to preach about “going back to our African roots” when the same people had no positive impact where they lived and worked and knew nothing about Africa. My parents planted their roots where they found themselves, and they encouraged me to do the same.
In largely homogeneous Detroit, I encountered the tyranny of a monolithic African-American identity. Not even a trip to Ghana in tenth grade was enough to overcome my narrow conception of what being a black American was supposed to entail. In college, however, I met other kids with complicated black existences like mine and together, we were able to forge unique identities and career paths. Mine led me to critical race and post-colonial theory, and human rights law in the developing world.
I currently live in Dakar, Senegal, where Senegalese tour guides often exaggerate the significance of the Gorée slave castles (very few slaves actually passed through Gorée; many more passed through Saint-Louis, four hours north of Dakar) in order to milk the emotions–and, more importantly, the money–of tourists. Here, some will genuinely embrace me as a long-lost sister, and others regard me as a “toubab” ( Wolof word for “foreigner”–often used derogatorily) and as an ATM. I have chosen to reject both classifications and am trying to find space for myself in the margins, realizing that trying to jump through hoops to be accepted as an African woman will profit me nothing but fatigue. Life in Senegal is difficult for Senegalese people for similar reasons, too: Even the most industrious and progressive Senegalese citizens are under constant pressure to constantly outlay large sums of money for frivolous occasions to friends, family and religious leaders in order to avoid being shunned. This idea of responsibility undermines individual and collective socioeconomic progress here, so much so that it is common to hear people complain that “personne ne peut avancer ici.” Thus, the more “responsible” one is in such a cultural context, the less of a long-term difference one is able to make in his or her own life, to say nothing of society.
It is unfair to talk of responsibility to the African Diaspora without also considering these burdens that are placed upon us by our families and cultural circles. In law school, I was encouraged to take a job at a big law firm not just for my own pocketbooks, but for the good of my race. “Not enough of us make money”, they said. “There aren’t enough of us on Wall Street”, they said. We owe it to our families.” “We” and “us” were not only African Americans, but first and second-generation Jamaicans, Barbadians, Haitians, Ghanaians, and Nigerians. We all felt the same pressure, the same responsibility that we understood but could not articulate. The pressure followed us to the Bar exam, and it was with us late at night at the office when we were busy working on projects we didn’t find interesting. We wanted our parents, our grandparents, and our people to be proud of us. We were paying our younger siblings’ tuition, and buying people expensive gifts, sending money home for Christmas and Ramadan. And then we became weary, because too much of a good thing–even communitarianism–is very bad.
We all have responsibilities to do good in the world, but should responsibility be tied to such fluid constructions as race and culture? After all, who is an African? Where does diaspora begin and end, and in which direction? Who gets to decide? When you occupy the margins, as I do, you realize that none of these questions have easy or correct answers. What matters more is how I use my experiences to strengthen whichever communities in which I make my own.
Perhaps the conversation about responsibilities of the African Diaspora is best had if we completely discard the notion of responsibility and replace it with the idea of opportunity. If I had allowed my heritage to dictate my future, I might be in Detroit today, or in Jamaica–places with lots of need, but not where I am supposed to be at the moment. While I have a passion for human rights and development, others will find great fulfillment in business ventures, medicine, science, and other endeavors.
My dad, who has now passed away, had a saying that has always remained with me, one that I rely upon often as an expatriate: “Be who you is,” he would say, often from the pulpit, “for if you is who you ain’t you ain’t who you is.” Being who we are is where our responsibility to Africa begins and ends: In the year 2013, we must find the courage to make our life decisions without a sense of pan-African guilt. No matter what paths we take, we should always capitalize upon the opportunities before us to create innovative paths forward, never letting the expectations of others undermine us. These paths will not always lead to the homes we’ve known, but they will certainly create new paths for all of us to travel.
Marissa Jackson sits on CompareAfrique’s Board of Advisors. She is currently a visiting scholar at the West African Research Center (CROA) in Dakar, Senegal. She is also founder at 4th World Initiative, and is crowd-sourcing for the organization’s flagship women’s rights and education program.
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